The Trouble with “Submit”
Rethinking How We Translate ὑποτάσσω
Few Greek verbs have done more work in Christian debates about marriage, church, and state than ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō). And few have been so consistently flattened in English translation. Open almost any modern version at Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, Romans 13, or 1 Peter 2–3, and you will find the same rendering doing all the heavy lifting: “submit.” The ESV, NIV, CSB, and NASB use it almost without variation; the NRSVue prefers the somewhat more formal “be subject to.” Either way, English readers hear a word that belongs to the vocabulary of hierarchy—one will bending to another, an inferior yielding to a superior, or even resistance giving way to capitulation.
I want to suggest that this is a case where our translations are not so much wrong as tone-deaf. “Submit” imports into these texts a set of assumptions about status, power, and rank, even obedience, that the Greek does not require and that the contexts in which the verb sometimes appears actively resist. We need to rethink how we render this verb and its cognates—not to soften the New Testament’s demands, but to hear them more accurately.
What Does the Word Actually Do?
Let’s start with the verb’s anatomy. ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) is a compound verb, built from τάσσω, “to order, arrange, appoint”—a word at home in contexts of arrangement and placement, of things and persons set in relation to one another—with the prefix ὑπο-, “under.” The verb’s semantic center of gravity, then, is not the breaking of one will by another but the ordering of oneself in relation to others. It concerns placement, not powerlessness.
In actual usage, whether in the New Testament or in the wider Hellenistic world, the sense of the term isn’t dictated by its etymology. Instead, the term can signify to make subject, as we might expect, as well as to append, to classify, to assign, to find one’s place, and so on.1 As with words more generally, ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) doesn’t encode a denotative meaning (as though words mean the same thing wherever and whenever they’re used), but serves as a prompt for understanding, a cue for the construction of meaning. Used with reference to people, ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) basically refers to finding and occupying responsibly one’s place in society (and not to passive or unreflective subjection).
In discussions related to usage in the New Testament, two details sharpen the point.
First, in the passages that most feature in debates, the verb appears in the middle voice: not “be subjected” (something done to you) but “order yourselves” (something you do). The middle voice marks the action as voluntary, self-involving, chosen.
Second, in Ephesians 5, the verb’s one explicit appearance governs a strikingly non-hierarchical object: “ordering yourselves to each another (ἀλλήλοις, allēlois) in reverence for Christ” (5:21 AT). Verse 22—“wives, to your husbands”—famously contains no verb at all; it borrows its verb from the mutuality of v. 21.
With respect to this last point, we see immediately the difficulty with “submit.” If submission names a hierarchical relation—an inferior yielding to a superior—then mutual submission is pretty much an oxymoron, instruction grounded in a contradiction in terms. Two parties cannot each outrank the other.
Yet mutuality is precisely what Paul commands. Either Paul is speaking incoherently, or the verb doesn’t mean what “submit” leads English readers to assume. The reciprocal pronoun isn’t an awkward exception to the verb’s meaning. It’s a window into it. ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) names a disposition that two people can practice toward each other simultaneously—which “submit,” in ordinary English, does not.
The Witness of 1 Peter
First Peter presses the point from another direction. Peter’s household code opens with the imperative ὑποτάγητε (hypotagēte): “For the Lord’s sake be subject to every human authority” (2:13 NRSVue; italics added). Read through the lens of “submit,” this sounds like a counsel of compliance, even resignation. But attend to how Peter qualifies the command, and a different picture emerges.
The imperative is hedged about with three phrases: “on account of the Lord,” “as free people,” and “as God’s slaves” (2:13, 16). Peter addresses his readers, remarkably, as free—and asks them to order themselves toward human institutions precisely as an exercise of that freedom. Whatever ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) means here, it cannot mean the surrender of agency, because Peter grounds his instruction in agency. “Subordination,” for Peter, is an expression of freedom, not its forfeiture.
Notice, too, what Peter does not say. When he speaks of the claims of God and the gospel, he reaches for a different word: ὑπακοή, hypakoē, “obedience” (1:2, 14, 22). That is:
Obedience belongs to God alone.
What Christ-followers owe to emperors, governors, masters, and each another isn’t obedience, but a considered, freely chosen placement of oneself within a web of human relationships. The distinction is Peter’s own, and our translations erase it when they render both word-groups with the same deferential vocabulary.
Peter’s word to household slaves (2:18–20) confirms the point in a way that should give pause to anyone who hears in ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) a counsel of passivity. In a world where slaves were widely regarded as lacking the capacity for moral reasoning—mere instruments, in Aristotle’s chilling phrase, “living tools”—the sheer fact that Peter addresses them directly is significant.
Household codes in the Greco-Roman world typically instructed masters about slaves; Peter speaks to slaves, as persons. And what he asks of them presupposes robust moral agency. They are to order themselves toward their masters “in all fear”—which, in the grammar of this letter, is not fear of the master’s lash but reverence toward God (1:17; 2:17); indeed, fear of what others think or can do must never motivate Christian behavior (3:14).
Their steadfastness is grounded in “consciousness of God” (2:19)—a shared, communal understanding of God’s will that funds behavior the surrounding world would find inexplicable. And their subordination is expressly not calibrated to the character of those in authority: It applies whether masters are “good and considerate” or “harsh.”
That last detail is easily misread as counseling doormat-like endurance, but its actual force runs the other way. If the master’s goodness is irrelevant to the slave’s conduct, then the slave’s conduct is not determined by the master at all. Its source lies elsewhere—in discernment about the will of God. Peter is asking slaves to do something Roman ideology said they couldn’t do, namely, to evaluate, to judge, to pattern their lives by an allegiance their masters don’t control. Whatever ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) names here, it’s the practice of moral agents, not the reflex of the powerless.
Best of all, I think, is to hear ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) in 1 Peter as the opposite of withdrawal. The live temptation for a beleaguered minority—“immigrants and strangers,” as Peter names them—wasn’t rebellion but retreat: pulling back from a society that slandered and maligned them. Against that temptation, Peter calls his readers and hearers to find and occupy their place in society responsibly, to stay engaged, to keep doing good in full view of their neighbors (2:12, 15).
“Submit” hears the verb as an alternative to defiance. Peter deploys it as an alternative to disengagement.
Translation Choices Are Never Innocent
If our verb is this supple, why the uniformity of “submit”? Partly inertia: William Tyndale’s (ca. 1494–1536) choices echo down the centuries:
“Submittinge youre selves one to another in the feare of God. Wemen submit youre selves vnto youre awne husbandes as vnto the Lorde” (Eph 5:21–22 Tyndale). The AV of 1611 merely cleans up the English: “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God. Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord”; and the NIV reads similarly: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.”
“Submit youre selves vnto all manner ordinaunce of man for the lordes sake whether it be vnto the kynge as vnto the chefe heed” (2:13 Tyndale). The AV follows in line: “Submit yourselves to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake: whether it be to the king, as supreme …”; as does the NIV: “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority: whether to the emperor, as the supreme authority.”
But translation decisions also track theological commitments. It’s no accident that the versions most invested in a hierarchical reading of marriage render ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) most rigidly—and reinforce the rendering with formatting. The ESV and NIV actually insert a paragraph break or section heading between Ephesians 5:21 and 5:22, visually severing the instruction to wives from the mutuality that grammatically supplies its verb. The NRSVue and CEB, by contrast, keep the verses connected, letting v. 22 read as a specification of v. 21. The white space on the page is doing exegesis.
I say this not only to observe that “submit” is not a neutral default from which other renderings deviate. It is itself an interpretation, and one that resolves the word’s flexibility (or polysemy) consistently in the direction of hierarchy.
Toward Better Renderings
What might we say instead? No single English word captures everything, but several options honor the verb’s actual profile better than “submit” does.
In mutual contexts: “defer to each another,” which preserves both the voluntary character of the middle voice and the coherence of reciprocity. Where the ordering nuance matters: “order yourselves toward” or “take your place in relation to”—wordier, but more transparent to what the Greek is doing. In 1 Peter’s civic context: “take your place responsibly within,” which makes the point about engaged placement rather than servile compliance unmistakable.
Each of these renderings costs us something: concision, familiarity, and the traditional, sturdy Anglo-Saxon punch of “submit.” But “submit” costs us more. It teaches English readers that the New Testament baptizes hierarchy as such, when the texts themselves are doing something far more interesting: calling free people, in Christ, to order their lives toward each another and toward their neighbors—voluntarily, mutually, and always under the prior claim of the Lord whose own self-giving sets the pattern.
The question, finally, is not whether “submit” can be defended lexically. In some contexts it can. The question is what English readers hear when they encounter it—and whether what they hear is what these texts are saying. On that score, I think, the verdict is in. It’s time to retire “submit” from its position of unearned dominance and let ὑποτάσσω (hypotassō) speak with its own voice: the voice not of capitulation, but of freely chosen, other-directed placement—the social shape of a cruciform life.
See, e.g., James Hope Moulton and George Millikan, The Vocabulary of the Greek Testament: Illustrated from the Papyri and Other Non-Literary Sources (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963), 660; J. Diggle, B. L. Fraser, P. James, O. B. Simkin, A. A. Thompson, and S. J. Westripp, eds., The Cambridge Greek Lexicon, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 2:1440; Gerhard Delling, “τάσσω κτλ,” in Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, 10 vols. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964–1976), 8:27–48 (39–46).
“The white space on the page is doing exegesis.” That’s a mic drop moment Joel. This is a very helpful reminder. Thank you for your efforts.
"Place yourselves at each others' service" perhaps?