Let us make, how much literature is written on that.  Is this God addressing the heavenly council? If so, then it’s not just God who’s involved in creation but the heavenly council.  The unseen realm, Is this a royal we? Is this a reference to the three persons of the Holy Trinity? In dogmatics that, across the history of the church, has been the most common way of taking the expression by far.

What  would the first readers of Genesis thought when they read, “Let us make man …” Plural..

This does not mean, because we’re made in the image of God and God made us male and female, that God himself is male and female. God is Spirit.

Reflections on the image of God.

There is probably not a Latin expression that has generated more speculation and more pages of ink than imago Dei. The image of God is bound up with conscience or it’s bound up with speech or it’s bound up with appearance or it’s bound up with rule or it’s bound up with … whatever.

The very notion of an image is that it reflects something. To be in the image of God is in some way to reflect God.

Man and Woman Created

1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27 And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

The male is created first and God puts him into the garden.

God gives to the man, to Adam directly, the task of working and caring for the garden, and also the prohibition of 2:17. All of this in the sequencing of the account in chapter 2 is before the woman appears on the scene.

After declaring everything that he’s made good, up to now, God now declares something is not good. Verse 18. What is not good is the man is alone. This then leads, in due course, to the creation of the woman.

2:18 And Jehovah God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a help meet for him. 19And out of the

2:21 And Jehovah God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof: 22 and the rib, which Jehovah God had taken from the man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. 23 And the man said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. 24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

She was created to be a “helper” suitable for him. There’s been vast literature just on the meaning of the word. Obviously, you can understand the word in such a way as to demean her, like a mother referring to her 3-1/2-year-old as Mamma’s little helper, or something of that sort. After all, in Scripture, as has often been pointed out, God himself can be called our helper. Psalm 33:20. Psalm 118:7.

It is not said that he is called into existence to help her, because when he is called into existence, she does not yet exist.  This does not bespeak any kind of ontological inferiority, but it unavoidably presupposes a distinction in roles. I do not see how you can avoid it with fair-minded exegesis.

The marriage thus formed is not the joining of two identical persons but almost the reunion of two slightly different halves coming together to form one flesh. One in their sexual union. One in the children they produce. One in the establishment of one new social unit, one new family, leaving father and mother and cleaving to the spouse.

The Roles of Men and Women

There are different opinions on the whole subject of complementarianism and egalitarianism. If complementarianism is true, and we understand it to be true, then how important is it? Should it be relegated to one of those relatively peripheral issues where some buy it and some don’t and we just agree to disagree?

Egalitarianism is Christian view on gender roles that holds that women and men properly have equal and interchangeable roles in the home, church, and wider society. This view is opposed to complementarianism, which holds that the proper roles for men and women are distinct and complementary. A theological view that although men and women are created equal in their being, morals, and destiny, they have different roles and responsibilities in marriage, family, and religious leadership.

Egalitarianism holds that women can hold all the same roles in church leadership as men, and that in a marriage authority is properly shared equally between husband and wife. Egalitarianism also holds that women and men may properly hold the same positions in society more broadly.

“How important is the historicity of Adam and Eve to the theological justification of complementarianism?”

The historicity of Adam and Eve is essential to make sense of Christ’s headship over the new humanity. That is more central yet and becomes finally non-negotiable.

Some Christians disagree over where to draw the line on this issue.  I am not of the camp that supports the broad, sweeping egalitarianism that says there’s no difference between men and women. I just don’t think that you can make that square with Scripture. With all the best will in the world to those who disagree, I don’t think you can.

Complementarianism, is sufficiently clearly taught in Scripture, it is structurally important, and sufficiently needed in our culture that churches and Christian organizations ought to defend it, especially with respect to the teaching function of the church.

Complementarianism is sufficiently clearly taught in Scripture.

In Genesis 1, God makes man and woman in his image. It is very important to say that on all kinds of fronts, men and women are linked. They’re equivalent, they are human beings equally made in the image of God and are of equal significance.

In chapter 2, when creation is re-told, she is made “as a help suitable for him.” What some say is, “Yes, but don’t forget that the word help or helper is sometimes used for God himself.

Of course, the word can refer to God, and it can refer to other human beings. The point is that she is created as a helper to him, not the other way around.

That fact is picked up as part of the reason behind Paul’s argumentation in 1 Timothy 2.

11 Let a woman learn in quietness with all subjection. 12 But I permit not a woman to teach, nor to have dominion over a man, but to be in quietness. 13 For Adam was first formed, then Eve; 14 and Adam was not beguiled, but the woman being beguiled hath fallen into transgression:

It’s not an isolated point. It’s something that is picked up as being significant. Then there are two or three passages in the New Testament that speak of the husband as being the head of the wife: 1 Corinthians 11, Ephesians 5, and so forth.

There has been an astonishing effort to demonstrate that the word head, when it is speaking of something metaphorical as opposed to that which wobbles on the top of my neck, often means something like source.

The difficulty is that when studies have been done of every use of the word (head) from about 300 BC to about AD 300, the evidence doesn’t really line up to support that view. In a handful of cases where head is used in the plural, metaphorically, it can mean streams that are the sources of things, like the heads of a river, but you don’t find a single example of head used metaphorically, in the literature from 300 years before Christ to 300 years after Christ, that unambiguously means source.

On that basis, to try to take away the fairly plain meaning of the passage like the one we read in order to inject the notion of source strikes as trying to escape the obvious. “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body.” Does that mean just source?

“Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”

Of course, this question of submission in chapter 5 is taken up,  everybody is supposed to submit to everybody. Therefore, if there are some texts that say, “Wives, submit to your husbands,” well, yes, but that falls under the blanket rubric of everybody submit to everybody,

21 subjecting yourselves one to another in the fear of Christ.

The question is.… Is that word always reciprocal? What you have is submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ, and then wives submit to the husbands, children to the parents, and slaves to the masters. If you want perfect reciprocity in the flow of the argument, you also have to have parents submitting to their children too.

A well-established complementarianism would say, Men and women are equally important to God and equally made in his image, but there are certain distinctions in roles beyond the fact that one can have babies and the other can’t.

The distinction in roles mandated by Scripture is located in the home and in the teaching office in the church, the church-recognized teaching authority over men. It seems to me that in the New Testament it is forbidden for a woman to have a church-recognized teaching authority over men.

This matter is sufficiently clearly taught in Scripture. It is, today, widely disputed, you have to work through the text and listen with the kind of attention that doesn’t care how the answer comes out so long as you’re submitting to the text.

The truth is, If you have an agenda and are clever, you can always make the text come out on the side you want it to. You always can. That doesn’t mean that the text is as ambiguous as all of that.

It just means that with a few years of Greek, a couple of courses of hermeneutics, a little bit of independence, some imagination, and reading one another’s works, pretty soon you can build a whole school of thought. It’s been done again and again on every topic under the sun.

Sometimes, these debates in earlier forms are forgotten, and one of the things that happens in the church when errors come up again is that people then dig out the previous debates.

We had the formulas down (we had inherited them), but we became pretty sloppy.

Complementarianism is sufficiently demonstrated to be structurally important.

It’s not that the questions of man-woman relationships just have to do with marriage and a bit of social dynamics so we can agree to disagree on just about everything here because it doesn’t have much bearing on the gospel.

We live in a culture where divorce, remarriage, and adultery are things you joke about. They are things that happen. It’s a plaything, It’s freedom. “I’ve lost my love for him or her” or whatever. Yet these questions of loyalty and fidelity and one flesh have a kind of parallel, a kind of ultimate reality, in the relationship between Christ and the church, so much so that one of the images of the final state is the marriage supper of the Lamb.

Then there’s the marriage supper of the Lamb in order to show that the ultimate state of union between Christ and the church can only be adequately be described in our lacking little vision of things by a honeymoon.

marriage in Scripture is interwoven with a lot more than just what headship means. It’s more than just a social accident. There is structure. There is something that finds its ultimate antitype in Christ and the church.  We must be very careful.

Complementarianism is culturally needed.

We can’t flinch from this one. When people say, “Why is complementarianism so important?” The place to begin is not with complementarianism, The place to begin is marriage.

In many of the cities of North America, 67 to 70 percent of children are born into single-parent families. The social ravages are past finding out, and we will reap that harvest for decades.

the priority should be, “How do you build a Christian family?”

We need dads who do not exasperate their children and who bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

We need adults not viewing children as a massive inconvenience to their lifestyle but as an inheritance from the Lord. Within that framework, we can talk about complementarianism, but those planks need to get laid down first.

We should worry about the feminization of the church.

Complementarianism is a needed stake in the ground today, not in and of itself but as part and parcel of bowing to Scripture on what the family is and how authority structures work in the church.

How you determine you stance on this is a hermeneutical issue.

If you find your interpretative principles so flexible and so elastic that you can get around all of these texts, which are really far more straightforward than people think, then I can’t see why you cannot use the same hermeneutical arguments to justify, likewise, homosexuality and its practice.

The hermeneutical issue that troubles me is that if we are hermeneutically sloppy on the passages that deal with man-woman relationships, I cannot see where there’s a hermeneutical barrier to being equally sloppy on the next stage.

The reason this sort of thing has become a touchstone in our churches is not because there are a lot of cranky old men that are just trying to say, “No.” It’s because sooner or later, you have to address the question.

Will we live under the authority of the Word of God or not?

If the definition I have given you is a fair summary, the church-recognized teaching authority over men is forbidden the woman. If that is a fair summary of the church side of the matter, it doesn’t rule out a Priscilla and an Aquila helping Apollos to get his theology straight, but it does rule out a woman being a pastor-elder-bishop because part of what defines that job is the authority to teach. Moreover, I would insist that once you have established the principle, the outworking in practice might be quite diverse.

I’m prepared to be quite flexible on the outworking of these things so long as the principle is there. That is, God’s Word does make a distinction in roles in two domains between men and women: in the home and in the authority structure of the local church.

If this is, in truth, what God’s Word says then it is, to use the title of Claire Smith’s book, God’s good design. It is not to be fought against; it is to be rejoiced in. It is to be worked out. It is to be cherished, defended, and lived out with pleasure, because God knows the end from the beginning. He knows what is really good.

It does not justify men becoming exploitative. It does not justify women becoming mice. It doesn’t stop Hanna Gray from being president of the University of Chicago. But it does seek to restore the family to the church, to the home, to the culture, and to society. It does seek to call men to be men in a biblically defined notion of manhood that includes compassion and gentleness and the love of Christ, who sacrifices himself for others.