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Introduction
In the first article in this series I argued that there are a number of barriers preventing the ears of contemporary Christians from hearing the scriptural claims concerning male “headship” (1 Cor. 11; Eph. 5). One factor here is that in the West the meaning of “headship” has consistently been reduced to that of “rulership”. My contention is that the “head” is best (and most biblically) understood as the representative member of the body.
In the second article I argued that the notion of “male headship” is deeply embedded in the scriptural narrative, from creation to new creation, and is a figure that finds fulfillment in Christ: the true and better “head” in whom the “body” of humanity is summed up and re-presented to the Father.
Where headship is understood principally as a synonym for rulership or chiefdom, the functions of the head are clear: rule, leadership, and authority over the body. Where headship is understood as a corporeal figure—namely, as the representative member of the body—what does headship entail? This article is my answer to that question.
In what follows, I will develop three implications for a lived theology of male headship: first, that headship denotes a theological status; second, a nuptial responsibility; and third, an authority in service of the body.
Male Headship as Theological Status
The man’s status as head-representative is fundamentally a theological status, which is to say that it is a status which relates the man first and foremost, not to the community or even to the family or household, but to God, and to the angels and principalities in the heavenly places (1 Cor. 11:10–13). Granted, the man as representative-head in Paul’s day suggested not only a theological status before God but also a legal and social status in relation to the community.
Still, for Paul, the social status of the head was rooted in something more fundamental—namely, in the ground of God’s own being, with God as the head of Christ, Christ the head of man, and man the head of woman (1 Cor. 11:3). Whatever status the man has as “head” relates him first to God, and more specifically to Christ in relation to the Church (Eph. 5:21-33).
Headship for Paul is thus first a theological status with secondary social manifestations, not the other way around.
In the Old Testament (OT), the man’s representative status involved a series of ritualized responsibilities, specifically his participation with and on behalf of his family in the liturgical and ceremonial rites of Israel, including circumcision, animal sacrifice, observance of holy days, and so on. In these ways, the OT household head served as a mediator of covenant membership for his household.
In the New Testament (NT) era, however, such covenant mediation through the male household head all but disappears. What becomes clear in this new dispensation is that the man as head is a figure of the true Mediator, Christ. Here the male head does not in fact mediate salvation to the body, but proclaims in his being the salvation mediated in Christ alone.
The man is the head after the pattern of Christ; but Christ alone is head and saviour of the body (Eph. 5:23). It is before God and a watching cosmos, then, that the man ultimately stands as representative of the one-flesh union, and is as such a figure (sign, proclamation) of Christ’s mediating and self-giving love.
One significant implication of this shift from the OT to the NT is that women are revealed as joint heirs with men, given the full covenant status as “sons” of God (Gal. 3:26; 4:6). Whereas the covenant sign of the OT (circumcision) was given only to males, the NT applies the new covenant sign (baptism) to all. Accordingly, we find that the NT woman, too, functions in equal manner with the man as a kind of mediator of covenant blessing (1 Cor. 7:14). She too enters into the “holy of holies,” welcomed into the very presence of God in the person of Christ (Luke 10:39). She too prays and prophesies in the assembly (1 Cor. 11:5; Luke 2:36; Acts 2:17).
What remains consistent from OT to NT is that the head is presented as the representative of the body, by definition. The man as head represents his own “flesh” to God and to all of creation. For this reason I have identified the man’s status as head to be fundamentally a theological status: a status by which he is related first and foremost to God in Christ. This becomes all the more clear when we consider the specific responsibilities of the head that are proper to his status.
Male Headship as Nuptial Responsibility
Contemporary debates over “male headship” have typically centered on the claim that headship entails a man’s exercising authority over his wife.
According to Paul, however, the man’s representative status is not explicitly linked to his “authority” or “leadership” but instead to a set of self-giving responsibilities, chiefly his responsibility for the purity and perfecting of the body. Exhorting husbands as “heads,” he says: “love your wives as Christ loved the church, and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her … so that he might present the church to himself in splendor” (Eph. 5:25–27).
It is precisely as the head-representative that the man is called to take final responsibility for pursuing and perfecting the sanctity of the one-flesh union of which he is a part—and all of this in order that he, after the pattern of Christ, might “present” his bride, with himself, to Christ “in splendor” (v. 27). As Christ takes final responsibility for the sanctification, wholeness, and flourishing of his bride, so the man with his wife (vv. 27–28).
In these ways, Paul’s NT “head” figure is simply a development of the OT figure, understood in the light of Christ. In short, then, to say that the man is the representative-head of the woman is to say that the man bears a certain and final responsibility for the flourishing of that one-flesh union of which he is the head. Put differently, the head, as the body’s representative member, bears a responsibility which centres on the flourishing of the whole body.
In affirming such a gender-specific calling, it is worth considering at least one way in which such a calling is offered as a matter of counterbalance. The woman, as one who bears in her own body a relation of possibility to reproduction, bears a natural relation to a literal “self-giving” for the sake of another. For the woman whose womb God “opens” (Gen. 30:22), the call to self-giving for the good of another takes its own unique, imposing shape as the woman’s bodily life is encumbered, even debilitated for a time, in order that another might live and flourish in and through her.
In some cases—gratefully far less now than ever before—in this process her life is demanded in its entirety, unto death, for the sake of her own flesh and blood. What is demanded of the woman by nature is thus demanded of the man, as a kind of divine imposition, to offer what is not by nature required of him: to lay down his very life.
Moreover, it is important to note that any such distinctively gendered calling (such as the man’s representative responsibility) is immediately qualified by the unitive dimension of his shared identity with the woman as “one flesh.” Whatever the man characteristically is or does in relation to the woman, the woman herself has a share in. The man can only be what he is, as head, through and with the woman as the body of which he is a part. Their union is in fact one of deeply mutual, if asymmetrical, submission (Eph. 5:21), as the man gives himself for the good of the woman, and the woman responds by submitting to the man as her head in an act of free and loving service under God (Eph. 5:22, 25).1
In this call, too (that the wife “submit” to her husband), it is clear that the man bears a certain responsibility for the whole body. Inasmuch as the wife is called to submit to her husband as head, as her own willing self-offering for their mutual good, to that extent he will be held accountable for the ways he loves, leads, serves and sanctifies—or fails to do so. And he will be judged accordingly (Col. 3:19; 1 Tim. 3:2–5; Jas. 3:1–2; 1 Pet. 3:7).
Moreover, he will be judged not only for whether he promoted the moral actions of his wife or whether he did no active harm to her, but for whether he sacrificially pursued her good: “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (v. 25). The husband is thus created—purposed—to live after the pattern of Christ, namely to pursue the bride, move toward the bride, and even offer his life for the bride, ultimately presenting the bride together with himself as one flesh to Christ (vv. 26–27).
The wife may do much the same, of course, reciprocally—pursuing her husband, sanctifying her one-flesh union with him, even offering her life for her husband. Indeed, such reciprocation is entirely appropriate as her shared responsibility under God. Still, it is the head whose identity as such binds him to take final responsibility for effecting in his marriage the pursuant and perfecting love of Christ.
Male Headship as Authority
This “representative responsibility” ascribed to the husband naturally raises the question of whether this status and responsibility entails a position of authority over the wife—a question which, as I have noted, has been at the centre of modern headship debates. A certain kind of authority indeed accompanies the “head” status. This authority is implied in our central text of Ephesians 5:21-33 by the call for the wife’s submission—a call which is based on the husband’s relation to her as head: “Wives, submit to your own husbands … For the husband is the head of the wife” (vv. 22–23). Two things must be noted concerning the nature and extent of the man’s authority in this passage.
First, the man’s authority as head is necessarily circumscribed according to his nature and function as the head of a body. The authority of a king differs from that of a mother, from that of a coach or tutor, from that of a team captain. Each might be said to have a certain kind of authority, but the authority of each is limited according to the nature of the relation. So it is with the head.
In fact, the notion of the head as “authority over the body”, found in much of the public discussion about these issues, marks a break with the body metaphor. Members of a body are of such a unity that each member is by nature utterly bound together with and in the service of the rest of the members, such that it is nonsensical to speak of one member having authority “over” any other (see 1 Cor. 12:21–26).
Second, not only is the head’s authority circumscribed by these conceptual limitations, but the very notion of authority is itself redefined in the NT after the pattern of Christ as a self-giving authority—an authority in service of the other. This notion is clear not only from NT “headship” passages (Eph. 1:22–23; 5:21-33; 1 Cor. 11:3) but follows a broad NT theme wherein the function of authority is redefined in terms of servitude. As Jesus says to his disciples,
Jesus could not have been clearer. Among his followers, positions of priority are sharply contrasted with notions of rule and authority, and instead described in terms of “servanthood” and “slavery”. All of this is ultimately exhibited, according to Paul, in Christ’s own example,
In sum, whatever authority is being promoted here in Ephesians for the man is necessarily delimited and defined by the figure of Christ: specifically, by Christ’s self-giving authority for the good of the bride. As Christ comes to his church as a servant-head, such servitude marks the function of his “authority” as head (Eph. 5:25–27; cf. John 13; Phil 2).
Conclusion
The man’s status as head-representative is fundamentally a theological status denoting a representative responsibility and an authority with and for the body.
As head of the male-female one-flesh union, the man represents Christ to his household and his household to God and to the angels; and as such he is responsible for the flourishing of the one-flesh union under God—namely, to love and to cherish his bride, as Christ does his Church, and to seek her good, as Christ does his Church, so as to present their union to God pure and without blemish, as Christ does his Church.
In this way, the man “in Christ” is being renewed as a figure of Christ. “This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph. 5:32).
1 The wife’s call to “submit” in this passage must be understood in light of the believer’s freedom in Christ (Gal. 5:1-13; Rom. 8:1-11) shared across all social divisions (Gal. 3:28; Col. 3:11), understood not as a “yoke of slavery” (Gal. 5:1) but as a call to “faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6), a call to “serve one another through love” (Gal. 5:6, 13). With the woman’s call to “submission in everything,” even “as to the Lord,” many have raised the concern that this will lead to women suffering silently under wicked, abusive men.
For this reason, it is imperative that such a call is taught with equally urgent instructions: e.g., that submission does not entail silent suffering under abuse; that all authorities in Christ must stand against any and all forms of abuse; that any indications of abuse will be investigated; that men will be held to account for any such abuse; etc.
For one example of such instruction in a complementarian context, see the Presbyterian Church in America’s “Report of the Ad Interim Committee on Domestic Abuse and Sexual Assault” (2022).
Portions of this article are adapted from Transfiguring Headship: A Figural Theology of Gender (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2026). Reproduced with the permission of Wipf & Stock Publishers, with thanks.
