Patriarchal Order

The Sunday school lesson today was on 1st Corinthians, chapters 11-16. For those of you who don't know (which is probably most of you), Corinthians is my favorite book in the New Testament, specifically chapter 15.

The lesson started off with a discussion on patriarchal order, and the relationship between man and wife. This particular belief of the church is often under attack, and is a source of dissension among investigators. Being male, however, I never put much thought into why it was in place, what it really means, etc, until recently.

That being said, it has recently become an important issue for me to understand, for reasons some of you may know. As such, I have put a decent amount of time and study into the subject.

The teacher brought one particular thing out very well; he stated that many people confuse a patriarchal order with a patriarchal society. In the latter, men are superior, or dominant over women; there is no equality. The church's order is not, by any means, intended to be that. Thinking that the church's interpretation of patriarchal order is the same as the world's is a severe mistake.

Before I go into specific doctrine, I'm going to start with a little anecdotal evidence; sometimes the best kind, when dealing with a social organization. If you were to go to any priesthood meeting where married men are prominent, I all but promise you that at some point in the meeting, the instructor will make a comment about how his wife is a better person than he is. Taking that farther, if you were to ask any married, priesthood holding member if he thought his wife was a better person than him, he would say yes. I am not kidding; we all think that women are more worthy than us. This should be fairly obvious; demographic data consistently shows that crime rate among men is much higher than women. I don't even need to cite sources, because a quick google search returns hundreds of applicable results.

Now for something a little more concrete.

Since the lesson was on Paul's first letter to the saints in Corinth, we'll start there. There are a couple key verses. The first is establishing the order, which is verse three in chapter eleven, "...the head of every man is Christ: and the head of the woman is the man: and the head of Christ is God." (11:3) this states, quite simply, that the Patriarchal Order is really just that, an order. More importantly, while it doesn't state it explicitly, modern revelation explains that this order only holds true while the man is acting in righteousness. This verse says that implicitly, because if the man is not acting in righteousness, then his head is not Christ, so the order is broken.

So, now the question is whether this order somehow grants men a high rank, or dominion over women. "...neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord." (11:11) This verse, along with a plethora of modern phrases from presidents and apostles of the church, make it quite clear that the answer is a resounding "No!" In fact, practicing unrighteous dominion is a serious sin. Just to make it even clearer, in the third official declaration of the church, The Family: A Proclamation to the World, it says, "fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners."

For me, the next question I would ask at this point would be (and has been), if man and woman are equal, what is the point of the patriarchal order? While there may well be a concise answer to this already, I have been unable to find it, so what follows is my speculation.

It is well known and well documented in the church that without the priesthood, the powers, and blessings, of heaven are completely inaccessible. "The rights and powers of the priesthood are inseparably connected with the powers of heaven, and [the] powers of heaven cannot be controlled nor handled only upon the principles of righteousness" (D&C 121:36)* This means that just following the commandments isn't good enough: there must needs be some force or power to get us there. This power is the the Holy Priesthood, after the Order of the Son of God. This was later renamed the Melchizedek Priesthood. The original name has a very important meaning, however; it quite clearly specifies that the priesthood functions via order. This is really no surprise, as the Lord's "house is a house of order." (D&C 132:8)

It is also true that a man cannot have full and eternal access to His priesthood without being married, and a woman cannot have access to the blessings of the priesthood without a husband. Furthermore, a woman cannot hold the priesthood of God the Father, because He is a man, but she is a necessary component of that power. As the first quote on this blog states, there is a Heavenly Mother, as well as Father; Heavenly Father's power has two halves, and two halves must wield it. We are taught that righteous women will become "queens and priestesses in Heaven." These women can only do so, as the men, inside the covenant of Marriage.

In the end, it boils down to basic thermodynamics: order versus entropy. It may also be an unbreakable law of the Universe, one that science cannot determine because it has no testing medium. The Order is only valid when the unit is righteous; in other words, it is only valid when all members are as one, just as God the Father and Jesus Christ are one in purpose. There must simply be a direction, or an order, to the authority and blessings. In short, I believe it is this simple: the ultimate blessings we can receive come from the Father, through his Son (the atonement), to a worthy man and then to his worthy wife. Men look to Christ, Christ looks to the Father, woman looks to husband.

It is an order of respect. It also happens to go in both directions.

EDIT: I've been thinking a lot on this subject lately. Its a rather potent one, filled with many of the core principles of the gospel. I think I came up with a fairly good analogy. Creation power (or organization power, priesthood power, etc) can be aptly compared, I think, to that of water going under a mill. There is a reason a man cannot have any power without a woman to hold it with, and why being kept from having spirit children is considered damnation. The power must flow. It cannot stop at anyone. If it does, it is damned, and it cannot drive or do any work. Thus, it must flow from man to woman, and then from woman to children, and the cycle repeats... into eternity.

*[In fact, while we're in D&C 121, a little aside, "No power or influence can or ought to be maintained by virtue of the priesthood" (121:41) "when we... exercise control or dominion or compulsion upon the souls of the children of men... Amen to the priesthood or authority of that man." (121:37) This is how and why Satan fell in the war in heaven; he tried to use the Order of God (the priesthood) to bend mankind to his will. This is not only impossible, but attempting to do so is, evidently, a quick way to lose all authority you had. Satan did not like this limitation, and so he rebelled, became the Father of Lies, fighting against the universe itself. It is quite common for people to think what little authority they have can be used in this way, and this is why "many are called, but few are chosen." Ben Parker's words of "with great power comes great responsibility" were extremely true.]