Craig Keener and the fallacy of mutual submission
Craig Keener, who certainly knows a thing or two, has written a piece on Jesus Creed reaffirming the common egalitarian argument that Paul prefaces the instructions to husbands and wives in Ephesians 5:22-33 with an exhortation to mutual submission. I count myself as a dyed-in-the-wool egalitarian, but I am still not convinced that this interpretation is exegetically correct. We get off to a rather disconcerting start with Keener’s argument that Paul expected masters to obey their servants. How does that work? Well, Paul tells slaves to obey their masters in Ephesians 6:5 and then in verse 9 says that masters should “do the same to them”. In Keener’s view Paul has “expressed one of the most radically antislavery sentiments of his day”. I really don’t think that’s very likely. Paul is not telling the masters to obey their slaves “with fear and trembling”. That is simply a social impossibility—and Keener has to admit that no one in the first century would have taken P...