So, if you've stuck with the series, you know the answer is "yes."
AND husbands need to submit to their wives.
The whole thing is rooted in three things-
First, the brokenness of this world, which leads to a lot of pain, but specifically in marriage leads women to want to rule their husbands and husbands to want to dominate their wives (Gen 3:16).
But (secondly) the Gospel breaks down walls, begins to reverse the effects of the curse, calls us to participate in that reversal, and serves as a great leveler of rich and poor, slave and free, and male and female.
And specifically (and thirdly), it calls us to resist the urge to dominate one another by means of mutual submission.
Yes, Paul says- you Wives still need to submit to your husbands- but not out of duty to the Hellenistic ideas of male superiority, not out of social convention and the pater familias family structure, but out of reverence for Christ and a desire to witness to a watching world that your husband may own you (in ancient culture), but it's JESUS who is your Lord.
And Husbands (even more radically in Paul's day, and apparently in ours as well) you need to submit to your wives.
In Eph 4:21, Paul commands us to submit to one another. This is SPECIFICALLY tied to the marriage verses which follow. How? In the Greek, the whole thing is one sentence with just one verb- Submit to each other- wives in this way, husbands in this way. "Submission" and "laying down your life" are really two ways of saying the same thing.
So why only tell the men they need to lay down their lives?
Maybe because most women already GET that submission means laying down your life- Paul doesn't have to tell them that. Most women do it almost daily in marriage and mothering.
But he reminds the women that are tempted to forget that and he needs to tell the men,Your submission to your wife looks practically like this: laying down your life. Those who believe that marriage is meant to represent Jesus and the Church (it is), but take that to mean that submission moves only in one direction misread (I believe) what Paul is saying here and miss the very example of Jesus in becoming a servant Himself- both in death and practically, as an example to His disciples in washing their feet.
Submission runs both ways- and we see this in Paul's explicit command (Eph 4:21), by the working of the Gospel and by Jesus' example...
Paul's overall contextual desire (at least in the Colossians passage most of this has flowed out of) is this: "And whatever you do or say, do it as a representative of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father." His main concern is that we represent Jesus well- that our relationships, be they marriage, parent-child, or those we work for/with, represent Jesus well.
Now, the big complaint in the comments of this series is that the complementarian ideal of marriage isn't "offensive." Well... I've seen "complementarian"marriages that were both offensive and non-offensive, at least on their face. However... I think the idea of stressing wives' submission misses both Paul's command to submit to each other as well as his intent. Stressing wifely submissionwithout balancing it out with husbandly submission is, I think, inherently offensive, and violates the spirit of what Paul is trying to do.
Overall, here's how I read these commands to wives- Paul's not laying on this over-arching ethos of womanly submission as many seem to think. He's speaking specifically to those living in a patriarchal, abusive-to-women society and saying "Women, believing in Jesus doesn't give you the right to give your husband the finger. And men your duty as a follower of Jesus trumps your rights as Roman citizens/pater familias. As a Christ follower, you still have a duty to submit to each other- as to the Lord!"
And to me, the marriage which best represents Jesus to an onlooking world is one which understands and lives out the principles which Paul lays out here- which, like most things, probably look pretty different in our context than it did in theirs.
