Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 28:4 (Autumn 2014)
Article: The Genesis Of Equality, Part 1
Author: Kevin Giles

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PP 28:4 (Autumn 2014) p. 3

The Genesis Of Equality, Part 1

Kevin Giles

Kevin Giles, an Australian, has served as an Anglican parish minister for over forty years. He has been publishing on the substantial equality of the sexes since 1975 and is a foundation member of CBE International. He holds a doctorate in New Testament studies and has published books on the church, church health, ministry in the apostolic age, the Book of Acts, gender equality and the Trinity, besides numerous scholarly and popular articles.

The painful and seemingly unending division among evangelicals over the relationship of the sexes is bedeviled by disputes about the interpretation of key biblical texts, most notably 1 Tim 2:9-15.1 However, how this Pauline text is understood depends more than anything else on how Gen 1-3 is understood. For complementarians2 what makes Paul’s prohibition on women teaching and exercising authority in church universally and transculturally binding is the premise that in creation, before the Fall, God gave the man authority over the woman. The importance for complementarians of the belief that woman was subordinated to man before the Fall cannot be overestimated. In stressing the vital nature of this argument for complementarians, Daniel Doriani notes that “nineteen of the twenty two authors” in the definitive collection of essays, Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, argue for the subordination of women “on the basis of creation, or the order or creation. . . .”3

Egalitarian evangelicals entirely agree with complementarians that no text in all of scripture is more important than Gen 1-3 in working out the God-given ideal for the man-woman relationship. The two groups simply disagree on how these chapters are to be interpreted.

Genesis 1

Gen 1 is rightly seen as a prologue to the whole Bible. It is put first because what it teaches is of first importance.4 It tells us that everything is created by God, that what God creates is good and that the apex of God’s creative work is humankind, man and woman standing side by side—one species, two sexes. In Gen 1:27 we read,

So God created humankind (’adam5),
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

The...

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