1 Peter 3:1-7

When Paul defines the duties of bond-servants, he balances his statement by a corresponding exposition of the duties of masters (Ephesians 6:9; Colossians 4:1). Peter, dealing here specially with the application of the general Christian law of order and submission, passes at once to the position of the wife as one of subordination in the household. We are not to infer from this difference between Peter's mode of handling the relative duties and Paul's, that there were; few Christian husbands in the territories addressed by the former. Peter's counsels, while applying to wives generally, seem to be particularly directed to those married to heathen husbands. In 1 Corinthians 7:13-15, Paul states the general principle that a believing wife was not to leave an unbelieving husband, although, if the bond was broken by the husband, she might ‘let him depart,' and need not refuse the separation. Peter here sets forth the wife's duty under the larger aspect of such a meek adjustment of herself to her position as might form the best persuasive with the husband. There was much to provoke the Christian wife to throw off the heathen husband's yoke. To the Greek the wife was something more than the slave, but much less than the husband's help-meet his dependant. In the social system of Rome, as it originally stood, the husband's power over the wife was, like the father's power over the child, unlimited, irresponsible, checked by no legal restrictions, and so inherent that neither age nor free act nor insanity could dissolve it. ‘In a legal point of view, the family was absolutely guided and governed by the single, all-powerful will of the “father of the household” (pater-familias). In relation to him all in the household were destitute of legal rights the wife and the child no less than the bullock or the slave' (Mommsen's History of Rome, Book i. chap. 5). At least two centuries before the Christian era the Roman wife had begun to scheme for her emancipation, and a quarrel of the sexes set in which produced bitter fruit in the days of the Empire. ‘The latter centuries of the Roman commonwealth,' says Dean Merivale, ‘are filled with the domestic struggles occasioned by the obstinacy with which political restrictions were maintained upon the most sensitive of the social relations' (The Romans under the Empire, 4 p. 84). Among such outlying populations, too, as are now addressed by Peter, the wife's lot might contain elements of bitterness peculiarly apt to provoke her, when the Christian doctrines of equality and purity took possession of her mind, to rebel against her position of abject subserviency, against the harshness of the heathen husband's rule, against much in the relation itself which heathenism allowed, but Christian feeling revolted against. In view of the social disaster and the danger to the Christian name which repudiation of the ties of family life would entail, Peter enjoins on wives patient regard to the duties of their station, and submission for Christ's sake to its inconveniences.