Equality and Submission
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Equality and Submission |
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PART II — GENESIS 2: EQUALITY AND SUBMISSION Genesis 2 expands on the creation of mankind covered in Genesis 1:26-31. While Genesis 1 affirms that God created mankind as male and female in His own image, Genesis 2 elaborates on how the two sexes were created and on the relationship between them. God first created man from the dust and breathed into him the breath of life (Gen 2:7). He stationed man in the Garden of Eden to develop it and guard it (Gen 2:15). He instructed man to eat of every tree except of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:16-17). God paraded the animals before Adam for him to name (Gen 2:19, 20). This task entailed more than slapping an arbitrary label on each beast. It required considering the characteristics of each animal so that its name was appropriate to its particular nature. From this exercise Adam discovered that there was no creature that shared his nature (Gen 2:20). God, who even before He brought the animals to Adam had evidently already planned to create a "helper fit for him" (v. 18), now proceeded to create the woman from Adam’s rib (Gen 2:21-22). Adam greeted Eve with rhapsodic relief, acknowledging her as part of his own flesh and calling her "Wo man" because she was taken out of Man (Gen 2:23). In her equality with himself, Adam perceived Eve not as a threat but as a partner capable of fulfilling his inner longing. God blessed the blissful union, saying, "Therefore a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh" (Gen 2:24). The creation account closes with a reminder of the perfection in which Adam and Eve first came together: "And the man and his wife were both naked and they were not ashamed" (Gen 2:25). They felt no shame because they had nothing to hide. They lived together in perfect integrity and harmony. Although the narrative focuses on the sameness of nature and the partnership between man and woman, within that equality and partnership there exists a clear sense of the woman’s submission to man. We use the term "submission" here not with negative connotations of oppression, denigration, or inferiority, but in the positive sense of depending upon another person for direction and protection and to ensure unity and harmony. Four main elements of the narrative suggest a distinction between the headship role of man and the helper role of woman: (1) the priority of man’s creation (Gen 2:7, 22), (2) the manner of the woman’s creation out of man (Gen 2:21-22), (3) the woman’s having been created to be man’s "helper" (Gen 2:18-20), and (4) man’s naming of the woman both before and after the Fall (Gen 2:23; 3:20). Our Women in Ministry author examines each of these elements but contends that none of them support the headship-submission distinctions between the man and the woman. Is this right? Let us analyze the arguments.
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