Adam and Eve were created as perfect beings without sin. They were created separately however. First, Adam was created, and later Eve was created. The Bible states:
And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet [“helper” NIV] for him. Gen 2:18
And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof; And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam 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. Gen 2:21-23
According to these verses, woman was not made at the same time as man. She was instead made later for man. Her role and reason for being was to be a “help meet” or “helper” for man. This is before Eve had sinned. She was not to be a competitor with Adam or to be his equal in role. She was designed and built to help Adam with his aims and desires. It must be remembered that this was in the perfect world of Eden before sin entered in. If sin had not come, Adam and Eve would still be living in Eden and Eve would still be Adam’s “helper.”
Next we are told that Eve sinned, and then caused Adam to sin. For this she was punished by God. After God pronounced a curse on the serpent who had deceived Eve, He continued on:
To the woman he said, I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” Gen 3:16
Adam was then cursed also with hard work and sweat until he died.
All three of the parties involved with the fall of mankind were punished. The snake had to crawl in the dirt, the woman had to be subservient to her husband, and the man had to work hard to get enough to eat. Some have tried to claim that this was not a command of God, a curse upon mankind, but the verses are quite clear here. God commanded that man was to rule over his wife, but he would have to work hard to support her and himself.
Now, here we have a situation where no human tradition was in place. There was no bias of hundreds or thousands of years of male dominated society influencing what transpired. We do not have imperfect men making up some rule that is slanted to suit themselves. Instead, the Old Testament, which Jesus proclaimed to be perfect down to the very punctuation, states that God Himself proclaimed that a woman was to be “ruled over” by her husband at the very beginning.
God could have set any other arrangement that He wanted. He could have said to Adam, "OK, you want to follow your wife into trouble, from now on you will have to do whatever she says." Or He could have said, "From now on I want you both to think for yourselves and don't follow what the other says because we can see where that leads. Be equal." Instead, we see that biblically a male dominated society was dictated by God Himself because of Eve’s sin.
The feminist of today proclaim that their lot in life has been dictated by those evil creatures called men. They even go so far as to state that the Bible was written by a bunch of men who had it in for women. To disbelieve the Bible is certainly their right but it would be completely deceitful to then turn around and claim to be Christian, because without the Bible, they would not even know that Christ existed, let alone what He taught.
At no point in the Bible is this male-dominated arrangement countermanded. Indeed, we find that this Eden story is referred to by Paul thousands of years later to support the rule of the Christian church that women were not to teach men in the church and that wives were to submit to their husbands. From start to finish, the Bible states that women are to be ruled over by their husbands.
Paul says:
“For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.” [I Cor 11:8,9]
He is not stating something new or original. As we have seen, he is just restating the facts as laid out in Genesis. Woman was made as a helper to man, not the other way around. And when Paul forbids women from teaching men or having authority over men he recalls Eden, the creation of woman as man’s helper, and the fall where the woman brought sin into the world:
But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve, And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if she continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety. 1 Tim 2:12-15.
Here is not some new doctrine. This is as old as the first book in the Bible. Paul is merely showing support for the command of God in Genesis 3:16. Even the reference to childbearing comes from there. The feminists who call Paul a woman hater, are pointing their fingers at the wrong source for their frustration! The Bible says that God proclaimed the role of women to be in submission to their husbands way back in the Garden of Eden as the first parents were being shown the way out.
If you look at what our society has become because of rejecting this biblical doctrine (see Feminism and Divorce), you will realize that our progressive and modern view is destructive to women, even more than men.
The term Christian Feminist is an oxymoron because the Bible clearly, and repeatedly, in both New and Old Testaments, states that a woman is not to have authority over a man, nor be his equal in role. She is to be ruled over by her husband, and be submissive to him. The feminist is saying just the opposite and therefore rejects the Bible. By rejecting the Bible, she is rejecting the only source of information about Christ and His teachings. She therefore is not and cannot be a Christian.
