In order to have a full comprehension of God’s will for male and female in the Church we must start at the beginning, with Genesis. Perhaps this seems an odd place to start for some, however there are two reasons for beginning our work here 1) Genesis is quoted in the passages we’ll be exegeting later on 2) Genesis 1-11 is like the molten inner-core of the earth. From the inner core, the outer core receives its heat and gravity, from there the mantle, and finally the earth’s crust is yet heated and kept in place by the inner-core working transitively upward through the other layers.
This is the way Genesis 1-11 works in the Bible, it gives heat and gravity to the rest of scripture, indeed there is no verse left untouched or unpulled toward this center. You may argue that Christ is in fact the center of scripture and you would be right. Christ is indeed the center of scripture, just as He is the cosmic-creator, gardener, snake-crusher, and righteous one found so prominently in Genesis 1-11. To put it another way, it is only with a good comprehension of these first 11 chapters that we begin to grasp the depth and magnitude of Jesus in His life, death, resurrection, ascension, and return.
In the same way, to better understand the roles that male and female play in the Church, we must know their place in creation. We must know their original relationship with the Creator, one another, with sin, and the rest of creation; thus we turn to the opening pages of the Word.
S. Joshua Swamidass' work in “the Genealogical Adam and Eve” is helpful here, not necessarily his overall conclusions which I don’t have time to discuss, but the mere reality that his fresh approach to Genesis 1 & 2 made exegetical space for both “evolutionists” and “creationists” to meet on common ground and reorient their argument from “science is wrong and the Bible is right” (and vice versa) to “what is the Bible actually saying about mankind in creation?”5
Similarly, a fresh exegetical interpretation of Genesis 1, 2, and 3 as it regards the sexes will result in a like-manner leveling of the playing field for complementarians and egalitarians. I call this interpretation “fresh” not because it is new, but because it has been discovered anew after centuries of assuming a different interpretation. It is indeed not “new” at all, and for this reason it is perhaps the most vital piece of this work.
The reason I consider it the most vital piece is because it is recovering the interpretation of Genesis that Paul is referring to in his letters when he harkens back to creation as a justification for his imperative statements. With this interpretation in mind, we’ll recreate the once-existing space for Paul to sound neither bigoted nor sexist while yet maintaining the authoritative nature of his inspired words.
To begin our exegetical work, please read all of Genesis 1, 2, and 3, taking special note of the following verses:
- Genesis 1:26-30
- Genesis 2:16-17
- Genesis 2:23-25
- Genesis 3:1-3
- Genesis 3:7
- Genesis 3:15
A proper reading of Genesis 1, 2 and 3 begins with an equality of humankind as observed in Genesis 1:26-30. Here, God makes mankind in His image, in the image of God He created mankind, male and female He created them. To this male and female mankind He twice commissions them to be rulers over the land. I encourage the reader to spend extra time reading Genesis 1:26-30 as it’s put together into something of a puzzle. I’d also encourage the reader to use a concordance or the original language, as an English version can trip us up a bit. Perhaps you noticed my intentionality in using the word “mankind” above, rather than the traditional translation of “man.” This is not a sleight of hand. The word adam is the word for human-kind and, though it can be used to describe a single man, the nature of the verses themselves make it clear that we are talking of “humanity,” not “a man.”
This nuance needs to be particularly clear in verse 27 for we must not accidentally hear “...in the image of God He created ‘a man;’ male and female He created them both” No, the “him” there is a direct object marker, meaning it is signifying the above “mankind” to be the thing created in His image. Then it goes on to reveal something about that “mankind,” namely that they are a one-thing that is itself two things: mankind is male and female.
I labor over this because I have heard it said by several pastors and teachers that Genesis 2 is doing something like “zooming in on the sixth day of creation.” Claiming that, where Genesis 1 speaks on a meta-level of the creation week, Genesis 2 then takes day 6 specifically and slows it down to show us more detail of what happened. This is a poor interpretation, be it built upon a right idea.
There are actually clues in the text itself that reveal this to be a poor interpretation. For instance, in the Genesis 1 timeline, the land is separated from the waters, trees are sprouted forth, animals are placed upon the earth, and then God creates mankind. But in Genesis 2, it notes explicitly “no shrub of the field was yet on the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted…'' and then God forms man out of dust (before anything else). Thus it’s made apparent that Genesis 1 and 2 are doing two different things, at least as far as the order of creation is concerned. This is not a contradiction or compromise of the truth of scripture. Rather, it’s a literary tool, in which two seemingly-contradictory pictures are placed side-by-side to point to a truer reality than can be sufficiently portrayed by either one alone.
For instance, in Genesis 1 God is portrayed as simply “speaking” creation into existence. A word from God becomes material reality. This God is clearly omnipotent, but potentially detachable from the creation He spoke into existence. In Genesis 1 alone, the reader gets no real sense that God actually cares for His creation, apart from that He calls it “good,” but even that could be a “good” defined by a malevolent god for sadistic purposes. However, in Genesis 2 God is portrayed as intimately working the ground with His own “hands” and breathing His own breath into the lungs of mankind. The God of Genesis 2 is clearly working for the “good” of mankind, but perhaps not exceptionally powerful apart from this small garden of His domain. However, when we put the two chapters together, these seeming-contradictions come to life to create an unfathomable picture of an infinite God; a God who is somehow all-powerful over the entire universe and yet ever-intimately present with a single being.
This is how Genesis 1 and 2 should be read, as two parts of a single story, each doing different things by utilizing different genres, but together pointing to a third and more-true reality.
This technique now applied to the sexes specifically will yield the same results. As we’ve already seen in Genesis 1, God makes one humanity that is both male and female sexually. They are both commissioned to the same work, given the same authority, and blessed in the same way. This is the first description of humanity and how the sexes function together, and notably being created equal in every way.
So as we turn the page to Genesis 2, this reality will not be superseded, but will add a second picture to guide us to the ultimate truth regarding the sexes. In fact we might notice a Genesis 1-like unity here too; in Genesis 2:18-23 the main tension is that no suitable helper is found for the man until the woman is made of the same essence as the man. She is not just a suitable helper, but as the man says, she is “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.” Somehow we miss the profundity of what the man is saying; ‘she is one who is perfect for me because she is the same as me in the most literal sense possible while still being another being.’
The essential oneness of man and woman here cannot be understated. What I mean is, we must notice that the thrust of this passage is that man and woman are made of the same stuff, the same essence in other words. I use this strange term of “essence” because it is the theological term used to in retort to the heresy of Arianism, that the Son is not of the same essence as the Father and so is eternally subordinate. This has been condemned as heresy since the first council of Nicaea in 325. I belabor the point because a variation of this argument has been recapitulated in our time, resurrecting the idea of Jesus’ subservience to the Father and applying it as theological leverage to assert a divine order intended to be mirrored by women’s subservience to men. But the Bible refutes this strongly in its opening pages.
With that in mind, let's go back to the top of the story where God creates one human, whom we’re still to simply call “human” and not “man” because the Hebrew word for male-human is not given until verse 23 (the first time the word for female-human is used is, interestingly, verse 22.) He then introduces the human to all the animals around, but none is suitable as a strong-and-right helper.
I’m using the phrase “strong-and-right helper” because I think it actually speaks to the Biblical meaning of the word, though it often appears simply translated as “helper.” When we hear that word in our context, we think “one who is there to support the other in their endeavours.” But given the Biblical context of the word, being most often used to describe God (see Psalm 33:20 for instance), it’s clear our modern understanding of “helper” falls short. Woman is no servant to Adam, just as God is no servant to man...and yet. Of course there is a clear and obvious apparent contradiction in that statement because, “I did not come to be served, but to serve,” says the Lord himself. But the way in which God “helps” humans is both strong and right. What I mean is, God’s “help,” in the sense of the word used here, is not one that’s oriented toward the man’s ambition, but toward ultimate goodness; namely that man would be in right relationship with God. This is the same way in which Jesus comes to “serve” man, such that He would put them back into a right relationship with the Lord. This is the same way that woman is to “help” mankind.
In this moment, I think we unlock an incredible beauty of the gospel. Just as Paul calls on men in Ephesians saying, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her;” here Eve is created for the same purpose. Perhaps that is why Paul calls for wives and husbands to “submit to one another” first and foremost in that section of Ephesians 5, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves yet.
So, in Genesis 2:24-25, God’s intent for the individual man and woman is revealed; that the two sexes would compliment each other by coming together as one flesh. Woman is created as a strong-and-right helper to orient mankind properly to the Lord. How is she to do this? The text answers our question straight away: the man and woman achieve this together. Mankind begins as becoming two out of one flesh and then is to be reunited as one when man would “leave his father and his mother, and be joined to his wife; and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” This is how man and woman “complement” each other.
Just as God is three persons yet perfectly intimately One, so mankind is to be two sexes united in a relationship that is “naked and unashamed.” Just as God would have been inadequately portrayed if He were not to become incarnate in Jesus Christ, or the Spirit never given, or the Father never proclaimed by the Son; so humankind is incomplete without the two sexes living as one in an intimacy that shadows that of the Godhead.
We know this is a proper reading because it is the humans’ “nakedness” that is compromised in the chapter to come. But before we move on to chapter three, we should take a moment to sit in the tension between the portrait of the sexes given in chapters 1 and 2. This is and should always be our starting place when building a Biblical understanding of the sexes. Somehow, humanity is created as one being made up of two equal sexes, called to the same calling, given the same authority, and equally blessed, yet vitally different from one another such that it is “not good” for them to be alone. It is in their “naked and unashamedness” with each other that they become truly human, imaging God’s oneness and super-personality.
However, this is not the humanity we observe today; one that is so obviously unequal in calling, authority, and blessing, where being naked and unashamed has an entirely darker meaning. So what does the Bible have to say about how we got here?
In Genesis 3, we observe Adam and Eve failing to live up to their calling to be one-flesh. We observe them fail to walk naked and unashamed before one another. So let’s observe how that happens. In verse 3, responding to the serpent’s temptation, the woman misquotes the command the Lord gave man. She says “you shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.” This is not what the Lord said in 2:17; He says “you shall not eat, for in the day you eat from it you will surely die.” It’s a small and subtle thing, but the woman adds an addendum that they shall not eat “or touch it.”
This is a vital note because it is the specific nuance we miss as modern readers that Paul is very clued into; the very detail he leans on in 1 Timothy 2:12-14. Understanding this pivotal moment will allow us to properly exegete Timothy later on.
What is made clear here is that Adam, who was given the command, passed it on to Eve but in such a way that she did not sufficiently grasp it. Rather than properly receiving and “submitting” to the Lord’s right command, the woman makes an authoritative decision based on a “false teaching” which had made room for deception. When the misunderstanding woman then takes the fruit and does not die, she is led to mistrust the Lord’s command and the deception is made complete, so she eats. She then gives the fruit to the man who is with her and he eats. Together, the two eat the fruit in a disobedience based on a “false teaching.” The woman, who had been insufficiently taught the Lord’s command by the man who received it, leads them both into deceived disobedience.
A lack of relational intimacy between the man and the woman is revealed by this apparent insufficiency while passing on the Lord’s command, resulting in sin. This is not a hermeneutical sleight of hand. In fact, this reading is made very clear in the Hebrew which uses a word play to describe the serpent as “arum”, which sounds similar to the “arom” used to describe man and woman’s nakedness only a few words prior.
Man keeps the Lord’s command from the woman in a way that is not equal, and the woman acts rashly to lead them both in deception. As a result, the two are handed over to the curse they brought upon themselves; a long-lasting relational deficiency between the sexes, a heightened lack of intimacy. This curse is pronounced upon the woman and is proportional to the failing itself, Adam and Eve’s uncooperation with each other regarding God’s commands. Such a curse, however, would be undone alongside (and at the same time as) all other curses that had resulted from the sin of Adam; that time being the death of Christ, wherein he took on the full curse of sin and died with it.
It should be noted that calling the entirety of Genesis 3:14-19 a “curse” is contentious ground. The rationale behind this argument lies in the fact that God only explicitly “curses” two times when He says “cursed are you” to the serpent and “cursed is the ground because of you.” The implication being that only those two things are cursed. This logic is often used to protect women, saying that they are not in fact a cursed sex. The idea is correct because the woman herself is indeed not cursed, however, robbing the entire section of its cursedness can lead us to a fundamental misunderstanding that has plagued our interpretation. The misunderstanding is this: if the woman was not cursed nor the woman’s relationship with the man included in the curse, we can (and have) wrongly conclude that, apart from the two explicit curses, this section is God proclaiming the way things will now exist eternally. To state it differently, it is now God’s will that women be eternally bound to subservience to men. With this framework, readers are reinforced in their understanding when reading Paul’s interpretation of Genesis, assuming he agrees with this conclusion, as it could sound that he does unless we have a proper interpretation of Genesis 1-3.
However, Dru Johnson is correct in his book “the Universal Story: Genesis 1-11” when he says “with the woman, her curse appears to entail the twisting and perversion of proper relationships.” He is correct in saying that the woman herself is not cursed, but that the curse is a perversion of the ways she relates to her children and her husband.
Alice Matthews says it so succinctly in her book “Gender Roles and the People of God,” “Hierarchy was not God’s will for the first pair, but it was imposed when they chose to disregard his command and eat the forbidden fruit. Adam would now be subject to his source, the ground, even as Eve was now subject to her source, Adam.”
So, stated again, the woman’s relationship to her husband and children have been accursed, however, this curse (as with all curses) is undone with Christ. This would be a bold statement to make, were it not for the explicit and numerous ways in which the scriptures lay this out for us.
Firstly, the “woman” Mary (the mother of Jesus) proclaims the following of herself in Luke 1:46-55 “...he [God] has looked on the humble estate of his servant. For behold, from now on all generations will call me blessed…” Mary calls herself blessed of God because she is bearing the Messiah child. This is vital to our understanding, because the first curse Eve receives is that her relationship to childbearing will be full of pain. However, now we see that the woman Mary is blessed by God through childbearing; the curse has been undone. This indeed is what Paul has in mind when he says “but she shall be saved through the childbearing” in 1 Timothy 2:15.
We see this interpretation on prominent display in the gospel of John. In John 2, the “woman” Mary instructs Jesus to provide wine for the wedding. Notice Jesus’s initial objection is not anything along the lines of “know your place; submit to the man’s authority and do not attempt to have authority over me for that is not the proper order of things.” But rather his objection is “my time has not yet come.” Yet in spite of this sentiment, Jesus apparently submits his timeline regarding the revelation of his God-ness to Mary’s. Let the reader not dismiss the narrative in favor of the prose just because it seems more explicit. We’ve already concluded that the Bible, in Genesis, uses the strongest language possible by way of narrative...it’s no stretch at all, and in fact has been claimed rather boldly by NT Wright among many other scholars, that John’s gospel functions similarly to Genesis in that way.
We get more validation of this interpretation when we examine Jesus’ words on the cross in John 19:26-27. Jesus looks upon his mother and says “woman.” In attempting to ensure the reader does not read a derogatory tone into Jesus’s word, we miss the clear picture message: the new Adam on the cursed tree is righting the “woman’s” relationship with the man.
Perhaps the most compelling instance of this curse reversal in the gospel of John is found in chapter 20. Pay close attention, because the details are really what make it pop:
14 At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. 15 He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mariam.” She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”). 17 Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
Here we see it so clearly, the “Man” and the “woman” in the “garden,” where the man calls the woman her by her true name, she listens to the voice of the teacher, and obeys the command given Him from God. This new Genesis in the resurrection garden is a clear reversal and fulfilment of the first Genesis.
A final small note on Genesis 1-3 that will help us as we exegete some of the coming passages where man is called the “head” of the woman. Notice Genesis 2:10 where the one river from Eden divides to become “four heads.”11 The word “head” here is used to describe the origin place for the rivers. In this same sense, Adam is the “head” of Eve; he is the origin place of the woman for she was taken out of him just as the water comes from its river-head.
So as we conclude our exegesis of Genesis 1-3 as it regards the sexes, we leave primarily noting that humanity is created as “one” equally made up of two sexes that are intended to live in an intimate relationship with one another, thus complementing the other to the glory of God. However, a lack of relational intimacy results in a sin and curse that corrupts humanity’s right relationship with God and each other. But Jesus puts an end to this curse, as He does all others, through His incarnation, life, death, resurrection, and ascension. Hopefully the reader can see how Genesis 1-3 opens the door to a Biblical understanding of human sexuality that is both complementarian and egalitarian; though the two words may have been stripped of any real meaning in this interpretation.
It is in following with this logic that I’ve called this interpretation the “redeemed humanity view” of the sexes. The first creation began with humanity made equally and in right relationship toward God and imaging Him to creation and one another, but that rightness was ruined by the curse of sin. However, in the new creation that began when Jesus came, He destroys the curse of sin and so redeems the sexes to a new righteousness toward God and one another.
In subsequent sections, we’ll explore other biblical passages that have the sexes in view and see that the redeemed humanity viewpoint holds up to scrutiny by the rest of scripture and, we’ll come to find that this is the only interpretation that makes sense of all of Paul’s statements regarding the sexes in his letters. It is also the only interpretation that leaves us with a blessing for humanity, gives glory to God, and culminates in the gospel of the risen Messiah.
In a Biblical understanding, humanity is created as “one” being. Humanity is made up of two sexes that are the same in essence and designed to live together in an intimate relationship with one another, complementing the other to the glory of God. Though the fall of humankind compromised sexual equality and estranged one another from finding beauty in their complement, God’s intent has always been to make it right; and He ultimately does so in Jesus Christ.
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