could someone please define “deceived” for me? especially, could someone please explain how eve’s “deception” qualifies her sin as diffferently than adam’s? does that occur anywhere else in the bible?

perhaps deceived is not a defficiency as much as it is an accurate accounting of what happened. eve thought she could be like God because of the snake’s counsel. she was mistaken and deceived. perhaps, this is why God does not directly curse her. because she owned up.

i still don’t understand how this argument works: because adam’s sin was more grave, we acknowledge adam as the head of the human race. i’m with tom. that’s a lousy recommendation for leadership, in my book.

as to the impact of eve’s being “second”.
1. gen 1:27 reads “God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created HIM, male and female he created THEM.” in essense, God creates a single human in two persons. which also converses nicely with trinitarian theology btw.
2. i’ve said it before, the flow of the genesis account goes from less to more sophisticated forms of life. according to the schematic of the text, eve is at the apex, rather than the tail end of creation.
if you hold that first means authority, then adam is under the authority of the earth. 3. the same holds true for the rib argument. if eve is subjugated to adam via the rib, then adam is subjugated to the earth via the clay.
4. primogeniture is a much later practice that is concerned almost exclusively with property distribution. their is no personal property in the garden, no inheritence. if you want to spiritualize inheritence, then eve is the only one who leaves the garden with anything resembling a blessing. in this, she resembles the younger brothers in many patriarchal families who came into family blessing despite their birth order.

Another option taken by old school BC’s, (an argument rejected by most modern BC’s because of it’s implications) is that God created women intellectually deficient - which explains why Eve fell into sin first and would place the emphasis on Paul’s comment that it was she who was deceived, not Adam. As I said, though, most BC’s reject this now and study after study has demonstrated the on par with men intellectual capabilities of women. That and personal experience - my wife is brilliant…I can’t keep up with her.

thanks for a great discussion, man. I look forward to engaging you more on this and other topics. Your humility is an example to me.

You’re right, I haven’t offered any reason to think we should interpret Paul as a complementarian. I’ve just been trying to show that we could interpret him that way even if Genesis paints a more egalitarian picture.

As to the question of how limiting who can play leadership roles could lesson the amount of immorality or make things better in general? I think explaining this is probably the biggest problem for complementarianism. One thing I’ve heard said here is that men are naturally more suited to be leaders and thus restricting who could lead to men would provide better leadership overall. However, this is an empirical claim which seems pretty questionable. I guess the two ways to defend it would be (1) say that God just designed men to be better leaders. or (2) tell some sort of evolutionary story to the effect that men would end up developing better leadership skills. Either way the fact that we have seen lots and lots of really bad male leaders and many good female leaders seems to undermine this way of looking at things.

Another response would be to go skeptical and claim that we don’t know why God decided to limit who could be a leader but that there must be some greater good that was accomplished by this. Somehow the consequences of God’s limiting leadership produced good or prevented evil. (This would be similar to the skeptical response to the problem of evil.) The skeptical response could maintain that we should not expect to be able to see all of the reasons why God acts as he does, but we can still be confident that he has good reasons. This response seems to have more promise than the first one.

To be honest i’ve always thought the philosophical case against complementarianism was pretty good. From a consequentialist perspective you’re right that limiting who can be in leadership would seem to produce bad results. From a more deontological perspective, if we think justice requires something like equality of opportunity then not allowing women to be leaders could turn out to be unjust. Despite that I’ve always stayed a complementarian because I was pretty convinced by the scriptural evidence for it. In particular I’d always thought that the 1 timothy passage sealed the deal, maybe I should rethink that in light of your artemis account.

So I guess I don’t really know why limiting who could be a leader would stifle immoral behavior, maybe the complementarian should just maintain that we shouldn’t expect to be able to know.

Philip

Also, taking my reading of I Tim. 2, there is still no reason to assume Paul is arguing for Patriarchy.

Good discussion, gentlemen.

There might be many ways in which the church is supposed to be similar to prefall humanity without thinking that they should be similar in respect to the issues I mentioned. It seems true that we should have the same type of relationship with God as existed prefall, that we should be redeemed from from the fall and that we should no longer be ruled by a corrupt nature. However, I don’t think that removes the main difference I’ve pointed out. People in current times behave immorally (perhaps I was incorrect to use sin as interchangable with immoral, so I’ll just stick with immoral). Now of course there is no place for being immoral in the church. It is never the case that people should act immorally. But as a matter of fact, people do act immorally. I suppose you could say that there is no immoral behavior in the church because all people who act wrongly aren’t really part of the church (this seems unlikely to me), However, even if that is the case, it is still true that christians today often encounter immoral behavior and the fact that we encounter immoral behavior still means that we are going to have to fulfill moral duties that people prefall did not have to fulfill.

Of course we should want God’s Kingdom to come on earth. But since we are in a different moral situation now then people prefall were in we might have very different obligations than they did with respect to how we should bring about God’s Kingdom. Our duty to evangelize seems like another good example of the difference. Prefall there would be no need to organize in a manner that promotes evangelism. However, there might well be such a need in the NT church.

So my suggestion is that there are some differences between how people behaved prefall and how we should behave now e.g. responding to immoral behavior and evangelizing. And these differences may explain the need to organize the church somewhat differently than the prefall society. Do you think scripture goes against this suggestion?

-Philip

ps I’d be interested in hearing your views on what makes an action sinful?

the whole of the New Testament argues against you.  Jesus was clearly reestablishing the relationship with God that we lost in Genesis 3.  Paul repeatedly speaks of the Church as a new creation that is redeemed from the fallen one.  And we can hardly read the Revelation without noting the explicit Genesis imagery in the description of the Church (chs 21-22).

Christian theology teaches a return to the pre-Fall nature of humanity (we won’t argue here against the possibility or necessity of of anything as internally inconsistent as a ‘Christian police force’).  The Church is meant to be Eden returned to Earth, or - as Jesus taught us to pray - "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven".

And 1 John is pretty sure that Sin has no place in the Church.  We would perhaps do well to question your conception of Sin as it relates to the NT’s understanding of the same word.

I do not think think that Paul (on the story I am telling) would be prooftexting. On the story I am telling Paul is not giving Genesis a new meaning or intention. He is not saying that Genesis supports the complementarian position. In my Mark 1 example, I would not be guilty of prooftexting, I am not saying that Mark 1 was intended to support the view that Jesus was crucified, I am merely using it to establish a premise in my argument. So too Paul (on my story) is merely using Genesis to establish premises which were in fact presented in Genesis (Adam was formed first and Eve was deceived). He is not saying that Genesis supports complementarianism.

Also, it does not seem obvious to me that it would be bad for a NT author to prooftext an OT passage. Prooftexting a passage does not seem to entail contradicting a passage. So if NT authors have the authority to create new scripture, why couldn’t they also have the authority to give a new meaning to an OT passage?

Having said all that, I now realize that my interpretation depends on rejecting premise (2) in your preliminary argument

2. The church community is the new creation of God which is to reflect the pre-sin community (an assertion drawn from other places in the NT)

I have been assuming that there could be significant differences between how people lived prefall and how we should live today. If this assumption is false then it seems like (if the prefall community was egalitarian) my interpretation of Paul can’t be right. I don’t think I have a knockdown argument against (2) but I will offer a couple reasons for doubting it:

a. There are clearly some differences between prefall life and how we should live today e.g. we should have a police force now, we should wear clothes now (christian nudists aside:).

b. A significant difference between prefall and today is that people behave immorally nowadays both outside and inside the church. This generates a whole new set of moral duties that we now have to undertake that people prefall did not have to deal with. e.g. duties to forgive, seek justice, and in general respond correctly to people’s immoral behavior.

c. It seems plausible to think that a community that has to deal with and respond to immoral behavior might need to be organized quite differently than a community that did not have these concerns. In particular the community dealing with sin might need a different type of leadership than the community not dealing with sin. Thus it seems plausible that God would give different instructions concerning leadership to the NT church than he gave to the prefall community.

Again I’m not sure how convincing any of this is but I feel like the truth or falsity of (2) is the crux of the matter.

-Philip

Now, if one throws out internal consistency (as I do), then we ultimately must “pick and choose” (which has such a nasty connotation even though everyone must do so). I’ve become perfectly fine with that. Reckognizing that there are portions of scripture that I outright disagree with (and likely always will) has been a long, but freeing process. That doesn’t mean I just rip them out of my Bible (I’m looking at you Martin Luther). It means that I see how various writers in my faith tradition’s history have had a different view point than myself, and I must try to understand where they are coming from and what work they are doing within Christianity.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this. Obviously, we must continually challenge our individual and communal hermeneutics. I’ve found myself leaning toward what Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza has put forth, in saying that we must always strive for a hermeneutic that promotes justice and liberation of the marginalized (though not necessarily along the dangerous lines that liberation theology can ultimately land on). It’s not about finding the perfect scientific method of studying scripture to get the perfect meaning…that’s never been a legitimate reality. What’s important is that we allow God to speak through the texts toward bringing about His kingdom here on earth (a kingdom which I would say embodies justice and liberation). If this means stepping into someone else’s hermeneutic and using it do bring about such ends, then so be it I say. :)

I hope that bit of free verse made some sort of sense…

pretty much any ancient rabbi did.

this was considered pretty acceptable hermeneutic.

for instance… Paul quotes "Abraham was justified by faith" to prove that salvation comes apart from works; James quotes the same verse to argue exactly the opposite: that works are integral to the process of salvation.

maybe OUR hermeneutic is flawed?

Prooftexting - taking a passage out of its original context and disregarding its original intention, then applying it to a context and giving it an intention which the original author did not intend.

Here’s how I would make my preliminary argument

1. As represented in Genesis, the pre-sin community was egalitarian
2. The church community is the new creation of God which is to reflect the pre-sin community (an assertion drawn from other places in the NT)
3. Therefore, the church should be egalitarian.

Now, specifically with Paul in I Timothy 2

1. Genesis does not espouse a patriarchal pre-sin community
2. Paul relies on Genesis in support of his claims in I Timothy 2
3. For Paul to base patriarchy on Genesis (a text not betraying any form of patriarchy) would be to misuse Genesis (prooftext) for his own purposes
4. As we do not wish to affirm premise 3, we must conclude that Paul uses Genesis the right way.
5. Therefore, Paul must be quoting from Genesis to support an egalitarian church
6. I have posited one way of examining this text which supports an egalitarian reading (Artemis).

Also, you reject G because “it is sometimes acceptable to use claims found in scriptural passages to argue for conclusions not found in those scriptural passages.” There may be some validity to this claim, as you assert with your example of Mk. 1.

However, if we make a claim that goes against a scripture, then we are are wrong. A patriarchal agenda goes against the flow of the Genesis narrative. The point of the Genesis narrative lies in equality and sameness, not distinctions and hierarchy. Therefore, to use the Genesis narrative for purposes of patriarchy and hierarchy is to prooftext. This is why, if Paul wants to argue for Patriarchy, it is hermeneutically necessary for him to go outside of the first 3 chapters of Genesis (there’s plenty of support outside of that).

Okay, I’m enjoying the discussion and I hope I am not talking in circles.

Cheers.