Are Submission and Equality Contradictory? Most feminists today view the principle of equality in nature and submission in function, which is present in Genesis 2, as a contradiction in terms. For example, Scanzoni and Hardesty write, "Many Christians thus speak of a wife’s being equal to her husband in personhood, but subordinate in function. However, this is just playing word games and is a contradiction in terms. Equality and subordination are contradictions."²⁴

The claim that equality and subordination are an unacceptable contradiction fails to recognize that such an apparent contradiction exists in our Savior Himself. On the one hand Christ says, "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30) and "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9), and on the other hand He states, "I can do nothing on my own authority; . . . I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me" (John 5:30) and "the Father is greater than I" (John 14:28). Christ is fully God (John 1:1; Col 1:15-20) and yet "the head of Christ is God" (1 Cor 11:3; cf. 15:28).

The submission in Genesis 2 is similar to the one that exists in the Godhead between Father and Son. In fact, Paul appeals to the latter model to explain in what sense a husband is the head of a wife, namely, as God is the head of Christ (1 Cor 11:3). This is a unique kind of submission that makes one person out of two. Man is called to be the head of a one-flesh relationship. Submission in Scripture does not connote subservience, as commonly understood, but willing response and loving assistance.

Susan T. Foh aptly remarks, "We know only the arbitrariness, the domination, the arrogance that even the best boss/underling relationship has. But in Eden, it was different. It really was. The man and the woman knew each other as equals, both in the image of God, and thus each with a personal relationship to God. Neither doubted the worth of the other nor of him/herself. Each was to perform his/her task in a different way, the man as the head and the woman as his helper. They operated as truly one flesh, one person. In one body does the rib rebel against or envy the head?"²⁵