Fattening beef, commercial "farming" (photo from Animal farm Life)

I was recently asked about the ethics of animal testing. While I’m aware that it is a very contentious issue for “animal rights activists” it is not one I have thought much about. Though, since I grow animals to eat, I am closer existentially to that related issue than someone who gets their meat from the supermarket.

It seems to me there are some simple principles that provide guidance:

• God made animals so we have a general responsibility to care for them like for the rest of creation (see Gen 1)
• God explicitly allowed the use of animals for human benefit including killing them to eat (see Gen 9:3) n.b. I’d see this extending to the next line…
• Research and testing which is of other great benefit for humans should also therefore be considered within God’s will.

We have a duty to care for God's creation - including other creatures we use for food.

This leads to the tentative conclusions:

If you would like a review copy of the print version of my new book:

Tim Bulkeley, Not Only a Father: Talk of God as Mother in the Bible & Christian Tradition (Signs) Auckland: Archer Press, 2011 ISBN: 978-1468091373

Please contact me, please say both where you expect to publish the review (blogs are quite acceptable though a full review rather than a short note would be good) and when you are expect to write it. There are no conditions and you should be as critical as you normally would.

Facebook does not seen good at giving attributions, so I don't know who produced this, if it was you write to me and I'll gladly attribute it :)

I’ve seen several peopl, including Rowland Crowcher, post this ”infographic” on Facebook. Since I’ve spoken quite a bit on “Family in the Bible”, and am due to speak to a leaders group from the NZ Christian Network on the “Theology of Marriage” really soon it makes me hopping mad!

In one sense the graphic is “true”. The Bible does present all these, and more (some arguably worse) patterns of marriage. It is also true that God chose to work in and through many of these. Just looking at Abraham (the “father” of the three monotheistic religions) or Jacob (aka “Israel”) makes it clear that God does not turn aside from some convoluted and perverse human arrangements in choosing who to use as a channel of grace.

But, do any of these represent “a biblical view of marriage”. Hell no! It is time for some stakes in the ground. In terms of the teaching of Scripture it is clear that Gen 2 is a privileged text (Jesus and Paul both cite it when discussing marriage). This passage, and the teaching of Jesus and Paul make some basics clear:

Marriage:

• was ordained by God
• is the union of a man and a woman
• produces and nurtures the next generation
• provides necessary partnership

However, in this (as in everything else) human sinfulness warps and twists God’s intent. All of the “biblical” marriages listed in the graphic reflect this.

See some of my earlier posts for background to this one:

•  What is a family?
• Does the Bible present a preferred pattern of family
• Reading the Bible: seeking teaching on family

I am aware that what I have written in the very short and angry post here will be understood by some people as endorsing particular views on the currently hot and vexed topic of “Gay marriages”. It does. Gay marriage is an oxymoron since not only is marriage the partnership of a man and a woman, but also intended to produce as well as nurture the next generation. However, the view endorsed above says nothing about either Civil Unions, or about the possibility of blessing (or even solemnising) them in churches. As far as I am concerned that seem to be separate issues, and ones on which my view of marriage does not entail any particular position. I wish that we (Christians of all stripes, marriage activists of every opinion, and especially the authorities of both states and churches) would just sit back and separate the two things and issues.

Until more complex theories of aerodynamics were developed accepting the possibility of "the flight of the bumblebee" required a suspension of disbelief - Photo by by stuant63

Yesterday I was asked: If Noah lived before the law was revealed to Moses, how did he know how to distinguish “clean” and “unclean” animals?

It is still holiday time (it’s the summer in NZ, though with all the rain and cold in recent weeks you wouldn’t believe it) so my answer was less full than it ought to have been:

Hmm… on Noah, Moses and the animals, there are two likely lines for an answer (a) the story of Noah is being told after the delivery of the law and so the telling reflects those categories; (b) there was perhaps a cultural practice of distinguishing clean and unclean animals even before the law was revealed to Moses (as there was already such a practice of not eating pork).

Of course the short simple answer is “we really don’t know” but people don’t like that one ;)

But it’s not as simple as that¹ behind any attempt to answer such a question lie two fundamentally different ways to read.

One way looks at the text from the outside, and reads as a “critic”. For a couple of centuries, in academic biblical studies, the most frequent way to thus “objectify”² the text has been to examine it historically to see where it came from and how it got to us. Such an approach noticing that there seems to be a “continuity error” here suggests that the text was written at some time later than the events described, and uses this and other signs to work out when and by whom. We could objectify the text in other ways, by examining it as an example of a particular genre or class of texts, against its sociological background…

The other way enters the “world” of the text, and reads it from the inside. This is to behave like a “reader” for this is how we read novels and other stories, indeed it is how we read physics textbooks too ;) In the case of Noah’s distinction my second answer (though it depends on a historical hypothesis and so perhaps looks like the same kind of answer as the first) tends in this direction. It is asking how we might explain this, not as a continuity error (the critic’s approach), but within Noah’s world (a readerly approach).

The great medieval Jewish commentator Rashi took a different readerly approach he explained it thus:

Of all the clean animals: that are destined to be clean for Israel. We learn [from here] that Noah studied the Torah. (From Chabad.org)

Each basic direction of reading offers several different options or styles. But the basic question facing a reader of any text whether to read as critic or as reader. “Readers” must offer the text a willing suspension of disbelief³ Indeed the idea of a need to suspend disbelief can be helpful in thinking about the reading (as opposed to the criticism) of all narrative. For in a laboratory report also there are elements of the narration of the experiment that are omitted, or poorly described, where the reader must suspend disbelief. Despite the variety of both critical and readerly approaches, and despite the fact that they can even share approaches (as above either can examine the text historically), on the suspension of disbelief they differ fundamentally.

[Incidentally,⁴ Rabbi Yaakov Asher Sinclair has a really interesting meditation for Purim on "The Willing Suspension of Disbelief".]

1. Except the last answer, because we really do not know ;)
2. Make into the object of study and examination.
3. The phrase is Coleridge’s from the Biographia Literaria of 1817, to explain how readers might approach the fantastic or supernatural elements in his work, but has been widely used in thinking about how readers can read many sorts of fiction. (( JRR Tolkein has also nuanced it speaking about “secondary belief” based on an inner consistency to the reality described in the narrative. But that’s getting too complicated for a short blog post ;)
4. Though not at all a HT ;)

Bookends (photo by Kevin Grocki, and in honour of Jim West)

In previous posts in this series I have been critical of Wayne Grudem’s interpretations of Gen 1-3:

• Biblical understandings of human gender: Part One: Beginnings
• Biblical understandings of human gender: How to read the Bible: Larger passages trump verses
• Biblical understandings of human gender: Part Two: The creation of human gender
• Biblical understandings of human gender: Part Four: Grudem on Adam and Eve
• Biblical understandings of human gender: Part Five: Grudem on Adam and Eve ii

It is pleasant therefore to write a post in which we largely agree.

The KJV rendered the last word in  Gen 2:18 knegdo as “meet for him” giving rise to the neologism “helpmeet” to describe women and their role with respect to men. The KJV translators did not create this neologism, they merely placed together the two words “help” and “meet” meaning “appropriate”, thus (as we’ll see) accurately rendering the Hebrew. The new conjoint word “helpmeet” was however in use before the end of the 17th century, and rewritten as “helpmate” in the next century.¹

The misappropriation of the KJV’s “help meet” to present a subservient role for women has led to a backlash, which Grudem’s book presents as typified by Aída Besançon Spencer’s claims in her 1989 work Beyond the Curse: Women Called to Ministry. Spenser (a New Testament scholar who ought therefore to have known better) translated “I will make for him a helper as if in front of him“. Then she leaped from this over-literal monstrosity to claim that “[f]ront or visible seems to suggest superiority or equality” the second is clearly true of any sensible rendering of the phrase, the first is evidently false, as Grudem notes.²

But on the other hand, and again as Grudem recognises knegdo does mean “corresponding to” and so implies equality and complementarity (i.e. mutuality) rather than some hierachy. In the second half of this sentence Grudem and I begin to part company, but since the reasons concern our understanding of “helper” ‘ezer rather than “meet” I’ll save that discussion for another post.

While it is true that knegdo is a rare construction found only in this chapter the core of the expression neged meaning beside or in front of, so here over-literally something like “as beside him” the implication of “corresponding to him” or “fitting for him” is fairly clear and the choice of all commonly accepted Bible translations in English.

The conclusion of this post is that knegdo means corresponding and implies that men and women are both equal and complementary (in the sense that we can fill out what the other lacks). It is in how these two truths can be held together without one in practice denying the other that the complexity of our topic lies. My next post on “helper” ‘ezer will begin to explore some aspects of this.

1. See Oxford Dictionaries Online.
2. Her appeal to nagid prince or leader to support her claims is disingenuous from a NT scholar, as Grudem notes. 

In a previous post I dealt with Grudem’s first three reasons for claiming that we can see male headship in Scripture “before the fall”.

His fourth reason: “The naming of the human race” seems to me disingenuous. He claims that God names humanity “man” in Gen 5:1-2. This claim depends on arguing that ‘adam is not a gender neutral term. That claim depends on citing a selection of verses from the early chapters of Genesis, where ‘adam functions often as a proper name Adam (human), corresponding to his partner’s name Eve (life). One cannot argue from this (usually) quite distinct usage to claim that ‘adam where it is not a name is not a gender neutral term. Indeed quite the opposite, the way the Hebrew and Greek languages are used in Scripture shows that gendered terms like ‘ish & adelphos in the plural at least can and do act as gender neutral terms!¹

I don’t plan to address the other arguments from his ten as they seem to me either to place too much weight on some idea which might or might not be present in the text but which is not expressed there, or to depend on reading back into Genesis elements of later theology (risking a circular argument).

So, in summary I am not convinced by Grudem that we should understand Gen 1-3 as teaching before the fall the submission of one gender to another or the authority of one over the other.

Therefore my conclusion from examining these chapters is that:

• humans are created male and female equally in the image of God
• humans are created for partnership in difference (but there seems before the fall to be no suggestion of a difference in authority or a hierarchy between the genders in God’s creative design)
• as a consequence of the fall women may be “ruled” by their men.

1. Incidentally in his footnote 20 he cites BDB to claim that ‘adam has four senses. When I looked it seemed that his meaning 3 “a man in distinction from a woman” is simply not present in BDB, which does not seem to support his ideas. 

Adam and Eve, from Genesis. Catacombs of Saints Marcellinus and Peter (via Wikimedia)

Many people, including those with whom I am in conversation here,¹ cite Wayne Grudem’s work (and especially his Evangelical Feminism and Biblical Truth) to argue for an understanding of Gen 1-3 (or perhaps more accurately Gen 2-3 since Grudem himself seems to read Gen 1 in a fully egalitarian sense)² in a way very different from how I have understood those chapters in previous posts. A key to Grudem’s arguments here are his “Ten arguments showing male headship in marriage before the Fall”. Here I will address only his first three:

1. The order: Adam was created first, then Eve
2. The representation: Adam, not Eve, had a special role in representing the human race
3. The naming of woman

On the order and naming I think it is significant to notice that the human being ‘adam is only spoken of as a “man”³ when he recognises the woman as “bone of his bone” etc. (i.e. “corresponding to him” to use God’s language from 2:18)⁴ and it is at this same moment that recognising himself as “man” he recognises her as “woman”. Far from suggesting “male headship in marriage before the fall” this to me suggests gender reciprocity.⁵

I want to deal at greater length with Grudem’s second point. He claims, in brief summary that Adam (understood as the husband of Eve, not as humanity) acts in a representative way while Eve does not. Before we start to look at Grudem’s argument I would like to point out a complication. In Gen 1-2 the word ‘adam is used in two different ways (it would be convenient if one were signalled by affixing the article ha’adam “the human being” but that usage is not clear).⁶ Sometimes as in Gen 1:26-27; 2:5 ‘adam clearly (in 1:27 also explicitely) means a human or humanity. Whereas in 3:21 the term acts as a name. Our difficulty stems from the other usages where it might be a name, Adam, or it might be a description “the human”.⁷

1 Cor 15:22 is a key text for Grudem:

21 For since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being;  22 for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:21-22 )

In verse 21 the Greek word used is anthropos roughly an equivalent of the Hebrew ‘adam since it means a human being or humanity in general rahter than (usually) a “man”. In v.22 Paul uses adam, which is not a Greek term to indicate that he is talking about the opening chapters of Genesis. Although Grudem claims that here:

The New Testament does not say, “as in Eve all die,” but rather, “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”

I am not convinced that here Paul is saying “as in Adam, but not Eve, all die”. It seems to me rather that his use of anthropos in the verse before suggests that here adam represents the Hebrew ‘adam rather than a gendered name.

Grudem concludes this section saying:

Adam alone represented the human race, because he had a particular leadership role that God had given him, a role Eve did not share.

How odd, that in Gen 1-3 this “particular leadership role” given by God is not mentioned in the text, but must be inferred back into the text after thousands of years of fallen existance in a gendered and unequal world.

1. Previous posts in the series are:
   • Biblical understandings of human gender: Part One: Beginnings
   • Biblical understandings of human gender: How to read the Bible: Verses are meaningless
   • Biblical understandings of human gender: How to read the Bible: Larger passages trump verses
   • Biblical understandings of human gender: Part Two: The creation of human gender
   • Biblical understandings of human gender: Part Three: Gender in a fallen world

2. I am trying in this series of posts to use Egalitarian and Complementarian spelt, with capital letters, to speak of the “party-line” positions often identified in that way, and spelt in lowercase, egalitarian and complementarian, when speaking of emphases or positions that seem to fit those labels, but which I am not identifying with some “party-line”. Thus, here, I am saying that on pp.25-28 where he deals with the claim that “Men and women are equal in value and dignity” Grudem is presenting a position, that is probably not that of a party-line Egalitarian, but is “egalitarian” in that it affirms the equal dignity and value of women and men.
3. = male human
4. kenegdo is translated variously but always with something like this sense NIV is the weakest of the translations I consulted.  The LXX went further still to accomodate this verse to traditional views of gender by omitting the term altogether!
5. An egalitarian view, with a small E.
6. In fact it almost seems the opposite of what one might expect, with “the human” meaning Adam.
7. As I said the presence or absence of the article does NOT neatly distinguish these usages for us.

Although Gen 1 talks of humanity as created “male and female” it only uses the biological terms, and not the particular words for “woman” and “man”. Like most languages the gendered terms for man and woman suggest much more than mere biological significance.

‘ishah the word for woman is first used in Gen 2:22 where the LORD God builds a woman from the material taken from the human/humanity. The word for “man” is first used in the next verse, where in identifying her as “woman” the first man identifies himself as such ‘ish.

[At this point we need an excursus on the relationship between Gen 1 and 2¹ These two chapters cannot be a sequential narrative for at 1:27 human female(s) already exist. Therefore, I will not try to harmonise the two narratives, though one perhaps might by seeing Gen 2 as a description of what happened in Gen 1:27.) Rather I will try to ask what each separately is seeking to teach us.]

Gen 2:25 seems to me more closely connected to chapter 3 than to chapter 2, note not least the keyword “naked” – though it may serve as a narrative bridge linking the two episodes.² In that case the conclusion to Gen 2 (before we start to think of what is to come in Gen 3) is Gen 2:24:

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.

The linking word “therefore” (‘al-ken) strongly suggests that this verse provides the conclusion (or punch line) of chapter 2. Both Jesus and Paul cite this verse in teaching about marriage (Mat 19:5-6; Mark 10:8; 1 Cor 6:16; Eph 5:31) in each case it is the unity created by this union that is stressed.

That too is what Gen 2 has stressed. When presented (v.22) with the “woman” the human says:

This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman,
for out of Man this one was taken. (Genesis 2:23)

Coming after the “unsuitable” helpers that all the animals proved to be, though it is clear that in purely functional terms animals can be a great help – horses carry us faster than legs, elephants lift tree trunks it would take many humans to move at all… – they do not fulfil the divine intention of 2:18 to provide a helper kenegdo (like opposite/corresponding to him). What woman has that animals do not (since reproduction is NOT mentioned at this point in the narrative) is that man and woman correspond.

Noticing further that a “helper” is usually one who supplies a lack or need, and is never a term for an inferior in Scripture reinforces the overall impression that this chapter teaches the equality and complementarity of the two human genders.

[I am aware that the two "tendencies" at war in debates over gender in Christian circles today are named "complementarian" and "egalitarian". My point here is not that either (or even both) doctrinaire positions are correct, but that both have names that express biblical truth.]

So, in Gen 1 we learned that humanity was created (male and female together) in the image of God, and that this image does not reside in one part of humanity or the other alone. Here in Gen 2 we learn that humans are made for each other, that we need the companionship of beings who are like us but different. The need of Gen 2:18 is not for mere physical help, that animals can provide, nor merely to reproduce (however highly the Bible values that) but for complementarity and equality. Both Feminism (as it is often expressed to imply some sort of quasi-sameness rather than equal-but-different) and Complementarianism (as it is often expressed to imply less than equality) are unbiblical. Yet both are also (understood “rightly”) thoroughly biblical, Feminism (with the Bible and against thousands of years of popular culture) afirms the equality of women and men, Complementarianism (with Scripture and against some strands of contemporary culture) affirms that women and men are meant to be different (Hurray! ;) and should not be forced to behave or think alike, forced into uncomfortable molds.

[The really hard questions will, of course, come when we ask about this "difference". Some "Complementarians" will assert that all sorts of gender roles are "built in" by the creator, and that particular men and women must try to conform to these predetermined roles. As I hope to show my view is that such attempts go beyond the biblical hope expressed in Gen 1-2, and are not called for elsewhere in Scripture. But that's another story ;) ]

1. Always remembering that the "real" chapter division takes place after the seven days of the week in chapter one are finished, at Gen 2:3-4.
2. See Ruth 1:22 for a nice example of such a bridge that clearly links to both chapters.

Photo of Pleiades Star Cluster by aresauburn™

I’ve been prodded by a couple of careful and humane responses¹ to my quick and thoughtless post pointing to a neat mocking of the Danvers Statement on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood to address in greater depth (and I hope with more respect to those I disagree with) why I come to the conclusions I do about gender and gender roles.

Where should I start? As a Baptist, obviously with Scripture. But different people start in different places in Scripture, we might begin by looking at the gender roles described or assumed in the Bible, but it seems to me worth beginning at a more fundamental level.  Why not start at the start of Scripture itself, in Genesis 1ff. with the strong clear teaching there about God, the world and humanity?

God and Human Gender in Genesis 1²

Genesis chapter one is a powerful piece of highly polished writing, it often seems on reading it that every word has its place and has been carefully chosen.³

God

Among many other important things the chapter hammers home an understanding of the God (‘elohim – the word looks like a plural of the word for a god, “gods”, but is clearly singular here and throughout the Hebrew Bible except where it does refer to a collection of gods) who is the only character to speak⁴ in the chapter. This “God”:

• acts alone, is accompanied by no pantheon of subsidiary – still less equal – powers
• creates by mere volition: “‘Let light be!’ and light became“…
• is not to be included in any class or group with other beings, for all other beings are creatures (including explicitly the lights in the sky worshiped by Israel’s neighbours as divine beings, who here serve as clocks and calendars regulating the worship of God).

This is important. Any theology which sets God alongside another, which fails to recognise that God is creator and every other being a creature, or which places God into some class or group with other beings who are similar in some way, would make this chapter a lie.

Human gender

This magnificent chapter is more mysterious and less clear about humanity. For example, what does “having dominion” and “subduing” entail? Or, why were humans created last? What does it mean to claim we are “made in the image of God”?

However, on human gender it seems much clearer:

So God created humanity in his own image,
vayibra’ ‘elohim et-ha’adam besalmo

in the image of God he created them;
beselem ‘elohim bara’ ‘oto

male and female he created him.
zakar uneqebah bara’ ‘ota

Humanity⁵ is made explicitly in two biological genders. The words “male” and “female” are the biological ones that would be used by animal breeders and such contexts, not the more respectful “man” and “woman”. These two sorts of human are created together.

Whatever the “image of God” is, it applies to them together. The parallelism of the verse is strong and powerful, there is no way we can make this “image” apply to one gender and not equally to the other.

The rest of what is said about humanity, including the subduing and dominion over the rest of creation is said about an ‘adam defined as “male and female”.

In my next post in this series I will move on to Gen 2.

1. For which I thank my interlocutors both here and on Facebook :)
2. When I speak of Genesis One I mean Gen 1:1-2:3 or 4a, for our purposes here there is no need to join the arguments over where exactly the division should be made 1:31 might even work for these purposes.
3. The great German scholar von Rad even said that it was hard to overinterpret this material!
4. Apart from the anonymous and mysterious narrator.
5. ‘adam while it becomes a name for the first man in the next chapter, here seems – as in a number of other places – to mean either a human or humanity.

An ironically blond European Moses discovered (Paul Delaroche 1797–1859 Moïse exposé sur le Nil)

I have completed the first (of the three) sections of my response to David’s Funny Stuff in the Bible challenge:

• Humour in the Bible: Book 1 Genesis
• Humour in the Bible: Book 2 Exodus
• Humour in the Bible: Book 3 Leviticus
• Humour in the Bible: Book 4 Numbers
• Humour in the Bible: Book 5 Deuteronomy

I must confess I was hoping for more help with Leviticus, I am saddened by my listeners’ lack of appreciation of humour, you must be a sombre bunch. Indeed, for Deuteronomy my help camed from a Rabbi, much better at recognising and appreciating humour than most Evangelicals, sadly.

I was fully expecting to fail on Leviticus, however, that hurdle overcome, I am sure the rest will come tumbling out – I’m relying on Miriam to suggest some lighthearted laughs from Lamentations ;)