BOOK REVIEW:
Does Christianity Teach Male Headship?: The Equal-Regard Marriage and Its Critics. Edited by David Blankenhorn, Don Browning and Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen. Religion, Marriage, and Family Series. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B.Eerdmans, 2004. xvi +141 pp. ISBN 0802821715.

Imagine the discovery of an unknown four-act play by William Shakespeare. Three acts are intact, but only the tail end of the fourth act is preserved. Shakespearean actors know how the drama will end, however, they must improvise the missing portion. Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen, one of the contributors to the lively exchange of ideas in this volume, credits this imaginative exercise to N. T. Wright (pp. 16, 17). The energized debate that occurs in Does Christianity Teach Male Headship? The Equal-Regard Marriage and Its Critics is an attempt to script “the missing portion” of a divine drama and a conscientious effort by active theologians to stage an answer to the question raised in the title.

Restated, their task is to choreograph an answer to the question of male headship in marriage (p.99). Was Christianity a major cultural contributor or carrier of women’s subordination with its emphasis on “headship marriage”? Did this propensity come from the surrounding Greco-Roman culture? Or did Christianity teach an “equal-regard” marriage in which husband and wife are mutually exclusive?

A passionate exchange of views occurs in Act IV. According to the series editors, more “liberal voices” open the debate as they make a case for equal-regard marriage (viii). The second part of the book is a challenge from more conservative players. Don Browning reflects on this debate in a summary observation.       

All the book is a stage for debate, and each theologian plays a major part. However, I will comment briefly on some of the stellar performances. David Blankenhorn navigates in the Introduction around numerous roles that men play, but it is his interviewing of a group of women from the Apostolic Church of God, an African-American Pentecostal Church, on the south side of Chicago, that impressed this reader. These women “need to craft an esteemed role for the male within the family,” thus, necessitating a form of male headship in marriage (xi). Daniel Mark Cere’s development of pre-Reformation doctrinal teaching on the sacramentality of marriage as “the magnet around which theological reflection on the Christ/church and husband/wife analogy gravitates” (p. 103) reopens an issue of theological concern for some. Maggie Gallagher’s interpretation of the purpose of the household codes as an attempt to reduce “transaction costs” in the economy of the household production and industry gives a fresh interpretation to an old script. Don Browning’s work on the “honor-shame codes” of the Greco-Roman world and their embeddedness in patriarchy, family hierarchies, and subsequent household codes or Haustafel is another fine performance.

Two of the central concepts of the book are the “male problematic” and the “female problematic.” The male problematic is “the tendency of males to procreate but often be reluctant to bond with and care for children and family” (pp. 135, 136). The female problematic is the “tendency of mothers under certain circumstances to bond with the children, exclude the father, and sometimes assert independence and go it alone” (p.137). The vocation of both husband and wife is to restore mutual love, to overcome both the male and female problematic, and to move redemptively, to the love ethic of equal–regard marriage (p.138).

If this book is likened to the “missing pieces” of a four-act play, I would also add additional “missing pieces” that need to be included. The violence of some forms of male headship needs greater attention in the script. In some variant readings of “male headship,” involving abuse, women have been killed in the name of submission to this concept. The subversive nature of the household codes as described in Ephesians 5 was not spotlighted. More attention to the pervasive reality of paterfamilias in the Roman world, the problematic of manus (lit. hand) or husband’s power over the wife, and the rulership of the Divine Father of the Roman Empire, the emperor, would set the stage for the revolutionary portrayal of God as Patria Potestas or Paterfamilias (Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner, The Spirit of Adoption: At Home in God’s Family [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2003] pp.112-113). Missing actors include Joseph, adoptive father of Jesus, who, even with a minor role, would add insights into the role of the male in Jesus’ culture. A representative of the Cult of the Great Mother like Artemis, for example, might have been given a brief appearance on the stage of speculation for she would represent “female headship” in the Mediterranean world at the time in which some of the books of Paul or the school of Paul were written (J. Stevenson-Moessner, Ephesians: An Idolatry, Pathology, and Theology of the Family, unpublished manuscript).

“Perhaps the proponents of equal regard and its ‘Biblicist’ critics share a common error: the belief that Scripture must affirm one particular order of relations between the sexes – either egalitarian or hierarchical. Perhaps the theological quest for an ordained order of sexual relations is doomed” (Cere, p.107). Even if the question posed by one contributor is accurate, the reader will be quite energized by this academic production. After reading the “script,” I was left with the desire to see the play “live.” Perhaps that performance will occur as this text is used in many church and academic classrooms, at conferences, in debates. For the suspense is mounting to see the denouement in Act Four: Does Christianity teach male headship?

Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner
Associate Professor of Pastoral Care
Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas

PUBLISHED IN THE BULLETIN OF THE INSTITUTE FOR REFORMED THEOLOGY, SPRING 2006, VOL. 6, #1.