In this document, Paul DeCelles corrected misconceptions about headship and submission. He explained two goals of pastoral care: to assist us in becoming free individuals and to build unity of mind and heart in the body. This is a manuscript for a talk and seems to end abruptly. We don’t know whether the talk was ever given.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that the words headship and submission in the combination do not occur in the Spirit and Purpose. The reason for that is we have taken that complex of ideas which is brought to mind by the words headship and submission and the relationship between those words and we’ve called it pastoral care. We have a section in the Spirit and Purpose on pastoral care.
The reason we made this change is to emphasize a different approach to the words headship and submission than one finds in the world. In fact, I think it is a very difficult job to get people to think the Christian way about headship and submission. Our Lord himself spoke of problems connected with this. In Scripture he said those who are over you in the world lord it over you. He did not say there would not be headship and submission in the Christian community, but in fact those who headed others had to be servants and the least of all. He himself who was Lord had come to serve, not to be served.
There is a problem with language regarding headship and submission. A lot of the teachings in the community need to be directed toward making clear what we mean when we use the phrases headship and submission.
Secondly, there are many different levels where one can enter a discussion of headship and submission. For us it’s extremely important to see the two major things we want to see accomplished, that we think are crucial to Christianity. The first is the freedom of the individual. Jesus came to set us free. We mean by that that a person should be increasingly self-determined, that he should be capable of having self-control, of heightening his awareness of realities, his understanding and having overcome the influences of the world in his life and being knowledgeable about the activity of Satan in the world and in one’s life as well as the effects of his own history. We really want people to be free and fully human individuals. We know Jesus died to save us, to set us free. While that is true, it is also true that Jesus established the church and saved us so that we could become one, with each other and with him even as he and the Father are one.
So we have two purposes—one is to be free individuals and on the other hand, to be one, a collection of people whose individuality is not apparent in their unity. They possess one mind and heart.
Talking about this is very difficult. It sounds on the face of it as though it were a contradiction between personal freedom and belonging to a community. That cannot be true because Jesus has called us to be one and to be of one mind and heart, to lay aside our personal objectives and freedoms, and to surrender our very lives for the sake of one another. On the other hand, he urges us to be free. He told us to be fully human, to know him and love him individually. We have these two realities and we need to understand how they work together.
This very large subject requires the development of a lot of notions which this medium really doesn’t make possible. Headship and submission has to do with both becoming free human persons on the one hand and, on the other hand, primarily with becoming one body, one mind and heart. It is possible to become of one mind and heart without becoming less of a person. It’s the role of the person who is heading someone to sort of straddle these two regions of reality and help the person both be an individual and help him be a member of the community, to help them be fully responsible free individual people who submit their individuality to the body for the sake of Christ, on the other hand.
The primary work of a head is to build unity in the body. Of course, this is done using primarily the characteristics that Jesus showed us — that in order to build unity, one must be willing to lay down his very life for the sake of the people he’s heading.
Because of the difficulties attached to the phrases headship and submission with which we enter the community, notions we have already acquired about it—true or false—because of these notions it’s necessary for us to continue to describe headship and submission as pastoral care and to keep that relationship of headship and submission with all of the elements of it clearly associated with good pastoring and good pastoral care.
Submitting as a way of life and increasing one’s freedom does seem to be impossible. That’s what is so perplexing about the Gospel. It says blessed are those who are poor and meek and I’ve read many, many things about poverty and meekness which redefine them so that they don’t mean what being poor and being meek means. Yet our Lord says that those are the conditions, basically, of entering the kingdom of God. It’s strange, in a way. I think it’s a miracle; it can only be a miracle that one can become fully an individual and self-determining by being meek and lowly. The point is you acquire individual freedom as a grace from God as opposed to something you earn by exerting your own self. It is a gift.
It seems to be the way in which you get all things, according to the Gospel, is to give up everything. That is a terribly difficult thing to perceive from the world’s point of view. St. Paul says, having nothing I have all things, etc. Our Lord himself has shown us how to acquire all things by first dying. So there is this assent to individual freedom which strangely enough begins by going down rather than up.
Aside from the method, there’s another part of the problem which is the fact that it’s really impossible for an enslaved person to be meek. You have to be free in order to be meek, in order to be something you’re doing as opposed to a condition which you endure. You have to be the kind of person who can indeed get along in a situation where he prefers other people’s opinions to his own. That requires a considerable amount of personal development. It’s not as though one has to be meek in order to become perfect. That’s true but it’s not sufficient. It’s also not sufficient to say one must be perfect — perfectly individual, perfect freedom — in order to be meek. That’s not true. In fact, I think it has to go something like leapfrog or like climbing a ladder, hand over hand. I think that’s what our Lord means when he says, because you’ve been faithful in small things I will give you more things to be in charge of. It is characteristic of the Lord that he leads us, he gives us some small grace and we respond in our small way. Because we have been faithful in that small thing, he will give us another grace and in that way he leads us gently to perfect freedom and perfect submission.
I don’t want to call it a mystery. I want to call it a grace. It seems to be freedom is a gift from God. It is the effect of our redemption. It is won by Jesus once and for all and is there for us to acquire. In order to acquire it we basically have to put ourselves in the right disposition to respond favorably to it because it is always a gift. So it is a mystery in that sense. But it’s a mystery of grace itself.
I think all of this is very high-follutin’ stuff. But it does seem that it’s not for no reason that people do not understand headship and submission in the world or in the church. It’s not an accident by any means that there is so little community in the church. You can’t have community without having headship and submission. You can’t have unity without pastoral care. You can have individuals who are living mostly deprived of the fellowship they need in order to acquire unity of heart and mind with Jesus. That’s what’s going on in the church and the world today. There is so little understanding of these things. They are difficult to understand. The Gospel in a certain sense is full of apparent contradictions. It’s not being explained very well. That’s the purpose of community.
Community itself is most readily attacked at this vulnerable point. The people become go-fers; the community exists for the sake of the top, that there’s an escalation of power and authority. All these things are arguing from Watergate through to caricatures of behavior of church bodies throughout the world. I can think of no organization that hasn’t fallen short of its goal. I know of nothing that has succeeded fully in the intention that God has for it. Therefore, we have to be continually reforming ourselves, alert to the abuses that creep in as selfishness takes over in individuals in pastoral care, as people become lazy and cease striving to become free. All these things are endemic to headship and oppression on the one hand and obedience and minimization of the human person on the other. The refusal to accept responsibility for one’s actions, for example.
It is a terrible thing to define. It seems to me the greatest challenge to the community is to become of one mind and heart in Jesus Christ, a free and voluntary association of fully human individuals who are in self-control free from the obstacles to grace, who in fact voluntarily lay down their lives for each other for the sake of Christ. Submission is the voluntary laying down of your life to fit into the plan of God, to become one in mind and heart, to change your mind to put on the mind of Christ, to submit to the Lord’s will.
It hardly ever looks that grand, I agree. It doesn’t for different reasons. One reason is that we all really have a hard time understanding the incarnation. It’s really hard to understand that the word of God would actually become a baby, an actual human being, who has all of the biological processes of a human being. At every moment this human being was the very word of God – Jesus. I think we can’t say that all these incidental things in Jesus’s life are irrelevant. They’re not. He was always, at all moments, fully human, fully divine.
That’s what I think our situation is. There is a lot of mundaneness about headship and submission, about daily life. Yet it is nonetheless by virtue of the incarnation we are gifted with the presence of the Holy Spirit in our life. It’s something like the words that the Lord said to Peter: what I have called holy you can’t call profane. He’s eating meat that was being let down in the sheets in that case. It does mean that, too, as a matter of fact as well as him accepting the Gentiles.
We need to be careful not to reject the plain, little things of our lives, like headship and submission, as though they don’t have anything to do with the grandiose plan of God in achieving unity of mind and heart.
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