This morning I listened to a recorded Facebook live broadcast.  It was about whether you should listen to God or your husband that I really wanted to respond to.  Actually, I left a few comments on the live broadcast because I couldn’t help myself.  It’s here if you want to see.  Scott LaPierre was answering the question:

What does a wife do when her conviction regarding a spiritual principle is different than her husbands?  For example, I have a conviction that we should be tithing. For a while we were, but when money got tight, my husband said that we should not tithe again until all of our debt is paid off. We have school loans, so we’re easily talking a decade from now. So, what does a wife do when her conviction is not the same as her husband’s in an area like this?

Scott’s answer was basically that she only has to worry about submitting to her husband.  That she’s not responsible for following God in situations like that.

I completely disagree!

Even though I believe in a headship and submission model of marriage.  Now, I normally wouldn’t write a post pointedly disagreeing with someone else, but this really bothered me.  Here’s why.

Hierarchies are … hierarchical

My biggest problem with a stance like that is that it throws out the idea of a hierarchy.  The hierarchy given in the Bible is God, then husband, then wife, then children.  Each “level” of hierarchy doesn’t supercede the previous one.  If it did, then the children could ignore the husband in favour of the wife’s wishes.  We know that’s not appropriate, so why then does God drop off the map as soon as a husband is in place?

The answer is, it doesn’t.  Just because you get married doesn’t mean that God isn’t the source of your morality.  It doesn’t mean you can start ignoring Him or even following your husband instead of God.  You follow your husband, so long as he doesn’t contradict God.

It’s like if you’re a worker in a plant and your manager tells you to do something that you know the CEO wouldn’t approve of.  Do you do it?  You shouldn’t.  Arguably, the CEO is the final authority in that company.  What if the CEO tells you to do something illegal?  Do you do it?  Of course not, because the CEO has an authority over him, the law.

In the same way, if a husband tells his wife to do something immoral, then she has a responsibility to God to say no.  In fact, I’d argue she also has a responsibility to correct him.  If done properly, that’s neither disrespectful or failing at submission.  It’s doing your job as a helper.  God help me if my wife ever things she can’t hold me accountable. Because no one else in the world sees as much of what I do as she does.  She’s the perfect person to hold me accountable to the things I said I would do.

We are each responsible for our own actions

Secondly, Scott mentioned that the wife is not held responsible for her actions, only for her decision to follow her husband.  That is not a view I see expressed in the Bible anywhere.  Instead, I see these verses:

But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor. For each will have to bear his own load. – Galatians 6:4-5

This one is sort of backwards,