Neither Complementarian nor Egalitarian: A Kingdom Corrective to the Evangelical Gender Debate

by Michelle Lee-Barnewall

Adam distances himself from Eve by blaming her, the person with whom he was supposed to be united, whereas Eve blames a third party, the serpent. Although earlier he considered Eve a suitable companion because she is like him, he now describes her as “the woman whom you gave to be with me” (Gen. 3:12). Instead of using kinship language to describe her relationship to him, he now speaks of her impersonally as “the woman” and as one who was given to him by a third party. His words no longer reflect an intimacy with Eve. As Alan Jon Hauser remarks, “She has become an object, not a companion.”63 Adam’s objectification of Eve is even more striking because only Adam receives any explicit instruction about their unity. The man is the one who is to leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife so that they may become one flesh, a union that involves numerous aspects beyond the sexual to include spiritual, emotional, and kinship relations.64 Adam is supposed to achieve the reunification of the two, but he fails profoundly. This is a critical, but mostly overlooked, aspect of Adam’s failure.