Why are young women instructed to love their husbands in Titus 2 but not in Ephesians 5?

How is it that Titus 2 mentions that wives should love their husbands, but Ephesians 5 does not?  Let's read the two passages:

In the same way, older women are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not slaves to excessive drinking. They are to teach what is good, so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands and to love their children, to be self-controlled, pure, workers at home, kind, and in submission to their husbands, so that God’s word will not be slandered.  -Titus 2:3-5

Submitting to one another in the fear of Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord, because the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church. He is the Savior of the body.  Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives are to submit to their husbands in everything.  Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word.  He did this to present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and blameless.  In the same way, husbands are to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself.  For no one ever hates his own flesh but provides and cares for it, just as Christ does for the church,  since we are members of his body.  For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.  This mystery is profound, but I am talking about Christ and the church.  To sum up, each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her husband.  -Ephesians 5:21-33

Commands to married women and men are different in Titus 2 and Ephesians 5

Married women are encouraged to love their husbands in Titus 2, but not in Ephesians 5.  Only husbands are told to love their wives in Ephesians 5, but husbands loving their wives is not mentioned in Titus 2.

Married women and men in Colossians and 1 Peter

Colossians 3 mirrors Ephesians 5 saying, "Wives submit to your husbands," and "husbands love your wives."  1 Peter 3 also says that wives should submit to their own husbands and that husbands "in the same way" should "live with them in an understanding way."  This means to be considerate, to be loving in listening, and to actively care and seek to understand your wife.  The CSB is perhaps confusing here, with the phrase "in the same way."  A perhaps better, more literal, translation is "likewise," which is found in the ESV, KJV, and NKJV.  "In the same way" might imply congruency, but the real meaning is  "by the same token" that "likewise" conveys.  Wives are admonished to submit, while husbands are commanded to be considerate in their use of authority. (Wayne Grudem, 1 Peter, p. 142)

Love 

Another point to consider is that the Greek words for love in Titus, versus Ephesians, are very different.  The word for love in Ephesians where Paul writes "husbands, love your wives" is agape, the highest form of love that means sacrificial.  The word for love in Titus, "encourage the young women to love their husbands and to love their children," is philandros and philoteknos, based on philos, which is friendly or friendship love.  These two words mean "loving your husband" and "loving your children."  A very literal translation of Titus 2:4 is: "in order that they may train the young women to be husband-lovers, children-lovers," (DLNT).  Sometimes people say they love you, or say "you know I love you," while not actually being loving, or lovers of their families.

What was going on in the church in Crete that might clue us in on why wives needed to be admonished to love, or to be lovers to their own husbands and children?  What would cause a Christian wife to lack spousal or maternal affection?  False teachers were infecting the church in Crete who "are ruining entire households by teaching what they shouldn’t in order to get money dishonestly." (Titus 1:11)  When Paul writes that households were being ruined by false teaching, he is saying that homes were being wrecked.

Home wrecking teachings

What were the home wrecking teachings?  Would one be asceticism?  Were teachers falsely teaching that married people should do certain things that would dull their affections for their families?

"It seems hardly necessary for Christian women to be trained in loving their own children, but again the exhortation may pinpoint some special weakness in the Creatan character.  It would have a particular significance in view of the home-disturbing tactics of the false teachers mentioned in 1:11.  Even our modern age is not without instances of professing Christian women lacking true maternal affection.  For women who put their careers before the welfare of their own children are displaying a significant symptom of this weakness." (Donald Guthrie, The Pastoral Epistles, 1957; 1983 ed., p. 193)

Does the married woman who works, whose husband is not disabled or in jail, neglect her husband and children because she's tired and has spent herself outside her home?  Does she then become a person who needs to be told to love her husband and children?  There are also many women whose husbands force them to work.  They are tired and suffering from work they don't want to be doing while perhaps trying their best to be loving.

When young wives were perhaps neglecting to be loving or to be a lover of their husband and kids, she needed to be mentored, trained, or encouraged by an older Christian woman.  This section of Titus is an illustration of discipleship.  We all need to be made disciples of Christ through other Christians who are usually older and wiser.

Workers at home

Wives need to be encouraged to be homemakers, workers at home.

In the same way, older women are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not slaves to excessive drinking. They are to teach what is good, so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands and to love their children, to be self-controlled, pure, workers at home, kind, and in submission to their husbands, so that God’s word will not be slandered.  -Titus 2:3-5

Other ways that this Greek word, oikourgos, is translated are: keepers at home, homemaker, keeping at home, housewives, manage their households, busy at home, and good managers of the household.  The older Christian women are to encourage the younger wives to be homemakers.  Why?  There must have been  something that was pushing them to not want to be homemakers.  It's very strange to comment on this passage and say that "this is not saying that women should stay at home" and "it is not saying that women cannot have careers."  I think that is a red herring.

This passage is not saying women cannot work outside the home.  What it is saying is that some young wives who are mothers should be trained by older women on several things, one of which is being homemakers, and another is being loving towards their husbands and children.  They needed to learn how to love their families, how to be self-controlled, how to be pure, how to be homemakers, how to be kind, and how to be submissive to their husbands.  

This passage is not teaching that women must stay at home, but that women should not neglect their home and hearth.  And what might lead to a wife and mother neglecting her home and hearth?  Outside activities, namely work or ministry.  And a wife who is discontented, dissatisfied, or sour with staying at home, needs to learn how and why she needs to be a happy homemaker from an older woman.

"God wants wives to make homemaking a priority. A woman’s home is the primary arena of her ministry. It also makes a statement about her values. Normally homemaking includes nurturing children (cf. Prov. 1:8; 1 Thess. 2:7). Supplementing the family income may be a possible option (cf. Prov. 31:16, 24). However a mother should take a job only if both her husband and she agree that this would be best for the family." (Thomas Constable)

“A wife’s first responsibility is in her home.” (Donald Guthrie)

“The wise husband allows his wife to manage the affairs of the household, for this is her ministry.” (Warren Wiersbe)

Worldly View vs God's View of Homemaking

Worldly

1. Home is a boring drudgey.
2. Homemaking and children are a burden.
3. Value material success and self-gratification NOW.
4. Place children in childcare.
5. Children, homemaking, and often marriage get in the way of self-achievement.
6. Demand your rights to fulfillment.

God's View

1. Home is a haven to come to from the world.
2. Homemaking and children are God’s good gifts.
3. Value character and godliness, and invest in the future.
4. Parents should teach and fulfill their responsibilities to train their children.
5. Raising godly children is one of the ways to fulfill God’s purposes.
6. Freely give of yourself to nurture your family.

(Adapted from Family Life Conference in Thomas Constable's notes and I re-wrote "God's View" 2 & 6)

Why Cretan wives needed to be told to love

“The values of the ‘new woman’ [style of conduct in Crete] had little to do with traditional commitments to the household; the new morality they emphasized endorsed the freedom to pursue extramarital sexual liaisons and liberties normally open only to men, which would place marital fidelity and household management at risk. Thus the household was the chief theater of Paul’s campaign.” (Philip H. Towner, The Letters, p. 726)

"There was evidently in Crete a feverish longing for excitement, for novelty in religious teaching; hence the demand for, and consequent supply of, the “fables” and “commandments of men” spoken of in Titus 1:14. Women as well as men preferred rather to do something for religion and for God, and thus to wipe out past transgressions, and perhaps to purchase the liberty of future licence. They preferred the rigid and often difficult observance of the elaborate ritual, “the tithing of the mint, and anise, and cummin,” to quietly and reverently “doing their Father’s business.’ St. Paul’s method of correcting this false and unhealthy view of religion was to recall women as well as men to the steady, faithful performance of those quiet every-day duties to which God had, in His providence, called them. The first duty of these younger women, St. Paul tells Titus, and which he would have their elder sisters impress on them, was the great home duty of loving their husbands and children. While St. Paul would never have the women of Christ forget their new and precious privileges in the present, their glorious hopes in the future, yet here on earth he would never let them desert, or even for a moment forget, their first and chiefest duties. Their work, let them remember, lay not abroad in the busy world. Their first duty was to make home life beautiful by the love of husband and child—that great love which ever teaches forgetfulness of self." (Charles John Ellicott)

Titus versus Ephesians on husbands and wives

We can speculate that women are designed to love, but they have to be admonished to submit to their husbands.  In this case, younger wives, under conditions found in Crete and conditions we also experience today, need to be admonished to love their families more, and that love is a friendly warm love.  Men are admonished in Ephesians to love their wives sacrificially.

Husbands are also called to love their wives and their children (Ephesians 5:25 and 5:2).

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Bibliography:

Charles John Ellicott, Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers

Family Life Conference notes adapted by Thomas Constable

Thomas Constable, Constable's Notes (NET Bible on line)

Wayne Grudem, 1 Peter

Donald Guthrie, The Pastoral Epistles

Philip H. Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus

Warren Wiersbe, The Bible Exposition Commentary