"22 Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Saviour. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.
25 Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, 26 that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, 27 so that he might present the church to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.[a]28 In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, 30 because we are members of his body. 31 “Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” 32 This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church. 33 However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband."
Ephesians 5:22-33
We look, then, at 22ff, which give the Apostle's teaching about husbands and wives. The immediate context of what he says is the idea of submission, expressed in 21. The being filled with the Spirit, he means, inculcates an attitude of submission. This is not a curious idea confined to Paul's thinking, for we find the same teaching in 1 Peter 2:13-3:1ff, where clearly the principle of submission is applied by Peter to this and other areas of Christian life. Indeed, it would be true to say this is a cardinal doctrine throughout the New Testament epistles. 'Christ pleased not Himself ...' Paul says in Romans 15:3, and in Philippians 2:5 he reminds us that 'Christ ... became obedient unto death', and urges us to be armed with the same mind. What Paul says here therefore in 22 is 'all of a piece' with apostolic teaching and practice. Submission is 'built in' to the structure of the Christian doctrine of the Church as the Body of Christ, and the notion of 'inter-dependence' is paramount.
There is little doubt that what Paul says here about wives submitting themselves to their husbands tends to 'raise some hackles', and it is hardly possible to expound these verses without the danger of this happening. All the same, this is not the writing of some cranky male chauvinist, but the inspired Word of God and one can only view with amusement and dismay the antics of Church dignitaries who fall over backwards in their efforts not to offend feminist fanatics, and have gone the length of revising some modern new translations of the Scriptures which remove every possible reference to the male sex or gender, for fear of offending feminist susceptibilities. This has reached such a pitch of absurdity in our day that one wonders whether they have simply developed some kind of hysteria. It is safe to say that it would not have crossed most preachers' minds to suspect that they were being chauvinist in using the phrase 'good will toward men' in the Christmas story but simply using the word 'man' in a general, collective sense. Why make such an issue of this?