Submission is treated as a bad thing because so often those who preach it (including husbands) use it as a power-play, a bid for control, an excuse for abuse.
Submission, when given willingly and without any form of coercion, can be beautiful. Submission, as part of a system of coercion, (which it is when people with spiritual authority demand it or claim that it is the only way to be godly etc), is so far from that as to be potentially demonic (something I don't say lightly).
I have noticed that "submission" in the sense of power/authority often stems from serious theological error. Since the comparison is often made that husbands are the head even as God is the head of Christ, and Christ is therefore subject to the Father; it assumes a power dynamic in the Trinity that is, at its heart, heretical: Subordinatism.
It is true that the Son willingly submits Himself to the Father in love, but it does not come from a place of subordination, but from a place of love. The dynamic within the Trinity is not one of subordination, but of love. The Son's offering of Himself to the Father is not one-sided, it is part of the mutual Self-offering of God, because the Father gives of Himself to the Son, and the Son gives of Himself to the Father. It is mutual Self-offering, of God to God, selflessly. And it is precisely this model of kenotic and koinonial giving of the self to another, intrinsic to the Triune Godhead, that establishes the pattern of human relationships as they ought to be.
To quote Hans Balthasar,
"
That he is Father we know in utmost fullness from Jesus Christ, who constantly makes loving, thankful, and reverent reference to him as his Origin. It is because he bears fruit of himself and requires no fructifying that he is called Father, and not in the sexual sense, for he will be the Creator of man and woman, and thus contains the primal qualities of woman in himself in the same simultaneously transcending way as those of man. (The Greek gennad
can imply both siring and bearing, as can the word for to come into being: ginomai
.) Jesus' words indicate that this fruitful self-surrender by the primal Origin has neither beginning nor end: It is a perpetual occurence in which essence and activity coincide. Herein lies the most unfathomable aspect of the Mystery of God: that what is absolutely primal is no statically self-contained and comprehensible reality, but one that exists solely in dispensing itself: a flowing wellspring with no holding-trough beneath it, and act of procreation with no seminal vesicle, with no organism at all to perform the act. In the pure act of self-pouring-forth, God the Father is his self, or, if one wishes, a 'person' (in a transcending way).
When the New Testament refers to him in many passages as 'almighty,' it becomes evident from these that this almightiness can be none other than that of surrender which is limited by nothing--what could surpass the power of bringing forth a God 'equal in nature,' that is, equally loving and equally powerful, not another God but an other in God ('In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,' Jn 1:1)? If the act of creation is attributed later on to the almighty Father, the GOspel leaves no doubt that God the Son and the Holy Spirit take part with equal almightiness, but still with an almightiness that is originally grounded in the fatherly Origin. It is therefore essential, in the first instance, to see the unimaginable power of the Father in the force of his self-surrender, that is, of his love, and not for example, his being able to do this or that as he chooses. And it is just as essential not to understand the Father's love-almightiness as something darkly elemental, eruptive, prelogical, since his self-giving appears simultaneous as a self-thinking, self-stating, and self-expressing (Heb 1:3): The Logos, the Word that contains every sense in itself, is their product. Just as little is the Father's 'all-mighty' self-testimony something compulsive; rather, it is also the origin of all freedom--once again, not in the sense of doing as one chooses, but in that of superior self-posession of the love which surrenders itself. This freedom is bestowed upon the Son along with divinity (he will become human in sovereign freedom and 'call to him those whom he desires,' Mk 3:13), and it is bestowed by both the Father and the Son upon the Holy Spirit, who 'blows where he wills' (Jn 3:8).
God's love is so complete in itself--he is lover, responding beloved, and union of the fruit of both--that he has need of no extradivine world in order to have something to love. If such a world is freely created by God, apart from any compelling need, then this occurs, from the viewpoint of the Father, in order to glorify the beloved Son; from the viewpoint of the loving Son, in order to lay everything as a gift at the Father's feet; and from the viewpoint of the Spirit, in order to lend new expression to the reciprocal love between Father and Son. Hence, the one triune God is Creator of the world. If this creation is attributed specifically to the Father, then that is because, within God, he is the Origin behind which nothing more can be sought." - Credo
Balthasar's language can be verbose and flowery here, but it really boils down to this: God's way of being God is not an act of violent dominance; but humble giving of Himself. The eternal generation of the Son from the Father is the loving surrender and giving, from the Father the Son has His eternal and uncreated Origin as God of God; and likewise the eternal procession of the Spirit is found in the self-giving of God. As we read in Scripture that "all things were made by [Christ] and for [Christ]" and also that at Christ's Parousia He will hand all things over to the Father so that God may "be all in all".
The creation itself is gift, and in this good thing made by God in which God will be glorified, on account of the love of God, we find ourselves, the creatures of God made in the Divine Image and Likeness to reflect that same divine glory. How is that divine glory to be reflected? What does the Divine Image look like? We have that in Christ "the image of the invisible God" and "the radiance of [God's] glory and express image of His hypostasis". It is not through dominance, force, or coersion--but through self-surrendering love of ourselves toward another that we encounter our God-created humanity; it is precisely this which has been marred and broken by sin by which we have turned away from God and each other toward ourselves and which Christ our Savior comes to save us from by destroying the power of sin, death, hell, and the devil and delivering us up from sin and death to God, reconciled, with our face turned toward the glorious hope of resurrection and the renewal of all things. That God may be all in all.
-CryptoLutheran
