The Kingdom of Cain: Finding God in the Literature of Darkness

by Andrew Klavan

“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord,” writes St. Paul to the Ephesians. “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy. . . . In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.”13 Paul is putting forward the idea that our flesh is indeed a language, but a language that expresses something beyond itself and beyond mere states of power. In Paul, the language of flesh expresses states of spiritual love. The wife surrenders herself to the husband not as a slave to a tyrant but as the body of Christ surrenders itself to God. The husband loves the wife as Christ loves the church, which is his own body. Created male and female in the image of God, the couple restore that image by becoming one flesh. Marriage—and sex in marriage and sexual roles in marriage—create humanity’s image of God.