Creation and Re-Creation—Male and Female in the Image of God

In this sermon, Don Carson explores the theological concepts of creation, fall, and redemption from a biblical perspective, focusing on the roles of men and women as created in the image of God. He discusses the significance of Genesis chapters 1 through 3 and their implications for understanding human identity and relationships in the context of God’s design and purpose. Carson also touches on New Testament teachings that relate back to these foundational Genesis passages.

Note: The sermon audio and following transcript are incomplete.

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The subject is massive. The literature is huge. In the contemporary climate, almost all of the important exegetical points are disputed. We’ll knock them all off in 45 minutes or so. I recall J. Alec Motyer once being asked to expound the entire prophecy of Isaiah in six expository sessions at Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union, CICCU.

He began by saying, “Owing to the paucity of the material, I thought I would throw in Jeremiah as well.” I have something of the same sort of feeling when I approach this subject. Since Greg Strand specified creation, fall, and redemption, let’s start with creation. I will say a fair bit about creation, a little bit less about the fall, and almost nothing about redemption because I will talk more about redemption in the following sessions.

We begin with Genesis 1, 2, and 3. These opening chapters are important for many reasons. They’re important intrinsically in the whole Bible storyline. They establish the frame of reference. They establish what the problem is. They establish who God is. On our topic, they’re also heavily quoted passages. Ephesians 5:31 quotes Genesis 2:24.

First Corinthians 11 is based on parts of both Genesis 1 and 2. First Timothy 2:13–14 point to parts of Genesis 1 and 2. First Corinthians 14:34 mentions the law and builds on Genesis 11. Then there are the references in the New Testament to Adam and comparisons drawn with Christ.

There are comparisons drawn, likewise, between creation and new creation. Likewise, where does Sabbath rest fit into the stream of things? In other words, these chapters become foundational for huge streams of biblical theology that run right through the entire Canon. To get a feel for how this works, it would be wise to spend time teasing more of them out, most of which I’m not going to do.

1. Creation

There are, of course, two creations accounts: Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. There is some sameness, and there is some difference. Both speak of creation. Both show that human beings are dependent on God. There is something distinctive about human beings as compared with other created beings. What is important for our sake, first of all, is to remember that both chapters are given by God, which means we don’t have the right to tilt in favor of one as opposed to the other.

So those, for example, on a more egalitarian side tend to prefer Genesis 1:27–28, and those on a more complementarian side tend to prefer chapter 2 with a distinction in order and who was made for whom and so on. We don’t have the right to choose between the two. Somehow we’ve got to put these things together to recognize God’s authorship of the whole.

A) The spheres of difference between the two creation accounts.

If we are going to comment on some of their parallels and especially their differences, it might bring some insight if we observe the spheres of their difference.

First, with respect to God. In chapter 1, God is presented as sovereign ruler over all. The God who acts. He creates out of chaos and formlessness. He provides for the needs of all. He’s a talking God. He deliberates at crucial points, especially in the creation of human beings, and he entrusts the care of his created order to human beings.

In chapter 2, the most striking initial difference is that God is presented as the Lord. God is Yahweh God, the name that came to be associated with God’s covenant with Israel. This chapter shows more clearly than chapter 1 that God is a personal God. There is an emphasis on his presence and relationship with his image-bearers.

We note the immanent presence. He sends the rain. He shapes the man from the dust. He breathes into his nostrils the breath of life. He plants a garden. He puts the man there. He takes a rib, closes the flesh, forms the woman, and brings her to the man. It’s much more hands-on, personal, and interactive.

Secondly, with respect to creation. In both chapters, transparently, there is creation out of formlessness. In both chapters, God names things and pronounces things good, but God is different from his creation in both chapters as well. Neither chapter will be open to a pantheistic, “green” view in which nature is God and God is nature. Nor even a panentheism, avatar view in which somehow creation is part of or infused by God.

There are some differences. Genesis 1 offers a kind of Google Earth view of creation. The whole Big Bang, the whole thing. Genesis 2 gives you more of a street view with names, locations, rivers. There is a picture of abundance and delight, which also itself says something about God and what he has made for human beings. I wish we had time to dig out some of contemporary debates on the archaeology of the rivers and all of that. I’m skipping all of that sort of thing.

Thirdly, with respect to human beings. The creation is introduced by divine speech in both chapters. Human beings are the pinnacle of the creation in both chapters. But there are some differences. Genesis 1 emphasizes the similarity of human beings to God, made in his image. We’ll come to that expression in due course. They are mandated to rule.

In Genesis 2, the similarity of human beings to animals is clearer. We are made from the dust. In the next chapter, to dust we will return. In Genesis 1, God made male and female, but the differences between male and female don’t leap off the page. In Genesis 2 there is a basket of differences. One was made first, was alone, and had the responsibility for ruling and naming, and then the woman was taken from him. We haven’t teased out any of those details yet, but you see quite a difference in tone and emphasis just in a quick reading of the two chapters.

B) Exegetical reflections on the creation of male and female

The crucial passage, of course, is 1:26–28. “Then God said …” Now here we stumble across translational differences with the pronouns right away.

The NIV says, “God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ ” The ESV and older versions generally say, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over …’ ” The real dispute is whether man there is focusing on an individual or on humankind.

However you prefer the translation to go, what you have to see is that by verse 28, both the man and the woman, male and female, are both commanded to be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, and so forth. This in the context where God blessed them. In my judgment, although one can quibble about what’s the best way of translating it, one shouldn’t get too upset either way. They’re both emphasizing certain things within the text.

“Let us make …” Oh my, the literature on that one. Is this God addressing the heavenly council? If so, then it’s not just God who’s involved in creation but the heavenly council. Is this a royal we? Is this a reference to the three persons of the Holy Trinity? In dogmatics that, across the history of the church, has been the most common way of taking the expression by far. If so, I think I would want to say that it is, at best, no more than an adumbration. Let me give an example and you’ll see what I mean.

In chapter 3, God eventually decides that the fig leaves are not enough. An animal is killed and he clothes Adam and Eve with skins of animals. That has tripped off another long discussion about whether this is blood sacrifice or not. Again, what I would want to say is, “In the context, nobody brings that up. This is not presented as an atoning sacrifice for sin.

Yet at the same time as you read on through the entire Canon and discover the place of animal sacrifice and, in turn, its adumbration of the ultimate Passover lamb, the ultimate sacrifices of Yom Kippur, it’s hard not to see the beginning of a trace that moves in that direction along a kind of gentle trajectory.”

I’m not quite sure what the first readers of Genesis would’ve thought when they read, “Let us make man …” Plural. Let us do so. I do think that if you read the whole of Scripture canonically, sooner or later you’re bound to have some reflections on whether or not this is an adumbration that is moving along that line.

That’s a little bit different from standing up and saying, boldly, “Of course the reference here is to the Holy Trinity.” I’m not sure it’s quite as simple as that. Yet there is something going on here that is important, and it is important for our subject, as we’ll see. God then made human beings and the poetry of verse 27 has three lines that make three distinct points.

In one sense, all of the lines are parallel. Yet there is a kind of step-parallelism that adds something on in the three cases. “So God created mankind [man] in his own image …” Here the emphasis is on God and what God does. Line 2: “… in the image of God he created them …” Here the emphasis is on the imago Dei, that we’ll come to in due course.

In the third line, “… male and female he created them.” That is, God made human beings, as it were, into kinds, distinguishable kinds. He didn’t make two parties that were exactly the same. He made them male and female. Obviously, implicitly, the animal creation similarly is sexually structured or it couldn’t reproduce.

It’s sexually structured in a wide and colorful variety of ways; nevertheless it is a reproducing organic universe. Yet none of that is mentioned. This is where it’s mentioned, mentioned in the context of human beings being made by God in his image. For the difference is part of what it means to be human. It tells us who we are.

This does not mean, because we’re made in the image of God and God made us male and female, that God himself is male and female. God is Spirit. But it does raise the question of whether there is any sort of tie between the plurality of humanness with the plurality intrinsic in God’s oneness. One has to be careful there.

There has been a lot of work on the doctrine of the Trinity in the last 25 years, and in my view, what started as a really good correction, nobody working at all from the doctrine of the Trinity, has now gotten to the nasty place where the doctrine of the Trinity has gotten on its white horse and traveled off in all directions. It’s increasingly uncontrolled, and more and more things are spun out of the doctrine of the Trinity without any sort of exegetical control anymore.

Yet it’s hard for me not to wonder if there is in this, “Let us” on God’s part, some echo in, “He made them male and female.” Even there you have to be careful, because you don’t want to get into the position where you start saying, therefore, a single person is not strictly human any more (now I’m in the realm of dogmatics here rather than the realm of exegesis) than you’d want to say, similarly, the Father is not God unless you’ve got the Son and the Holy Spirit.

You want to be careful about such things, and yet at the same time, there is a social wholeness to this initial creation that is not unimportant and should be listened to carefully. Almost hearing echoes in the background rather than giving you something that enables you to write an entire doctoral dissertation. Most doctoral dissertations are over the top in any case. That’s what makes them doctoral dissertations.

Go cautiously, yet the language does suggest that in the beginning there was perfect harmony between these mutually complementary human beings as perfect as the harmony in God. Paul, as we shall see, makes some kind of connection along those lines in 1 Corinthians 11.

C) Reflections on the image of God

First, chapter 1. I doubt if there is a Latin expression that has generated more speculation and more pages of ink than imago Dei. The image of God is bound up with conscience or it’s bound up with speech or it’s bound up with appearance or it’s bound up with rule or it’s bound up with … whatever. The issue on it is really huge. How shall we go about sorting this one out?

I suspect that it is an expression in the Bible that is not a terminus technicus, a technical expression that always has exactly the same meaning. You have to see how it functions in a particular context. There are a lot of expressions like that. Kingdom is another one, for example. Even son of God can refer to angels, including Satan in Job 1. It can refer to Adam as a son of God. It can refer to Jesus Christ in his role as son of David.

It’s an expression with a lot of different meanings depending on the context. If I had time, I would show you that imago Dei has a range of meanings and overtones as well. In this context, I think the way you have got to flesh it out is by asking, “In what ways human beings, especially in this context, reflect God?”

The very notion of an image is that it reflects something. To be in the image of God is in some way to reflect God. That includes certain things. In this context, God talks. Human beings talk back. I know today people say, “Yes, but whales talk, dolphins talk,” and so on. You’re starting to stretch just what talk is. Yes, they can communicate. Talk is something a bit different.

What one remembers that the linguists distinguish between ability to speak and competence in speech. For example, a parrot can be said to speak English. It does not follow that a parrot is a speaker of English. No, this business of talking in the full human sense is pretty much bound up with God and human beings and other sentient creatures such as angels and the like. God talks, and we reflect the fact that God is a talking God.

There is more than that. There is a relationship with God that is progressively unpacked. It’s put in colorful terms: “Walking with God in the garden of the coolness of the day.” That’s not said of orangutans. There’s no beetle of whom that is predicated. This is something that is bound up with a certain kind of intimacy because we reflect God in some ways.

The most dramatic one in the context is rule. God makes everything, and what he does in making human beings and asserting that they are in his image is assign them the rule over everything else. That’s a godlike function. God rules over everything and he puts human beings under him to rule over everything apart from him.

This, in verse 28, is given to both men and women, male and female. Yet there is some difference here. God made us two complementary persons. Our gender is inseparable from who we are. Gender in the Scripture is not just for procreating (be fruitful and increase) though it is not less than that. The very expression suggests that we are maximally reflecting God this way.

I’m going to indulge in a small excursus here because I think this notion is hard to get across in Western individualist society. I’m going to leave image behind and then come back to it in a moment. Think for a moment of “son” language. For us, sonship is bound up with DNA. All you have to do is watch a couple of CSI episodes and you’ll find out that the whole case turns on who begat whom, although they don’t use that language on CSI.

You can prove who the true father is, what the lines of paternity are, down to parts of probability per tens of billion by having enough points on your DNA chart. That has to do with real sonship. In the ancient world, that wasn’t the association that came to mind when you thought sonship. Part of the reason for that is because in the ancient world, most sons took on the work role vocation tonality of the father.

This is an experiment I’ve tried in many places. Let me try it here, too. Just the men for a moment. How many of you are doing vocationally what your fathers were doing at the same age? Look around, folks. Six, seven, eight out of close to 300? You women? How many of you women are doing vocationally what your mothers did at the same age? I got a half a hand over here. Another one over there. That’s encouraging.

Whereas if you tried this at any point in the ancient world you would’ve discovered that it was 95 percent or 97 percent. If your father was a baker, then you’re the baker’s son. Jesus is the carpenter’s son. Eventually when Joseph apparently dies, Jesus becomes the carpenter. That’s the way it is. It’s not just a matter of vocation. That’s where your formation lies.

For us, formation is not only your education but what shapes you into all that you are and all that you do. You go to university for that or to tech school or nursing school or whatever. You go away from home for it. In the ancient world, if you’re the farmer’s son, then you might learn to read and write in Jewish circles in Jesus’ day in a local synagogue, but you learn farming from your dad. The fishermen learn fishing from their dad and so on. It’s a passed-on heritage. With that come the mannerisms and the sense of humor and the identity.

Out of that then come a lot of biblical euphemisms like, sons of Belial, sons of worthlessness. If somebody calls you a son of worthlessness, it really isn’t a criticism of your father, Mr. Worthless. It just means you’re acting in such a disgustingly worthless way that the only explanation is you belong to the worthless family.

That’s also why the apostle Paul can say who the real children of Abraham are. They’re not the people with Abraham’s genes. That’s too easy. They’re the people with Abraham’s faith. They’re the sons of the faithful man. Likewise, it can work for good in Jesus’ teaching and for bad in Jesus’ teaching. For good, “Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called, literally, the sons of God.” Our versions often say the children, but it’s the sons of God. It’s picking up that idiom.

That is to say, God is the supreme peacemaker and insofar as we make peace, we’re acting like God. We may not be acting like God in other fronts, but in that front, we’re acting like God. It shows us to be sons of God. Similarly in John, chapter 8, when the Jews are in confrontation with Jesus and they claim to be sons of Abraham, Jesus says, “It can’t be. Abraham rejoiced to see my day, and if you don’t recognize me you can’t be sons of Abraham.”

So they up the argument and they say, “Well actually, we’re sons of God.” He says, “No, that can’t be. I come from God, God knows me, and I know him. If you don’t know me, you can’t be sons of God. Let me tell you who your daddy is. You’re of your father, the Devil, and the lusts of the father you will do. He was a liar from the beginning. You’re telling untruths about me. He was a murderer from the beginning. You’re trying to bump me off.”

Thus, sonship is bound up with function. It’s bound up with how you live, with the way you do things, thus identifying yourself with a certain family. Behind such function in some passages, there lies an ontology. That brings us into important questions about eternal sonship and so on. I don’t have time to explore them here. There is a sense in which sons reflect their fathers. It’s in that way, likewise, that we bear the image of God. We reflect God. We are to be like God insofar as human beings can be.

Obviously, that can be teased out in a lot of different ways. There are texts that say, “Be holy, for I am holy.” There is no text that says, “Be omnipotent, for I am omnipotent.” That’s why theologians distinguish between communicable attributes of God and noncommunicable attributes of God. Insofar as human beings can be like God, we are to reflect him. That’s what’s going on. Male and female alike are to be the reflectors of God in this respect.

Secondly, Genesis 2.

a. The male is created first and God puts him into the garden.

In other words, there’s a certain kind of temporal priority in this passage that you simply cannot ignore. See verses 8 and 15. It is a temporal priority, to which some New Testament writers draw attention, more than once, as we shall see later in the series.

b. God gives to the man, to Adam directly, the task of working and caring for the garden, and also the prohibition of 2:17.

All of this in the sequencing of the account in chapter 2 is before the woman appears on the scene.

c. After declaring everything that he’s made good, up to now, God now declares something is not good.

Verse 18. What is not good is the man is alone. This then leads, in due course, to the creation of the woman.

d. The naming of the animals that follows before the creation of the woman inevitably results in two conclusions.

The human being is different from the animals, and in particular, he rules over them. The naming of them is a power thing. It’s not just that he’s got the imagination to think of funny syllables. It’s an authority emphasis. He rules.

e. The creation of the woman was from man.

She is called wo-man, which establishes her as part of him, from him, yet together making a complementary whole. The first human words in the Bible are in 2:23. “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.”

Full of delight. Full of grateful recognition for the sameness and the difference to make a union that comes to be called marriage. It was not possible to draw this woman from the beasts, nor is she is a fresh creation, de novo. She is made from him, a fellow human, but with such difference in fact that now, complementarily, they become one flesh.

f. She was created to be a “helper” suitable for him.

Once again, there’s been a vast literature just on the meaning of the word. Obviously, you can understand the word in such a way as to demean her, like a mother referring to her 3-1/2-year-old as “Mummy’s little helper,” or something of that sort. After all, in Scripture, as has often been pointed out, God himself can be called our helper. Psalm 33:20. Psalm 118:7.

Yet after you’ve pointed out the times in which the Bible can refer to God as helper, I don’t think what is meant here can be determined by word study alone. You’ve got to see the flow of the narrative. The narrative flow unavoidably creates a certain kind of relationship. She is not called into existence to help animals. She’s called into existence to help the man.

It is not said that he is called into existence to help her, because when he is called into existence, she does not yet exist. Paul picks up on the point, as we’ll see later. This does not bespeak any kind of ontological inferiority, but it unavoidably presupposes a distinction in roles. I do not see how you can avoid it with fair-minded exegesis.

g. The marriage thus formed is not the joining of two identical persons but almost the reunion of two slightly different halves coming together to form one flesh.

One in their sexual union. One in the children they produce. One in the establishment of one new social unit, one new family, leaving father and mother and cleaving to the spouse. That’s all I’m going to say about Genesis 1 and 2.

2. The fall

I wish I had time to expound all of chapter 3. Believe it or not, when I do university missions, and I still do them pretty often, I often expound Genesis 3. You have to be careful how you do it, but somewhere along the line you’ve got to get across the notion of idolatry and sin and guilt and what the Bible storyline is about.

Chapter 3 of Genesis is, at the end of the day, the presenting problem for the entire biblical storyline. Somewhere along the line it has to be addressed. I wish I had time to unpack that in considerable detail. We’re not told quite a lot of things. We’re not told, for example, how the Serpent came to be the way he was. Even some of the expressions that we stumble across in our English translations are a bit ambiguous.

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.” Crafty to my ears, which are admittedly Canadian/British ears rather than American ears, so I sometimes get things wrong, sounds somewhat sneaky, somewhat perverse, and somewhat corrupt. It doesn’t mean really smart. It’s crafty. Does that mean the same in your ears?

In fact, the Hebrew word is sometimes used in context, especially in the book of Proverbs, where a better translation is something like prudent or shrewd, without any negative connotation. One begins to suspect that this creature began with shrewdness and ended up in craftiness. How we get there, this text doesn’t tell us that.

He approaches the woman, but the text already establishes that he himself is a creature. In other words, the presupposition of verse 1 is not that the universe is a massive dualism. There’s a God figure and there’s a serpent figure. Which one wins, you’re not quite sure. They’re both pretty powerful, but which one turns out to be more powerful, well time will tell. Read on.

Rather, the Serpent himself was made by God. “He was the most crafty of all of the creatures that God had made.” Because initially God had made everything good, then it is entirely natural to presuppose that there was some sort of fallenness, rebellion, whatever on the Serpent’s part. Whether the Serpent is the representative of Satan or the embodiment of Satan, the text doesn’t say.

Later on in Scripture, the Serpent is actually labeled Satan; nevertheless, the text doesn’t answer all of our questions about the ontology. What we do see is that he begins, not with a denial, but with a kind of evocative question, “Did God really say that?” A question that has a built-in exaggeration. “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” A question designed to portray God as a cosmic party pooper, a cosmic killjoy.

God’s in the business of saying, “No! You can’t do that! No! Mustn’t do that! No!” Even though the initial presentation is that God has made this man and this woman in sheer delight, to their joy, with the first human words being full of praise and gratitude. The woman initially begins, “The woman said to the Serpent, ‘We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden.’ ” God didn’t forbid all the trees in the garden. “But God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden …’ ”

If she put a period there, she’d still have been okay. Then she adds, “ ‘… and you must not touch it or you will die.’ ” You sense just a wee bit of resentment creeping into the narrative now. Maybe God’s not a cosmic party pooper, but he was bit narrow-minded and bigoted on that one. Then you find the first massive denial of a biblical truth. “You will not certainly die.”

The first doctrine to be denied in Scripture is judgment. Because if you can get rid of that one, everything is open. It’s fun. That has been a repeated pattern in the history of the church. Soften hell and you open up a lot of things. “Indeed, God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be open and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

This expression “You will be like God, knowing good and evil,” is another one that’s really quite difficult. In some contexts in the Old Testament, this knowledge of good and evil seems to bear with it the overtone of establishing good and evil. You have the right to establish good and evil. You would thus be forming your own good and evil, as it were.

It may also have something of the emphasis of knowing it personally. There’s a sense in which God in his omniscience knows good and evil as he knows all things. There is another sense in which you know evil by participating in evil. My wife, as many of you know, has long suffered from cancer. The oncologist knows cancer much better than my wife does from the outside. She knows cancer much better from the inside.

There are ambiguities in Satan’s words here. By the end of the chapter, God himself acknowledges that the woman has come to know good and evil. In that sense, the Devil is not telling a lie. Yet while he’s telling a part-truth, it’s a whole deceit. “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it.

She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.” That is picking up, of course, on the last verse of chapter 2. “Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.”

I want to talk to you about nudist colonies. You never know what you’re going to get at an EFCA Ministerial. In the best nudist colonies, if I may relativize them in this way … that is, in nudist colonies that actually had a theory behind them and were not merely escapist units where everybody was doing their own thing … the theory was this:

What you really need for good social relationships in a perfect world is perfect candor and openness. You start to achieve this by being perfectly open and candid even in the physical realm and the sexual realm. If you can do this in realm after realm after realm, eventually you bring in nirvana.

Of course, it never works. The reason is sin. All the jealousy creeps in, the resentment, the one-upmanship, and all the rest. You never get rid of them by taking off your clothes. It’s painful. Yet there’s something really deep here. Really, really deep. What would it be like never, ever, ever to have done anything of which you are ever ashamed, such that you have absolutely nothing to hide. Nothing in thought, word, or deed. Absolutely nothing to hide.

Then you can afford to be naked. What you find here is both the onset of both guilt and shame. I know the Western culture prefers to deal with guilt and Oriental cultures often prefer to deal with shame, but the Bible talks happily about both, thank you. Now we’ve got far enough in our reading that we must ask the crucial question for our subject.… Why is the woman seduced first?

With that question is, granted that it’s the woman who is seduced first.… Why is so much made of Adam in Paul? I’m sure you’ve heard the theories. Because women are intrinsically more susceptible to deception. Because their IQs are not quite as good. Because they think with their hearts instead of their heads. Because they’re the weaker vessel (picking up a term that we’ll come to look at in due course), and many other expressions along such lines which are pretty nicely grouped in assorted misogynist camps.

More positively, they are looking for explanations without listening quite attentively enough to the text. No, I think that what’s going on here is pretty clear. What you have is a complete reversal of God’s created order. It’s no longer man submitting himself to God and the woman submitting herself to man by helping him, together having authority over the creatures.

All is reversed. The woman listens to the creature. The man listens to the woman. Neither listens to God. That’s what’s going on. There are hints all through the text that that’s what’s going on. That’s not just Don spouting off, making things up as he goes along. That’s why you get verse 17. “To Adam he said, ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, “You must not eat …” ’ ”

There is a literary reversal that is going on that is thematic of the overthrow of the entire created order built out of chapter 2. Why then is the sentence of death in the curses that follow pronounced upon the man? There’s a curse upon the Serpent. There’s a curse upon the woman, but it’s on the man that we read:

“Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” It is true that that’s going to be applied to the woman too.

Women die at the same sort of rate, more or less. Maybe they live a little longer; nevertheless, they die more or less at the same rate as all the rest of us, 100 percent as far as I’ve been able to observe, but the curse is not expressed that way. It’s expressed on the man. This, literarily, is tied to chapter 2, verse 17, where the prohibition and the promise of the curse is tied to Adam before the woman is even there. It’s this sequencing of things in chapter 2 that establishes Adam as the kind of head of the race or the representative of the race.

Whether you want to move from there into federal theology and the like, I will leave that to systematicians or another occasion where you’ve got to bring in a lot of other different kinds of evidence and biblical texts. Just on the surface of things, that’s why there is a pronouncement upon the man here that is sweeping, that brings in the entire created order and that pronounces death, precisely because death was what was promised in 2:17.

3. Redemption

Redemption is a sweeping category that really begins in Genesis 3. It’s not for nothing that 3:16 is sometimes called the protoevangelium, the initial pronouncement of the gospel, the promise of it. So much of the Bible’s drama is set in the framework of the actions that God takes to set about his massive plan of redemption that finally comes to a climax in the cross and resurrection and to its consummation in a new heaven and a new earth and resurrection existence, the home of righteousness. There, too, we do find some interesting things.

In the new heaven and the new earth, apparently there’s neither marriage nor giving in marriage. Some of the very structure, even of goodness in creation, marriage itself before sin, is still not the ultimate goal, the ultimate picture, the ultimate hope, the ultimate goodness. There you’re at the very limits of what you can see in a lot of passages that are apocalyptically flavored. Most of the Bible is dealing with this drama of redemption from the fall all the way to the consummation. I will pick up a little more of some of those things in due course.

I’m going to finish off by drawing your attention to 1 Corinthians, chapter 11, where some of these themes that we’ve been looking at are picked up, especially verses 2–16. It’s worth observing that there are some parallels between this passage and 1 Timothy 2. Both are by Paul. Both are concerned with the conduct of both men and women. Both are concerned at some level or another with hair, childbirth, and what women wear.

Both talk about participation at some level or another at the church, determined in some way or other by gender. Both refer back to creation and fall, in one case. What are the exegetical turning points? I’m going to take the time to read the passage. I’m sure that most of us are familiar with it, but then I’m going to allude to a lot of things in it quickly and it will help us if we have the text firmly in our minds.

“I praise you for remembering me in everything and for holding to the traditions just as I passed them on to you. But I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head.

But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is the same as having her head shaved. For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head.

A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man. It is for this reason that a woman ought to have authority over her own head, because of the angels. Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman.

For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God. Judge for yourselves: Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered? Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For long hair is given to her as a covering. If anyone wants to be contentious about this, we have no other practice—nor do the churches of God.”

Let me offer some exegetical turning points.

It’s worth remembering right at the outset that much of 1 Corinthians has to do with not standing on your rights.

In chapter 8, for example, the person who has a strong conscience has the right to eat food that has been offered to idols.

On the other hand, it’s the mark of graciousness, of Christian wisdom, of charity, of concern for the weaker brother or sister not to so model conduct that that weaker person (weaker because he or she thinks that it is wrong to eat even though it is not objectively wrong; that’s what makes the conscience weak) might be tempted to do something against conscience and thus damage their conscience.

In that kind of framework, Paul will say, “If that’s the test, I will not eat meat while the world stands.” In chapter 7, likewise, in the context of marriage, a great deal of Paul’s admonition has to do with not exercising all rights. He has the right to get married, but there and in chapter 9 he resolves not to use that right.

Yes, you can go to court, in the previous chapter, but on the other hand we follow Christ who was prepared to take abuse. The quick step toward the courtroom may not be a godly way to act at all. There is a great deal in this book that is talking about not standing on your rights. Likewise, of course, God gives gifts as he wishes.

Some people speak in tongues, and yet there must be order in the church. Sit down and shut up and let the others speak. Make sure not more than two or three, and so on. He’s clamping down on this abuse of rights on every front. You can’t help but get the feeling, as you read through this passage, that again he is concerned about people taking on to themselves their rights, so much so that at the end of the day, they’re threatening the stability of the dynamic relationship between men and women. The second exegetical turning point is …

The meaning of kefάli (or head).

Again, much ink has been spilled. The two dominant theories are that it means source, like the head of the river is a spring, or something like that, or authority over, but almost everybody in the field today, though there are some holdouts …

Almost everybody who is really linguistically trained and who has actually looked at the evidence right across the whole theological spectrum recognizes that when kefάli is used in the singular to mean something other than the organ that wobbles on the top of my neck (when it’s used metaphorically) it has the overtone of authority somewhere in the context, usually very strongly so.

Even where it has overtones of nurture, or the like, as in Ephesians 4:15 and Colossians 2:19, there is authority built right into it in the context as well. Moreover, in the few instances where out of about 3,800 instances that you can pull out of the Greek literary corpus from about 200 BC to AD 200. You can pull it out now with computers.

You go through all of them and you discover that in the handful of instances where it could mean source, it’s always in the plural. It’s the heads of a stream, the sources of a stream. When it’s in the singular, to my knowledge, there’s no unambiguous exception, although people still write articles from time to time to try to find them.

The next thing to observe about this head is that there’s a pun going on. “The head of every man is Christ. The head of the woman is man. The head of Christ is God. Every man who prays and prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head, but every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head.” There’s clearly some going back and forth between what’s balanced on the top of my neck, whether I’m male or female, and headship in this authority sense.

“The head of Christ is God.” This has generated, in our time, a long stream of books about whether there is (the phrase is commonly used) an eternal subordination of the Son to the Father. The question goes like this. “Are these passages that speak of God the Father being Jesus’ head referring to Jesus in the days of his flesh, as it were, where there is a kind of functional subordination, but not to the eternal Godhead?”

The technical terms that people use are diverse, but something like this is common. “Are we talking about the ontological Trinity or the economic Trinity?” Because, it is argued, if we’re talking about the economic Trinity, God as he has revealed himself in space-time history and thus in the framework of the incarnation, then obviously there’s a functional subordination.

But if we’re talking about the eternal Trinity, the whole history of the church has emphasized the equality of the persons of the Godhead, they are all equally God. If you want to read someone strong on an anti-subordinationist view, read Kevin Giles, who keeps updating his book. The principal of Oak Hill has written to respond in a variety of ways.

Nowadays, this discussion has got so weird that one doesn’t know what to do with it. When you come to Ephesians 5, where we’re told that wives are to submit to their husbands as Christ to the church, this has prompted one author recently, Alan Padgett, to write a book entitled As Christ Submits to the Church.

His argument is since we’re all supposed to submit to one another (submit to one another reciprocally is what is presupposed) then this must mean that in some sense, the church submits to Christ and Christ submits to the church. It’s all one happy atmosphere of mutual submission. This then gets pushed a little further with some exegetical details that belong only to Ephesians, so again I’ll slip them aside.

There is an analogous argument that was put forth by another scholar in the gospel of John about 20 years ago. The argument went like this. It is true that the Father sends the Son in the gospel of John, and so the Son goes. It’s also true that Jesus can say that whatever he asks of the Father, the Father gives him. Thus, there is a mutual deference and, thus, a mutual submission.

The problem with this, it seems to me, is playing with words. It’s just not listening very carefully. You have to care a little less about how it comes out and care a little more about what is actually said in the text. The fact is, the Father sends the Son. The Son goes. John speaks of the obedience of the Son to the Father, never of the obedience of the Father to the Son.

Even when my children were young enough to be at home, I might defer to one of their requests. I would never speak of obeying one of their requests. The Father/Sonship language doesn’t work like that. What we have is a kind of fuzz expression, mutual deference, to hide a real distinction. The way Jesus manifests his love to the Father, in John’s gospel, is precisely by obeying him and going to the cross as his Father commands him.

The way the Father shows his love for the Son is by insisting that all men come to honor him even as they honor the Father. To fudge all of this together under some category called mutual deference is, it seems to me, too agenda-driven to be realistic. No, if we take words at their face value in the argument on the face of it here, it seems to me that this parallelism is quite striking.

“I want you to realize that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.” You might not like the word hierarchy. The word hierarchy certainly can have a whole set of nasty overtones that I would want to avoid quite studiously, but if head metaphorically does have overtones of authority, the text makes perfect sense. That’s the first exegetical challenge here.

This does not mean that the woman is inferior to her husband any more than it means that the Son is inferior to his Father. It is certainly not suggesting that the Son is less God than his Father and, therefore, somehow the woman is less human being than her husband. All such notions, it seems to me, are completely missing the point.

Why the difference?

Granted the structure (however you label it) of, “Every man who prays or prophesies with his head covered dishonors his head,” which clearly means prayer or prophesy with his head (the thing on his neck) covered dishonors his head (namely, Christ), and “Every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head (her husband) …” why should that be the case?

Before we try and push that question you have to observe that women here are praying and prophesying. So whatever the “keep silent in the church” texts mean, namely 1 Corinthians 14 …