Sunday, October 4, 2009

thoughts

I had an email from a friend yesterday who is writing a seminar on women and work and wanted feedback.

His material was good and has got me thinking.

A frustration that I feel whenever a 'women's issue' is addressed is that we always have to have Genesis 1-2 as our primary text. It makes me yawn.

Is this because:
  • I'm ungodly and don't want to hear what God wants me to hear! Do I feel discontented in my female-ness? (This is quite possible! If true, I need to repent.)
  • I've heard it too many times and am bored with it. It's okay, I agree with the content, but play me a different tune for a while... (If boredom is the issue, I need to suck it up and listen to the Gen 1-2 arguments for the sake of those who haven't heard them a million times before.)
  • I don't like female-ness being the defining thing about me. It makes me feel 'imprisoned in my gender' (see Blocher quote below)
The emphasis on the co-humanity [of the man and the woman] relativizes the differentiation as such. ʻMale and femaleʼ will never be anything more than a second truth about man and woman. History shows an ever-recurring tendency to imprison woman in her femininity, to the detriment of her participating quite simply in human life. By underlining the likeness, Genesis provides protection against the course machismo of the Mediterranean male, but also against the suspect cult of an Eternal Feminine, and against the Romantic speculations which make the masculine and feminine, like yin and yang, the
ultimate principles, the two poles of being.
(Henri Blocher, In the Beginning: The Opening Chapters of Genesis, (Leicester: IVP, 1984), p. 100, emphasis mine)

It's most likely a mix of all three. Some repentance is probably needed, some patience, and some reveling in the fact that I, just like my brothers, am a human being living in God's world.

3 comments:

  1. I can't comment on your friend's angle but I get tired of the "woman is subordinate to man because Gen 2 says that Eve was created to be Adam's helpmate" idea. By that logic, God is subordinate to man because at one point later the same word for "helpmate" is used of God helping man. Hmmm.

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