By Paul Elam
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her.” Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians, 5:25 (NASB 1995)
In my experience, this is one of the more commonly quoted bits of scripture. I’ve had it recited to me, sometimes more like thrown at me, by other Christian men when discussing marriage and relationships. It’s most often used when the conversation turns to contentious wives and how to handle them within scriptural canons.
To be frank, most of the time I’ve heard Ephesians 5 invoked, it came across as a copout; a convenience for men without boundaries or leadership qualities to explain their failure to stand up to their wives, or, and even worse, as a way to soften the spines of other men who might consider rebuking their wives for their contentious ways. In other words, it’s “go to” scripture for emasculating and emasculated men. I’ve seen no shortage of clergy who also fall into this category.
This unfortunate tendency to conflate love with weakness is pervasive and part and parcel to the feminized facsimile of Jesus now being peddled by mainstream churches. To tell the truth, I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the negative impact that this misinterpretation of scripture has visited on the church, on the expectations that Christian men and women have of each other, and on the institution of marriage itself.
But I’ll try.
And I’ll start with a shout-out to Javier, whose suggestion in the recent chat I started piqued my interest right away. I offer this with a linguistic caveat. I pledged when I started this series of lectures that I would avoid all of the foul language that accentuated my work prior to my Christian life. Out of respect to Javier, I’ll read the suggestion as written, and I quote:
“Consider a series where you take a typical thing a woman says, which is usually a shit test, and dissect the various ways to respond to it. Almost like a school for how to deal with women in a long-term relationship when they start to gradually introduce disrespect.”
Fantastic suggestion, but one that requires some rebranding. I will henceforth refer to the well known test, as a leadership test. I think this works out pretty well since that is actually what it is. Language problem resolved.
Also, I want to approach this from a slightly different angle than you’d normally expect from someone in the red pill space. Rather than tag this and future similar talks as how to overcome leadership tests, I’m calling this, “How to love your wife as Christ loved the church.” Like the term, “leadership test,” I think “How to love your wife as Christ loved the church,” drills down much more succinctly on the designated topic.
But herein is the problem. The mind of the Western man and woman, Christian or not, is saturated and thoroughly corrupted with the romantic love narrative. When the conversation turns toward women and love, the Western mind automatically and reflexively conjures up images of romance, of giddy, undying infatuation, gallantry, chivalry, and worshipful praise, particularly of the woman. And I submit to you, dear listener, that this model of a man loving a woman doesn’t just evaporate when reading Ephesians 5:25. It continues to wield its influence, unabated, shaping our perceptions and our beliefs. It clouds our minds to what is actually meant by loving your wife as Christ loved the church. So, the task here is to first and foremost, long before we ever contemplate how to respond to disrespectful behavior, to clear out the romantic clutter from our worldview: to actively and purposefully reject the notion of romantic love when considering the love we have for a woman. We must, I tell you now, be unburdened by what has been… Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.
I should note here this confusion, this conflation of Christian love with romantic love, which I now call the “great conflation,” is a matter of historical record. After all, marriage based on romantic love is a recent development in anthropological terms. That kind of marriage, resting entirely on the insanity of infatuation, has only been happening for about 150 years. For countless thousands of years before that, marriages were arranged for the benefit of the families that were united by the institution. This involved, depending on circumstances, either dowries or bride price as the compensatory payoff for the union. It’s a topic I’ll be digging into an upcoming interview I’m doing with “This is Shah,” a man who has done significant investigation and research on the subject.
Suffice it to say for now that the Great Conflation did not go unnoticed. It’s been referenced in works by CS Lewis, but it was perhaps most succinctly nailed down by the great moral and religious thinker, Leo Tolstoy, who in 1888 wrote, and I quote, “I wish to open the eyes of all to the real nature and the tragic consequences of this substitution of romantic for Christian love.” End quote.
Keep in mind that that was written at the same time that romantically based marriage was coming into full swing as the latest social fad in the western world. Tolstoy wrote about what he was seeing play out in society, including the church, in real time. This may come as a surprise to those who have erroneously believed that marriage had always been a matter of romantic love. I would not hold that against them too harshly. Everyone operating in the romantic model is subject to such conditioned ignorance.
So, where does this leave us? Once we’ve cleared our view of romantic clutter, we need to answer the question, just how did Christ love the church?
Of course, the moment we actually do that, and attempt to answer the question honestly, it becomes abundantly clear that Christ’s love for the church wasn’t romantic. Christ didn’t send the church flowers. He didn’t take it on lavish vacations, or whisper sweet nothings in the church’s ear. He didn’t kneel before the church offering jewels. Indeed, he never tried to impress the church in any way. He never responded to a problem in the church with the pathetic surrender of, “yes, dear.” It was often quite the opposite.
Mind you, Christ loved the church, just as he loved all mankind. He gave his life for the church, just as he gave his life for you and me. In that light, the biblical lesson of that kind of love is clear where it concerns wives. We are to love them completely. We are willing to die for their protection. And, at least in my mind, this is where any similarity to the chivalrous model of romantic love begins and ends. The rest, every example of Christ’s love witnessed and recorded in scripture, takes a very different path.
The first thing we must acknowledge is that Christ’s love of the church was corrective.
In Revelations 2:14-16 Christ says to the Church of Pegamum;
“Nevertheless, I have a few things against you: There are some among you who hold to the teaching of Balaam, who taught Balak to entice the Israelites to sin so that they ate food sacrificed to idols and committed sexual immorality. Likewise, you also have those who hold to the teaching of the Nicolaitans. Repent therefore! Otherwise, I will soon come to you and will fight against them with the sword of my mouth.”
Call me crazy, but that doesn’t sound like date night.
To the Church of Thyatira, Christ, while commending their love and service, nonetheless rebukes them for allowing Jezebel to lead believers into sexual immorality and idolatry. He urges them to repent. That is from Revelation 2:20-23.
Indeed, as we study the scripture in Revelations, we see churches lined up like ducks in a carnival shooting game as Christ draws a bead on them, one after another. For reference, see Revelations 2:4-5, Revelations 2:10, Revelations 3:1-3 and Revelations 3:15-19
Furthermore, in Matthew 21:12-13 and John 2:13-17 Jesus corrects the misuse of the temple when He drives out the money changers and merchants in a violent outburst of righteous indignation. He condemns the commercialization of worship and the way the temple, a house of prayer, had been turned into what He called a “den of robbers.”
In Matthew 23, Jesus delivers a series of “woes” to the Pharisees and teachers of the law, who represented the religious establishment. He corrects them for hypocrisy, legalism, and their focus on outward righteousness while neglecting justice, mercy, and faithfulness. Though not addressing the Christian church directly, this correction speaks to the same religious hypocrisy that now infects the modern Christian church.
Finally, we see in Matthew 16:23 the Rebuke of Peter, Christ’s personally designated rock on which the Christian church was built. For after Peter tries to prevent Jesus from going to the cross, Jesus sternly rebukes him by saying, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
There are countless other examples in scripture that fall along these lines. The Pauline Epistles amount to a collection of church spankings, with the Apostle Paul wielding the paddle through divine inspiration. I invite you now to find more examples in scripture that clearly demonstrate Christ’s love for the church and post them to the comments below.
And what are we to conclude from this about Christ’s love for the church? Well, it was obviously a corrective love. Christ held the church accountable for straying from its duties and sacred obligations. He insisted that the church adhere to its holy purpose, and was quick to rebuke the church when it didn’t.
That’s obviously not romantic love, as romantic love, by its very nature, elevates women above being rebuked. I think it’s fair to say that it elevates women above the church, and you can now witness the results of Tolstoy’s warning about that throughout Churches in the Western world.
Now, with this as the foundational understanding, we can begin to consider how to love our wives as Christ loved the church. We can now have meaningful dialogue about how to deal with the inescapable leadership tests that all women employ in their relationships with men. That is, we can do all that if we have examined, broken down and rejected the notion of romance, a tool of Satan designed to undermine both family and church.
That can be an ongoing challenge. Romance entered the family the same way that crack entered the inner city, and with largely the same deleterious effect. Like crack, romance is addictive. It’s pretty on the outside, it’s seductive and feels incredibly good for a while, but ultimately ends in ruin for most who take the bait and run with it.
As I continue this series of talks, I’ll do so assuming you’ve broken the code; that you’ve taken the red pill and have wiped away fairy tale mirage. You’re now free, sans romanticism’s unhealthy sentiments and ridiculous expectations.
Now that we have the foundation corrected, we can begin our work in earnest.
And with that, I will see you again with the next installment of the 425.
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