Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian: A Kingdom Corrective to the Evangelical Gender Debate

by Michelle Lee-Barnewall

The normal expectation for the metaphor is that the head is the leader and provider of the body. Consequently, it is the head’s responsibility to ensure its own safety, and the body’s responsibility to sacrifice itself for the sake of the head. As a result, we would expect Paul to instruct the wife, the body, to be willing to sacrifice for the sake of the husband, the head. Such instructions would be the most logical since, according to common reasoning, the body could not survive without the head. But that is not what we find; rather, Paul states the reverse. The husband as the head is called to give himself up for the wife as his body, just as Christ gave himself up for the church, which is his body.33 Furthermore, where normal expectations would have the body being the one to love the head, Paul states that the husband as head is to love his wife as his body as Christ loved the church.