MetaCatholic

Better Bibles has been running a poll on some specific statements about especially gender relations. (As regular readers will know, I have an ambivalent view about the usefulness of many of these sorts of discussions.) Now Wayne Leman has begun discussing the results here. His most recent post focuses on the idea of submission, and concentrates particularly on the household code of Ephesians.

Incidentally, check out the very interesting series on household codes currently running on Kruse Kronicle. Michael Kruse locates this discussion in a wider discussion of fictive family, before narrowing the focus. A flavour of the line he takes is here:

I don’t believe the New Testament household codes articulate a culturally transcendent ordering of the family and household. I don’t think the household codes are a departure from earlier teaching by later authors. I also reject the idea that the objective of these codes was to equalize the decision-making authority between husbands and wives. Their objective was to exhibit the new creation ethos of the coming kingdom without creating needless obstacles to hearing the good news. These household codes gave instruction about appropriate relational attitudes among members of temporal households who were siblings in the Household of God, responding to God’s mission in the world.

I think the work he’s doing offers an important hermeneutical purview without which any narrower focus on language will fail. Nonetheless, I want to confine myself to a linguistic point here.

Wayne’s discussion keeps talking about the meaning of “submission” and “submit.” Of course, he knows that he’s actually talking about the meaning of ὑποτάσσω (hupotassō) but unfortunately the use of the English word dominates the discussion. And I think there’s a real problem in working out how to translate this word.

In our modern Western society we are very non-heirarchical, and for all our talk about “order” we are not a particularly ordered society. One result of this is that “submission” is a word that finds it’s primary context in the field of conflict and victory, not peaceable ordering of daily life. Its connotations in English make it a questionable translation.

Rendering the Greek word shares all the normal translation questions of reflecting on its context in relation to potential near synonyms and antonyms that might be used instead, and seeing what the particular lexical choice of ὑποτάσσω brings to this or that sentence that other words might not bring. But it is specifically one of quite a large number of words sharing the same root -ταγ- which tend to reflect a range of ordering relationships, and the precise nature of the ordering depends both on the selection of the word and the context. There is little doubt that ὑποτάσσω coveys a subordinate ordering, but how that should best be translated in English is another question.

Wayne rightly notes some of the broader context:

Yet Jesus himself showed his disciples what servant leadership was when they were arguing about hierarchy, which of them was most important. He washed their feet. In that culture washing the feet of another was a sign of humility. It is something that was typically done by servants.

The sense of being willing to order oneself below another indeed runs through a large swathe of the NT ethic, and is embedded in the teaching of Jesus, especially emphatically in the third gospel. Theologically, any more specific statements about that self-to-other subordinating ethic have to be referred to the broader picture. But linguistically it also points to the problems of the English word “submit” as a word the victor might say to the vanquished, from playground fight to large scale war, as anything like an adequate translation of ὑποτάσσω.