Postlude 2: Adam, then Eve

Tony: If you are taking this in the husband headship direction, I will just agree to disagree. Although I think some rigid, husband-has-to-be-the-head-even-if-he's-an-imbecile-on-every-level notion sells God and the gospel short.

I suppose someone could argue that Paul's first defense--"Adam first then Eve" is about headship. Then you could argue that the second argument "Eve deceived" is about teaching.

But ultimately, I believe this whole argument doesn't take into account the flexibility of how NT authors used biblical texts. They did not assign a single meaning or application to an OT text and their interpretations almost always read the texts out of context! So Paul reads the Genesis story very differently than an ancient Israelite would have.

And while he gives us one authoritative interpretation of it for one context, everything we know about how NT authors used texts leads us to believe that the same text could be used validly in other ways as well. For example, it would not contradict anything the NT authors do if one of them had argued that Eve was more important than Adam because God made her last, just as God made the animals in the lead up to man in Genesis 1. I want to emphasize this point: it would not be unlike the way NT authors argued to claim that Eve is the supreme creation because after God made the animals and made man, he ended with the crown of His creation: woman.

As it is none of the NT authors actually make such an interpretation, but believe me, some NT authors, including Paul, make arguments from the OT that are far less in context than my hypothetical here (e.g., many connections Matthew draws).

I would say you are institutionalizing an interpretation (yours) of an interpretation (Paul's) of a story (Genesis) that ultimately was not about women in ministry. Genesis 2-3 was originally an etiological story to express why certain things are as they are in the world. Why do men have to work so hard tilling the land? Why are wives subject to their husbands and experience such painful childbirth? Why don't snakes have legs and why don't humans get along with snakes. We'd better have our spiritual glasses on when we are applying it to such a different context such as ours today.

Notice, for example, that in the original story, the woman's desire is to her husband as a consequence of her sin. It doesn't seem to me that the subordination of Eve to Adam was originally the point of the creation order in that story. Rather, this subordination was explained by Eve's sin (Gen. 3:16).

By the way, to show us that we're probably getting too detailed here, notice that if we take Genesis 1 and 2 completely literally and completely historically, they seem to contradict each other somewhat. In other words, both seem to be at least somewhat symbolic.

In the second story, Adam is made before there are any plants or trees on the earth (2:5, 9)--some versions alternate between the words ground and earth but it's the same Hebrew word. In the first story, all these things are made before humanity. Of course there are always ways to force texts together if you're more interested in a particular theology of the Bible more than the Bible itself.

I would suggest that we are immature in our understanding of the Bible if we take these accounts as video feed, live from the garden.