Roles vs Restrictions: Women and Men

First, a hopefully helpful but absolutely necessary comment on taking verses out of context:
If you want to develop your understanding of a Christian life, you need to bring the whole bible into discussion, not 0.05% of it.
          You can't understand calculus if you leave out algebra.

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It seems to me one of greatest stumbling blocks in Christianity is the idea of authority; women are not to be in positions of ultimate authority within the church, and women are told to submit to their husbands. We struggle with this. Why aren't women and men exactly the same? Why don't they do at all times and all places the exact same thing? The obvious answer for that is, well, they aren't exactly the same. This is easiest to perceive in our physiology; although we have many, many similarities because we are both humans, we still have different parts which have different functions. This tangible, irrefutable difference is easily and openly accepted, and I at least don't regularly hear anyone arguing that women are superior or inferior because they are the ones to carry the baby for 9 months. We don't debate it. It is what it is.

Move over to the intangible and we are not so okay with the idea of differences. Why is that? We all accept that there are women and there are men, right? We accept they have fundamentally different roles in certain physical processes, right? Is it so hard to believe that they have different roles spiritually? It's okay to want to be equal, because we are; we are all one in Christ (Galatians 3:28). But, don't kid yourself, women and men are different. Mull that over a while if you still struggle with it.

Please remember the above point: strip away culture, strip away tradition, strip away in some cases a history of ruthless suppression, and you STILL HAVE fundamental differences between women and men. Societies may have abused women, but it didn't create them. Women and men are different no matter what culture has to say about it. Do you accept this point? That regardless of all of the good and bad cultural overlay, women and men are different? Recognizing and distinguishing that there are two sexes doesn't make you OR the bible sexist.

Now that we've set the table, let's lay out the meat. Just as women and men were created with certain different physical roles, they have different spiritual roles as well. In the garden before the fall, God made Adam and gave him commands; then, He made Eve. Adam was to share God's role for him with Eve, and Eve was to help Adam fulfill God's commands to shepherd all living things and their lives together would glorify God. Thus: Eve was subject to Adam; she helped him carry out the command given him by God. That isn't a bad thing! In fact, Adam wasn't adequate, he wasn't "good", without Eve! And that's the relationship that is to be reflected in our marriages today: both persons seeking the will of the Lord. Unfortunately, because of the fall, this by default has to look differently than it did in the garden because all things have been distorted by sin, but we are to strive for righteousness nonetheless. This means worshiping and serving the Lord as close to the manner that was in Eden as we can, and how we do that is laid out in the bible, for example, in the popularly misinterpreted Ephesians.

If you examine a Christian marriage (that is, one where both people are striving for righteousness; not where one or both may or may not occasionally sit in a pew), it's a complete partnership - it is one-ship. The idea of one member ruling over the other is beyond comprehension, because in such a relationship both people view their spouse as part of themselves - they are one being. How does such a marriage come into existence and then persist in this perverse world? It happens when people stop being obsessed with themselves and look together to the Lord.

If you or someone you know has experienced oppression or abuse, and even if they experienced it under the facade of "Christian teaching", it wasn't Christian! People are flawed and can do horrendously wrong things, I will be the first to agree with you on that and will never try to excuse bad/horrible behavior.  But God's word and God's will (not to be confused with our attempt at carrying it out) are perfect. Don't judge Him on what we, even and especially Christians, as humans do; that's just a foolish argument. Would you judge Mozart as a failure if you heard his symphonies played by untrained 5th graders? Don't judge the Lord based on humankind's iniquities.