Eve's Fallen, and She Can't Get Up

Some recent blog-reading among my conservative brethren has stirred up an old issue for me.

One of the more challenging things about being the progressive Anglo pastor of a congregation that is now almost entirely Korean is coming to terms with some of the cultural expectations of gender. Even among second generation Korean-Americans, there can be a deep personal and spiritual segregation between the sexes. Roles and expectations that were programmed heavily into Korean culture die hard, and drawing out the full gifts and leadership skills of the young women of my church hasn't always been easy.

This is, in large part, because the traditional cultural assumptions about women in Korean society have been given a potent theological edge by Christianity. I grew up in congregations where women were both pastors and elders, and the realization that most Christian churches in both the U.S. and the developing world have a problem with this always struck me as bizarre. But the attitude is there, and it's real. It says:

Women should be submissive to men. They should be subordinate to men. Why? Because that's the way Jesus wants it. Bible says it, I believe it, so shut up and go get me a beer. Oh, and when I was coming down for my ESPN, I noticed that little Tyler's been puking in the upstairs bathroom. You might want to deal with that. After the beer, woman.

That is, of course, not how evangelicals generally conceptualize the relationship between men and women. It's also not how their healthy traditional marriages work, and unlike many of my progressive counterparts, I'm fully aware that they can work. There are relationships in which the male plays the traditional breadwinner role and still manages to be respectful and gracious towards his wife. Problem is, the ethic of a mandated power imbalance between one half of the human race and the other just does not jibe with the foundational ethic of Christian faith. Love involves being a gracious servant to all, even to one's enemies, and requiring fifty percent of the species to be subordinate just doesn't reflect the presence of the Spirit. It is also an ethic that's repeatedly abused by those men whose desire isn't Christ, but worldly power.

So why has this way of looking at gender relations stuck around? People who feel this is a Biblical mandate root the submission of women to men in the later texts of the Epistles, in texts like Ephesians or 2 Peter. More deeply, though, they use the same core justification for their assumptions about women that can be found in the writings of Paul's disciples or the pseudo-apocalyptic Peter. That assumption goes way back, back to the very beginning.

Why are women to submit? Because they are weak. Why are they weak? Because of Eve, and because after the Fall, her punishment for shattering the relationship with God was as follows:

To the woman he said,

"I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;

with pain you will give birth to children.

Your desire will be for your husband,

and he will rule over you." (Genesis 3:16)

There you go. God is mad at all of us for the transgression of Adam and Eve, and so men have to dig endlessly in the dirt scrounging for a living, snakes get stomped on, and women have to accept that "he will rule over you." While progressive Christians have major issue with the whole idea of our fallen nature, and cringe at passages like this one, I think it's more constructive for us to just accept the foundational argument of conservatives. That argument, in a nutshell, is that the submission of women to men is a part of our fallen nature. To which I say, sure. Yes. I believe that. I'm willing to cede that point, because in ceding it, it is logical to then ask:

Does Jesus not save women?

According to the great story of the Gospel, the purpose of Christ's life, death and resurrection was to reconcile human beings to both God and one another. For those who are moved by Christ's teachings and transformed by the Holy Spirit, the curse of the Fall is lifted. We are, in declaring Christ's Lordship over our lives, part of that great struggle to lift the yoke of all fallen "dominion, authority, and power."

And yet in the great majority of the Christian world, we Jesus people allow ourselves to be instruments of that curse over fully half of humanity. The reasons for this are primarily because of the incursion of cultural values about the role of women into the faith. That incursion is most intensely expressed in societies where women have been traditionally subordinate, but it begins, to be frank, in the Epistles. The influence of Greco-Roman culture grows strong as the early church moved further and further away from Christ. That's why the Gospels and the seven undisputed letters of Paul take a radically egalitarian stance towards women, and the later Epistles start to reflect both Roman and first century Jewish views on the roles of women.

That variance in the teaching of Scripture leaves folks who take the Bible seriously with two options. The first is to continue to embrace the cultural power imbalance between men and women. We take those texts that affirm us in that belief, and make them the lynchpin around which we approach gender. To do that, though, we must also believe that Jesus metes out uneven salvation, and that when Paul says Christ tears down the boundaries between cultures and genders, Paul was just blowing smoke. It also means we reject the servant ethic that...at least the last time I checked...ain't just for Christian ladies.

The second is to realize that there is a powerful case in Scripture for moving away from the subordination of women. We mainliners grasped this a while ago, and throughout our churches, women's voices are now heard and their leadership is recognized. It ain't perfect, but we're getting there. Unfortunately, while we've done some important stuff spiritually, we're not very evangelical about it. We too often talk about gender equality in terms of "fairness," or using the language of academic feminism.

In reality, what we are doing goes way, way deeper than that. It's a part of that great battle against human brokenness. It's about redemption, and the transformation of humanity by the presence of Christ.

I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up

Defining sin, of course, is a favorite Christian pastime, coming in a close third after macrame and Salem-style barbeque. We're all sure we know what it is, and we're all double extra sure plus to let all the sinners around us know that we know.

As the caricature would have it, Christians fall into two distinct camps on the subject. On the one hand, you have progressive, social justice, organic Guatemalan llama's milk Christians. For them, sin is primarily a corporate thing, something systemic and thus a bit on the amorphous side.

On the other, you have the fundamentalist, bible-believing, it's either Jesus or H-E-double-toothpicks Christians. For them, sin is primarily a personal thing, something to do with your own walk with God and whether or not you've had your altar-call card punched enough times.

That's the caricature, anyway.

But the Christian view of sin isn't just about our collective injustices or our individual moral failings. Sin isn't a particular behavior or pattern of behaviors, but something somehow integral to the human condition. Scripturally, sin begins before the word sin is ever used.

It starts, of course, at the beginning, so to the beginning we must go.

So we traipse back to the beginning, to our two stories of creation. Genesis 1:1 to Genesis 2:3—the ancient priestly story of creation, told as part of the temple liturgies—is all about the goodness and power of God. God makes and affirms all of creation as good, and while one Hebrew text includes a caveat in Genesis 1:31 that specifically excludes Howard Stern, scholars are divided on the authenticity of that codex.

It’s in Genesis 2:4, with the beginning of the second story of creation, that we see scripture’s explanation of why God’s good works seem so freakin’ messed up. It’s the story of the Garden and the Fall, even more ancient than the priestly tale, a story that would have been told and retold around the campfires of the nomadic Abiru peoples. Here, God isn’t towering and glorious, spoken of in rhythmic liturgical cant. He is close, intimate, One who walks through the garden at the cool of the day. He creates the ‘adam, meaning “creature of earth,” not through a divine command, but with hands crusted with the loam of the earth and the warm life of his breath. He sets him in the garden to care for it in all of its goodness, warning him only to stay away from the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.

When the ‘adam needs a helpmate, God creates the ‘adamah, (the feminine form of adam) and things are briefly hunky dory. Then comes the passage that bugs the bejabbers out of every committed herpetologist.

The serpent—not Satan, that’s a later theological construction--arrives, and settles down to chat with the adamah. Interestingly, the snake doesn’t actually ever say anything that isn’t technically true, nor does it tell the adamah directly that she should eat from the tree of good and evil. It poses one question: What may you eat? Then it truthfully tells the adamah that the fruit won’t kill her (not right away, anyway), but will give her the knowledge of good and evil, just like God. So she chows down, and the adam, who’s been standing around the whole time listening in, eats too. Boom. There we have the root of sin.

But what is that sin? Is sin a flaw in how we are made, in the bodies that God knitted together from dust and breath? Or is sin something wrong with our minds, more a matter of our will?