In | The Submission of Women in 1 Peter

Read 1 Peter 3:1-8.

Peter’s instruction for women in 1 Peter 3:1-8 may sound sexist or oppressive in contemporary society, but Dr. Joel Green has noted that this passage would have been subversive and countercultural in its original context. The Roman essayist Plutarch, writing a few decades after Peter, gives us a glimpse of the place of women in the society in which Peter was writing. In his “Advice to Bride and Groom,” he claims:

A woman ought not to make friends of her own, but to enjoy her husband’s friends, in common with him. The gods are the first and most important friends. Hence, it is becoming for a wife to worship and to know only the gods that her husband believes in, and to shut the door tight upon all strange rituals and outlandish superstitions. For with no god do stealthy and secret rites performed by a woman find any favor. 

The mere fact that Peter was encouraging married women to keep their own faith in Christ, even potentially against the faith of their husbands, represented an elevated view of female autonomy. A woman holding a private faith apart from her husband would have been viewed as a divisive and rebellious act. 

The distinctiveness of Peter’s message was not in its suggestion of female submissiveness, which was a prevailing Roman value at the time, but in his assumption that women, even married women, had a right to a personal faith according to their own convictions. 

The Christian “mysteries” of baptism and the Eucharist may have been some of the “strange rituals and outlandish superstitions” that Plutarch had in mind. And in this context, a Christian woman married to a non-believer may well need to take part in Christian worship and its rituals in a “stealthy and secret” way. While this passage in 1 Peter may seem backward or oppressive today, we miss Peter’s message, and his distinctive approach to both women’s rights and marriage, if we overlook his context. 

Reference and Plutarch quote: Joel B. Green, 1 Peter, 2007, p. 92.