Plenary address (Part 1) presented at the 2024 Priscilla & Aquila Centre conference.
Speaker: Andrew Leslie.
Understandably, much of our interest in the Bible’s teaching about men and women is centred on what it means in practice. In the morning plenary sessions, Moore College faculty member Andrew Leslie takes a step back from these practical concerns and reflects on the wisdom of this teaching. He explores how the depiction of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden echo the pattern of creation itself set out in Genesis 1. Reflecting on this pattern sheds much light on the nature of God and the complementary vocation he has given us as his image bearers.
1. Introduction
When it comes to reflecting on the Bible’s teaching regarding the complementarity of the sexes, our tendency is often to focus particularly on practical questions regarding what we can and cannot do as Christian women and men, whether as wives and husbands in marriage (so, what does headship look like in practice? Or what does submission look like in practice?), or whether as public citizens (should women seek careers outside the home, or exercise leadership in a public context?), or whether particularly in the context of the church (can women exercise pastoral leadership over men? Or can women preach or lead bible studies in a mixed congregational setting? Or how do we model complementarity in the context of our communal life as God’s people? And so on).
As a result, we often become preoccupied with those few specific biblical injunctions—almost all from the writings of Paul—which provoke these questions. So what does Paul mean when he calls wives to submit to their husbands in everything in Ephesians 5, and what is that to look like in my marriage? What does it mean for a man to lay down his life for his wife? What does it mean to for a woman to teach and exercise authority over a man? What does it mean for a woman to learn in quietness and submission? And how does all this square with and differ from whatever it is that Paul calls “prophecy” in 1 Corinthians which he seemingly permits women to do? And so, the discussion inevitably gets tangled up in the thickets of exegetical and semantic issues over the loaded terms in these injunctions and how those terms approximate to our contemporary practices.
There’s something obviously commendable in this way of approaching the Bible’s teaching. Above all it is driven by a sense that this ancient text continues to be authoritative for us as Christians today and that its injunctions are therefore intimately relevant to our daily life and practices.
But there are also a couple of problems with this way of approaching things.
The most basic, and perhaps less sinister one is the tendency to zero in on a few isolated injunctions that are called forth to do the lion’s share of heavy-lifting on this topic at the expense of the Bible’s teaching as a whole.
A preoccupation with these few texts is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. Everything in Scripture is for our instruction and we instinctively and not unreasonably discern the relevance of certain texts for any given issue over others. But to do so at the expense of situating these particular instructions in their broader biblical context can result in two unfortunate outcomes: first, a discussion which tends to be oriented towards deciding what it is that women can or can’t do over and against what men can do; and secondly, a failure to grasp the true beauty and proper proportions of the divine wisdom that informs these injunctions.
So, for instance, in the public debate about same sex marriage some years ago, I remember being amazed at the number of people in my own church who could say “I know what the Bible teaches about homosexuality”, but I have no idea why that teaching is right other than God says it is.
To say I should believe something to be true simply because God says so is a start I suppose. But I think God gives us so much more to go on in the Bible than a bunch of seemingly arbitrary rules. He reveals to us the wisdom of these teachings, their proportion, their relationship to his character and to everything that he is doing in his world, to our identity as his creatures, to Christ, and the future he has prepared in him. And without a grasp of these realities, our opposition to same sex marriage in a culture which is so defiantly moving in a different direction is likely to buckle beneath itself—as has been the experience for many Christians.
And I think the same is true when it comes to the Bible’s teaching on the complementarity of the sexes. A failure to appreciate the fuller biblical wisdom and proportion of this teaching makes us much more vulnerable to buckling beneath a culture that chides us for what sure sounds a lot like all we are really interested in doing is placing a whole lot of meaningless and oppressive restrictions on women.
But focussing on a few isolated injunctions to men and women, wives and husbands, and so on, is, as I say perhaps the less sinister of the two problems with allowing our own practical questions to govern the way we approach the Bible’s teaching on gender complementarity.
The more sinister risk, I think, is that we overlook the way in which the Bible as a whole first describes and interprets the reality of our lives before we interpret and apply any given bit of it to our daily experience. Before we “do” anything with the Bible’s teaching, it has in a sense already done something and described something that is true about ourselves, quite apart from whatever it is we do or don’t do with its teaching. You see, the Bible is not some quarry of inert ancient instructions that we somehow have to dig up and refine and translate into our own contexts. No, it is the living and active word of God, capable of speaking directly and authoritatively into any and every context.
And therefore, before we bring our own practical questions to the injunctions of Scripture—how does Ephesians 5:24 apply in my marriage? What does 1 Tim. 2:12 mean for preaching in my local church?—the Bible is actually calling us to be attentive to the way in which those injunctions (and any other given instruction for that matter) are situated in its own description and interpretation of our lives.
It’s not that our own practical concerns—whatever we think we should or shouldn’t do with the teaching of Scripture—are irrelevant or unimportant. It’s just that before we do anything with Scripture it first describes to us what is, regardless of whatever it is that we think we should do.
And it calls us first to be attentive to what is before it shows any interest in answering our own questions about what we should or shouldn’t do.
And we can’t actually evade that call, because our lives already attest to the reality the Bible describes.
We are born. We live. We do this that and that other. And we die.
That is simply the outworking of the reality that Bible has already defined.
In the Bible’s terms, we are in Adam, who was born, who lived, who did this that and that and the other, and who died. Because in the Bible’s description of what it means to be a human being, when all is said and done, before there is Bob or Jane, before there is husband or wife, before there is this man or that woman, or indeed any other label we so choose to describe ourselves, there is only Adam. And to the extent that we are born, we live, we do this that or the other, and we die, we are—in the Bible’s description of things as they are—we are living out the reality of being in him.
And so, as the church has heeded the call to attend to that Adamic description of our identity as human beings, it has not, unsurprisingly been drawn especially to the opening pages of the Bible, where in the first three chapters of Genesis, life was given to Adam by God, a life that eventually gave way to death.
But, of course, the story of Adam is not the sum total of the Bible’s description of what it means to be a human being. Because apart from Adam it tells us of another.
Aside from Adam there is Christ. And if the story of Adam is one of life giving way to death, the story it tells of Christ is the exact reverse: it is one of death giving way to life.
That’s not to say that the human story summed up in Christ is simply a reversal of the story summed up in Adam. No, the relationship is more complex than that. It is a reversal, but it’s a reversal that at the same time recapitulates the story of Adam.
Like Adam, Christ was born, he lived, he did this that and the other, and then he died. It’s a recapitulation of Adam. And yet at the same time it’s a radical reversal: for if, as Paul says, by one man came death, by this other man came the resurrection of the dead.
Christ and the humanity he represents—a story of death giving way to life—is most emphatically not Adam and the humanity he represents—a story of life that gives way to death.
And yet, the story of Christ is patterned on the story of Adam.
Indeed, the entry of Christ into the world was a birth, the formation of something from the dust of the earth, yes. And then, like Adam, Christ did this that and the other, and then he died.
But as much as Christ’s birth was the formation of life from the dust of the earth—like Adam’s life—this birth was, in reality, a reversal, the emptying of something from heaven above, as Paul famously puts it in Philippians 2. It was in fact a surrender of life, to a way, a movement, a journey that was peculiarly cross shaped, a life that was from the beginning really a death—a death that would give way to a glorious, indestructible life.
The Bible likens this patterning of the life of Christ on the life of Adam to the falling of a seed from a plant into the ground (Jesus himself in John 12 and Paul in 1 Corinthians 15). While the falling of the seed from a plant is at once life, giving way to death (the pattern of Adam), it is in fact the exact reverse, it is death giving way to new life. Unless a grain of wheat falls down to the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies it bears much fruit.
So the Bible sums up the story of humanity in terms of these two representative figures: Adam and Christ. And there’s a fundamental sense in which these two humanities are radically different, thoroughly equivocal, one an exact reversal of the other, while at the same time, that which is summed up in Christ is nonetheless patterned on that which is summed up in Adam.
This distinct but overlapping dynamic has frequently been captured through the concept of typology.
The key components of typology are really quite straightforward to grasp.
In typology there is a type and an antitype. And it’s crucial to understand the relationship between them.
The type is not the same as the antitype. Rather, the type is a pattern, while the antitype is a reality that follows or reflects the pattern. That is to say, the type is not the reality, it is just the pattern on which the reality, the antitype, is modelled.
And like I say, Christian exegetes and theologians from the early days of the church have reached for the concept of typology to describe the relationship between the humanity summed up in Adam—the type—and the humanity summed up in Christ—the antitype.
You see, ultimately there is only one reality, one antitype. Only one humanity can truly be described as the perfect image of the invisible God, the true firstborn, the true heir over all creation.
And that, the Bible suggests, is not in fact the humanity summed up in Adam, but the humanity which is summed up in Christ. That which is summed up in Christ recapitulates, it follows the pattern of that which is summed up in Adam—and so Christ is described as the “last Adam” or a second Adam—but that which is summed up in Adam is just the pattern, the type, it’s not the reality.
And the Bible tells us why it’s not the reality. It’s not the reality simply because of Adam’s sin, Adam’s failure to be all that his God-given humanity was called to be. And Christ is the reality, the antitype, because he did what Adam should always have done.
What we’re talking about here in dogmatic or theological terms is of course the creation and fall of humanity in Adam, on the one hand, and the redemption of humanity in Christ, on the other.
And if the Bible describes and interprets the truth about our own mortal existence in terms of the story of Adam—Genesis 1-3—it also invites us into the redemption and resurrection of that mortal existence which is summed in the story of Christ—Genesis 4 through to Revelation 21, so that if anyone be in Christ, Paul says, behold, there is a new creation—for the old has gone and behold the new has come.
But grasping the typological relationship between the old and the new, between that which is summed up in Adam—Genesis 1-3—and that which is summed up in Christ—Genesis 4—Revelation 21—is critical for how we read Scripture, and for how we understand ourselves and our own vocation—not least our own vocation as men and women—in light of its teaching.
First of all, it means that the Bible’s description of the old story, the old humanity, that which is summed up in the story of Adam in Genesis 1-3, is not somehow left behind when we get to Genesis 4, as if it’s been and done with and is no more. No, it remains as the pattern on which the story of the new, the antitype, is modelled.
And so, not surprisingly, both Christian and Jewish exegetes have noticed how the story of Adam is not simply recapitulated in the New Testament’s portrayal of the antitype, of Christ himself and the new heavens and new earth, but is recapitulated again and again and again in the foreshadowing of that antitype in the story of Israel which begins, in a sense, in Genesis 4.
But likewise, it also explains why my new human identity in Christ is at once utterly new—the old has gone, behold, the new has come—but at the same time mapped onto the pattern of the old Adamic reality of bodily life and death, albeit transposing those old realities into an entirely new and better key.
And therefore, the injunctions the Bible gives us for our vocation as those who are in Christ need to be understood through this dynamic of pattern or type and its antitypical fulfilment.
So, for instance—and as we will see in the next session—if the Christian husband is called to be the head of the wife, and the wife called to submit to her husband, there is a sense in which this Christian vocation is mapped onto the contours of the old pattern God established in the beginning, yes, but it is only to be properly understood and lived out in the shape and form of the antitype, of Christ and his bride, in the loving and sacrificial economy of the new and true humanity, rather than in the old Adamic economy of failure, of neglect and abuse.
So the point of this lengthy but I think important preamble is to say that before we seek to have our practical and functional questions answered through zeroing in on a few isolated texts, we will better grasp the wisdom and proportion of those texts if we first attend to how they are situated in the Bible’s description and interpretation of our reality as human beings—both as created and fallen in Adam, and as redeemed in Christ. That I think will then put us in a better position to discern how they speak into our lives and how they should inform practices today.
It’s this sort of reflection that will prevent us from inferring too much or too little from these texts as well as providing us with a more robust confidence in the rightness, the truthfulness, the solidity, the beauty of the biblical teaching about manhood and womanhood, than the brittle foundation of a few seemingly arbitrary commands.
2. The Adamic Pattern (Genesis 1 & 2)
a. Genesis 1
I want to spend the rest of this first talk reflecting on the Adamic pattern, that which was established by God in the beginning before the fall, for which our key text is of course Genesis 1-3, and specifically chapters 1 and 2.
As we look again at these chapters to trace out the contours of this pattern we are instinctively drawn to those very explicit statements which are so familiar to us. So, 1:26-28: “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likenesss…”; or the explicit details in chapter 2: Adam’s formation from the dust of the ground (v. 7), the instructions to work the Garden and take care of it (v. 15), the absence of a suitable helper, and then the formation of Eve from Adam’s side which leads to the explicit institution of marriage where a man is said to leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife so as to become one flesh; and finally, of course, the unravelling of all this in the temptation of Eve, the fall of Adam, and the curses of chapter 3.
And obviously these details are highly significant.
But as many commentators have observed, there are many artful literary details in these chapters that colour these specific statements about humanity, and in particular, illustrate just how much the pattern of humanity and the differentiation of the two sexes is enmeshed within the entire created order itself.
And I just want to draw some of these things to our attention.
So let’s begin with Genesis 1.
It’s hardly a remarkable to observe that the shape of this chapter is regulated by a cascading succession of six staccato-like statements that chart the gradual moulding of the newly created heavens and earth from its primordial “formless and empty” state to its climax on the sixth day with the creation of the man and woman in the image of God.
But if we zero in a little more closely, there are further patterns to observe beyond the simple repetition of the “Let there be…and there was” that marks out each day.
First, we should notice how the six days divide into two halves that describe two distinct but complementary sets of creative activities. Only day three and six have a double act as it were, and only day three and day six have this distinctive jussive command, let the earth produce—vegetation on day 3 and animals on day 6.
And these two panels of divine activity—days 1-3 and days 4-6—correspond to and answer the twin descriptions of the earth’s primordial state.
For if the newly created earth is said to be first “formless,” submerged as it were beneath the dark and ominous shadows of the watery deep, the first three days depict a kind of hallowing—it’s cultic, ceremonial vocabulary you see—a hallowing, the sanctification of a habitable—but empty, as yet uninhabited—space, a formed space that rises out of the uninhabitable formlessness, as it were, formed but not yet filled.
So first, there is the emergence of light from darkness, a separation, a distinguishing, a hallowing of light from the primordial darkness, day where there was first only night (vv. 3-5). Then (vv. 6-8) there is further vertical separation of the waters, the hallowing of a vault, a space as it were (day 2), followed (vv. 9-10) by a horizontal gathering of the waters below, so that dry land might appear, as if, as the Psalmist puts in his own commentary on this third day of creation, the waters first stood above the mountains and submerged them, and then at the thunderous sound of God’s voice, fled to one side so that the mountains could rise up and the valleys sink down (Ps 104:6-8). And then, and only then, with the separation of dry land from the seas, does God see that it is good.
But there’s one last thing to happen on day 3 to make the earth habitable and that is the production of vegetation—plants bearing seed and trees bearing fruit (11-12)—which as we see on day 6 are created to be eaten by the living creatures that will roam along the ground.
In other words, the first three days in a sense echo the initial divine command—the formation of something out of nothing, the heavens and the earth—only this time it is not so much the formation of something out of nothing as the formation, the separation, the hallowing of something good out of that which was as yet formless and void.
But that which is now formed is not yet filled. That which is now habitable is yet to be inhabited. And so the next three days portray a succession of acts, each declared to be good on their own terms, but one cascading upon another with every increasing fullness: first, the delegation of authority to the lights in the sky, the sun to rule the day and the moon the night, to mark out sacred times, days, and years (14-19); then the creatures, the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky according to their kind (20-23); then the land animals and livestock, the creeping things (24-25); climaxing with the piece de resistance, the creation of man and woman, together in the image and likeness of God.
And then and only then, on day seven, do these discrete but complementary activities, forming from that which was formless—days one to three, and filling from that which was void—days four to six, come together and “kiss each other”—as one writer has put it—in the sabbath rest of God (2:2-3).
b. Genesis 2
But then we have the rest of chapter 2, and what I think chapter 2 shows us, is that the sabbath rest of God for all its hallowed glory and lofty significance, is as much the beginning point of creation as it is its culmination. For if the days described in chapter 1 have a beginning and an end, the seventh day, the sabbath of chapter 2, it transpires, is open-ended.
So perhaps we might say that chapter 2 spells out precisely what God’s sabbath rest now means for creation in terms of its own purpose and end. And it is one in which the activity of the man and the woman is exalted by God to take centre stage.
See, chapter 2, is not just another creation account, another perspective added for the sake of stylistic variety or colour.
Rather it in fact echoes and recapitulates the pattern of Genesis 1, in a way that focusses in upon a special place within the wider creation, a Garden, and especially, the identity and vocation of the man and woman.
Let’s take a look at these parallels.
So if the first moment of creation, the first ex nihilo divine act, the creation of something out of nothing—day zero, if you like—is described in chapter 1:1-2, this aligns with chapter 2:4-6, only in the second case, it is not the formless void which sets the backdrop for what is to follow but the earth that is, as it were, pregnant with potential, but as yet devoid of someone to work the ground.
Then, chapter 2:7, the formation of Adam from the dust parallels day 1, the formation of light from darkness.
Then verse 8, instead of the division of the waters to make space for the earth on day 2, now it is the setting-apart of a particular place within the earth where he takes the man and places him.
And like on day 3, the next thing that happens in chapter 2 is gathering of the waters into rivers that gives a concrete geographical shape to the Garden with its various lands, as well as the emergence of vegetation including the two trees which are identified as the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (9-14).
In that way the Garden described in chapter 2 is habitable, as it were, fit and ready to be cultivated, but not as yet cultivated, formed but still in a sense void.
And so, Adam is next placed in the Garden with a specific purpose, to serve and guard it, with the laws concerning the trees (vv. 15-17), echoing the appointment of the sun and the moon to govern the day and the night on day four.
Then, paralleling the fifth and sixth days with its creation of the animals that fill the sea, the land and the sky, in chapter 2, the LORD is said to have formed from the ground the wild animals and birds in the sky, and then after bringing them to the man who named them (vv. 29-20), vv. 21-22, he finally forms Eve from Adam’s side to be the suitable helper that none of the animals could be in his vocation to serve and guard the Garden.
So, in chapter 2, there is a kind of recapitulation of the pattern of divine activity in chapter 1. And so as it turns out, the sabbath rest of God does not entail a cessation of creative activity so much as delegation of the creative mandate to the man and woman. Indeed, there is a sense in which, as I say, the sabbath is as much the beginning of creation as it is its end. The subtle distinction between the Garden paradise and the wider earth suggests that the man and the woman are to take up where God has left off, to extend the boundaries of the Garden God has planted by tilling its ground, by cultivating and harnessing the resources God has placed into the ground—its gold, its aromatic resin, its onyx—being fruitful, increasing in number, and thereby filling and subduing the whole earth. It’s as if the initial creation week sets the pattern for what is to come, so that the creative activity of the man and the woman and their offspring will be like a set of variations on the theme God first composed.
c. The vocation of Adam and Eve
Now this recapitulation of the theme in the details of chapter 2 sheds considerable light on the unique vocation of the man and the woman in the creative variations—as it were—that they are called upon to compose. And I’ll come to that in a moment.
But it’s worth first saying something about the vocation of humanity in general as it’s pictured here.
It’s often spelled out in kingly terms, or in terms of stewardship, as they are called upon to fill and subdue in the earth (1:28), to rule over, to have dominion over all the other living creatures. Undoubtedly that is part of it.
But as many have observed, chapter 2 places the accent upon a kind of priestly vocation.
Indeed, in the first six days of chapter 1, you already get a sense that emergence of the earth and the marking out of dry land from the inhabitable watery depths is a kind of cultic act, a hallowing, a sanctification of something ordered, a habitable mountain from which the raging waters, now subdued, flow in the form of life-giving streams. Or on day 4, there is the reference to the sacred times, the festivals, that are regulated by the sun and the moon.
But these cultic allusions here become more visible from the way they are recapitulated in the redemptive story that begins to take shape in the life of Israel and the tabernacle, and is consummated ultimately in the prophetic vision of the new heavens and the new earth.
So, for instance, commentators have noticed the way the descriptions concerning the tabernacle in Exodus echo the seven-fold pattern of Genesis 1.
So when God gives Moses the instructions concerning the tabernacle, he does so in seven speeches, with the final speech focussing on the Sabbath, explicitly tying it back to the creation week. (I’ve given you the references on the outline to follow up if you want to)
When the work is completed, Moses surveys and inspects it and the satisfaction with that work is redolent of God’s sabbath satisfaction with his creation (Gen 1:31-2:3/Exod 39:43; 39:32; 40:33; 39:43; 40:9)
Then the consecration of the tabernacle is a seven day process, from the time it is set up (Exod 40) on the first day of the month to the acceptance of Aaron’s first offering on the eighth day (Lev 9).
Even the very design of the tabernacle has parallels to the days of Genesis 1.
Similar seven-fold patterns are repeated again in the narrative detailing the construction and dedication of Solomon’s temple in 1 Kings.
But if the whole earth can be described as a kind of cosmic tabernacle, the Garden is, if you like, the holy of holies.
So, for instance, the language that’s used for God walking in the Garden (Gen 3:8) is the same that’s used elsewhere to describe God’s holy presence in the sanctuary. Likewise, the placement of the cherubim evokes the gold cherubim that guarded the temple’s inner sanctuary. Or there is the river flowing from Eden which evokes the river flowing from the tabernacle in Ezekiel’s vision, and ultimately of course, the water of life flowing from the throne in the heavenly Jerusalem in Revelation 22, a city whose dimensions echo the shape of the holy of holies.
If the earth, then, rises up out of the waters like a mountain—like Mount Zion—perched at the very top of that mountain is the Garden tabernacle, the focal point of all that God has made, the point at which heaven as it were enters into communion with the earth, the point at which the earth enters into the sabbath rest of God.
And right at the heart of that Garden sanctuary is the man and the woman.
It shouldn’t surprise us then that the language that’s used to describe Adam’s vocation in the Garden—to serve and to guard the Garden—is language that’s typically used of Levites priestly ministry within the sanctuary.
In other words, these kinds of cultic allusions impel us to notice not only a royal but also a priestly dimension to the vocation of humanity in the garden.
Indeed, perhaps we need to go a step further. When these twin royal and priestly vocations are nested within the special dignity that is bestowed upon them as God’s image bearers, maybe we should say, as theologians have done so since the early church, that it’s not the Garden ultimately that is the holy of holies but the man and woman themselves …
the man and woman who are, it is said, a “microcosm” of the cosmic temple, who in themselves sum up the most concentrated manifestation of God’s glory and holy presence in all creation (Zanchi quotation).
d. The complementarity of the pair
If this in general terms sums up the identity and vocation of the man and the woman in the Garden, we are in a position now to trace out the complementarity of the sexes that is portrayed in the narrative.
There are the basic details that are familiar to us. It is Adam who is formed first from the dust, then taken by God and placed in the Garden. It is to Adam that the instruction is directly given regarding the trees. It is to Adam that the animals are brought by God for him to name. And then, when no suitable helper is found, it is Adam who is then placed by God into a deep sleep, and Eve is said to be fashioned or built from the rib that is taken from his side. And then, finally, it is Adam who recognises her and first calls her “woman,” (2:23) and then later gives her the personal name, “Eve” (3:20).
Among these familiar details, rightly we zero in on the woman’s vocation to be a “helper” to the man. And as many have pointed out, the context suggests this is not so much about solving a psychological problem as if the man was lonely and needed a soulmate as it is about completing what is necessary for his royal and priestly vocation as God’s image bearer.
The vocation of filling and subduing the earth, of tending and guarding the Garden, is an inherently dynamic and not least generative reality, and without the woman this would be impossible.
That’s not to reduce things to sheer biology, as if the sum total of the man’s vocation is to be a sperm donor and the woman to make babies. Obviously these embodied biological realities are significant and irreducible features of the sexual differentiation. But I think these biological differences are part of a much deeper and more expansive figural reality that evokes and echoes the shape of God’s creative activity that we noticed earlier.
This is where the parallels I mentioned between the days of creation in Genesis 1 and the recapitulation of that pattern in Genesis 2 come into their own.
Recall that the days of creation fall into two panels—days 1-3, forming that which is as yet formless; days 4-6, filling that which is formed but as yet void, habitable but as yet uninhabited.
Recall too the parallel between the creation of light on day 1 and the formation of Adam from the dust in chapter 2, and then the parallel between the placement of the heavenly lights to govern the day and the night on day 4 and the placement of Adam in the Garden to serve and guard it.
In other words, if the formation of Adam echoes the first panel of divine creative activity—forming that which is as yet formless—the placement of Adam in the garden echoes the second, the filling of that which is now habitable but as yet uninhabited.
But if the consummation of this filling activity awaits the sixth day with the creation of the man and the woman, the parallel in chapter two actually alights upon the formation of Eve from Adam’s side.
In other words, it is the formation of Eve, not the formation of Adam, then, that consummates what we might justly call the feminine dimension to God’s creative activity—the filling, the fructification, the habitation of the earth. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the Scriptures sometimes liken the earth to the womb, or the womb to the earth, so David speaks of himself being knit together in the depths of the earth (Psalm 139:15)—the earth that like the womb generates new life; so that conversely, when the earth consumes life and a body goes down into the grave, it is likened to a barren womb (Prov 30:16).
Here it is worth making two asides.
The first thing is to say that of course it is entirely proper to speak of God in terms of his paternity, his fatherhood, for a whole host of reasons not least of which that is the way he is addressed in Scripture.
But when the glory of that paternity is revealed in the economy of God’s creative activity, in creation as a whole, and especially in its concentrated microcosmic expression in the two image bearers, it turns that it is not a paternity that in any way excludes maternity. In fact, it is a paternity that is only consummated in its maternal complement.
And that is why, properly understood, the retention of masculine pronouns in relation to God cannot and must not ever equate to a baptism of patriarchy.
It’s also worth making another aside about the way in which Adam and Eve together do not simply point back to the paternity of God in general, but also to the processions of the three persons.
The complementarity of Adam and Eve in connection with the Trinity has become such a fraught topic in recent times that it might be tempting to abandon any connection at all. But I don’t think we should or even can.
My suggestion is, however, that we don’t map Adam and Eve onto the procession of the Father and the Son, as if Adam represents the Father and Eve represents the Son. I think we can imply as much when we see an echo of the Son’s submission to the Father in the submission of Eve to her husband. But the thing is, in the Scriptures, as far as I can tell, Adam is never described most basically as “father” (although, obviously, he was a father). But he is never described as the father of humanity in the way, say, Eve is described as the mother of all the living. Only God is said to be the Father of humanity. But Adam is called the “son of God”, notably in the genealogy of Luke 3.
So, my suggestion is that it is actually most primarily in Adam’s son-like submission to his heavenly Father that we see an echo of the eternal Son’s relation to the Father. But then since Adam’s sonship cannot be defined without reference to his bride, and ultimately, to her maternity, perhaps we see in her offspring, in the filling and perfecting of God’s creation through her offspring, an echo of the Spirit’s procession from the Father, through the Son. The procession of the Spirit is often associated with the perfecting of creation, and that is something that is perhaps per-eminently echoed in the generation of offspring from Adam, the son, and his bride.
These digressions aside. The key point is notice how the two sexes—the man and the woman—are figural of two distinct but complementary and mutually interdependent divine creative activities—forming, taming, dividing, naming, and ruling (days 1-3); and filling, generating, fructifying, communing, consummating (days 4-6)—one set of activities that give way to the other; one that begins, the other that completes and glorifies.
In other words, the complementarity that is expressed in the macrocosm of divine creative activity is recapitulated in the microcosm of his male and female image bearers.
Yes, it’s a complementarity that reaches all the way down to our biology and physical anatomy, but it’s a dynamic that is exemplified and perpetuated in the context of marriage, in the bringing forth and raising of children who will in turn replicate the pattern as the grown man leaves his father and mother to form a new creation, a new family that is filled and consummated only as he cleaves to another woman.
In other words, the complementarity here is not simply a biological or even erotic or romantic reality. If those things are implied it is only because they serve what is chiefly a social and indeed political or public reality, where the man and woman together are delegated with God-like creative capacity and tasked with a royal and priestly vocation to steward the earth and draw it into the sabbath rest of God.
If this gendered complementarity is summed up in the creative acts of forming and filling, the narrative is sparse when it comes to specifying particular roles and functions to express these root differences.
Certainly, some things are implied. There is a kind of male headship implied inasmuch as the woman is taken out of the man’s side. And perhaps this is given expression in the way the man names his wife, in the way, we can assume, the man would have had the responsibility of passing on to the woman the instructions given directly to him about the trees—of teaching and instructing her in the wisdom of God’s commandments, and then of protecting her from the cunning prevarications of the serpent, and then being uniquely held to account in the way the woman isn’t, should he fail in this regard.
If there is an expression of authority or precedence here in this headship, it actually takes the shape of service, of a love that leads only as it is devoted to the flourishing and glorification of the other, a dynamic perhaps that explains why Paul speaks of the wife as the “glory” of the husband. If he is the glorifier, the one who gives away glory, she is the glorified, its radiant recipient. That’s not to say the man is active in the relationship and the woman is passive—not at all. Paul doesn’t say the wife’s glory is the husband. No, it is the wife herself—all that sheis and all that she does—who is the glory of the husband. The picture, then, is much more of him laying down what she will then take up, of her completing and bringing to fulfilment what he only begins or initiates. It’s much more a picture of him being a servant and promoter of his wife’s flourishing than anything else.
On the other hand, the woman is clearly called to flourish not least through being the bearer and mother of children who will populate the earth, which is why she is later called Eve, and designated “the mother of all the living”.
Outside of this, there is little explicit detail in the narrative about specific roles or responsibilities that each is to play in the life of the Garden. The only thing explicitly mentioned is Adam’s naming of the animals which occurs before the creation of the woman, which may be echoed in his own naming of the woman, and the naming activity of God that occurs in the first three days. But that’s about it. Even the divine blessing and instructions about their responsibilities in the Garden is said to be addressed directly to them both in chapter 1 (28-9).
Rather the focus of the complementarity is overwhelmingly on the marriage itself. It’s as the marriage is cultivated that Garden life is served. In other words, there’s a sense in which tending to and guarding the woman is the way in which the man’s royal and priestly vocation in the Garden will be fulfilled, and bearing and mothering children is the way in which her royal and priestly vocation will be fulfilled.
Now, as I say since these specific tasks—being a husband and father, being a wife and mother—are figural of a much more expansive set of complementary divine activities, it’s fair to infer that the complementarity would spill over into their collaborative activity in the Garden, with their distinctive anatomy perhaps suiting a complementary array of tasks.
But I think the lack of specific detail suggests that the picture of masculinity and femininity in the Garden shouldn’t be thought of as tropes to be filled up with quite specific stereotypically masculine and feminine roles and tasks, but instead as a basic pattern that the man and the woman were given freedom and latitude by God to express in the concrete mutuality of their married life.
But in closing this first instalment of these reflections, the critical thing I want us to see is the way which the picture of gender in the beginning is not an arbitrary divine imposition that comes with its own set of arbitrary rules and instructions. Rather, the man and the woman together—and only together—irreducibly different and yet one inconceivable without the other, created a microcosm of God’s own very being and character and glory, summing up the wisdom and creative word of God, echoing that which is expressed at large in the macrocosm of his own creative activity.
But, of course, as you know, that is only the first part of what is a two-act drama.
