The Lydia Center Digests No. 1
As Greystone’s Lydia Center for Women and Families takes the next step in development, we are pleased to introduce Lydia’s new Research Associate Amber Edds. Amber is trained in music and English literature, in which areas she has received several awards, and has held various organizational leadership positions. A thoughtful Reformed Christian with extensive familiarity with the literature and philosophy of recent gender models, Amber brings her reading and writing skills to bear upon many questions of immense cultural moment. Amber is also wife to Greystone’s Director of Marketing and Communications, Cody Edds.
One of the more visible ways you will benefit from Amber’s work with the Center is in her leading role in the creation of research digests. The Lydia Center Digest Series is a running list of abstracts of research into subjects explored at the Lydia Center. These digests of academic journal articles, monographs, essays, and presentations will be released approximately every two weeks. Importantly, these digests are not reviews in the conventional sense, for they are not designed to evaluate the research or argument abstracted in the digest, but only to inform the public of the argument and the research. For this reason, readers should not assume that digested research items are therefore recommended by the Lydia Center for purposes other than research. Furthermore, in keeping with the Lydia Center’s purpose, we will not ordinarily digest works in gender and family that are written at lower than a standard academic level. Thus we will not feature digests of the majority of the books and essays that tend to command the most popular attention, but will instead alert you to a wide variety of academic or otherwise noteworthy works in these areas. In today’s post, we feature Lydia Center Digest No. 1, and invite you to follow the series of digests as you find them valuable for your own research and edification.
The Lydia Center Digests No. 1
Title: Keown, Mark. “Paul’s Vision of A New Masculinity (Eph 5:21-6:9),” Colloquium 48:1 (2016): 47-60.
Keywords: Ephesians; Paterfamilias; Household Code; Submission; Masculinity
Keown argues that Paul paints a picture of a new masculinity that is subversive of the default patriarchal assumptions at work in the Greco-Roman culture of his time. He approaches Ephesians 5:21-6:9 as a passage addressing especially men within the context of the ancient family. Subverting the conventional expectations and liberties of the classical paterfamilias, Paul, according to Keown, teaches men how to be a husband, father, and master modeled after Christ in the Christian household. Though he agrees with many that Paul is giving “a vision for the whole Christian family,” Keown insists that “the structure and emphasis of the passage indicates that his primary focus is to define what it means to be a paterfamilias,” consequently rendering the “questions of women in leadership… subordinat[e] to Paul’s radical appeal to men” (47).
Keown insists that the sharp edge of the passage is found in the exhortations given by Paul starting in Ephesians 4:1, instructing men and women of all ages to “renounce the patterns of life that dominate the Greco-Roman world and live out the virtues of the gospel and the pattern laid down by Christ,” and he stresses that “5:21-6:9 should not be disassociated” from that most basic concern (48). Only in the latter half of Paul’s letter does he “singl[e] out specific members of the family” using the “familiar form” of “the oikonomia tradition” to instruct them in their home life (48, 49). Expanding on Timothy Gombis’s argument that Paul, in his appeal to the household codes, is calling for a “new social order under Christ” within the “‘new creation communities,’” Keown argues that the “special emphasis lies on the male head” and “what it means to be a man ‘in Christ’” (49).
The grammatical structure of Ephesians 5:22-6:9, argues Keown, is “simple but critical” for this argument (50). The “imperatival participle” in Ephesians 5:21 is “grammatically dependent on the imperatival construct in 5:21” to be “be filled with the spirit,” which is then “developed with five present active participles of means, manner or result” (50). Thus, 5:21 is the “fifth participle which functions as the hinge verse, transitioning into what follows” (50). Keown concludes that “mutual submission,” then, “is a mark of Spirit-filled living” (50).
Paul then develops this mutual submission within “the context of family relations” using “three parallel sections,” each having “two parts”: (1) wives--husbands; (2) children--fathers; (3) slaves--masters (50, 51). Keown explores the structure in which Paul addresses each family member and the exhortations he gives in order to highlight two things: (1) each section “shifts to focus on what is effectively one person; the… paterfamilias” who is “the primary target of Paul’s address”; and (2) Paul “provides a neat balance of social relations” and a “vision of mutual servanthood” within these dyadic relationships that “challenges the social norms of the first century Roman World” (51,52,53).
Critical to Paul’s argument, explains Keown, is that the expectations attaching to the first element in each of his pairings (the wife, child, and slave, each of which is a “social inferior” in the ancient world) are wholly predictable and unspectacular, reflecting the standard expectations for wives, children, and slaves in the ancient world generally and in Greco-Roman culture particularly. The Torah-inflected ways in which the Apostle describes these expectations creates a positive Christian connection for those expectations as well. But the expectations attaching to the second element in his pairings (thus the husband, father, and master) are anything but conventional. They are subversive of what the surrounding world thinks is normal, and thus they receive the greater amount of attention and development in the passage. Though Paul’s direct (rather than indirect, e.g., via the paterfamilias) address to the “socially inferior” in each section is extraordinary, Paul’s instructions to wives, children, and slaves are all “sociological axiom[s]” to the “first century hearer” (53, 54).
Keown suggests that Paul’s movement from the “expected” to the “unexpected” in each section indicates where the asymmetrical emphasis lies--on the paterfamilias, the single individual who was husband, father, and master all at once--as well as the radical vision given for his conduct. Furthermore, the injunction to husbands to love his wife as Christ loved the church is “parallel to submission in 5:22” as it “further develops ‘submit to one another’ in 5:21” and “the Christ pattern of total self-giving is effectively submission” (55). Thus, “what matters,” Keown stresses, isn’t “debates on role[s] within the marriage” but “an attitude of selfless service” (55). Similarly, in his address to the paterfamilias as father and master, he says, Paul was charging them “to be different from those of their surrounding society” by encouraging them not to exasperate their children, to raise them in the instruction of the Lord, and to “take the attitudes outlined… in 5:1-2 and apply them to” how they treat their slaves (56, 58).
However relevant it may be to such questions, Keown concludes that this passage is not about “women who submit unquestionably to their husbands, run homes and raise their children”; it is not even about “specific roles within the family unit or church” as such (59). Rather, it is about the subversive reconfiguration of the nature, powers, and responsibilities of the ancient paterfamilias on revolutionary Christian terms; indeed, the new husband-father-master is expected to function as a public focal point of the new creation on display within the Church. The dynamic of that subversion is the Christian man who employs a serving, humble, and sacrificial attitude toward others, as all in the Christian household do toward one another, modeled after Christ. More specifically, Paul’s “three-fold appeal to the ancient paterfamilias for cruciform self-sacrificial love, kyrios-centered parenting, and service of slaves, balances out his appeal [to wives, children, and slaves] and indicates that mutual submission (5:21) is in fact mutual service” (59). “Thus radical servanthood, gentleness, humility, sacrifice and love should be the primary attitudinal marks of men in the church, the home and all of life” (60).
AE (MAG)