If you believe that your God requires women to submit to men, especially in a marriage relationship, then you are portraying a presumably male God who insists that women do what they are told to do by men. Underlying this commandment has to be a reality that men know more than women and are superior to them. If this is so in a marriage relationship, it can be assumed that it surely follows that men should dominate women in all relationships. This God obviously created men to be superior to women, rather than equal though different. And what if the woman refuses to submit? Has the man the right to punish her, even with violence? There is considerable evidence to indicate that this does happen.
In teaching this about God, people convey the assumption that God is male and that, therefore, women can’t really represent this God. Of course, Christians, Muslims and Jews have often inferred that anyway. On the other hand, in the Jewish Scriptures, there are some beautiful references to the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Wisdom, as female.
Culturally, over the ages, women have mostly been regarded as subject to men. In practical terms some of this has been related to the fact that women are the child-bearers and that has often deterred them from being able to assume all sorts of work and responsibilities. In our present day and culture, the beauty of shared parenting can be seen in many families – the richness and creativity of both mother and father engaging deeply with their children as they grow.
When women are required to submit to men, so much wisdom and creative inter-relationship can be lost. We also lose the depths of relationship with a God who embraces in being all types and genders of people, who has walked their way and entered into all their realties with love and understanding.
Then we may have racism, certainly in our history we did, especially in the days of slavery when people quoted “Slaves obey your masters” from the Christian Bible. The God portrayed in all this was one who had, obviously, created people with differing status. Coloured people were inferior to white people and should serve them rather than hope for justice and equality. In our country, we didn’t even count Indigenous people in the census until the 1960s. What sort of God would see them as not worthy of being counted?
This reality should invite in us much more scrutiny of what we do and teach. We really cannot simply say, “It’s in the Bible” and therefore that is the word of God. If we do that, we introduce others to a God whom we would most likely not want as a friend and whose standards for us often deny ordinary morality, let alone the great commandment to “Love your neighbour as yourself”.
