One of the things I ran into recently was someone actually claiming that Grudem’s word study on kephale (Koine Greek “head”) actually said that Grudem claimed head did not mean authority. I can only assume they went into it with preconceived notions and read his work incorrectly.
As Grudem notes in his personal reflections on the topic:
On October 5, 1979, I was a third-year pro-fessor at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and I was surprised to see that Christianity Todayhad come out with an article written by my neigh-bors just six houses down the street, Berkeley and Alvera Mickelsen (Berkeley taught New Testa-ment at Bethel Seminary and Alvera taught jour-nalism at Bethel College). Their article was titled, “Does male dominance tarnish our translations?” They argued that the Greek word kephalē (literally, “head”) often means “source” but never “authority,” so that “the husband is the head of the wife” (Eph 5:23; cf. also 1 Cor 11:3) means “the husband is the source of the wife” and does not have authority over his wife. I thought the argument was wrong, but I didn’t have the time or material at hand to answer it. Then, a little later, Dr. George Knight came to Bethel College to lecture, and I said to him in passing, “George, you really need to write an article answering Berkeley and Alvera Mickelsen’s claim that ‘head’ means ‘source.’” “No,” said George, “you need to write it.” Little did I know that that encouragement would affect the next thirty years of my life.
Six years later, in 1985, I published a twenty one-page article in Trinity Journal, “Does kephalē Mean ‘Source’ or ‘Authority Over’? An Examination of 2,336 Examples”2 —examples which took me some time to look up in ancient Greek literature!
There were several responses from egalitarians to that twenty-one-page article. So, five years later, in 1990, I published a seventy-page article in Trinity Journal,3 responding to other studies on the meaning of kephalē and showing that there were now over fifty examples where it meant “someone in authority,” or “a leader,” but never an instance where someone is said to be the “head” of someone else and was not in the position of authority over that person. Never.
But there were still more responses, and more people disagreeing. So eleven years after that, in 2001, I published another article, forty-one pages in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, on “The Meaning of kephalē (“Head”): An Evaluation of New Evidence, Real and Alleged.”4
So that’s 132 pages of lexicographical research published in academic journals on one word in the Bible. And these articles spanned sixteen years of my life.
Why did I do this? Because it was a crucial word in a crucial verse in a crucial issue. Destroying the meaning “authority over” for kephalē is crucial to the egalitarian argument. If in fact the Bible says in Eph 5:23 that “the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church,” and if head means, as I am convinced it does, “person in position of authority,” then the egalitarian cause is lost. That is because that verse anchors the husband’s headship in the headship of Christ over the church, which is not something culturally variable (and 1 Cor 11:3 makes it parallel to the eternal headship of the Father with respect to the Son in the Trinity)**. So the egalitarians cannot lose this argument, because if they lose on the meaning of that word, then they have lost their fundamental argument with regard to manhood and womanhood in marriage.
As has been noted before, having a honest look at Scripture with egalitarians and feminists is usually useless. They don’t care about what the Scriptures say. They care about taking their preconceived cultural values and twisting Scripture to agree with them. Look no further than attempting to twist kephale, “submit to one another in the fear of Christ,” “there is no male or female… for you are one in Christ Jesus,” and other Scriptures in an attempt to annul male headship and authority over a wife.
Of course, as I have noted before, usually most of these people have cultural blinders on their view of authority. Usually a bad experience with a parent or other authority figure which has left them scarred and thus hating authority rather than understanding it comes from God and it is good when used correctly.
I ran through the differences in opinion myself until I understood correctly.
** Grudem is likely off about eternal headship. Father-Jesus headship was modeled by Jesus here on earth but is likely not eternal given God is one and such things like the Nicene Creed. This is one of the potential heresies that Christians were fighting against early in the Church.
