Federal Headship Nomism, Part 3: Conflated Concepts

It is sometimes wondered why the Bible portrays the sons of Eli as the fault of the father (1 Sam. 2:12-17; 27-36), and yet similar sins are attributed to the sons of Samuel without the same blame (1 Sam. 8:1-5). Is it because of the role the latter played in administering God’s proclamations to Saul and to David, so that they are glossed over for the sake of the main flow of the story? Or is it because Samuel was not in fact guilty in the same way that Eli was? The truth is we are not told in detail. There is however a clue in the words to Eli,

“Why then do you scorn my sacrifices and my offerings that I commanded for my dwelling, and honor your sons above me by fattening yourselves on the choicest parts of every offering of my people Israel?’ (2:29)

Or the subsequent words to Samuel about Eli,

“his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain them” (3:13).

The words seem to indicate that though Eli rebuked, he did not take further disciplinary actions toward their removal. On the other hand, we are not told anything that Samuel did that was any more specific. Even by its silence, the Scriptures do not give much help to FHN expectations here. At any rate, we must search the wider principles of God’s word here rather than a narrow set of narrative examples where the data seems to refuse to us a uniform pattern. 

Closely associated with the hasty conclusions drawn from FHN’s legalistic logic is a failure to properly distinguish between the concepts that are involved. In our chart on the logic of the system, we may have noticed that the snapshot response of the wife and children becomes confused with the husband’s faithfulness.

Those looking on see the negative response and conclude that the man has been unfaithful. He must earn back his authority, or his qualification, or, in other words, his headship.

In addition to making the members the leader and the head the follower, this also tends to conflate the actions of the man with that which is not properly his action. The point is not to say that there is not a “sphere” over which he is responsible, so that he is responsible precisely for things that are neither himself nor his thoughts, desires, and choices. Of course he is. The man’s action is not divorced from his wider domain, but it is nevertheless distinguished. The best way I have found to explain this is by means of what I call “the three Rs.”

The “Three Rs” — Responsibility, Raw Material, Results

Let me briefly define these three and then make some observations about what they have in common and how they differ in ways relevant to our discussion. 

For the purpose of being concise, I am satisfied to borrow the language of John Piper to describe the husband-father’s responsibility, namely, to lead, provide, and protect.1 This of course has spiritual and material connotations. These three things within his field of responsibility are fundamentally actions. They are things that the man deliberately does. What is crucial to get at first is that the responsibility to act and the actions proper are distinct from each other. That may seem a rather pointless nuance, but we will see shortly how important it is. 

By raw material I mean the personality and DNA unique to the wife and children, their own body of experiences which will shape them in ways imperceptible to even the most watchful human being, and crosses that all parties in the family will be made to bear. In other words, this refers to everything that “comes into” each encounter with the man’s action.

By results I mean everything that “comes out of” each encounter with the man’s action, as well as everything else that follows by a confluence of other external causes—since, toy with a god-complex as he might, the man’s most wide-ranging actions simply will not comprise the whole matrix of causes upon those body-soul unities. 

Of course when we put things in these terms, it ought to occur especially to a Reformed Christian that one is going on about these things without much thought of the sovereignty and providence of God. Precisely. And the reader would do well to remember that very thing as we move forward.

The man’s actions are none of these three Rs, yet the responsibility to act has what should be an obvious priority in the assessment of the man’s real actions over the raw material and results. That is because each man’s actions will be upon material that is radically different from another man’s material in many ways. As the Proverb says, “Where there are no oxen, the manger is clean” (14:4). A wholly childless house is quiet, of course, but is it peaceful? It depends. Like the ox-less stall, it is also immaculate. But is anything being built (or tilled)? Again, it depends. And it is just in the discovery of all of the factors it really does depend upon, that of all our supposed moral seriousness turns out to have been nothing but a conservative version of virtue-signaling. 

In his book Reforming Marriage, Douglas Wilson wrote,

“When a couple comes for marriage counseling, my operative assumption is always that the man is completely responsible for all the problems. Some may be inclined to react to this, but it is important to note that responsibility is not the same thing as guilt. If a woman has been unfaithful to her husband, of course she bears the guilt of her adultery. But at the same time, he is responsible for it.”2

Notice how Wilson immediately qualifies what at first seems monstrous. By “responsibility” the reader is assured that all he means is the “sphere” of action over which the husband is first in authority. Sphere is kept distinct from action—so that (hopefully) the man is both duty-bound and free to take that next action required by the actions of others (wife and children). Every word of that last sentence is crucial. I would urge the reader to read it several times to be mentally prepared for the necessary analysis ahead. Wilson follows with an analogy that will help us see whether or not he means the same. 

“To illustrate, suppose a young sailor disobeys his orders and runs a ship aground in the middle of the night. The captain and the navigator were both asleep and had nothing to do with his irresponsible actions. Who is finally responsible? The captain and the navigator are responsible for the incident. They are career officers, and their careers are ruined.”3

Analogies are limited. All of ours are. I do not take exception to Wilson using even this exact analogy to get things started. But the limitations are actually crucial in this case. What Wilson gives us that is correct is the principle of authority manifested in the concept of chain of command. So far, so good. Those in higher authority were indeed responsible. But now what? Wilson tells us—“their careers are ruined.” It would seem that Wilson, whether he realizes it or not, is going quite a bit beyond his original qualification. What does it mean for a naval commander to be “ruined” in this way? Discharge or something of the sort. I will take Wilson’s word for this “ruin,” since I understand he was actually in the navy.

Very well. Now apply the analogy to marriage. Do you see the problem?

One’s wife and children are not a ship; and if a man lost his temper disciplining his children last time, the fact of the matter is that his children still need his discipline today. What is needed is not a new captain of the ship. He needs a new record and freedom to act.

Actually this is only the first problem of many. I will mention only one other. Did the husband indeed “fall asleep” during the wife’s “running things aground”? I might introduce any number of other troubles at sea or invaders from nearby ships into the analogy. And if somebody says, “No fair—it’s his analogy, not yours.” True enough. But real life is not any of our analogies. They are God’s, and He has more stories to tell at sea than merely those handful that interest the legalist. 

So Wilson concludes, “This means that men, whether through tyranny or abdication, are responsible for any problems in the home.”4 Just a moment—through tyranny or abdication … responsible for any problems? So the careful reader may pause, “Responsible over them all (good and bad), for sure; but I thought responsibility was being kept distinct from guilt per se.” You are right to catch the equivocation from one page to the next. If the reader thought that the initial qualification about responsibility was precisely between “responsibility” as sphere of action and “responsibility” as fault in action, the reader will be disappointed to know that Wilson was either being evasive or is himself confused. In either case, I do not recommend counseling from such an operative assumption.  

One very disturbing thing I have learned in over two decades of ministry is that there just are more people than you would like to think who simply view the world through disqualifying others. They are too busy sidelining men to recruit and build up soldiers. It may be that for most of these individuals, the American philosophy of pragmatism and the effects of consumerism on the attention span have left us with only one kind of moral seriousness left: results, results, results. Of course we are after results. The trouble comes when results on the cheap attempts to turn out a product for the sake of show. 

Nor is this only harmful to men. 

Wives and children, no less than disciples in a church, are not served by being told that they are mere appendages (and, it is a short step from that to say, victims) of the man’s will. Leadership that is less than Christ’s own leadership cultivates souls for another. It does not keep them in an infantile state and codependent relationship. It most certainly does not enable their perceived power over the man to disqualify him by virtue of their vices. A man who loves those under his care will keep before their eyes their accountability before God, to heed the divine voice through his frail human utterances, and yes, actions. Hence he will be keen to warn them that they cannot hide behind their subordinate place on Judgment Day if they will not so much as keep it for a moment until then. 

The Distinctions Supported by Scripture

In the law of Moses we are told,  

“If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear, and fear” (Deut. 21:18-21).

First, note his age. Not only is this not a “tender child,” but Charles Hodge reminds us that this is also a very early stage of society, in which tribes and clans are spread out, and fathers are acting as magistrates, given charge of civil affairs.5 Consequently such punishments only appear strange to us because we hear “family” in a modern sense that does not overlap with the other social spheres. That is an easy facet of the Mosaic law to neglect. 

Second, observe how the remedy assumes that the parents have fulfilled their responsibilities. If we put this together with the statement by Hodge, we may reasonably derive the conclusion that Scripture teaches a discernible boundary in between when the parents are responsible for the child in total as opposed to when their responsibilities are more limited. Notice further my distinction—“in total” and “more limited,” indicating that the parents are still responsible to express love, offer wisdom, pray for, and be present for their children even as they have grown to adulthood. The point is that the “raising” of the children has already happened. That raising is an objective set of actions, both in Scripture and in nature, which any honest person can discern. 

The root of this idea is as old as creation. God said, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). The actions of “leaving and cleaving” are often conceived as inseparable. Indeed they are with respect to how marriage forms a social bond distinct from the original homes of both spouses. However, it does not follow that the “leaving” is utterly dependent on the cleaving. Adulthood is a cause of marriage, not marriage of adulthood.

In a socially deviant age like ours, it may seem like the reverse is true, since it takes a thing like marriage and children to grow young men up; yet that is because of sin and not God’s design. In other words, adulthood does not begin once marriage has been consummated. If it did, then one would be in a predicament in counseling the young woman to look for a “man” and the young man to look for a “woman.” Such things would not exist until they are already unavailable. 

Although many principles in Scripture could be cited to construct a fuller doctrine of these distinctions, let me point to only one other place. Consider Christ as man, as head, as leader. Surely Jesus could have looked better to the world if He had chosen as His disciples a few princes from the secular courts, a few scribes and Pharisees, or even simply a few that were less impetuous than Peter, older than John, more well-thought of than Matthew, and let us not even mention Judas. Three years later they not only still did not grasp what He had come to do, but had all abandoned Him in the end. “But,” someone may say, “that was all according to plan.” 

I see. And the plan God has for your own little band of followers: What does that look like in the end?

I have no answer to give the objector. Not in the specifics. But I suspect that if it does not include the windstorm that visited Job’s children, the hearing that Amos or Jeremiah gained, or that pleasant bunch that was always grumbling against Moses, perhaps it will include an autistic child or two, or else the death of a spouse, or perhaps a mutiny in one’s church in the case of a pastor. Perhaps you will be lied about and abandoned by everyone you know. Perhaps your children will catch wind of it and not know who to believe for a season. Perhaps some judge who is an enemy of God will rule against you, or some other hardship will leave you unable to homeschool or to send them to a Christian school. Perhaps they will simply be noisy or erratic or different, for some reason inexplicable to the doctors for a season, but it will last just long enough to pose for the moralist’s snapshot. Enough of hypotheticals. The point is only that if you confuse any of these per se for the man “disordering” his home, then you are most to be pitied, yet sadly most likely to be in power. 

Real masculine leadership is greatest when it patiently endures the weakest. Paul tells us,

“We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves. ‘Let each of us please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. For Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, ‘The reproaches of those who reproached you fell on me’” (Rom. 15:1-3).

Jesus not only bore our sins. He wore our shame. Like Hosea had prefigured in marrying the harlot Gomer, so the antitype, Christ, took upon Himself the reproaches of a most unfaithful bride. He does not leave His beloved in that state, but neither does He let leadership of her wait for her performance, much less her permission. Thus the view of leadership conceived by FHN reverses the order of the cross, of justification, and of sanctification. 

We will have more to say in the way of analyzing passages of Scripture. Perhaps it is best to see how the typical “proof texts” brought in by FHN advocates simply do not say what this system wants them to say. It is to that exegetical work that we will turn to next.

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1. John Piper, What’s the Difference? Manhood and Womanhood Defined According to the Bible (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1990)

2. Douglas Wilson, Reforming Marriage (Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 1995), 30.

3. Wilson, Reforming Marriage, 30.

4. Wilson, Reforming Marriage, 31.

5. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, III.19.9.