An article published in the Washington Post last week draws attention to the claim in Rep. Steve Pearce’s memoir that a wife is to “voluntarily submit” to her husband. While the fact that this statement issued from the mouth of a U.S. congressman attracted headlines, the idea itself is not news. There is already a best-selling book that posits this idea: the Bible.

Rather, there is an anthology of ancient literature, considered by many to be sacred, containing a couple of letters that posit this idea. It’s important to remember that the Bible as we have it today is not a book like Harry Potter. Instead, it is a compilation of 66 books, letters, collections of poetry, folktales, instructions, myths, and legal codes.

One of my least favorite sentence-starters is, “The Bible says…” because the Bible says a lot — much of it contradictory. After all, these works were written by countless authors and revised by innumerable editors over the course of several thousand years. It’s essential, then, to understand the context in which “the Bible says” something. For example:

The Bible says that polygamy was taking place from the very beginning of the faith, and the practice is never condemned. Abraham, the patriarch of Judaism, had two wives and a slave, all of whom bore him children. His grandson, Jacob, married two sisters and had two concubines. Much later in the history of Israel, King David had at least seven wives, and his son Solomon is said to have had a harem including 700 princesses and 300 concubines. Each of these men was routinely criticized when he failed to do what God wanted of him, and yet polygamy was never something for which they were punished.

So let’s look at the context. At the beginning of a faith intended to spread to the whole world (Genesis 12:1-3), it’s critical for members of that faith to procreate and for their offspring to survive. Polygamy is a social structure that seems particularly suited to achieving these goals. We now live in a context in which very few places in the world — if any — are unaware of the Judeo-Christian faith; polygamy is no longer a necessity. This line of thinking is also pertinent to the conversation about same-sex relationships, which I will not address here.

The Bible says that, should a married man die with no male heir, his brother is to sleep with his widow until she gives birth to a son. This command — and it is a command — is known as levirate marriage, and it is the central conceit of the story of Judah and Tamar. In Genesis 38, Judah is punished for failing to provide one of his sons as a husband for Tamar. In the Book of Ruth, the character of Boaz is commended as a “man of valor” for taking Ruth as a wife after her husband dies.

The law of levirate marriage seems to have developed, in part, as a way for men to maintain control over the wealth within a family; however, it also arose in a context in which there was no social security, no unemployment pay, and no such thing as a homeless shelter. This practice was, in effect, a social safety net for widows and children who would otherwise have no way to care for themselves. In a culture that has systems in place (at least, in theory) to provide for the less fortunate, this practice is truly obsolete.

Before we return to Pearce’s perspective on marital relationships, let’s look at one more thing the Bible says: namely, that it’s better for single people never to marry at all. This idea comes to us most clearly from the Apostle Paul, the author of many of the letters that make up the New Testament. In 1 Corinthians 7:8-9, Paul recommends to the unmarried and the widowed that they “remain unmarried as I am.” Indeed, Jesus himself was never married.

Marriage clearly wasn’t the highest priority for these two men. The context here is that Jesus and Paul lived their lives believing that the final culmination of history was just over the horizon. Jesus proclaimed that “this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place” (Matthew 24:34 and verses following), and Paul wrote that “the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2). In light of such apocalyptic thinking, dedicating oneself to marriage took a back seat to dedicating oneself to the faith. Jesus made this explicit when he said, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). Nearly 2,000 years later, we recognize that life on Earth is probably one of God’s long-term projects; perhaps marriage is back on the table.

The New Mexican congressman’s understanding of marriage, namely that “the wife is to voluntarily submit, just as the husband is to lovingly lead and sacrifice,” comes from the “household code” found in Paul’s letters to the Ephesians and the Colossians. Paul’s mission was to continue the expansion of the Church. The “code” sections of the letters are a set of directions for maintaining the hierarchical order of society: women obey men, children obey parents, slaves obey masters.

At the time these letters were written, Christianity was a developing faith. Some thought it was primarily subversive — after all, these people were talking about a King up in heaven, which some of the Powers-That-Were took as a threat to their own authority. Christianity does demand radical change, and so these passages may have been an attempt to say, “Yes, we’re different, but we’re not clueless! We know how the world works.” The way the world worked in the first century was that men were in charge. Perhaps the household code was meant to reflect, rather than to legislate, that reality.

In America today, that reality is no longer uniformly the case. Women have more discretion (though not absolute freedom, especially in oppressive or abusive situations) in the forms their relationships will take. Reading the passages from Ephesians and Colossians, we might choose to focus less on the gender of the person in charge and more on the idea of mutual care and respect: that husbands and wives, parents and children, even, er, “bosses and employees,” are to show concern for one another.

In each of these examples, there is a practice and a principle: the practice of polygamy served the principle of spreading a faith; the practice of levirate marriage served the principle of concern for the powerless in society; the practice of eschewing marriage served the principle of wholehearted dedication to one’s faith; the practice of the household code served the principle of maintaining social order. Far too often, we get bogged down in the practice, without going a step further to discern the principle it serves.

So choose your own biblical view of marriage, but do so recognizing that context is crucial and that the Bible isn’t a book of answers; it can’t live our lives for us. What we need is a faith that engages such a book, a faith that is alive, adaptable, and not afraid of change, a faith that is born and reborn each day. That’s the kind of faith that can show us how to live.

The author is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and serves as a chaplain in the Virginia Commonwealth University health system.

For further reading on these topics, check out Unprotected Texts: The Bible’s Surprising Contradictions about Sex and Desire by Jennifer Wright Knust (New York: HarperCollins, 2011).