The Christian Household

Scripture: Ephesians 5:22–6:9

Read Ephesians 5:22–6:9 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.

Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her… This mystery is great… I am actually speaking with reference to Christ and the church.

(Ephesians 5:25, 32, selected)

The Household Code, Transfigured

In the world of Paul’s day, a household code was a familiar literary form. Greek and Roman moralists had written for centuries about the proper ordering of the household: the relationships between husband and wife, parent and child, master and slave. The genre had a recognizable shape, and educated readers in the Greco-Roman world would have known it on sight.

Paul writes in this genre. But he transfigures it.

The pagan household codes of his time generally addressed only the powerful members of each pair: the husband, the father, the master. They issued their instructions about how the head of the household should manage those beneath him. Wives, children, and slaves were treated as passive parts of the household structure, to be managed but not addressed.

Paul does something different. He addresses both members of every pair. He speaks to wives and husbands. He speaks to children and parents. He speaks to slaves and masters. This was a striking departure from the genre. The lower-status member of each pair is treated as a moral agent, addressed directly, given instructions of her own. The Christian household is one in which every member is addressed by the gospel, every member is responsible to Christ, and every member’s place in the household has been re-grounded in what God has done in Jesus.

And there is a second transfiguration. Each instruction is rooted, not in cultural assumption or in mere hierarchy, but in the gospel. Wives and husbands are addressed in light of Christ and the Church. Children obey their parents in the Lord. Slaves serve their earthly masters as slaves of Christ. Masters treat their slaves the same way, because they themselves have a Master in heaven. The household codes have been Christianized at the deepest level. They are no longer about who is on top. They are about who all of them belong to.

The bridge to the whole passage is verse 21, which we treated last session: the call for the saints to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. This verse stands at the head of all that follows. The mutual submission of all the saints to one another, out of reverence for Christ, is the frame within which the specific submissions of wife to husband, child to parent, servant to master, are to be understood. Paul does not begin the household codes with hierarchical submission. He begins them with mutual submission. Every relationship in the Christian household is shaped by the prior reality that all of the saints, in Christ, defer to one another.

The Lutheran tradition has read this whole passage as one of the great texts on the doctrine of vocation. Each saint stands in a particular set of stations: as wife or husband, as child or parent, as servant or master, as citizen or magistrate. These stations are not accidents; they are the places God has placed each saint, and they are the arenas in which she serves her neighbor. Luther included a Haustafel, a Table of Duties, in his Small Catechism, and for parents, children, servants, and masters it draws its verses from this very passage. The Christian’s life with God is not lived only at the altar. It is also lived at the kitchen table, at the workplace, in the classroom, at the bedside of the sick, in the ordinary stations of daily life. Paul gives us, here, the gospel-shape of those stations.

We turn now to the first pair.

Wives, Husbands, and the Headship of Christ

In verses 22 to 24, Paul addresses wives. He tells them to submit to their husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is head of the wife as Christ is head of the Church, and the Church submits to Christ.

This passage has been one of the most contested in modern discussion of the Bible, and it is worth reading carefully, both for what it says and for what it does not say.

It does say that the husband stands as the head of the wife, in some way that mirrors Christ’s headship of the Church. The Greek word for head (kephalē) can carry the sense of authority, of priority, of source, of representative. In this context, the headship of Christ over the Church involves all of these. Christ has authority over His Church; Christ is the source of His Church; Christ is the representative of His Church before the Father. Some of this is being claimed for the husband in his relation to his wife, though, as we will see in the next section, the kind of headship Paul means is precisely the kind that Christ exercises, which is a headship of self-giving love.

It does say that the wife is to submit to her own husband. The verb is hypotassō (to arrange under, to defer to, to yield); in the oldest manuscripts verse 22 has no verb of its own but borrows it from verse 21’s call for all the saints to submit to one another. Notice the qualification. The NET renders verse 22 simply “your husbands,” but Paul’s Greek includes the adjective idiois, “your own.” Paul does not say wives are to submit to all men, or that women generally are inferior to men generally, or that the wife’s submission extends beyond the marriage. The submission is specific: a wife to the husband she has, in the household they share, as the Church submits to her Lord.

What it does not say is also important. It does not say the husband has authority over the wife in the way a slaveowner has authority over a slave. It does not say the wife has no voice, no agency, no equal standing in Christ. Paul has already named, in 1:5, that the saints, male and female alike, are adopted as God’s legal heirs. He has named, in 2:14, that the middle wall of partition between Jew and Gentile has been destroyed by the cross. He has named, in 5:21, that all the saints submit to one another in Christ. The submission of the wife to the husband sits inside this larger reality: she is his sister in Christ, a fellow saint, a co-heir of the kingdom, equal in dignity and standing before God. Whatever the wife’s submission means, it does not mean a denial of any of these.

And it must be said plainly, because this passage has too often been twisted to excuse cruelty: neither submission nor headship ever authorizes sin. The wife submits “as to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22), and nothing done as to the Lord can require what the Lord forbids. A wife is not obligated to obey a husband who commands what God forbids. When any earthly authority commands sin, the apostles’ answer stands: “We must obey God rather than people” (Acts 5:29). The Augsburg Confession, Article XVI, applies this same limit even to the civil authority. No husband may use this text to demand submission to violence, to sexual coercion, to cruelty, to threats, to the concealment of a crime, or to the endangerment of children. A husband who does these things is not exercising Christ-like headship. He is betraying it, and he stands under God’s judgment and in need of repentance. If you are the one being harmed, hear this clearly: seeking safety is not a failure of Christian submission. Telling your pastor or another trusted person, and calling on the civil authorities, is not disloyalty to your husband or to Christ. It is a use of the very offices God has established for your protection; Paul calls the governing authority “God’s servant for your well-being” (Romans 13:4). The Church’s calling is to believe you, to protect you and your children, and to call the one who does harm to repentance, never to send you back into danger in the name of this verse. The Christ who gave Himself for His bride does not ask any bride to be destroyed for the sake of a sinful husband.

The Lutheran tradition has read this passage with care. Lutheran teaching has not pressed it into a strict legal or political category. It reads it as a description of how the gospel orders the marriage relationship, with the husband bearing a particular kind of responsibility (which we will see in the next section is staggering in its weight) and the wife responding within the marriage in a way that mirrors the Church’s response to Christ. The marriage is to be lived under the gospel, not under the spirit of the age: not the patriarchal spirit of the ancient world, and not the egalitarian spirit of every modern reaction to it. It is to be lived as a small icon of Christ and the Church.

The God-given pattern itself, sacrificial headship and respectful response, is not culturally negotiable. But the concrete ways a particular household expresses that pattern (in decisions, labor, gifts, schedules, and daily habits) require wisdom, love, and freedom, with the gospel as their guide and the Spirit, working through that Word, as their helper. Paul does not give a job description. He gives a theological frame.

As Christ Loved the Church

If Paul has used few verses on the wife’s submission, he uses many on the husband’s love. Verses 25 to 33 are weighted toward the husband, and the burden on him is set at a height that should make any honest husband flinch.

Husbands, Paul tells them, are to love their wives the way Christ loved the Church, by giving Himself for her.

The standard is the cross. The husband is to love his wife with the love that took Christ to His death. This is not a sentimental love. It is not the love of a poet who admires his beloved at a distance. It is a self-giving love that lays itself down for the sake of the one it loves. The husband who reads this verse rightly will know that he has been called to a kind of love he cannot manufacture on his own: a love that requires daily death to himself, daily sacrifice for his wife, daily setting aside of his own preferences for her good.

Paul then describes what Christ’s love for the Church does, and the description is breathtaking.

Christ’s love sanctifies. He cleanses His Church “with the washing of the water by the word” (Ephesians 5:26). The Lutheran tradition has read this as a clear reference to Holy Baptism. Christ’s love for His Church is not theoretical; it is delivered through the means of grace. He cleanses her at the font. He addresses her with His Word. He makes her holy through what He has given her. The husband’s love, if it follows this pattern, will not be a love of declarations only, but a love of concrete service: of doing what serves his wife’s actual sanctification, her actual flourishing in Christ.

Christ’s love is preparing a presentation. He is preparing to present the Church to Himself as glorious, without stain or wrinkle, holy and blameless, at the marriage of the Lamb. The image is of a wedding day. Christ is preparing His bride. The Church is being made beautiful for the day she will be presented to Him in glory. This is the cosmic, eternal trajectory of Christ’s love for His Church. Marriage in this age is a small picture of that great preparation.

Paul then turns from the cosmic image back to the daily reality. The husband’s love for his wife should be like his love for his own body. The reason: a man’s wife is, in the mystery of marriage, his own flesh. To love his wife is to love himself. To neglect his wife is to neglect his own body, which no one with any sense does. The husband feeds and takes care of his wife as he feeds and takes care of his own flesh, just as Christ does for His Church.

And then comes the great mystery. Paul quotes Genesis 2:24, the first marriage in Scripture, the joining of Adam and Eve: “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and will be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh” (Ephesians 5:31). And he reads the verse as referring not just to human marriage but to the relationship between Christ and His Church. The joining and one-flesh-becoming of every marriage is, in some deep way, an image of what Christ has done with His bride. Christ came forth from the Father, took flesh, and joined Himself to His Church through the cross. He did not cease to be the eternal Son or sever His communion with the Father; rather, in the flesh He took His bride to Himself and made her one body with Himself, He whose own body was given into death for her. Marriage in this age is a mystery (mystērion, the same Greek word Paul has used in 1:9 and 3:3–4), a divine truth hidden in plain sight, revealed in the gospel. The reason marriage exists at all, the reason it has the shape it has, is that it images Christ and the Church.

The Lutheran tradition has handled this passage with theological seriousness. Lutheran theologians do not classify marriage as a sacrament in the strict sense, that is, as a rite given by Christ specifically for the forgiveness of sins. But they have always recognized marriage as a divine institution given at creation, blessed in Christ, and pointing to the great gospel reality of Christ and His Church. Marriage matters because what it pictures matters. The way husband and wife treat each other is not just personal preference. It is, in a small way, a picture being painted in front of the watching world of the love between Christ and His bride.

Paul ends the passage in verse 33 with a summary, almost catechetical in its simplicity: each husband is to love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife is to respect her husband. The whole long discourse on Christ and the Church reduces, in its practical application, to two simple verbs: love and respect. The husband loves. The wife respects. These are not opposites; they are complements. Both arise out of what God has done in Christ. Both are given for the saints to live out, day by day, in the ordinary life of the Christian home.

Children and Parents

In 6:1–4, Paul turns to the second pair: children and their parents.

He addresses the children directly, telling them to obey their parents in the Lord because that obedience is right.

This was unusual. In the Greco-Roman household codes, children were not typically addressed; they were spoken about. Paul speaks to them. The Christian child is a moral agent, capable of hearing and obeying, capable of receiving the gospel, capable of obedience as a Christian act.

The reason given is twofold. First, the obedience is right; there is a creational order to it. Honor of parents is built into the structure of human life. It is not a cultural preference; it is a feature of how God has made the world. Children who obey their parents are walking in the grain of creation.

Second, Paul cites the Fourth Commandment: “Honor your father and mother,” which is, as Paul notes, “the first commandment accompanied by a promise, namely, ‘that it will go well with you and that you will live a long time on the earth’” (Ephesians 6:2–3). Paul connects the Christian household to the Old Testament law. The Fourth Commandment has not been overturned by the gospel. It has been confirmed and applied.

The Lutheran tradition’s reading of this passage has been particularly rich. Luther treats the Fourth Commandment with great seriousness in both the Small Catechism and the Large Catechism. The honor due to parents, he insists, is not a small matter. It is built into the Christian’s most fundamental obligations. And in Lutheran theology the Fourth Commandment extends beyond biological parents to all those who stand in parental authority: in the Large Catechism, the master of the household, the civil rulers, and the pastors who are our spiritual fathers. Honor of those whom God has placed over the saint is part of how the saint loves her neighbor. Disregard of parental authority is, in the Lutheran tradition, not a small matter; it touches the whole social fabric within which the gospel goes forward.

But Paul’s address is not only to children. In verse 4, he turns to fathers, and the burden he places on them is significant. He tells them not to provoke their children to anger. The instruction is striking. Paul does not begin with the father’s authority; he begins with a warning. Fathers are to be careful not to drive their children to anger, not to exasperate them, not to crush their spirits. The authority of the father in the Christian household is a stewardship, not a license. It is to be used for the child’s good, not for the father’s gratification. Here too the same limit holds as in marriage: the Fourth Commandment never requires a child to keep silent about harm done to him, and a parent who abuses a child has not exercised his authority but abandoned it.

And in place of provocation, Paul names the father’s positive task: the father is to raise his children up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. The father, and behind him the whole Christian household, is to teach the children the faith. Christian parenting is not just child-rearing in a Christian style; it is the deliberate teaching of the gospel and the catechesis of the Christian faith to the next generation. Luther’s Small Catechism is written just this way, each part set out in a simple form for the head of the house to teach to the household, and that conviction comes directly from passages like this one. The father is the household’s first teacher of the faith, and the home is the household’s first sanctuary.

Servants and Masters

In 6:5–9, Paul turns to the third pair: slaves and masters.

This passage has, in modern discussion, generated a great deal of difficulty. We must address that difficulty honestly before we work through what Paul says.

The institution Paul addresses, slavery in the Roman world, was a real and morally serious one. It involved the ownership of human beings, the buying and selling of persons, the use of forced labor, and the loss of basic freedoms by those who were enslaved. The Bible nowhere endorses this institution as a positive good. The same Paul who writes here all but requires, in his letter to Philemon, that the slave Onesimus be received no longer as a slave but as a dear brother. The gospel through the centuries has pressed against slavery, and many of the Christian abolitionists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drew their fundamental convictions from the same Scripture Paul is writing here.

What Paul is doing in this passage is not endorsing slavery as such. He is addressing slaves and masters who are saints, telling them how to live as Christians within an institution that did exist in their day. He is not saying the institution should continue. He is saying that, while it does, the Christian slave and the Christian master are both responsible to Christ in how they conduct themselves within it. The gospel transforms even the relationships embedded in fallen institutions. And the gospel, applied consistently, eventually undoes the institutions themselves.

With that frame in place, what does Paul say?

To the slaves: serve your earthly masters as you would serve Christ. Render service from the heart, not as those who are merely trying to please when watched, but as slaves of Christ doing the will of God. Whatever good is done, the Lord will reward it, whether the doer is slave or free.

This is striking. The slave’s daily labor is being treated as service rendered to Christ Himself. Whatever indignity her station may involve, her work is not invisible to God; it is being seen and received by Him. The slave is not less a saint for being a slave. She has the same Master in heaven as her earthly master does. Her labor is part of her Christian discipleship.

To the masters: treat your slaves the same way (that is, treat them as servants of Christ, as fellow saints), giving up the use of threats. Remember that the Master in heaven is both yours and theirs, and that there is no favoritism with Him.

This is even more striking. Paul tells the masters to treat their slaves the same way, to extend the same Christian conduct toward their slaves that he has just commanded the slaves to extend toward them. The mutual submission of 5:21 has reached even into this most asymmetrical of relationships. And he tells them, plainly, that there is no favoritism with God. The master has no preference with the One who matters most. He stands before God the way his slave does: as a creature, as a sinner, as one who has been given everything in Christ. God will not honor his social standing in the judgment.

The Lutheran tradition has read this passage with sensitivity to the gospel’s transforming power. Luther himself, in addressing the social conditions of his day, did not press for revolution, but he insisted on the Christian dignity of every saint, regardless of station. The peasant before God is the equal of the prince. The servant before God is the equal of the master. The faith knows no respect of persons. The application of these principles to the institution of slavery itself took centuries to fully work out, and the Church has not always lived up to her own gospel. But the seed of slavery’s overthrow was planted, in some real way, in passages like this one, where masters and slaves are addressed as fellow saints, with the same Master in heaven, with whom there is no favoritism.

The principle of the passage applies today, even though slavery as Paul knew it has been abolished in most of the world. Christians work for employers; Christians employ workers; Christians live in many asymmetrical relationships of authority and labor. In all of them, the same logic applies. The worker labors as to the Lord. The employer treats his workers as fellow saints. Both have a Master in heaven, with whom there is no favoritism. The gospel transforms work, just as it transforms marriage, just as it transforms parenting.

The Table of Duties

The Lutheran tradition has organized the gospel-shape of these stations into what Luther called the Haustafel, the Table of Duties. In his Small Catechism, after the chief parts of the faith (the Ten Commandments, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Sacraments) and the daily prayers, Luther included a section listing the duties of various stations: pastors, hearers, magistrates, citizens, husbands, wives, parents, children, servants, masters, young people, widows, all believers. Each station was given a brief statement, typically rooted in a passage of Scripture, and often this passage in Ephesians.

The point of the Table of Duties is not to provide a detailed code of conduct for every imaginable situation. The point is to remind the Christian that her life with God is not separate from her life with her neighbor. The two are one. The Christian who hears the gospel on Sunday morning is the same Christian who, on Monday, returns to her marriage, her children, her work, her congregation. She does not leave the gospel behind when she leaves the sanctuary. She carries it with her, into the small stations of her ordinary life, and she lives there as one who has been given everything in Christ.

This is the doctrine of vocation. Every saint has a calling. The calling is not just to the pulpit or the mission field. The calling is also to the kitchen table, to the bassinet, to the workbench, to the desk, to the bedside. Wherever God has placed the saint, that is where she serves her neighbor in Christ’s name. The hands that change the diaper, the hands that draft the report, the hands that plow the field, the hands that hold the dying: all of these are hands through which Christ is serving His world, working through His saints.

This session ends here. The Christian household has been described: wives and husbands rooted in Christ and the Church, children and parents bound to one another in the Fourth Commandment, servants and masters equal before God in heaven. The household codes of the ancient world have been transfigured by the gospel. The ordinary stations of life have been given new weight. The saints in Ephesus, hearing this read aloud, would have known what was being asked of them, and what was being given to them. So do we.

For Discussion

1. The pagan household codes addressed only the powerful members of each pair. Paul addresses both. What does it tell us about the gospel that every member of the household is treated as a moral agent, addressed directly, given instructions?

2. Paul calls husbands to love their wives the way Christ loved His Church, by giving Himself for her. The standard is the cross. Where does this standard meet you most challengingly in your own marriage or marriages you know? What kinds of love does this standard rule out, and what does it require?

3. Marriage is named as a mystery that refers to Christ and the Church. The ways husband and wife treat each other are, in some real way, a picture being painted of the gospel for the watching world. How does this change the way you think about marriage: your own, your friends’, your congregation’s?

4. Paul tells fathers not to provoke their children to anger but to raise them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Where in Christian parenting does this verse press against modern habits? What does it press for?

5. The slave/master passage requires careful reading. Paul addresses both as saints with the same Master in heaven. How do you see the gospel transforming the institution from within, even as the institution itself was eventually abolished? Where in your own work life (as employee or employer, or both) does this principle still apply?

6. Luther’s Table of Duties insists that the Christian’s life with God is not separate from her life with her neighbor. Where does this most need to be heard in the Christian world today? Where in your own life are you tempted to keep them separate?

Closing Prayer

Heavenly Father, You have placed each of us in particular stations: as wives or husbands, as children or parents, as workers or those who employ workers, as members of households and members of Your Church. Teach us to live in those stations as those who have been given everything in Christ. Make our marriages small icons of Christ and His bride. Help husbands love their wives as Christ loved the Church. Help wives respond as the Church responds to her Lord. Protect all who are harmed in their own homes, and give them refuge and help. Help parents not to provoke their children, but to raise them in the discipline and instruction of Jesus. Help children honor their parents as You have commanded. Help workers serve their employers as if their work were rendered to You. Help employers treat their workers as fellow saints, knowing that they themselves have a Master in heaven. And in all our stations, teach us to remember that there is no favoritism with You, that we stand before You as creatures, as sinners, as saints, all on the same ground in Christ. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Looking Ahead

Next session we read the final passage of the letter: Ephesians 6:10–24. Paul has spent five chapters telling us what God has done in Christ and how the saints are to live. He now ends with the picture that the whole letter has been preparing us for: the Christian life is a battle. The saints stand in a contest, not against flesh and blood, but against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens. The same heavenly realms where the saints have been blessed (1:3), where Christ reigns (1:20), where the saints are seated with Christ (2:6), where the Church displays God’s wisdom to the powers (3:10): those same heavenly realms are also where the spiritual war is being fought. (The NET says “in the heavens” at 6:12 and “in the heavenly realms” in the earlier verses, but Paul’s Greek phrase is the same in all of them.)

Against this enemy, the saints are given armor. Each piece is named (belt, breastplate, footwear, shield, helmet, sword), and each is connected to a gospel reality. Truth, righteousness, the good news of peace, faith, salvation, the Word of God. The whole armor is the gospel itself, applied to the saint for the fight she is in.

And the chapter ends with Paul’s own request for prayer: that he, in chains, may have the boldness to speak the gospel as he ought. The man in chains asks the saints to pray for his speech. The whole letter circles back to the prison from which it came.

Before next session, read Ephesians 6:10–24 at least twice. Read it once for sense. Read it a second time noticing the armor: what it is made of, how it is put on, what it equips the saint for. The Christian life is a walk, but it is also a stand. Paul will tell us how to do both.