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

by Michelle Lee-Barnewall

We would do well to ask whether our conceptions of leadership and authority recognize the equivalent of this paradoxical kind of social lowering and abasement and, consequently, the vital component leading to a Christ-focused and other-oriented perspective in the church that produces unity. Furthermore, we must ask whether our structures give the glory to God, who gives the growth, or the people occupying the positions.

Conspicuously absent in Genesis 1–2 is any reference to the divine prescription for man to exercise authority over woman. . . . The total absence of such a commission indicates that it was not part of God’s intent. . . . Any teaching that inserts an authority structure between Adam and Eve in God’s creation design is to be firmly rejected since it is not founded on the biblical text.2

Thus there is a striking and important pattern here: God gives the command directly to Adam, asks only Adam whether he broke the command, and specifically relates Adam’s punishment to the command.

Adam is the only one who does not state the command at all, whether accurately or inaccurately, yet his relationship to the command provides a main point for the narrative. God gives him the command, confronts him about the command, and judges him for breaking the command. While much of the dialogue revolves around the command, indicating its importance in the overall narrative, for Adam the spotlight is on his choice to obey God or not.

We noted earlier that obedience was critical for understanding the importance of holiness, including corporate holiness as God’s people were instructed to live in proper relationship with one another. Obedience in general is a central theme throughout the Old Testament, where God’s relationship to his people is intimately connected with obedience to his commands.44

The major motifs related to Eve are: (1) She is “like” Adam and so is the only one who is a suitable companion for him. Because she is “like” Adam in that she is another human being, his female counterpart made in God’s image, she is in a sense his equal. However, more fitting terms to describe her relationship with Adam would be “sameness” and “unity” rather than “equality.” The goal of their relationship, to become “one flesh,” also reflects the importance of her likeness to Adam.

(2) She is created for a specific purpose as Adam’s “helper.” Understanding the significance of her role as “helper” lies not as much in a determination of relative authority or equality as in a careful examination of the way that the narrative portrays the type of help she is to give and what actually happens.

the sameness of the man and the woman and their intimate unity do not automatically mean that they are “equal.” In addition to Adam’s representative function, their sequential creation needs to be considered.

However, Adam is created first, and further, Eve is created from Adam. At the very least, the two-stage creation raises the question of whether the biblical account was intended to portray their equality.

Adam, and not the other way around.56 As we have seen, it is Adam who is originally given the command, an event that happens before Eve is created. This is not accidental but rather is an integral part of the narrative, since he is ultimately held accountable for his obedience to it in a way that Eve is not.

part of her “help” to Adam may include helping him to keep the command as well as cultivating the earth.

Although Eve was to help Adam obey God, she not only failed in helping Adam keep the command but ironically was also a principal player in his disobedience.

when God confronts her and she says, “The serpent deceived me” (Gen. 3:13). The identification of this literary focus on Eve also finds a correspondence in Paul’s understanding of Eve. Both times that Paul speaks of her are in reference to her deception (2 Cor. 11:3; 1 Tim. 2:13).

Deception is an important theme throughout Scripture.

our passage does not imply that Eve is naturally more prone to deception but rather makes clear that deception is the work of Satan. Genesis 3 highlights the serpent’s role since it describes the serpent as “more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made” (Gen. 3:1 NIV).

Eve’s deception begins a chain of events that ultimately leads to the consequences for which Adam is responsible: death and the cursing of the ground. That she is the critical link in this tragic turn of events is particularly ironic because she was created to be his helper.

If Adam is the prototype of those who will disobey God, Eve is the first in a line of those who turn from God and the truth because they are deceived, with disastrous results.

However, there are other ways that we learn about their relationship, and in this Adam plays a critical role. He is the only one who speaks directly of the other, and the content of his words is revealing since in both occurrences it reflects their unity or disunity.

When Eve is created, he declares that she is “like” him in being “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23), but there is no corresponding response from Eve.

After this comment about their “sameness,” his next comment reflects their separation. Adam distances himself from Eve by blaming her, the person with whom he was supposed to be unit...

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 imperson...

His words no longer reflect an intim...

As Alan Jon Hauser remarks, “She has become an object, n...

Adam is the one who is instructed to achieve marital unity, but he actually does the opposite.

If God commissioned Adam to promote the unity of the marriage, then it is difficult to imagine that “authority” would be a main characteristic of his responsibility since power relationships tend to separate rather than create intimacy.

while Adam and Eve’s relationship revolves around unity and love, it is also characterized by more than equality.

At the same time, it lacks any explicit commands for Adam to exercise authority over Eve but does emphasize the obedience of both Adam and Eve to God.

is difficult to see how authority would be a primary characteristic of Adam’s role if one of his main duties is to create unity between the two.

In conclusion, if either “equality” or “authority” is present in this passage in some way, it must be understood in the context of these larger and more dominant concerns of unity, holiness, and obedience.

Adam is to keep God’s command and create unity with Eve. Eve is charged with helping Adam, and both are called to obey God.

First, the presence of a “reversal” will show that the significance of kephalē lies both in what it means or implies in its cultural context and also how Paul transforms its significance in comparison with what was accepted in that time, as might be expected from a gospel that opposes the values of the world.

We will see that while kephalē can have connotations of “authority,” the main significance of its use is the way in which Paul reverses the cultural expectations of the “head” according to the radical new values of the Christian community.

However, if “head” signifies prominence because of its leading role in the body, this does not imply that we can simply transfer meanings of leadership and authority wholesale into Ephesians.

As emphasized earlier, in rhetoric it was not the appearance of a common metaphor but its specific use that was significant. It becomes critical at this point to examine more closely the way in which Paul uses the image, and it should not surprise us to see that Paul makes a radical transformation. Our next step will be to take a closer look at the expectations regarding love and leadership in ancient uses of the head-body metaphor.

another aspect of the tradition was that the head, as ruler, was not called to be the one who loves but rather was more deserving of being loved.

In conclusion, the metaphor was a graphic representation of the roles of the head and the body. The superior physical placement of the head was symbolic of its leading role in the body and resulted in specific behavioral expectations for both parties.

The normal expectation for the metaphor is that the head is the leader and provider of the body. Consequently, it is the head’s responsibility to ensure its own safety, and the body’s responsibility to sacrifice itself for the sake of the head. As a result, we would expect Paul to instruct the wife, the body, to be willing to sacrifice for the sake of the husband, the head. Such instructions would be the most logical since, according to common reasoning, the body

could not survive without the head.

But that is not what we find; rather, Paul states the reverse. The husband as the head is called to give himself up for the wife as his body, just as Christ gave himself up for the church, which is his body.33 Furthermore, where normal expectations would have the body being the one to love the head, Paul states t...

The fundamental nature of the reversal is critical. It would have struck Paul’s audience not only as odd but even more so as being against nature. The sacrifice of the head would be suicidal for the entire body since the head provides guidance for the whole. The reversal in expectations in regard to love would also seem shocking in light of traditio...

It is also enlightening to examine the significance of Paul’s reversal of status conventions. When Paul asks husbands, and not wives, to love and sacrifice, this reversal would be shocking in light of traditional status conventions because he tells the most honored part, the head,

to perform the duties of the less honored member.

As described earlier, the quest for honor was central in the ancient Mediterranean culture. As Bartchy states, “Among all social classes, traditional male socialization programmed males to pursue a never-ending quest for greater honor and influence.”38 Since honor for men was gained through domination of others, the husband would have been expected to dominate and be served by his wife.39 However, Pa...

also says that the reversal seen in the love of the husband relates to the one flesh unity of Gen. 2:24. The use of Gen. 2:24 brings us back to our earlier discussion of Adam and Eve. In Genesis the one flesh unity was Adam’s primary imperative in his relationship with Eve, and he was unable to fulfill it. Now under the new covenant, the husband’s ability to love his wife as Christ loves the church enables him to “cleave” to his wife and be “one flesh” with her in all its fullness.

relationship of Christ and the church so that it goes beyond analogy or comparison to indicate a “new reality.”43

For both the husband and Christ, the one flesh union is connected with sacrificial love, a critical component of Paul’s understanding of headship.

However, Eph. 5:25–32 adds another dimension when it focuses on the initiating love of the head for the body in relationship to the unity between Christ and the church and the husband and the wife. In other words, while all believers are to love one another like Christ for the purpose of unity within the body, there is something unique about the love of the head (Christ or the husband) that relates to the unity between the body (the church or the wife) and itself in regard to the “one flesh” union.

The relationship between a love that originates with the husband and an intimate marital relationship is also found in the Old Testament in relation to God and Israel. In Hosea God is portrayed as the one who continually seeks after Israel. Even though Israel has abandoned him for other lovers, God proclaims that he “will allure her, bring her into the wilderness and speak kindly to her” (Hosea 2:14).

The concept of intimacy is presented boldly in Hosea 2:20, which states that Israel will “know the LORD,” using the term (yādaʿ) that connotes sexual intimacy and is used metaphorically for intimacy in a covenantal sense.53

More than any other metaphor, including God as the Father or Shepherd of his people, the image of the husband highlights the love and trust that should exist between God and his people.55