Ladies First? Genesis 3 and Gender Roles

I once heard a young woman tell me, "women shouldn't take the initiative in relationships because it was Eve who took the initiative in Eden and caused the fall."  I think her point was, not that women shouldn't take the initiative because they were responsble for the fall, but that the fall proved that women were never meant to take the initiative.  From there it seems a short step to this kind of thinking,



It is fair to say that there are a number of women in Genesis who take the initiative with negative results and in ways that disobey God.   Apart from Eve, the examples of Sarai telling Abram to impregnate Hagar (Gen 16) and Potiphar's wife attempting to seduce Joseph (Gen 39) come to mind.  However, in none of those examples is there any indication that the problem with their actions is that they are women.  In each instance those actions are simply expressions of sin regardless of gender.  Adam, Abram, and Potiphar, hardly serve as shining examples of ethical initiative taking in those narratives either.

On the other hand, in two significant narrative sections women take the initiative in highly unorthodox ways, and yet, within the world view of Genesis, are richly rewarded.  The first story is that of Lot's daughters, to our modern minds a tale of depravity and incest, but in Genesis actually the story of how Lot's daughters take the initiative when their father is too scared and useless to find them husbands and ensure the survival of the family by nay means necessary.  Their reward is that their offspring become two great nations, the Moabites and the Ammonites, the women are vindicated by history (Gen 19:30-38).  The second story is of Judah and Tamar, where in a scarcely less sordid episode Judah's daughter in law has to disguise herself as a prostitute in order to seduce him and preserve the family line.  She is rewarded by success and the recognition that her actions were righteous (Gen 38, not to mention Matt 1:3).  None of this is to suggest that women's place is only in preserving the family line, i.e. breeding, but in Genesis that is pretty much all anyone, male or female, cares about.  The point is that women take the initiative throughout Genesis, sometimes it results in bad and sometimes in good, just like it does with the men.

If anything, Gen 3 actually shows the Eve taking some responsibilty and admitting being deceived (3:13), whereas Adam just tries to blame both Eve and God for putting Eve in the garden with him (3:12).  

What if God was one of us?

I am one of those people who always likes to read the prefaces and ackowledgements of a book just to get a bit of insight into the personality of the author.  Correspondingly, I also like the "about" pages on peoples blogs, although those are often dissapointing lists of abstract interests rather than any real self revelation as such.  Clayboy, AKA Doug Chaplin has a great "about" page, which reads pretty much as a short and pithy manifesto for theology.  (My own blog manifesto is here)  I've actually found Doug's worth returning to just for its own sake.  One phrase has been giving me thought recently:

as the Scriptures suggest, if you’re going to anthropomorphise the eternal reality who dwells in unapproachable light you might as well do it outrageously.

Which nicely pins down the absurdity of the revelation of God in the Bible, of our attempts to talk about such a being, and most of all of the absurdity of the incarnation itself.   We have permission to to anthropomorphise God, the one who is so supremely other, because God does so in God's own self revelation.

But there is a danger in this. It may be done outrageously, but it must also be done critically and rigourously.  I recently formatted the proofs for a forthcoming book on evangelical views on God and gender (review to follow once it actually gets published).  As well as the fare I expected, regarding gender equality in home and church (or lack of it), I was surprised by the number of chapters that used the topic to actually talk about God.  (perhaps I shouldn't have been, but I was.)  I realised that in the last few years God had been getting increasingly distant and abstract for me, mainly as a resuly of the particular areas I was studying in.  That book reminded me that God reveals himself to us anthopomorphised, sometimes as male and sometimes female.  God, he/she/it, is someone we can relate to.  The danger comes when we take this extraordinary gift of God and confuse which direction the morphing actually operates in.  God may anthropomorphise God's self in revelation, we may need to use anthropomorphic analogy to describe God (e.g. God is "love"), but we absolutely must not reverse this and deify or theomorphise our own selves, especially not our gender. 

So the answer to Joan's question, posed so well in the song above, is that God was one of us, God is one of us, and yet just because I am a slob, doesn't mean God is. :-)