Genesis 2:15-3:7
I Timothy 2:8-15
Galatians 3:26-28, 5:1
Today’s service is focused around the theme of re-thinking Eve, and so I want to begin with a question. What words come to your mind when you hear the name “Eve.” At our first planning meeting for this service, I asked this question, and these are the words we came up with: Listen for all the contradictions:
Shame, Temptress, Smart, Gullible, Daring, Lesser, Beneath, Second, Powerful, Trapped, Pinnacle of Creation, Strength, Womb, Mother.
Once we had all these associations out on the table, the lively debate began. Where did all of these associations come from? Are they all found in the Genesis text, or are some of them imposed on the text by later interpreters with a misogynist bent? Did Eve really do anything wrong, or was she just seeking wisdom and following her natural, God-given curiosity to its logical conclusion? Does the story portray Eve seducing Adam into eating the forbidden fruit or was he equally culpable? Was she derivative of Adam, a second-best replica designed to be his servant, or was she the crown of creation, the perfection of the human species, of which Adam was a rough draft? Or was she neither below nor above Adam, but his perfect match, his equal, his partner in every way?
Is your head swimming yet? Mine sure is. The more I delved into this story, both in the biblical literature and through my conversations with people inside and outside this church, the more confusing it became, because there are so many different interpretations of this story! And so, I have a confession to make to you today. I don’t have the answers to the questions that swirl around this story. But what I bring you today, what I hope to engage you in, are the questions themselves. Because the questions are fascinating, and important, and they need to be engaged.
Let’s begin with the basic question that inspired this service: who is Eve? And what does the answer given to that question have to say about the answerer’s view of women? Because if one thing is certain, it’s that later interpreters of this story have taken a startling amount of liberty in drawing general conclusions about the nature of women based on this one biblical character. So let’s listen in to some of the answers given to this question about the nature of Eve. We’ve already heard one of the earliest answers, found in the New Testament book of I Timothy. The writer of I Timothy literally silences women in the churches because of Eve’s transgression, which in his eyes proves her to be deceitful and untrustworthy as a teacher of the gospel. The remedy for Eve’s sin, according to this early church leader, is for women to be saved through childbearing, that is, through fulfilling their only useful God-given purpose, which is aiding man in procreation. This role for Eve is, of course, specified by Adam, who names the woman “Eve,” which means, “source of all life” or “mother of all living” (Gen. 3:20).
Now, the 1 Timothy text is just plain offensive. But that’s almost milk toast compared to later writings about Eve. Fast forward a century or so, and you hear this from the famous early Church Father, Tertullian, who had this to say to women:
And do you not know that you are (each) an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that (forbidden) tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded Adam whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack.
This trajectory of the vilification of Eve probably reached its nadir with the publication in 1486 of the Malleus Maleficarum, which is Latin for “The Hammer of Witches.” Written by two monks at the height of the witchcraze, the centuries-long period when women were hunted down and persecuted as witches, these monks reflect upon why women are more susceptible to witchcraft than men. They conclude:
the natural reason is that she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. And it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, a rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives.
These are terrible texts, and I recoil from reading them from the pulpit, as I’m sure you probably recoil from hearing them. And yet, not only are these interpretations a part of our Christian history and doctrine, they are also still very much alive today, because sexism and misogyny has permeated the dominant Christian view of Eve, and hence of all womankind; and even now, sexist and misogynistic views of Eve inform many Christians in more conservative churches. And even in the UCC, as our committee exercise demonstrated, we can’t help but call up some of these negative associations when we hear the name of Eve—they are that ingrained in our cultural consciousness. But these negative views of Eve were not the only ones floating about in the atmosphere of early Christianity. You might be surprised to learn that some Christians had a very different view of Eve, a strikingly positive one.
Certain Christians living in the first few centuries after Christ became known as gnostics, because they yearned to gain access to higher awareness of spiritual truths, which they called, gnosis, the Greek word for “knowledge” or “insight.” How many of you have heard of the gnostic Christians? We know them today as heretics, because they lost the battle over Christian orthodoxy, but for a number of years, it was quite unclear which version of Christianity would prevail. The gnostic message was attractive and compelling for many believers. Gnostic Christians offered a radically different interpretation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Instead of seeing the human desire for knowledge as the cause of sin and death, they praised the human thirst for knowledge. And while orthodox Christians often blamed Eve for the “fall” and saw women’s submission to men as a fitting punishment, gnostics told a different story.
As historian Elaine Pagels writes in her book, Adam, Eve and the Serpent, “Gnostic authors loved to tell, with many variations, the story of Eve, that elusive spiritual intelligence: how she first emerged within Adam and awakened him, the soul, to awareness of its spiritual nature; how she encountered resistance, was misunderstood, attacked, and mistaken for what she was not; and how she finally joined with Adam ‘in marriage’ so to speak, and so came to live in harmonious union with the soul.” Hear this excerpt from a gnostic text called The Secret Book of John. Eve speaks:
I said, “Whoever hears, let him arise from the deep sleep.” And [Adam] wept and shed bitter tears…and he said, “Who is this that calls my name, and whence has this hope come to me while I am in the chains of this prison [of the body.] And I said, “I am the intelligence of the pure life; I am the thinking of the virginal spirit….Arise and remember…and follow your root, which is I…and beware of the deep sleep.”
Well, it’s all rather confusing, isn’t it? All these interpretations of Eve leave us right back where we started, with the question still hanging in the air, “but who, really, is Eve?” So let’s turn to the biblical text itself, the source of all these interpretations, and see if we can get any clearer answers.
Did you enjoy the dramatic reading of the text today? It really brought the story alive, didn’t it? Now that you’ve seen it performed live, what did you notice about the scene involving the man, the woman, and the serpent? Did you notice where Adam was while the serpent was talking to Eve? Was he, oh, hiding behind the pulpit? Was he off looking out the window? No! He was standing right next to Eve, listening to her dialogue with the serpent. Now granted, we weren’t there, right? But we can infer this from chapter 3, verse 6, which makes a point to note that the man was with the woman when she ate the fruit, close enough for her to simply hand over the fruit to him so he could eat it right after her. The Genesis text makes a point throughout to show that the woman and the man were experiencing everything together. Chapter 2:25: “And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.” Chapter 3:6: “And she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Chapter 3:7: “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked….”
Lillian Calles Barger puts it this way. “In Eden, Adam and Eve are ‘bone of bone, flesh of flesh”—one in intimate knowledge of each other and the world. God saw them as one, and they acted as one. To acquire wisdom, they needed each other….As Eve was socializing with the serpent, she was speaking as a representative of their union and spoke for both Adam and herself. Adam’s silence is his acquiescence.”
But even this reading of the biblical text doesn’t clear up all the questions. There are clearly different ways to interpret the text. Does the serpent approach Eve because she’s more gullible and easily deceived, or because she’s more intelligent? Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible suggests that the woman is a theologian and ethicist in this story. To Trible, the text shows female intelligence, authority and initiative—all positive traits. Some even say that Eve and Adam’s “sin” was necessary in order to bring about human culture and human history. Until they left the garden, they were not yet fully mature human beings, but childlike creatures held in a kind of timeless stasis. Yet clearly other interpreters disagree. One prominent Baptist preacher, Charles Stanley, closely echoes earlier Christian interpretations when he says, “God’s command to Adam was that he rule his domain; disaster struck when Eve ignored her husband’s instructions.” He goes on to say that, “Women can connive to get their own way if they are clever enough, evil enough, or un-Christlike enough, but seldom are they happy with the results of their manipulation.”
Well, since the beginning of this sermon, I’ve been asking the question, “who is Eve?” And we’ve heard many possible answers. Eve is a seducer, a temptress, a gullible, deceiving, manipulative troublemaker. She uses her feminine wiles to bewitch Adam into betraying God’s command. She is the weaker sex in terms of both faith and intelligence. Or, Eve is the first wisdom-seeker, the primal spiritual intelligence seeking to awaken a sleeping Adam to the higher spiritual mysteries. She is a theologian, a bringer of culture, the one with the courage to choose knowledge over ignorance. By now, you would be forgiven for wondering, what does it matter? I hope I’ve shown that it matters because Eve is still very much with us. How we read this story still matters, at least for those of us living in a Judeo-Christian milieu.
We still live in a society where women are sexualized and then blamed for tempting males, even in cases of rape. We still live in a society where women are beaten by men who quote the Bible to them, demanding submission. We still live in a society where women are kept from ordained offices, even within an increasingly divided Episcopal church, much less among their distant Baptist cousins. We still live in a society where the majority of the poor are women and children. We still live in a society where women are judged more on their looks while men are appreciated more for their minds—a society where even women television anchors must be blond and hot and young to make it on the air. And we live in a world where women harm their own bodies in order to achieve an ideal of female beauty that is unattainable, because they perceive their only value in life as pleasing men. Eve matters, because, for better or worse, Eve is perceived as Everywoman.
But what, I wonder, would Eve say if she could talk to us today? Women’s Sunday, is after all, a time to hear women’s voices. And so, if you will permit me an imaginative leap, I would suggest that Eve might say the following to us today:
“I am neither the first nor the last, neither the crown nor the afterthought of creation. I am one among many of God’s good creations. I am neither a man’s helpmeet nor plaything, neither his servant nor his master, but I am an equal partner in the project of human life. You have failed to see me for all of who I am. I am neither the virgin nor the whore, nor even the wife or the mother, but I can be all these things or none of them. When you have seen only the carnal, fleshly part of me, you have done violence to my spirit and depreciated my mind, but when you have seen me only as spirit, you have devalued my God-given body. I am a wisdom-seeker, and I desire knowledge, and I share this trait with all of humanity. Our thirst for knowledge has led to our greatest achievements as a species and also to our greatest crimes, as we have learned to turn our technologies even against the very forces of life which sustain God’s creation. Yet I am not alone culpable in this respect. Please take responsibility for your part in this. And so, along with you, I am wise and I am foolish, for finally, I am merely and gloriously human.”