28 September 2022
Congratulations to Jack at Sigma Frame. Personally, I like where his blog has been going. While I don't use the term "headship" the way he does, it overlaps with my concept of moral dominion enough that I see no need to critique his approach. It doesn't warrant an explanation. But some of the comments have provoked me to explain where I stand on something.
The primary purpose of the Eden narratives is to explain where we are as fallen creatures. Frankly, there's not enough detail in the narratives to help us really understand the characters involved, nor very much about the events. Indeed, we learn more about Satan than we do anything else. I take the position that something significant in God's purpose in Creating Eden and placing it under Adam's management was to demonstrate to some unknown audience why and how Satan was demoted to Black Hat. Thus, how Satan performed in Eden reflects his current status. God had already dealt with whatever rebellion Satan might have led by the time he shows up to tempt the humans.
The sins of Adam and Eve are characteristic of their sex. Adam failed to assert his moral dominion and Eve sought to control outcomes. Yes, that's an oversimplification, but it answers well our current cultural context and the inherent failures of that context. Far more important is that Adam and Eve together agreed to assert human capabilities in moral decisions that still affect us today. The crux of the Fall is trying to live in this physical world by human perception and reason, and discounting God's revelation.
If you miss that part of the Genesis narratives, then nothing else you might learn from them will matter. That Adam failed to assert "headship" does not let Eve off the hook. That's not part of the story in Genesis. Again, a main point of the story is to explain the characteristic flaws of fallen men and women. This is echoed when Paul writes in 1 Timothy 2 about the restrictions on women, because "it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being quite deceived, fell into transgression" (1 Timothy 2:14 NASB 1977).
If you nit-pick legalistically over the verbiage of any Bible passage, you'll easily miss the whole point. Paul is explaining to Timothy something that was not acceptable to those who were raised in various parts of the pagan cultures where Paul and Timothy ministered. Restricting women's prerogatives in the church was a dire necessity for former pagans to learn. The revelation of God is particularly hostile to the notion that women can make moral decisions equal with men. Throughout Hebrew history, it was bad enough that there were male pagan deities, but female deities were an abomination. Females are inherently incapable of understanding certain issues; it's not a question of intellect but moral authority. God gave males dominion based on design; the Bible is unabashedly patriarchal.
It's not as if women have no assigned authority at all. The pattern of what prerogatives women exercised under the Covenant is not very well explained in the Old Testament. There are some bits and pieces, but no consistent statement. The Law of Moses simply assumes you already know. It's just one of those things you have to find in external sources, though it's not hard. What's hard is trying to translate those things into our context today. My tendency is to take Paul's prescriptions on it at face value as universal absolutes. I don't consider it misogyny. The best thing you can do for a woman is keep her from picking the wrong fruit.
Nobody has to tell me how thoroughly this is hated in our western culture. The Germanic half of the source for Western Civilization was particularly flawed for pedestalizing women. There's a whole range of flaws in that culture that still influence the West today. Any deification of any female or any part of feminine nature is utterly repulsive to the Bible, and yet utterly required by western culture. At any rate, Jack's "headship" concept is way better than any part of modern western feminism.
The Covenant has boundaries, folks.
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