counterculture or kingdom?

My day job (besides taking care of my own babies) is helping families build healthy and sustainable sleep foundations for their babies and toddlers. One of the first things I try to instill in every set of parents I work with is the following principle:

Respond, don’t react.

When you respond to your baby’s crying in the middle of the night, you might pause for a moment and listen. You might evaluate the sound of their cry. You might compare it to how they normally communicate with you when they’re hungry, sick, cold, or just annoyed. Based on all of that information, you’d then decide what kind of response they need, and offer it to them accordingly.

This way of operating allows your baby, not yourself, to be the guide of your actions—in contrast with when you simply react, rushing to stop the crying in any way that you think might work, even if it’s not what your baby needs.

I think a lot of us as believers and believing churches could stand to work on this.

Among congregations that highly value the Bible and the holiness of God, there is a temptation to recoil from the secular culture and go in the opposite direction—ironically, instead of actually following the guidance of the Bible.

We react instead of responding.

Consider one example from my formative years: A book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye was published in 1997, at the height of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board’s extremely popular and widespread “True Love Waits” abstinence campaign. The book and the associated purity culture movement gained enormous traction in evangelical Christian circles. And it was a reaction to the Sexual Revolution’s influence on church youth in the 1970s and 1980s.

But instead of achieving any meaningful “purity” or teaching a healthy sexual ethic, sound data now overwhelmingly indicates that the principles of purity culture primarily succeeded in warping an entire generation of Christians’ understanding of sex and sexuality (see the work of Sheila Wray Gregoire).

Or how about another that is both as old as time and very current (and, clearly, on my mind): The effort to stop any movement toward true mutuality in husband-wife relationships, let alone toward equality of men and women in a church setting, has in the past several decades largely been a reaction to the feminist movement. More recently, it has gained a new momentum as we recoil from the confusion in society around gender and the gender binary.

And instead of putting on display God’s glorious Genesis 2 vision, in which men and women work in equal partnership to achieve His goals on earth and reflect His nature, the church’s grip on complementarianism has only succeeded in handicapping our witness by Christianizing the idea that some human beings naturally rank higher than others. This idea is anti-Scripture, anti-Gospel, and anti-Christ, but nevertheless has been used by the church to justify atrocities throughout history, from slavery to the Holocaust to many forms of abuse.

When the Bible calls us out of the patterns of the world, it doesn’t say “Observe the way the world is going and run in the opposite direction.” Instead, the Word of God calls us to discernment. Discernment is what we need to navigate an environment that is rarely black-and-white. Discernment is what we need if we intend to respond instead of react. Discernment is what we need when the answers aren’t easy.

Discernment is what keeps us off the endlessly swinging pendulum of react, react, react.

Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.

- Romans 12:2

Like taking a moment to breathe and tune into my baby’s cry in the middle of the night prevents me from acting out of my own panic or frustration and allows my baby’s need to dictate my response, taking the time to investigate the Scriptures and listen to the guidance of the Holy Spirit when we notice unholiness in our culture allows God, not the culture, to be the leader of our actions.

Doing a 180-degree turn away from the culture does not make us holy or our culture better. There are often pieces of goodness even in the parts of our culture that we find most abhorrent, and in our haste to react, we lose the good along with the bad. Thus the traditional Christian church, desiring rightly to uphold Scripture’s clear teachings that men and women are not interchangeable, at the same time lost hold of Scripture’s clear teachings that God made men and women absolutely equal in both calling and value.

Holiness comes through transformation—transformation that takes place through the renewing of our minds. Our thoughts, intellect, reason, perceptions, judgments, and determinations must be made completely new. We think of the kingdom of heaven as the “upside-down kingdom” not because it operates exactly opposite of how earthly kingdoms do, but because it operates in a way that is entirely foreign to all of us. It is not instinctive, it’s transformative. To be part of that kingdom, we can’t just change course; we must be born all over again, into an entirely new way of thinking, understanding, judging, acting.

Then alone can we discern the heart of God, which doesn’t fit neatly inside any of our comfortable categories.

But if we study our Bibles through the lens of our culture, it will be culture, not Scripture, that gets the last word.

for yonder breaks

What do you see in the picture above?

Is it an all-seeing eye? Or is it an eerie black cave?

It’s both.

When I was about three years old, the same age as my daughter Clara, I remember the power going out in the middle of the night. We lived in a double-wide mobile home in the middle of nowhere, so when the power went out on a moonless night, it was darkness like most of us never see anymore. I couldn’t see my own hand in front of my face, and I was scared—terrified. I could only think of one thing to do: Get to my mom and dad’s room, because with them, I’d be safe.

Very carefully, I slid out of bed. My bedroom was tiny, and I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to map my way to the doorway. A few steps forward, then a right turn, a few more steps—and I’d be out in the hall. From there I would just have to make it straight across the living room to my parents’ bedroom door.

Step, step, step. Turn. Step, step—bang.

It wasn’t my doorway I had found. It was bars. Vertical bars, like a jail. I gripped one in each hand and felt my whole body seize silently with terror. They had locked me in. I couldn’t escape this horrible dark place. I was trapped.

---

This memory resurfaces often for me, usually at random and without much emotion attached. I’ve always wondered why it stuck with me so clearly for so long—until I realized recently, with some guidance from my counselor, that even though this event occurred nearly 27 years ago, I have unconsciously relived it about a thousand times since.

When my idealistic illusions of my marriage shattered—trapped. When I was sitting in the Neuro ICU waiting room for what felt like days on end—trapped. When I had a newborn baby and postpartum depression—trapped. When I sat in church community groups in disagreement, yet unable to speak—trapped.

Most recently, when I had to force-feed my too-small baby who was always happy except when she was eating, but had to eat for the sake of her own development: Trapped.

My counselor said I might benefit from what she called “memory work.” It’s where you return to the memory and relive it as realistically as you can. While you’re there, you seek until you find where God was in that moment—where the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were in the scene with you.

I tried, but I felt handicapped by my logical mind. I’d try to feel the bars in my hands and I’d hear my left-brain saying, “This isn’t going to work. You know you’re not actually there.” So I tried something else my counselor has suggested before as a bridge into my right-brain: art.

The picture above began with my paintbrush dipped in black. I painted the black of that room where I had felt so trapped, the choking quality of an unfathomable darkness. I added other colors and shapes and concepts as the memory stirred me. And when the picture was complete, I finally discovered where God had been—or maybe more accurately, where I was in relation to God: In the center of His eye all along.

---

My dad came down the hall carrying a candle. His voice was gentle and reassuring. I could see, finally, in that dim and flickering light, that the bars I thought were a jail they’d put up to contain me were just the railing of my sister’s crib. I had miscalculated my steps and never reached the door.

I think my joy and relief to see that faint glow of light and Dad’s face must be something like what Creation felt when the baby Jesus drew His first human breath.

A thrill of hope.

Maybe I wasn’t truly trapped. Maybe they did really love me. Maybe I wouldn’t be stuck in the dark by myself forever.

Maybe, even though all I could see was darkness, I was actually enveloped on all sides by the dazzling embrace of a loving and compassionate God.

O holy night! the stars are brightly shining;
It is the night of the dear Savior’s birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
Till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope—the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!
Fall on your knees! O hear the angel voices!
O night divine, O night when Christ was born!

- O Holy Night by Placide Cappeau (translated by John S. Dwight), 1847

as Christ loved the church

I’m married to a firefighter who is the son of a retired sheriff’s deputy. A couple of his cousins were/are in the U.S. military. Maybe it’s a trait of most men, or maybe their occupations give them a unique perspective, but one thing I’ve noticed that all of these guys have in common is a rather lighthearted way of talking about their own deaths.

My husband, for example, periodically remarks that I’ll be a rich widow if he dies on the job. He recalls how his dad used to joke that if he were to die unexpectedly at home, the family should put on his uniform and stage him in his patrol car to make it look like an on-duty death. His cousins would talk among themselves about the “cool” ways they hoped to die, if they must die in the course of their service.

I’m not surprised, then, that Christian men seem to like Ephesians 5 a lot more than Christian women do. Not only do Paul’s words make it easy to preach a divine calling for wives to be doormats, but they also give ample opportunity to paint men as spectacular heroes, knights in shining armor, Prince Charmings who get the glamorous mission of loving their wives “just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her” (Ephesians 5:25).

Dying a “cool” death—a hero’s death—for your family? It’s right there in the Bible. What wife wouldn’t naturally want to defer to the lordship of such a man? What husband doesn’t deserve unconditional reverence, if this is his divine calling?

I’m no great music buff, but I can almost always clear a space in my brain for the music of alternative rock duo Twenty One Pilots. To my taste, they hit the sweet spot of catchiness, poetry, and depth. I find that there’s an apt Twenty One Pilots lyric for most occasions (along with a Jane Austen or Downton Abbey quote—what can I say, I contain multitudes).

Ephesians 5:25 and our glorification of sacrificial love to mean a hero’s death is, it turns out, one such occasion.

“I’d die for you” that’s easy to say
We have a list of people that we would take
A bullet for them, a bullet for you
A bullet for everybody in this room
But I don’t seem to see many bullets coming through
See many bullets coming through
Metaphorically, I’m the man
But literally, I don’t know what I’d do

- Twenty One Pilots, “Ride”

These few lines of rap are not about Ephesians 5 (well, I guess I’d have to ask Tyler to know for sure, but I rather doubt it). But they capture the dissonance between how Paul chose his words and how the Church often chooses to teach them.

Let’s review:

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her. . . . So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

Ephesians 5:25, 28-31

There is only one imperative in this section: “Husbands, love your wives.” The rest of the passage, including verses 26-27 which I’ve intentionally excluded*, is descriptive of Christ’s role in the Church and God’s good design for the sexes as outlined in Genesis 2:23-24.

*I have excluded verses 26-27 because, while they do go into greater detail on what Christ did for the church, they don’t add directly to what the husband is commanded to do for his wife. It’s as if Paul started talking about Jesus and got so excited by it that he had to expound on Christ’s work further—even though the contents of these verses are not part of his command to husbands. Christ alone sanctifies and cleanses the church, the whole church, including its women. Husbands are not told to do that work.

Paul included both of these examples for the singular purpose of arguing for the importance of his basic command. Contrary to how this passage is sometimes presented in our culture, “Husbands, love your wives” was an earth-shattering countercultural message for Ephesus, not a given or an afterthought. To convince the Ephesian Christian men that it was actually important to treat their wives as if they have value, Paul had to support his argument, and he used the example of Christ and the example of Creation to that end. These together make up the answer to the question:

How are husbands called to love their wives?

1. Following the example of Christ

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her.

This is where that glorious hero’s death image usually shows up. Instead of seeing Christ in the Garden, humbly healing the soldier after Peter impetuously cut off his ear, willingly giving Himself into the custody of the Romans; instead of watching Him silently stand an unjust trial, turn His cheek to His abusers, and carry His own method of execution to the site of His own brutal death—all of which Paul is referencing when he says “gave Himself up”—we insert a different set of images pulled from our own cultural zeitgeist: Harry Potter absorbing Voldemort’s Killing Curse; Gandalf the Grey fighting the Balrog to protect the Fellowship of the Ring; Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor enveloped by the brilliant white heat of the Death Star’s attack on Scarif just after transmitting the space station’s all-important plans to the Rebel fleet. These heart-wrenching moments of sacrifice play out over an epic musical score and make the whole idea of giving oneself up look truly glorious—even, almost, appealing.

It’s not that hard to think of people we’d take a bullet for. It might even be fun to imagine playing that kind of hero in our story, and using this trope can make the loving and peaceful values of the Kingdom of Heaven seem a lot more interesting. But as the Twenty One Pilots lyric goes: “I don’t seem to see many bullets coming through.”

When we make Ephesians 5 into a call for wives to become smaller and weaker while husbands become bigger and stronger, several sad things happen. Abusive dynamics increase. Avenues to safely and appropriately deal with such abuses decrease. Women are taught that their part of the bargain is an all-day-every-day command they must obey, while men are allowed many liberties as long as they’re prepared to take a bullet (literally or metaphorically) when the need arises—even if that never happens.

It’s easy to forget that when Paul said “Husbands, love your wives,” he was telling husbands to become like Christ, not to become like Tony Stark in Avengers: Endgame.

In the Greek, “gave Himself up” does not mean “died.” Paul was not referencing Christ’s sacrificial death alone (although that’s undoubtedly part of the picture). The word means to hand over or to betray oneself. In essence, it means to give up one’s power. To humble oneself as Christ did: the Creator and King of the universe became a human “nobody.” He lived as a vagrant; He was eventually abandoned by nearly all of His friends and family; He was unjustly accused, arrested, and tried. He died the lonely death of a criminal.

He gave up His power and His rights. That’s how He loved the church.

Can you imagine what Paul would say if he knew his words were being used for the exact opposite purpose—to set husbands in a position of superiority and entitlement over their wives?

2. Following the example of Creation

So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

Ephesians 5:28-31

The final sentence in this passage, verse 31, is a direct quote from Genesis 2:

For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh.

Genesis 2:24

This is important. If you’ve spent much time in churches that place a high value on the study of the Scriptures, you may have heard it said, “Whenever you see a ‘therefore’ you need to figure out what it’s there for.” The “therefore” in this version is translated “for this reason,” but the principle holds. For what reason?

We can’t find the answer in Ephesians 5. We must follow Paul where he’s taking us—back to the beginning, back to God’s original design, back to Genesis 2.

Then the Lord God said, “It’s not good that the human is alone. I will make him a helper that is perfect for him.” . . . So the Lord God put the human into a deep and heavy sleep, and took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh over it. With the rib taken from the human, the Lord God fashioned a woman and brought her to the human being. The human said, “This one finally is bone from my bones and flesh from my flesh. She will be called a woman because from a man she was taken.” This is the reason that a man leaves his father and mother and embraces his wife, and they become one flesh.

Genesis 2:18, 21-24 CEB

The reason a man leaves his parents and is joined to a wife as one flesh? “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.”

In other words, when the first man sees the first woman, he recognizes her as a piece of himself. She is him—she came straight out of him. She is identical to him in nature and identity and role and value—in everything, except in her sex. She is his exact counterpart, his perfect partner, and—both literally and figuratively—his other half.

So it makes perfect sense for Paul to command husbands to love their wives as their own bodies. After all, “He who loves his own wife loves himself”—not in the shallow, self-centered sense of the old cliche, “Happy wife = happy life,” but in the profound Creation truth that God’s design for marriage was for two equal image-bearers to join together as one, together more perfectly reflecting the male and female attributes of God than either could do alone.

In the Greco-Roman culture of Paul’s day, it was common for women’s bodies to be seen as a flawed and deformed version of the male body, which was considered the ideal. Paul was, again, teaching the church something that would have blown their minds (and unfortunately, might still blow some minds in our churches today): Husbands, your wife is your equal, a perfectly designed and pricelessly valued human being created by God Himself to reflect His image.

Treat her like one.

The next line in the song goes like this:

“I’d live for you” and that’s hard to do
Even harder to say when you know it’s not true

In my thirty-ish years of observation in the various churches and communities I’ve been part of, I’ve known a lot of men who were probably ready to take a bullet. But the ones actually giving themselves up? That was usually the women—especially the wives and mothers.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t be doing it. Paul is clear that the command to subject ourselves to one another is mutual (Ephesians 5:21), and the entirety of Scripture is clear that the command to love one another is not limited to either sex. At the same time, we need to acknowledge that we often see the sacrificial love of a man as something completely different from the sacrificial love of a woman. We allow his version to be aspirations for a “cool” death, or maybe the exchange of 60+ hours of his week for pay, if we’re being generous.

But hers? Hers is expected to include the day-by-day, minute-by-minute offering up of her time, her career, her sleep, her physical body, her brain space, her dreams, her desires, her mental health, her interests, and even the food on her plate (if you have a toddler, you know what I’m talking about). On top of all this, she’s reminded with wearying regularity that it’s very important to her heroic husband that she stay young, pretty, thin, and sexually available. She might get a potted plant and an allusion to Proverbs 31 by way of a thank you at church on Mother’s Day, if she’s lucky.

This is so distant from what Paul envisioned when he was writing the New Testament—not to mention what Jesus envisioned when He came bringing the Good News of the Kingdom, or what the Creator envisioned when He formed humans in the Garden—that I want to weep on his behalf.

We’ve only been studying the portion of the passage that deals with husbands, but Paul’s message begins all the way back in Ephesians 5:18, with the initial command to “Be filled with the Spirit.” When the Holy Spirit of God fills two people who are in a marriage, there is mutual submission, respect, and sacrificial love. The wife lays down her own interests for her husband the same way she would expect to do for her God; the husband gives up his rights for his wife the same way he would expect to do for his Savior.

The husband treats his wife as his equal image-bearer and co-worker in the Kingdom. The wife treats her husband the same way.

They live out the Genesis design by recognizing that they are not opposites, but counterparts. Their union is not a hierarchy, but a team: the head needs the lifeblood supplied by the body and the body needs the animation made possible by the head. Their clearest testimony to the Good News of the Kingdom is to refuse to imitate any version of the Genesis 3:16 distortion of God’s plan—even one taught inside a church.

Jesus already died the hero’s death for us. Sure, there have been martyrs since, and will be martyrs to come—but the ultimate life-saving sacrifice has already been made. Our job now as husbands and wives, as men and women, as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven, is not necessarily to lay down our physical lives, but to do the thing that is sometimes harder: to give up our very selves.

Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me.”

Matthew 16:24