Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church

by Rachel Held Evans

Even the apostle Paul, himself single and an enthusiastic proponent of singleness, said as much in his letter to the Ephesians. “Husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies,” he wrote. “He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body . . . This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:28–30, 32). Ironically, this very letter is often invoked to support hierarchal gender roles in marriage, because earlier, in urging all members of a household to “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ,” Paul describes a typical first-century Greco-Roman household, complete with a male head-of-house who has authority over his wives, slaves, and children. In the past, some Christians referred to this passage to argue that the hierarchy between master and slave is God-ordained, and in the present, some continue to use it to argue that hierarchy between men and women is God-ordained. But the point of this passage, and of the other New Testament household codes, is not to emphasize the holiness of a single household structure, but rather to admonish Christians to imitate Jesus, no matter where they stand in the sociological pecking order. So men are told to be kind to their slaves, gentle with their children, and loving with their wives (Ephesians 5:25–28; 6:4, 9). Slaves are admonished to work well, w...