What You Were Never Taught About Submission

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I want to ask you something before you read another word.

When you hear the word submission in a church context — what is your first instinct?

Be honest. Not the answer you would give in Sabbath School. The one that rises in your chest before your theology catches up.

For many people — especially women who grew up in conservative religious homes — the word lands like a weight. It carries the residue of sermons that ended conversations before they started, of marriages that called silence obedience and called obedience holiness. For others, it is simply uncomfortable. A word they have learned to step around carefully, the way you step around a loose floorboard.

I have been sitting with Lesson 12 of this quarter's Sabbath School guide — The True Nature of Submission — and I cannot move past it without writing something. Because the lesson does something I did not expect: it refuses to let the text be weaponized. It goes back behind the doctrine to the history, and the history changes everything.

The Rome Nobody Talks About

Before you can understand what Paul was saying in Ephesians 5, you have to understand the world Paul was writing into.

Rome operated under a legal principle called patria potestas — the authority of the father. In its classical form, the paterfamilias, the head of the household, held absolute legal power over every person under his roof: his wife, his children, his servants. Not merely authority to direct or discipline. Legal power. Including, in the early centuries of the Republic, the power of life and death.

A Roman wife's submission to her husband was not a theological invitation. It was the law of the empire. It was assumed. It required no command.

This is the cultural water in which the Ephesian church was swimming when Paul sat down to write.

And then Paul opens his mouth — and the command that would have stunned the room was not what anyone expected.

He did not write: "Wives, submit to your husbands."

Well, he did write that. But that was not the radical word. That was the one everyone already knew.

The radical word was this:

"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her." (Ephesians 5:25, NKJV)

Self-emptying. Sacrificial. Modeled on a crucifixion.

The man who held patria potestas — who had been given, by Caesar himself, authority over the bodies and futures of every person in that household — was now being told that the only legitimate expression of that authority was to lay down his life. Foot-washing. Servanthood. Crucifixion.

That was the counter-cultural move. That was the world-altering command.

Nobody preaches it that way. But that is exactly what the text says.

Verse 21 Is the Sentence Everyone Skips

There is another piece of the puzzle that tends to disappear in popular teaching.

Ephesians 5:22 — the verse most people quote — does not actually contain a verb in the original Greek. It borrows its verb from the verse immediately before it:

"...submitting to one another in the fear of God." (Ephesians 5:21, NKJV)

That verse governs everything that follows. The wives and husbands of verse 22. The children and parents of chapter 6. The employees and employers. All of it flows from a mutuality — a reciprocal posture of submission that is anchored, not in a social hierarchy, but in the fear of God.

You cannot read Ephesians 5:22 honestly without reading Ephesians 5:21 first.

Most teaching does not make that connection. Which means most teaching on submission has been reading half a sentence and building a theology on it.

The Qualifier That Carries the Weight

Look again at Colossians 3:18, the companion passage:

"Wives, submit to your own husbands, as is fitting in the Lord."

The phrase most likely to be omitted in popular teaching is the one that carries all the theological weight: as is fitting in the Lord.

Biblical submission is anchored to the Lordship of Christ. It is bounded by His Lordship. It is qualified by His Lordship.

Which means it is not absolute.

Ellen White said it plainly in The Adventist Home, page 116 — and she said it with a precision that I think still makes people uncomfortable:

"Entire submission is to be made only to the Lord Jesus Christ, who has purchased her as His own child by the infinite price of His life. God has given her a conscience, which she cannot violate with impunity. Her individuality cannot be merged into that of her husband, for she is the purchase of Christ."

Three things that belong to Christ alone — not to any husband, not to any human authority:

The conscience. The individuality. The identity.

This is not a peripheral comment. It is the theological center. Biblical submission is not a dissolution of personhood. It is a free-will posture of a heart that belongs — first, last, and entirely — to Jesus.

When the Head Has No Crown

On page 117 of the same work, Ellen White said something even harder:

"But it was not the design of God that the husband should have control, as head of the house, when he himself does not submit to Christ... If he is a coarse, rough, boisterous, egotistical, harsh, and overbearing man, let him NEVER utter the word that the husband is the head of the wife, and that she must submit to him in everything; for he is not the Lord."

The Greek word Paul uses in Ephesians 5:25 for the love husbands are commanded to show is agapaō — the verb form of agape. Not affection. Not attraction. Self-emptying, other-directed, cruciform love.

A man who demands submission without offering agapaō is not exercising biblical headship. He is exercising Roman patria potestas — and calling it Christian.

Those are not the same thing. They are not even related.

This Is a Great Controversy Issue

Here is where I want to go somewhere that the standard marriage sermon never goes.

The way authority functions in a home — whether it is exercised as servant leadership or as coercive control — is not just a domestic question. It is a theological one. And in Adventist theology, it belongs inside the largest story the Bible tells.

God's method of governance, throughout the entire controversy with Satan, has always been free-will love. Love cannot be commanded. It must be chosen. The entire argument God is making before the watching universe is that free beings, given complete information, will choose Him — not because they have to, but because they want to.

Satan's method has always been compulsion. Force. Fear.

Ellen White wrote in Darkness Before Dawn:

"God never forces the will or the conscience; but Satan's constant resort — to gain control of those whom he cannot otherwise seduce — is compulsion by cruelty."

This is not abstract cosmology. It maps directly onto what happens in marriages, in parenting, in churches.

Any system — any relationship — that rules by crushing the conscience is not operating in the Spirit of Christ. It is operating in the spirit of the adversary.

Forced submission is not a more conservative version of biblical submission. It is a theological counterfeit.

The Model Is Gethsemane

If you want to understand what biblical submission actually looks like, do not look at a marriage seminar. Look at Gethsemane.

"Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done." (Luke 22:42, KJV)

Christ, who is coequal in deity with the Father. Christ, in whom "all things consist" (Colossians 1:17). Christ, who spoke the universe into existence — submitted.

And His submission did not diminish Him. It glorified Him. It redeemed the world.

He was not coerced. The Father did not force the cup. No patria potestas was invoked. Christ chose it freely, deliberately, out of love — and the love was the whole point.

This is the logic the lesson keeps pressing: if the eternal Son of God can submit without becoming lesser, then submission cannot inherently mean degradation. It cannot mean inferiority. It cannot mean silencing. Submission and dignity dwell together in Christ — and they can dwell together in us.

I Have to Name My Own Situation Here

I am a man writing this. I am a husband. I am a church elder. I occupy exactly the kinds of roles that have been most easily abused by the distortion of this theology.

And I have to be honest: the version of submission that sounds like patria potestas in a Sunday suit is far easier to preach. It requires nothing of the man. It places the entire moral weight of harmony on the woman. It leaves the husband's character unchallenged and his authority unqualified.

The biblical version is harder. Much harder.

It says: before you ask anyone in your home to submit to you, ask yourself whether you are submitted to Christ. Because if you are not submitted to Him, you have no standing — Ellen White's word, not mine — to invoke His framework.

It says: the qualifying standard for headship is the cross. Foot-washing. Servanthood. Self-emptying love. Not management. Not authority. Not being right. The cross.

I find this convicting. Not comfortable. Convicting.

The Question You Leave With

At the foot of the cross, the ground is level.

The husband and the wife. The parent and the child. The elder and the parishioner. No one stands above another at Calvary.

The question the lesson presses is not: Who has authority over me?

The question is: Am I submitted to Christ?

Because biblical submission — real submission, the kind modeled in Gethsemane — flows from that answer first. Everything else is derivative.

If you are submitted to Christ, the people around you experience service. Patience. The willingness to lay something down.

If you are not submitted to Christ, whatever you call your authority, it is not what Paul meant.

The word has been used as a weapon long enough.

It is time to give it back its meaning.

Chukwuma I. Onyeije, MD, FACOG is a Maternal-Fetal Medicine specialist, husband, father, and elder at Atlanta North Seventh-day Adventist Church. He writes at the intersection of medicine, faith, and contemporary life. This post was developed from Lesson 12 of the 2026 First Quarter Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide.

Chukwuma Theology — What You Were Never Taught About Submission