Decolonizing Marital Gender Norms in Eph. 5:21–33

Abstract

Decolonizing literary strategies, while on the one hand seeking to raise the awareness of the colonized, on the other hand try to counteract the colonizer’s claims and to subvert the colonizer’s imperializing methods.’ “Just like the strategy of subverting the master’s genre and language, the critical twinning of biblical and indigenous religious stories is an anti-imperial decolonizing method. Imperialism took the form of destroying people’s languages, history, dances, education, religions, naming systems, and other social institutions that were the basis of their self conception.”² As a postcolonial African feminist biblical scholar, Musa W. Dube identifies biblical texts as propounding “values that are compatible with imperialistic tendencies. Historical evidence of modern imperialism thus categorizes the biblical texts as imperializing texts: texts that authorize the imposition of foreign institutions on one nation by another.”³ It is appropriate to ask two questions to the Ephesian passage, 5:21–33, in light of the methodology suggested by Dube: Does the Ephesian passage have a clear stance against the political imperialism of its time? and Does the Ephesian passage employ gender and divine representations to construct relationships of subordination and domination?⁴