Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity

by Rebekah Merkle

“And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” If you think about that for a second, there’s something very key that sometimes escapes people’s notice. What are gates for? Are they offensive weapons or defensive? If Christ is promising that the gates of Hell shall not prevail against the church, what does that imply about the actions and position of the church? Right. The church is the army that is charging, not the one that’s on the run.

God created light and it was good. He created the sun and moon and they were good. He created the sea and the land and they were good. He created the trees and the plants and they were good. He created the animals and they were good. He created a man, and suddenly . . . it was not good. It was not good that man should be alone—he needed a helper. And we already know what he needed the help for—he had been given the job of taming an entire planet. So the first thing we should note about the creation of Eve is that she was created specifically to assist Adam in his work, because he was insufficient for the task of conquering a world alone. When God created the first and perfect woman, He made a worker meant to stand by Adam’s side as the two of them, together, took dominion of the earth. When the ’60s feminists were chomping at the bit to get out there and work, they were doing so because that’s what God made us for. God didn’t look at Adam in the garden and say, “It is not good for man to be alone, he needs something pretty to look at.” The ’50s idealized notion of a woman who only exists to look pretty and make the house look pretty is just as much a revolt against the creation order as the radical feminist agenda is—it’s just a revolt against a different part. The Victorian ideal of a tender, swooning, delicate woman who is incapable of getting her lily white hands dirty is a rebellious ideal, forgetting what it was Eve was created for.

A quintessentially biblical and very Hebraic way of expressing a superlative is to use the form the Song of Songs or the Holy of Holies. We tend to read this Corinthians passage as if the glory is getting more and more diluted the further it gets away from the center. But stop and think in more biblical categories for a second. If Adam is the crown of creation, then Eve is the crown of the crown. Women are the glory of the glory. When you read of the Holy of Holies in Scripture, are you on the furthest fringe of the holiness, or are you closer to the center? Obviously the holiness isn’t getting weaker as you go into the Holy of Holies, it’s getting stronger, more distilled. Man was created as the image and glory of God, but then along came the woman—second—in an even more concentrated form. The glory of the glory of God. If men are the beer, women are the whiskey. The most potent, strong, and intoxicating version of the glory of God, not the weakest and most watered down.

There’s nothing inherently blessed about the physical act of childbearing. A woman can have children to the glory of God or in defiance of God, and a woman can be childless to the glory of God or in defiance of God.

A little learning is a dang’rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.