The Origin of Gender Roles

All of us have heard people blaming someone, or something, for their misfortune or lack of success. But even though blaming someone makes people feel better, it doesn't fix the problem. 

Adam blamed Eve, but God didn't let him stay in the garden.
Eve blamed the serpent, but she didn't get to stay either. 

SBC is currently looking for reasons for their declining numbers, and evangelism has been offered as a solution - and prayer. But how will they reach a world that has already run past them and doesn't identify with their in many ways outdated, worldview? If their message is, "repent and be baptized!" while people think it is the SBC that should do the repenting, they aren't going to get too far.

Patriarchy has always blamed women for all the misfortunes that have befallen humanity, and theologians who believe patriarchy is God's ideal have been quick to do the same. But creating churches for men, and preaching only to the men doesn't produce the church everyone is looking for. For if we exclude women, we get a body that looks like it has had a stroke. It needs to be hospitalized.

But why are our theologians so anxious to exclude women? Why would the exclusion of women make the church a better place? The answer is found in patriarchy itself: 

"If Thomas’ argument [that the woman was created inferior to the man] didn’t match the perfection of the original creation, why did it become so incredibly popular? To find the answer, we must travel back in time and visit ancient Greece. The Greeks considered themselves supremely wise contrasted to their “barbarian” neighbors due to their long tradition of loving wisdom, or philosophy, as they would call it. Aristotle, whose philosophy Thomas Aquinas used to argue that the wiser man should rule, was one of their brightest stars. Unfortunately, Aristotle didn’t write down only his own wise thoughts; he added also the beliefs of his fellow Athenians into his writings (being the product of his own time), including the ideas that originated from their mythology, although he was unwilling to prescribe to their pantheon of gods. Thus, through Thomas Aquinas the ancient patriarchal beliefs of the Greeks found their way into theology, and our theologians would repeat them endlessly until no one remembered where they came from.

In order to discover exactly how our reading of the creation account was altered, we must find out what the ancient Greeks believed about men and women. We know Athenians believed women were born to obey their husbands, and to live a life of quietness in their homes spinning and weaving, cooking and cleaning. It was the women’s job to care for oikos (the home) in order to make it possible for their husbands to dedicate their time to running polis (the city). Athenian women were respected for their docility, silence, and invisibility—a respectable woman’s name was never to be mentioned in public. Men, on the other hand, were respected for their skills as hunters (providers) and fighters (protectors), and their ability to make decisions without a display of emotions. Hence, whereas the woman’s life was marked by restrictions, passivity, and domestic dullness, the man’s life was one of freedom from restraining rules that would have subdued his passions and desires; chastity and moderation were for women. Philosophers tried to curb the worst of the excesses, but none of them refuted the belief that women were inferior, irrational, emotional, conniving, and deceitful creatures, for in Greek mythology the first woman—Pandora—was created from clay to deceive the man with her beauty and cunning. The purpose of her creation was to punish Prometheus for his theft of fire that benefitted humankind; Prometheus wished humankind well, Zeus didn’t. In addition, it was Pandora who opened the jar given to her by Zeus that unleashed all the woes that came to plague humankind. Because all Athenian women were considered to be Pandoras, deceitful and out of control, they had to be strictly controlled by men in order to prevent further mischief from occurring.[i] (Genesis 3: The Origin of Gender Roles, p 64-65)

When theologians blame women for the declining numbers, or the discomfort of men (the "feminizing" of the church), they side with ancient patriarchs, who believed the woman had a different origin than the man, and therefore a very different nature than the man. And because she had a different nature, she was created for a different "role" than the man. 

The Bible does not agree. 

By taking the Bible seriously, egalitarian theologians are returning the church to its origin, to the proclamation of the equality of all humankind. Having created the woman from the man, and having brought the woman to the man, God heard the man say the woman was like him, for he called the woman a "female human." What he was, she was, created for the same purpose, having the same calling in life, the same role to play: that of caring for the created world in partnership with their Creator. 

Gender roles do not belong in our theology, for they were not created by God. The origin of gender roles is found in Genesis 3 as they were created after the entrance of sin to fit a world that knows good and evil, and that is ruled by patriarchy. It is time for all of our theologians to recognize this truth.

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[i] “And so we come to the virtues of women, the qualities that allow them best to correspond to the “natural” model. “Silence is a woman’s glory.” Says Aristotle, citing a well-known line of Sophocles, and thus he reconfirms the usual female model. Endowed with a smaller and imperfect reason, incapable of controlling her “lustful” side, the woman, who has no will, must be controlled by either the husband or the state.” (Pandora’s Daughters, p 60) http://eportfolios.ithaca.edu/eoaks1/colegeeessays/mortalgoddess/ [accessed 1/15/2014] Pandora’s Daughters, p 60.

[ii] 1 Corinthians 1:20

[iii] 1 Corinthians 10:18-22