Contextualizing the Exhortation for Female Submission and Propriety

The women's movement of modernity has successfully made strides towards gender equality; women in post-modern America increasingly enjoy the liberties and social status once granted almost exclusively to men. These changes have altered the way in which many people understand gender language, leading to an inevitable conflict between the Bible's treatment of gender–a text of antiquity–and contemporary sensibilities. If these scriptures are to be properly understood and thus correctly applied today, it must be upheld that while truth is universal, language may be bound by space and time. Hence the purpose of this brief body of research is to present and analyze the ancient social context of the gender specific passages of 1 Peter 3, including their origin in the Greco-Roman household code, in order to gain a better understanding of the way in which they are to be most rightly applied in a contemporary context. Herein, we will discover that the exhortation for female submission and propriety in 1 Peter 3 is situation specific and not a universal command; however, the evangelistic, Christian spirit of 1 Peter remains cogent to the contemporary Christian.