3. Women and Creation

The dispute between complementarians and egalitarians over the place of women in the church often centres on creation. For many complementarians, the argument of creation seems so strongly in their favour that it also provides a reason why the egalitarian position should not even be considered—if male headship was the plan even in the Garden of Eden then arguments about shifting culture are non-starters. Denying complementarianism is denying God’s creation order as revealed in Old and New Testaments.

As a complementarian myself, I have long found most elements of the creation argument unpersuasive, and so I want to offer some reasons why it is problematic enough that we should refrain at least from dismissing arguments from the egalitarian position out of hand.

There are two issues in relation to creation that I would like to discuss. Have the characteristics of maleness and femaleness been hard-wired into creation? And do the appeals in the New Testament to the creation story imply that female subordination in the home and the church are part of God’s universal creation-order plan?

Are differences between men and women hard-wired into creation?

It is often assumed that egalitarians deny that there are differences between male and female, that gender is merely a social construct. This is incorrect. There is nothing objectionable about the idea of gender differences, as long as these aren’t made a basis for prejudice. The primary goal of egalitarianism is to ensure that Christian sisters are treated with full personhood and full equality in the church, not to deny that there are differences. The question is whether the fact of gender differences has any implication for differences in the roles that men and women may occupy in the church.

John Piper is persuaded that gender differences have an important role:

“I have been a long time in coming to understand it as part of God’s great goodness in creating us male and female. It had to do with something very deep… They were rooted in God… He designed our differences and they are profound.” (Piper, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, p. 32)

Piper goes on to insist also that these differences are essential to male and female identity. He criticises scholars such as Paul Jewett because, while Jewett concedes that gender is essential to our personhood, he says that there is an ineffable quality to gender that defies neat definition (ibid., p. 33).

Piper claims that the differences between male and female are deep and profound, but his attempt to define manhood and womanhood does little better than to insist that men are leaders, protectors and providers, and women are responders to male leadership and provision—a definition that to my mind falls far short of profundity. It conflates identity and role and it is horribly reductionistic.

Jewett’s contention that manhood and womanhood defy definition conforms much better to experience. The differences between male and female are at best an assortment of tendencies that men or women will more regularly exhibit as a group, but which are not universally true. For example, men might generally be physically stronger and women more emotionally connected, but female athletes are stronger than most unathletic men, and many women are goal-directed and not especially empathetic. Many women have undeniable leadership gifts; many men don’t. Many women have abilities that make them excellent providers (cf. Proverbs 31); some men are nurturing types who make excellent stay-at-home parents.

Given that the argument is that God has created these differences, then being a man and a woman does not imply just one set of characteristics and roles and Piper’s definition is wrong.

Piper’s attempt to define our roles is a procrustean bed. There may well be general differences between men and women, but it is not possible to use them to define manhood and womanhood without seriously alienating the significant minority who do not possess the ‘correct’ characteristics. If being male and female is so essential to our identity and well-being, then we should be very careful not to make definitions that exclude millions of people from being a ‘real man’ or a ‘real woman’.

It should not pass unnoticed that the Bible makes no attempt to define what a man or a woman is. Our identity in the Bible is based on imitation of Christ and on the loving exercise of the gifts allocated by the Spirit. It seems that to insist that God designed a single, generic maleness and femaleness as core to our identity is both contrary to experience and a denial of the differences between individuals that genuinely are part of the design of God’s multi-membered body.

Are the roles of men and women permanent facts of creation?

A second related question—and the crucial difference between complementarians and egalitarians—concerns whether or not it is a universal fact of creation that males are to occupy headship roles and women are to submit. Piper is again a typical proponent of the view that male headship is eternal. He says:

“When the Bible teaches that men and women fulfil different roles in relation to each other, charging man with a unique leadership role, it bases this differentiation not on temporary cultural norms but on permanent facts of creation. This is seen in 1 Corinthians 11:3-16 (especially vv. 8-9, 14); Ephesians 5:21-33 (especially vv. 31-32); and 1 Timothy 2:11-14.” (Piper, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, p. 35)

As Piper’s quote makes clear, the evidence in favour of the complementarian view is found in three citations from Paul’s letters in which he invokes creation to make a point about social order.

In favour of the complementarian view, each of these three texts has to do with male headship, and so it is noteworthy that headship seems to be connected to the creation story in Paul’s mind. Furthermore, that there is an ordered male-female relationship that confers responsibility for the pair upon Adam is a possible reading of Genesis 1-4.

However, exegetes of this text must concede that it is far from clear that Genesis 1-4 is promoting male leadership and female submission, and that the overt emphasis of this passage rests strongly on the unity of male and female.

Consider the following points:

• Humankind is created in the image of God—male and female together (1:27).
• Adam is delegated custodianship of creation, but there is no creature like him (2:20), and so Eve is created to be his ‘helper’ (2:20-22). While the word translated ‘helper’ is often taken to imply that Eve is Adam’s personal assistant, every other use of the word in Scripture is for the help that a political ally gives (often a superior force, such as Egypt) or, very commonly, for the help that God gives. In other words, there is no hint of hierarchy implied by the word at all. It implies that she is a partner or an ally, not a subordinate.
• She is created from a part of Adam, not to show that she is a secondary emanation from a primary being, but that she is of the same stuff as him. Adam’s exclamation that she is “flesh of his flesh” underlines that the lack of a creature of his kind has been addressed.
• While woman is taken out of man (2:23), this is in order to underline their unity in marriage—the coming together of those two parts into one flesh again (2:24). The human is not alone.

In short, while these chapters might imply hierarchy, there is an overt emphasis on the unity and the status that male and female share together in contrast to the rest of the animal kingdom.

If exegesis of these chapters produces only the most muted of support for hierarchy, why then does Paul refer to these texts when speaking about gender roles?

It seems to me that Paul’s use of the Adam and Eve story is typically illustrative, not exegetical. He uses the Old Testament illustratively often enough. Adam’s story is potentially in the background of much of Romans (e.g. Rom 7:9, “I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died”). He also creates an allegory out of the story of Hagar and Sarah (Gal. 4), which is not an interpretation that emerges from exegesis, but which is illustrative of Paul’s wider theology of law and covenant.

Piper’s basis for the universality of male leadership comes from three occasions on which Paul uses the Adam and Eve story, but each of these is problematic:

1 Timothy 2:11-14

This text uses the fact that Adam was formed first and Eve was deceived first to show that women should not teach men, but it is unclear on what basis this is a principle of the Genesis story. RT France (Women in the Church’s Ministry, pp. 67-68) points out that being formed first is not an argument for superiority, because the animals were formed before Adam. Furthermore, in what way is Eve being deceived first a principle? Does it mean that women have greater blame? Paul blames Adam, not Eve, for human sin in Romans 5, so no. Does it mean women have some sort of deficiency in comparison with men? If this text is appealing to permanent facts of creation, as Piper says, then this surely is an implication of what Paul says. Good luck demonstrating that. We are awash with deficient male leaders in the news at the moment, and I frequently have female students at the top of the class in exegetical subjects that I teach.

Rather than being about creation order, as France points out, this text is probably better understood as an illustration of what seems to have been happening in Ephesus—similarly to Eve, women were taking the initiative, asserting independence, becoming deceived and passing on false teaching. They needed to learn first (1 Tim. 2:11).

Ephesians 5:31-32

While this passage is generally about a wife’s submission to her husband, Paul does not invoke Genesis to assert Adam’s headship over Eve, but rather he uses the image of woman being created from the flesh of man and reunited in marriage so that they are one flesh again—i.e. the Genesis image of unity. If this text means to make the husband’s headship a permanent fact (not a culturally negotiable one), it is because Christ’s headship is permanent, not because hierarchy is a fact of creation order. He doesn’t connect those things here.

1 Corinthians 11:8-9, 14

This text is the most problematic for Piper, because if we’re listing things that are permanent facts of creation, it’s hard to avoid adding to the list that long-haired men are clearly disgraceful (v. 14), that men should not cover their heads in worship (v. 4) and that women should not appear with their heads uncovered (v. 5). It uses precisely the same reasoning as 1 Tim. 2.

It seems to me that there are three ways one can argue this:

1. Much of the church is in rebellion against this chapter, in which case we can hardly claim the moral high ground over the egalitarians who are ‘rebelling’ against 1 Tim. 2.
2. The appeal to creation does not necessarily imply that head-covering is a permanent fact of creation, in which case Piper must surrender his point.
3. The universal principle is not the head-covering but the husband’s headship. However, if one goes this route, one admits that the expression of headship is culturally determined not universal. Then on what grounds is the prohibition of women’s teaching and authority in 1 Tim. 2 universal? By the same reasoning, it would be a culturally determined application of the universality of headship, and much as discarding head-coverings no longer implies disorder, so also public roles for women are now normal and so allowing women to occupy such roles in the church wouldn’t imply disorder either.

As far as I can tell, the only option that allows for Piper’s argument to stand is the first one, which also commits us to saying that nature makes it obvious that long hair is disgraceful for men, which is very far from obvious, and that we all ought to revive the long-dead cultural practice of veiling married women so that they can have the sign of authority on their heads (even though it’s no longer a sign of authority).

In summary, there are real problems with each of the three chapters that Piper cites in support of the idea that male leadership and female submission are not cultural but are permanent facts of creation. Exegesis of Genesis does not unequivocally produce these conclusions, and Paul rather seems to invoke the creation story illustratively. Ephesians invokes unity from Genesis, not hierarchy. 1 Cor. 11 would make non-obvious cultural practices into permanent facts of creation by the same logic.

Conclusion

The appeal to creation is often taken to be one of the strengths of the complementarian position—it is the deal-clincher for many Christians—but I believe that it is a problematic and presumptuous argument throughout. Creation differences between men and women are a bouquet of general tendencies, not a basis for a description of manhood and womanhood. The Bible never attempts to define what these mean, but rather emphasises the goodness of diversity of giftedness. Defining men as leaders, protectors and providers and women as nurturing followers is a procrustean bed without secure biblical basis. The attempt to ground these characteristics in permanent facts of creation raises more problems than it solves.

While complementarianism has merit as a biblical argument, and I continue for now to identify as complementarian (albeit as close to the centre as possible), the point of this blog and others in this series has been to show that egalitarian arguments need to be taken much more seriously than complementarians have taken them to date.

Both sides claim that women are equal and gifted. It is right for all of us to insist on unity and equal treatment for women in the church and to oppose sexism in the church, even when it comes robed in good theology.

We can continue to assert gender difference and culturally appropriate expressions of male headship, but even if we go further as evangelicals and decide that there is insufficient warrant to assert 1 Tim. 2 as a universal command, it is not a threat to our doctrine of Scripture, or to creation order, or to Christian integrity for one to do so.