Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.csd.uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: nlt@romeo.cs.duke.edu (N. L. Tinkham) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: Husband as leader in marriage Message-ID: Date: 1 Sep 89 07:57:49 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Duke University CS Dept.; Durham, NC Lines: 64 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu I have refrained thus far from joining the discussion on authority in marriage, because most of the Scriptural support for both cases has been pointed out already: Several Pauline passages support the traditional style of marriage, while Galatians, Genesis 1, and the general principle of loving one's neighbor as one's self give support to an egalitarian view; Genesis 2-3 is, um, flexible enough to be used to support either side. However, I decided to post when the end of Peter Berghold's article caught my eye. He writes: > Each member of the partnership have differing needs. A wife for instance > tends to need to know that she is loved and appreciated by her husband for > something other than being a "baby factory" (to put it delicately). Husbands > tend to need to be respected and know that they are looked up to. Wives: if > you don't respect your husbands, why did you marry him? If both partners > WORK at providing the needs of each other, they won't need to be reminded of > EPH 5:32. It will just happen. Two things bother me in this paragraph. First: The asymmetry in the descriptions of the wife's and husband's needs is strange to my ears. In my own relationship, yes, I need to feel loved -- but so does he; he needs respect -- but so do I. (My fiance's comment here was "Yes, we have different needs: you need air and I need water.") Second: The meaning of the word "respect" shifts between its occurrences in the third and fourth sentences, making the implied argument fallacious. Two of the dictionary definitions for "respect" are a) "admiration for or a sense of the worth or excellence of a person..." and b) "deference to a right, privilege, privileged position, or to someone or something considered as having certain rights or privileges". By tying "respect" to being "looked up to", the third sentence suggests meaning (b); by asking "why did you marry him?", the fourth sentence uses meaning (a). The argument appears to be If X marries Y, then X should respect(a) Y. If X respects(b) Y, then X submits to Y's authority over X. Therefore, if X marries Y, X should submit to Y's authority over X. which, of course, commits the fallacy of equivocation. The flaw is most easily seen by assigning other values to X and Y: for instance, if X = "the husband" and Y = "the wife", we have "If a husband marries his wife, then he should 'respect' [ambiguous] her; therefore, he should submit to her authority over him." My own opinion on the question of authority in marriage is that since, for me, authority in a relationship tends to create a distance that inhibits intimacy in that relationship, it baffles me that anyone would want to introduce authority into a relationship as intimate as marriage. What St. Paul's advice would have been had he been able to meet twentieth-century men and women, I cannot say. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- "The first thing that strikes the careless observer is that women are unlike men. They are 'the opposite sex' -- (though why 'opposite' I do not know; what is the 'neighbouring sex'?). But the fundamental thing is that women are more like men than anything else in the world. They are human beings." - D. L. Sayers Nancy Tinkham nlt@lear.cs.duke.edu {decvax,rutgers}!mcnc!duke!nlt