Obedience in the Family

The Christian Order of Husband, Wife, and Children — A Continuation

Introduction: An Order We No Longer Understand

In the previous article, To Whom Should We Offer Obedience?, we spoke about the obedience of the layman towards his confessor, and about the distinction between the confessor and the spiritual father. The present article is its natural continuation: obedience in the family. The same patristic logic applies, but now in the closest relationships of life — between husband and wife, between parents and children.

The Christian family is an icon of the Holy Trinity and of the relation Christ–Church. This is not pious metaphor; it is the ontological truth of Christian marriage, established in Scripture by Saint Paul and witnessed by the entire patristic Tradition.

And where there is icon, there is order. The Holy Trinity is not a confusion of undifferentiated persons but perfect communion in personal order: the Father is the source of the Godhead, the Son is born of the Father, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. The three Persons are consubstantial, equal in glory, power, and will. And in the economy of salvation, the incarnate Son becomes obedient to the Father unto death on the Cross, showing that obedience, in Christ, does not mean inferiority of being — it means perfect love. Christ and the Church are not in horizontal balance; Christ is the Head, the Church is the Body, and both together form a single reality through the Mystery. And the Christian family, as icon of these realities, has its own order — which our times have lost, overturned, and now seek desperately through therapies and ideologies that cannot restore it.

This article is about that order. It is not nostalgia for how things were "in the old days". The patristic teaching on the family took shape in the Christian cities of the fourth century — Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria — where women were educated, worked, managed estates, and where Saint John Chrysostom addressed them directly, as free and responsible persons. This is not rural patriarchalism; it is Byzantine urban theology.

We shall follow the natural thread: what order was in Paradise, how it was overturned in the fall, what God ordained for the wounded nature, how Christ restored this order through His own Mystery, what visible signs witness to it, what has happened in our times, and how our children can still grow up Christian in a world that has forgotten what a father is.

The Order of Paradise: Hierarchical Unity in Love

In Paradise, before the fall, God establishes an order. Scripture reveals it to us in simple words, which the Tradition has interpreted without adding to them what is not there.

Genesis 1:27: "And God made man according to His image; according to the image of God He made him; male and female He made them."

Here is the fundamental truth: both sexes are according to the image of God. Equal dignity of being. Neither is less human, neither is closer to God by its nature. Saint Basil the Great is explicit: "the woman also possesses the quality of having been created according to the image of God, just as the man does". This is the premise of any Orthodox discussion about the family. Whoever begins elsewhere is not beginning in a Christian way.

Genesis 2:18: "It is not good for man to be alone; let Us make for him a helper suited to him."

The woman is "a helper suited to him" — helper in the strong sense of the word, the support that makes possible what cannot be done alone. The Hebrew word ezer kenegdo does not mean servant; it is used in Scripture even of God Himself as "helper" of Israel. "Suited" means corresponding, complementary, made precisely for this mission. The woman is not inferior to the man; she is made specifically to complete him.

Genesis 2:21-24: the woman is taken from Adam’s rib — not from his head, that she might rule over him; not from his heel, that she might be under his foot; but from his side, that she might be alongside him, near his heart. And the reaction of Adam, the first words uttered by a human being in Scripture, are words of loving wonder: "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh… Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and shall be joined to his wife, and the two shall be one flesh."

Here are all the elements of the order of Paradise: unity ("one flesh"), complementarity ("a helper suited to him"), common origin ("bone of my bones"), order (the man was the first created, upon which Saint Paul will base his teaching — 1 Timothy 2:13). And all this without oppression, without fear, without slavish subjection. The man is head for an order of creation, not for some moral reward. The woman obeys in an order of free love — even as Christ incarnate obeys the Father in perfect equality of being, unto death on the Cross, out of perfect love.

This is the good order, willed by God from the beginning. Before any fall, before any "he shall rule over you". The order of love.

The Overturning of Order in Paradise and God’s Ordinance After the Fall

How did man fall from this order? We must look attentively, for the manner of the fall explains the entire order after it.

Genesis 3:1-6: the serpent approaches Eve. Not Adam. Eve. And Eve speaks with him — alone. She hears doubt about God’s word — alone. She receives the deception — alone. She decides to take from the tree — alone. And "she also gave to her husband, who was with her, and he ate".

The text shows a double disorder. On the one hand, Eve enters into dialogue with temptation and receives the decision without remaining in the communion of obedience — she steps out from under the head, she becomes herself the source of the decision in a matter of life and death, she hands the fruit to Adam, she makes him a participant in her own decision. On the other hand, Adam — who was called to keep the commandment, to be a responsible head, to answer for human nature as the first-created — receives without resistance and falls together with her. The overturning of order is double: the woman steps out from under the head, the man capitulates as head. This is why the Tradition does not see the fall as the simple fault "of the woman", but as the collapse of the whole order of communion.

And Adam’s guilt, in the Pauline-patristic reading, is the heavier. Saint Paul places it in Romans 5:12-19: "by the disobedience of one man…" — masculine singular, it is Adam. Saint John Chrysostom, in the Homilies on Genesis, shows clearly that Adam was more guilty than Eve, because Eve had been deceived by the serpent, while Adam took from her hand without the serpent deceiving him any further — consciously, freely. All patristic Christology rests on this: Christ is "the New Adam" who heals the fall of Adam, because Adam, as head, is the one who answers.

Genesis 3:16 — God’s word to Eve: "You shall return to your husband, and he shall rule over you."

This word is not arbitrary punishment. It is medicine for the wounded nature. Saint John Chrysostom, in Homily 26 on 1 Corinthians, shows that the order after the fall is given for the woman’s benefit, not against her. If her autonomy in Paradise led to ruin, her autonomy in the fallen state is even more dangerous. Human nature is now sick, weakened, inclined to evil. And to a sick nature is given a stricter framework, just as to a sick child are given stricter rules than to a healthy one.

All the words of the Lord in Genesis 3:14-19 are consequences of the fall — to the serpent, to the woman, to the man. The serpent shall crawl on its belly; the woman shall bring forth children in pain and shall be ruled over; the man shall till the earth in sweat, in thorns and thistles. None of these is good in itself. The pain of childbirth is not a gift; it is the fruit of the fall. The thorns of the earth are not a gift; they are the fruit of the fall. And "he shall rule over you" is the same — part of the evil that Christ will come to heal.

The strengthening of order is not divine vengeance; it is a harsher love, which protects weakened nature until the coming of the Healer.

Restoration in Christ: The Sacrificial Head and the Receiving Heart

The Healer has come. And through Him, the order of Paradise is restored — not by abolishing the hierarchy, but by transfiguring it. This is the great teaching of Saint Paul in Ephesians 5.

Ephesians 5:21: "Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of Christ."

This is the first word. Not "wives to husbands", but "one to another". Reciprocity. Mutual humility. All Christians, to all. This verse is the foundation; everything that follows is a specification of the concrete ways in which this mutual humility is lived in different states of life.

Ephesians 5:22-24: "Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church, He being the Saviour of the body. Therefore as the Church is subject to Christ, so let the wives also be to their own husbands in everything."

Three verses. That is all. And the reference is not to the fall, not to the ordinance-medicine of Genesis 3. The reference is to Christ-Church — to the iconic order of redemption. The wife submits not because Eve fell, but because the Church receives Christ. This is another order — restored, transfigured, in Christ.

Ephesians 5:25-33: nine verses on the husband’s duty. Here is the key word in v. 25: "Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church, and gave Himself for it."

Here is the true icon of the husband-head. Christ as head = Christ crucified for His Church. The head is not a ruler; the head dies for the body. Christianity does not sanctify the fallen rule of man over woman (Genesis 3:16) — it heals it through the sacrificial head. In Christ, the head does not oppress the body, but saves it through love. The Christian husband does not demand obedience through terror; he receives it because he gives his life for those he leads — in work, in prayer, in confession of the faith, in taking responsibility when things go wrong, in forgiveness when he is wronged, in patience when he is misunderstood.

He who demands obedience without giving sacrificial love is not a Christian head; he is a tyrant. And the Tradition does not support tyranny. Saint John Chrysostom, in Homily 20 on Ephesians, speaks directly to husbands: do not coerce your wife by force, but by gentleness, by honour, by love; show her that you honour her more than your goods, more than your life; and then she will obey you not out of compulsion, but out of love.

Here is the key: the wife’s submission is not slavish subjection. It is obedience in love. And without love, obedience suffocates and becomes what the previous article called "constraint masked in ecclesial vocabulary". The two go together — the wife’s obedience-in-love and the husband’s sacrificial love. One without the other cannot stand. One feeds the other.

Saint John Chrysostom, in Homily 20 on Ephesians, does not ground marriage on competition or on the assertion of rights, but on the harmony between head and body, on the sacrificial love of the husband and the loving obedience of the wife. The Tradition does not know the assertion of equality as the foundation of marriage — it knows union as one flesh. The husband and wife are not in competition; they are one. And in a unified being, equality is not required between head and heart; harmony is. The husband as head, the woman as heart, the children as fruit — and together a single being, the little church of the Christian family.

The same teaching we find, as a second apostolic witness, in Saint Peter the Apostle. In 1 Peter 3:1-7 — a passage parallel to that in Ephesians — Saint Peter sets out the same two symmetrical calls. To wives: "In the same way, you wives, be in subjection to your own husbands, so that, even if any do not obey the word, they may be won by the behaviour of their wives without a word, when they see your pure behaviour in fear" (1 Peter 3:1-2). To husbands: "You husbands, in the same way, live with your wives according to knowledge, giving honour to the woman as to the weaker vessel, as also being joint heirs of the grace of life, that your prayers may not be hindered" (1 Peter 3:7). Two apostolic epistles, two twin calls: the husband to honour his wife as a co-heir of grace; the wife to win her husband through the pure conduct of her life. This is not particular Pauline doctrine; it is the unified apostolic witness of the Church.

The Visible Signs of Order

The patristic Tradition knows something which our times have forgotten: the outward signs work upon the inner nature. The monastic habit not only shows that you are a monk; it forms you as a monk. The priest’s vestments work upon the priest. And in the family, the visible signs of order both support and witness to it before the world.

Distinction in clothing between man and woman is the commandment of Scripture and the canon of the Church.

Deuteronomy 22:5: "A woman shall not wear that which pertains to a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God."

Canon 13 of the Council of Gangra (4th century): "If any woman, under the pretext of asceticism, change her apparel and, instead of the customary feminine garment, take a masculine one, let her be anathema."

The logic is one: distinction in clothing visibly witnesses to the distinction of natures. The two natures are created by God as different — "male and female He made them" — and the Tradition requires this difference to be seen in outward form. The erasure of it is not a detail of fashion; it is an inner work upon nature. A woman who puts on masculine clothing visibly witnesses to a refusal of the order received — not because she would be inferior in being, but because the outward sign contests the blessed difference between the two vocations God has placed in Paradise. And this visible sign, in time, strengthens the inner disposition towards the overturning of order.

The Canons of Gangra are not to be read as a mechanical list of rules about cuts and cloth. They were given in the fourth century against the Eustathian movement, which, under the pretext of a higher asceticism, despised marriage, the ordinary clothing of women, and the very creational difference between male and female. The Council condemned this false asceticism — but the principle remains clear across the centuries: outward signs are not neutral when they express refusal of the order God has created. The concrete application in our times (cuts, materials, contexts) is made with the confessor of each family; the principle remains firm.

The Christian vestiary tradition has, however, a positive side which must not be forgotten — the inward adornment which Saint Peter the Apostle sets above all outer adornment. In 1 Peter 3:3-4, to wives: "Let your adorning not be the outward adorning of the braiding of the hair, of the wearing of golden ornaments, or of the putting on of fine clothing, but the hidden person of the heart, in the incorruptible adornment of a meek and quiet spirit, which is very precious in the sight of God." The Christian woman is not called to outer ugliness — she is called to place her adornment where God sees it: in a meek and quiet spirit. And where this spirit lives within, outer clothing follows naturally — sober, honourable, without ostentation. Saint Peter ties this directly to the model of Sarah and of the holy women of the Old Covenant, who "adorned themselves" with this inward adornment (1 Peter 3:5-6).

The covering of the head at prayer has direct foundation in Holy Scripture.

1 Corinthians 11:3-10: "But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God… For this cause ought the woman to have a sign of authority on her head because of the angels."

Saint Paul links the covering of the head directly to the hierarchical order in Christ: Father-Christ-man-woman. The woman who covers her head at prayer visibly affirms her place in this order — not as humiliation, but as humility-in-prayer, as receiving God’s ordinance. And the Tradition of the Orthodox Church preserves this practice unbroken, from the first century to this day, in all monasteries and in the villages that have not lost the faith.

Canon 17 of the same Council of Gangra condemns women who cut their hair "under the pretext of asceticism" — strengthening the same logic: a woman’s hair is given by God as adornment and as a reminder of subjection (1 Corinthians 11:15), and its cutting visibly expresses the refusal of order.

These signs — distinction in clothing and the covering of the head — are a visible witnessing of order, not arbitrary moralism. The Christian woman who keeps them makes no gesture of social backwardness; she lives visibly what she believes inwardly.

The Diagnosis of Our Times

Our times have overturned this order. The overturning has not come in a single day and has not one single cause; it is the fruit of a century of multiple changes. The secularisation of society has taken family life out from under the Liturgy, out from under prayer, out from under Confession — the family has become an economic and sentimental unit, not a little church. Industrialisation tore the husband from the household, threw him into the factory far from his children, and later, when one salary was no longer enough to support the house, dragged the wife after him into work — so that the children remained without their parents at home for most of the day. Communism, in our part of the world, did all it could to erase the role of the Christian father: it forced women into compulsory labour on the same schedule as men, took children from the family early through state nurseries and kindergartens, replaced the father’s authority with the authority of the State-as-father (the comrade, the Party, the Leader), tore religious education from the schools, transformed priests into servants dependent on the regime. By the fall of the regime, whole generations had grown up without knowing what a Christian father in the house was. The movements of emancipation brought legitimate civil rights — the right to education, to the vote, to property — but they also struck the creational order itself, preaching not only equality of dignity (which the Tradition has known from the beginning) but the interchangeability of roles. Consumerism dissolved everything that was steadfast: marriage became a revocable contract, the child became an economic burden, the family became an obstacle to "self-realisation". All these changes struck both husband and wife. The diagnosis is not an accusation against one of the parties; it is a description of a systemic disorder.

The concrete mechanism is seen today in nearly all of Christian Europe, unfolding in five steps:

Step one: the husband abdicates. He is no longer a spiritual presence in the house. He no longer prays with his family. He no longer fasts. He no longer confesses the faith before his children. He flees into pleasures — alcohol, screens, games, spectator sports, time-devouring hobbies. He leaves the religious education of his children to his wife and to the Church. He becomes a shadow in his own house.

Step two: the wife is forced to compensate. She ends up bearing alone the burdens which, in the natural order of the family, were to be borne together, with the husband answering before God. It is not that she works or decides which is the problem in itself — the Tradition knows holy women who worked, who led, who answered for estates and communities. The problem is that the whole house ends up functioning without a sacrificial head, and the woman is forced to compensate for an abdication which exhausts her. Saint John Chrysostom says it clearly: when the woman ends up bearing alone the burdens that belong to the husband, she exhausts herself more quickly than he does. She becomes weary, strained, embittered. And this inner exhaustion begins to show in her — in her countenance, in her tone, in her gaze towards her husband.

Step three: the children begin no longer to obey. Here we see the gravest mechanism, which our times forget. When the wife no longer obeys the husband, the children will no longer obey either mother or father. The chain is simple and inexorable. The small child learns obedience by seeing it: he sees his mother obeying his father, he receives from her hand not only bodily care but the icon of order — "here, in this house, father is the head, and mother honours him". When this icon shatters — when the child sees his father contradicted, despised, marginalised by his own mother — he receives another teaching, wordless: "the father’s authority is not real; it is an empty form that even mother breaks". And if the father no longer has authority before the wife, he will no longer have it before the children either — because the father’s authority in the house passes through the honour given him by the mother.

And from here everything collapses. The child no longer obeys the father, because he sees that neither does the mother. And the mother, paradoxically, he will no longer obey either — for the child’s obedience to the mother was mediated through the father: it was obedience to the mother-who-stands-under-the-head, not to the mother-who-leads-alone. The mother who has usurped the father’s position loses, without realising it, her own authority over the child. He obeys her while small, through fear or habit; but at the first age of natural revolt (adolescence) he will contest her with vehemence, because inwardly he senses her position as illegitimate. "You are not father" — this is the unspoken answer of the adolescent to the mother who tried to be both.

Saint Paul says it clearly in Ephesians 6:1-2: "Children, obey your parents in the Lord… Honour your father and your mother." Parents in the plural, as a unity. Obedience to the mother cannot be separated from obedience to the father; the two stand or fall together, because in the Tradition the family is a single body. And when the unity is broken within — when the mother no longer honours the father of her children — obedience to both collapses at the same time.

Step four: the children are left without a reference point. In the small child, the mother is the natural direct authority; he obeys her, and this is well. But in the child above eight or ten years old, when boys begin to seek the father’s model and girls the model of what it means to be honoured as a woman by an authentic head-husband, the void becomes visible. Boys without a model of an authentic sacrificial head grow up confused in identity — they learn that to be a man means either violence or passivity, neither Christian. Girls without the model of the loving father seek affection elsewhere, prematurely, and seek it in places where they will not find it.

Step five: disorder becomes the norm. Generation after generation, the order is lost. The Christian family becomes the exception. And the visible signs of disorder multiply: the spectacular increase of divorces — a subject we shall treat in a separate article —, single-parent families, children raised without models, the loss of gender identity in the younger generations, the erasure of symbolic distinctions.

This is the reality. To name it does not mean to blame anyone. Husbands did not ask to become shadows; the culture took away from them the models of Christian manhood. Wives did not ask to bear the burdens that are not theirs; they were forced by practical necessities when the husbands gave way. Children did not ask to grow up without a reference point; the world we have brought them into has taken their reference point away. The diagnosis sees all this, without searching for the guilty. Healing requires something else.

The Obedience of Children — What May Still Be When Order Has Trembled

Children are the fruit of the family. Their inner health is directly tied to the health of the parental order. And Saint Paul formulates the order in the passage parallel to the one quoted earlier:

Ephesians 6:1-4: "Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honour your father and your mother, which is the first commandment with promise, that it may be well with you and that you may live long on the earth. And, you fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord."

Two points to retain. "In the Lord" — the child’s obedience is bounded by the same condition that bounds every Christian obedience: it cannot go against God. And the duty of parents is symmetrical: "do not provoke to wrath". Punishment that comes from anger does not build up the child; it wounds him. Punishment that comes from love, when it is needed, forms him.

There is a decisive difference from the previous article on obedience. The layman chooses his confessor; the disciple seeks his elder with long examination. The child does not choose his parents. They are given to him. And precisely for this reason, the parent’s duty not to abuse is all the more grave. The child has nowhere to go; he has no other home, no other father, no other mother. The parent who educates through fear destroys the child without being able to repair, for the wound goes deep into the nature still being formed.

The patristic Tradition is firm: the child learns the order by seeing it, not by hearing it preached. Saint John Chrysostom, in On the Bringing Up of Children, says that the first teacher of the child is the life of his father and mother — what they see at home, that they will believe about God, about obedience, about love, about the world. Good words without good deeds build nothing.

This is why the recovery of children’s obedience is not done through stricter rules. It is done through the recovery of the parental order. The boy obeys a father whom he sees praying, fasting, confessing the faith before the world, loving his wife sacrificially. The girl obeys a mother whom she sees honouring the father, receiving in peace the order of the house, witnessing visibly to God’s order. Where the order exists in the parents, the obedience in the children comes naturally, without compulsion. Where the order has trembled in the parents, no authoritarian tone will restore it in the children.

What can still be in our times? Christian parents who, seeing the disorder outside, keep the order within their own house. A father who is a sacrificial head even though the world laughs. A mother who obeys in love even though the neighbours think her backward. Children who see this order and learn it for what it is — the inner truth of their own nature — not as a curious peculiarity of their house.

And if someone reads this article and awakens to the disorder of his own family — a husband who has abdicated, a wife exhausted from leading, children who have grown up between the two in confusion — the good news is this: God does not ask what you cannot give. He asks for the turning back. He asks for the first step. A day of prayer together. A Liturgy on Sunday kept with seriousness. A Confession made honestly, with a fitting confessor. And the rest will come.

Conclusion: Order as Icon, Not as Punishment

This is the order of the Christian family. Not a human construction that the times can erase. The ordinance of God, placed in Paradise, strengthened after the fall as medicine for wounded nature, restored in Christ through the Mystery of marriage as icon of the relation Christ–Church.

The husband as sacrificial head, after the icon of the Saviour who died for His Bride. The woman as receiving heart, after the icon of the Church that receives the love of the Bridegroom. The children as the fruit of this union, formed by the life of their parents more than by any sermon. All three together — the little church of the home, according to the word of Saint Paul: "This is a great mystery; but I speak concerning Christ and the Church" (Ephesians 5:32).

And for those who live in this disorder — and we are many, very many — the Tradition does not ask what cannot be done. It asks for the turning back. For the Christian husband: recover the position of sacrificial head. Pray with your family. Fast. Confess the faith before the world. Die for your own, without grand words, in the small things of daily life. And if you have abdicated — turn back. Your wife awaits you, even though she seems weary. Your children await you, even though it seems they no longer give you their attention. Christ receives you like the father in the parable of the prodigal son.

For the Christian wife: place yourself in obedience-in-love. Honour your husband, even when he seems unworthy — for your obedience is "in the Lord", not "in your husband’s merit". Cover your head in church. Bear with honour the signs of femininity which God has given you. And if you have grown weary bearing burdens which were not yours — rest. Give them back to him to whom they belong. And pray for him, that God may raise him up.

For Christian children: honour your parents. Learn from their life — both good and bad. And if your parents do not bear the authentic order, keep the seed of it within yourselves, that you may give it back to your own children when the time comes.

This is not done through social laws, nor through moralism. It is done through the return of each family to the ordinance of God, under the guidance of the Holy Tradition, in the Mysteries of the Church. A return that the times do not ask for, that the world does not reward, that the neighbours will not understand. But which Christ receives — and blesses with that peace which the world does not know.

For a broader treatment of love as the foundation of the entire Christian life, I invite you to read the article Love: the Foundation, Measure, and Summit of the Christian Life.

---