Feminism, Language, and Creation
As a twenty-something feminist, I, like many of my students, found the Bible guilty of promoting a patriarchal system that devalues women. Now, as a fifty-something feminist, I think of the Bible as proto-feminist discourse. My assessment changed as my understanding of ancient Near East cultures expanded. The storytellers who produced the Bible, while definitely recognizing the power women wield, could not imagine the equality or agency some cultures envision for women today.
I define a feminist as someone who believes that women are fully human and may not be beaten, raped, or otherwise dominated by anyone, including a husband. In addition, feminists believe that women should be free to pursue education, own property, and choose any occupation, from physicist to full-time homemaker. Feminists also believe that men can be tender, nurturing, and intuitive, fully capable of child-rearing and household management. When my evangelical husband told me after we got engaged that he “never thought he’d marry a feminist,” I secretly thought, “By my definition, you are a feminist.” Of course, definitions vary, and people who identify as feminist bring a vast range of personal experiences—some of them excruciating—to their understanding of the Bible. I have the privilege of helping young feminist Bible readers grapple with stories written from an ancient patriarchal perspective. The male-centered narration can provoke strong reactions from feminists, which I can certainly understand.
For starters, the Bible’s gendered language for God annoys many feminists, whether they are men, women, or nonbinary persons. Why use masculine pronouns and imagery to describe something immaterial and nonhuman? If gendered pronouns bother you, I recommend substituting whatever language makes referring to God easier. God is the Bible’s main character, so literary discussion of the Bible inevitably includes discussion of its God-character. Many religious readers repeat the word-name “God” and use “Godself,” to avoid the gendered pronouns. Some readers refer to God as “She” or “They,” which puzzles--and sometimes upsets--religious readers attached to masculine pronouns. Part of getting along in a diverse reading community means accepting that people have different ways of speaking about God. Generous participants in any discussion avoid getting stuck on how people talk, and focus instead on what is being said. Religious readers of any persuasion do well to offer linguistic hospitality to readers who use unfamiliar language while discussing the Divine.
Readers who experience God as real can remember that human language only points toward the Divine, which lies beyond language. Language variations, therefore, do not alter what God is, only how people experience God. Irish theologian John O’ Donohue actually recommends that religious people periodically unbind the God-experience from particular God-language. To empty oneself of human ideas and move closer to the ineffable Divine, O’ Donohue suggests an exercise: temporarily give up whatever language you typically use to name or think about the God-experience. Inviting others into the experience may be more important than insisting on uniform language for the experience. I vary my God-language in order to make discussions more broadly accessible to readers with a wide range of worldviews. When discussing the Bible as literature, I say “God,” “the God-experience,” “the God character,” the “God-Presence,” “Yahweh-God,” “the Divine,” “the Divine Presence,” or “the Sacred.” The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur suggests that the word-name “God” is “the religious name for Being.” So I sometimes say “Being with a capital B,” to explore what certain stories would have readers understand about the nature of Being--being alive, being human, being a body, being part of the cosmos. Although I personally feel comfortable with masculine pronouns in connection with God, I aim for gender-neutrality when discussing God in diverse reading environments. I preserve the masculine pronouns when quoting the Bible, however, since I like to reproduce text exactly when quoting.
Gender takes center stage in the creation story that starts at Genesis 2:4-4, which includes the passage about God creating Eve out of Adam’s rib. The first man happens like this: “the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being (2:7).” Later, God decides that “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” The “helper” role irritates many feminists. (I’m a feminist who doesn’t mind it. I enjoy helping my favorite men.) Feminist women and men sometimes consider the “helper” designation too subservient.
Feminist men and women also express concern that God’s creative process makes the woman sound like an afterthought in the mind of God. God makes the man, then “every beast of the field and every bird of the air.” God brings every creature to the man to be named. After the naming, “there was not found a helper fit for him,” so “the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs. . . and the rib which the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man” (2:21). The man decides that “she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” For twenty-first century egalitarians, this sounds objectionable: the man comes first, the woman comes second, she’s saddled with a “helper” role, and the man alone wields the God-like power of language. Most feminists don’t buy the woman-as-crown-of-creation interpretation that religious readers sometimes suggest. The idea of the woman as extra-special ornament or icing on the creation cake does not typically help readers concerned about the woman’s secondary-ness.
The Eve-from-Adam’s-rib story definitely gets used to support a male-dominant gender hierarchy. Paul of Tarsus uses the story to enforce this dominance hierarchy and to validate his view that women should only pray when veiled. Paul argues that “the head of every man is Christ, [and] the head of a woman is her husband” (Corinthians 11:3). Paul writes about heads more literally in the next verse, which doesn’t get the same airtime in Christian circles as Paul's metaphorical use of “head” to stipulate the man-as-boss hierarchy. Paul specifies that men should pray without a head covering and women should pray with one, because man “is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man” (I Corinthians 11: 4-8). Paul further explains his reasoning: “man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for woman, but woman for man” (Corinthians 11: 8-9). Those are fighting words for many feminists. It’s good to notice how the story supports patriarchal gender ideology: twenty-first century people should always be on guard against second-class citizenship. Paul’s specifications no longer offend my feminist sensibilities about social hierarchy (or head covering) because I do not treat the Bible like a rulebook or book of quotations for supporting human sociopolitical arrangements.
Although I take the Bible seriously and do guide my life by it to some extent, I consider it a human product shaped by human perspectives. Bible scholar Pete Enns invites critical-thinking religious readers to embrace what he calls an “incarnational” view of the Bible. By this Enns means that the Bible is “fully human, fully Divine,” both spirit-breathed and human-made. It’s also human-used: throughout the Bible’s history, people have twisted the Bible to support specific social dominance structures. This is one form of using the name of the Lord “in vain.” You have to quote the Bible very selectively to make it support specific human social agendas. I worship with evangelical Christians, and see culturally conservative, “Bible-believing” women praying without their heads covered all the time. Evangelical culture hears the first but not the second part of Paul’s “head” passage as a call to action. Apparently, the man-as-boss concept can be imported wholesale into our present cultural context, but the cover-your-head-when-you-pray dictum can be safely left in the past. Selectivity is necessary for people who use the Bible to condemn homosexuality but not men who pray while they are wearing hats or to condemn women teaching but not women praying with uncovered heads. Selectivity allowed enslavers to justify slave-holding and racism but not stoning disobedient sons to death.
I accept that some readers quote the Bible selectively to support their social preferences, personal actions, or treasured ideas. I do it too. Here’s my favorite quotable Paul: “‘Knowledge’ puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know” (1 Corinthians 8:2). My favorite translation of that passage puts it this way: “Anyone who claims to know all the answers doesn’t really know very much.” I take that as scriptural support for the idea that religious know-it-alls are greatly mistaken about their authority, and should strive for greater humility and tentativeness about knowledge.
While it’s worth noticing that Genesis can be used to support the patriarchal order, we might notice as well how the story also, for its era, elevates the social status of women. In all cultures of the ancient near east, including those that circulated goddess stories, most actual women were understood as beings closer to sheep or cattle than to men. You could buy, sell, and own women as property. A story that portrays women as made from the same substance as men is, for the era and region, proto-feminist. There’s no denying the story’s heterosexual orientation, but imagining a “wife” to be her husband’s “helper” rather than his property gives women a social promotion.
Feminist readers often denounce the Bible’s emphasis on child-bearing (or trouble-making) as the primary reason for any woman’s appearance in a story. The Bible frequently showcases women’s reproductive power, but also portrays women wielding power in many roles--judge, fighter/warrior, diplomat, prophet, financier, manager, homemaker, community organizer, real estate purchaser. Depending on how you interpret Creation II, however, even Eve’s trouble-making in the forbidden fruit story may be more complex than church-shaped interpretation typically admits.
Photo credit: Jean Louis Mazieres on Visual Hunt
The story’s plot gives Eve a starring role. When God puts Adam in the garden of Eden, God commands, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die” (2:16). Not long after Eve is made, a serpent appears and asks, “Did God say, “You shall not eat of any tree of the garden?” Eve confirms this and relays God’s warning “you shall die.” The serpent counters, “You will not die. . . . God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Interestingly, the serpent is correct. When Eve eats the fruit, she does not die. (Students commonly ask why not: did God lie when God said they would die if they ate the fruit? Was God mistaken?) You probably know how the story goes: “the woman saw . . . that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate.”
What happens next lends itself to a variety of interpretations: “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” What exactly happens there? How are we to account for the pair not dying, as God had predicted, but instead experiencing an “eye-opening”? To have your eyes opened usually means you acquire new understanding. Eye-opening connotes awakening, an expansion of awareness. We cannot understand the eye-opening literally: it’s clearly a metaphor requiring interpretation. The “original sin” interpretation turns this moment into a Pandora’s Box moment: a trouble-making woman does something she’s told not to do, and unleashes havoc on the world. Interpretations that focus on rebellion, disobedience, and punishment pass lightly over the remarkable effects of Eve’s independent enterprise: the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. Metaphors this provocative certainly bear more than one interpretation.
The psychologist Erich Fromm interprets Adam and Eve’s awakening as the emergence of human awareness of separateness. Adam and Eve “emancipate” themselves, Fromm writes, from an original animal harmony with nature by exercising their freedom to act as beings separate from God and separate from the rest of nature. Their sense of separateness evokes a feeling of vulnerability (nakedness), anxiety, and shame. Human development depends on such a sense of separateness. As any childhood development textbook would explain, infants move through this same process as their conscious selves develop. We are born feeling merged with the world: infants gradually form self-image by realizing their separateness from mother and world. Before we acquire agency, we must acquire a sense of separate self. According to Fromm’s interpretation, Eve precipitates the birth of self.
We could also say that Eve’s action precipitates the birth of shame. Since the pair’s new awareness compels them to invent clothes, we could read it as the acquisition of self-consciousness, personal boundaries, and modesty—all of which arise from the capacity to feel shame. Shame has a bad reputation these days, and unhealthy shame is certainly problematic. But shame is also essential to human culture: it motivates people to regulate the conduct and deportment of their own bodies and prevents people from behaving “shamelessly,” like animals. When we understand the story as symbol-picture of the birth of self-awareness and self-consciousness, Eve’s role in the story changes. Instead of condemning humanity to “sin” or instigating a “Fall,” she becomes the progenitor of human civilization, initiator of an awakening that distinguishes human from animal.
Evangelical preachers sometimes use Eve’s story to illustrate the danger of women taking initiative. Men need to control their women, some preachers argue, because look what happens when women take initiative. An Honors student of mine became an atheist listening to her pastor-father hammer relentlessly with Creation II on his daughter’s ambitions for independence. The efforts of well-meaning fundamentalists to provide “clear teaching” drive many young people away from the Bible. They turn up in my classes, wondering what it would be like to read the Bible freely, forming their own interpretations.
Feminist readers rightly raise concerns about interpretations of the forbidden fruit story that blame women for the “Fall” of humankind. However, depending on what you think happens when the man and woman eat the fruit, the story can be read as a misogynist cautionary tale about the dangers of following a woman, or a tale that inscribes women as leaders in self-awareness, moral awareness, social development, and self-determination. All four--self-awareness, moral awareness, social development, and self-determination--bring pain and suffering, but they also initiate the entire process of nation-building and cultural development that follow upon Eve’s independent act of curiosity. So does the Bible blame women for the Fall of humankind? Or credit women with the invention of culture? The answer depends on your interpretation.
Sources:
John O’Donohue, The Divine Imagination
Rob Bell, What Is the Bible?
Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Pete Enns, Inspiration and Incarnation, The Bible Tells Me So & How the Bible Actually Works
Pete Enns and Jared Byas, Genesis for Normal People
Sharon Ringe, “When Women Interpret the Bible,” in Women’s Bible Commentary, Third
Edition, Edited by Carol Newsom, Sharon Ringe, and Jaqueline Lapsley
Susan Niditch, “Genesis,” Women’s Bible Commentary
Anne W. Stewart, “Eve and Her Interpreters,” Women’s Bible Commentary
Melissa Florer-Bixler, Fire by Night
