Hi Samuel.
Please look at my photo. This is the face that approximates the countenance on me as I write this. I am further assuming that your photo is just as representative of your approach to addressing these 'heady' issues.
I therefore have some comments, but I wanted to start off by requesting that you recognize that much of what I'm going to write is playful. It doesn't mean I'm not taking the subject matter seriously -- just that I'm not taking it
too seriously. And that it's important that we engage in these discussions with the kind of love Christ instructed us to engage in with everyone with whom we associate.
We must ensure that our exegesis of Genesis aligns with the exegesis found in scripture. And Paul's exegesis of this passage is as follows:
1 Corinthians 11:3,8-9
But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God. ... 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.
So according to Paul, man is the head of woman, not because of the fall, but because the woman was created from him, and for him. He doesn't mention the fall at all. He sees this as something existing from creation.
And perhaps, when we're exegeting exegetion of someone as profound as Paul, we should ensure that we can exegetically support any assertion we make of what the subject matter of the exegesis in question actually was. Which is to ask, how did you determine that I Corinthians 11:3 and 8-9 were exegetic interpretation of the Genesis head passages? That doesn't occur to me as immediately obvious, especially given that you removed the overall context of that part of I Corinthians 11, which was a discussion of whether or not a woman should cover her head or have tresses under certain circumstances. At best, that's a discussion that uses headship as a justification for women having more head hair than men, but it avoids any discussion relevant to our disagreements over whether husbands are to rule over wives.
[I also feel compelled to add that it's probably almost
always essential to note at what point in his ministry Paul said things. For example, I Corinthians was written during the Acts period when Paul still predominantly identified himself as a Jew and had not yet revealed the full extent of the Mystery of Grace. Later on, after the Acts period, once Paul had received full revelation, many topics fell right off his written radar, which would indicate that they lost some significant degree of relevance for him. I suspect once he was in prison his lack of sartorial commentary was quite purposeful.]
I think this is actually completely consistent with
@Keith Martin's proposal that Eve may have been created from a sexual organ rather than a rib (I don't know whether that's correct, I'm just accepting it for arguments sake in this post). So, the original human had a head (in control), and various body parts (under the control of the head). Then one of those body parts was taken and formed into a separate being. But that part was not the head. The original head remained on the man. Thus the authority remained with the man.
And thus the woman had no authority, because she was made without a head. Oh, whoops, that's right -- she actually had a head, too.
I'm not disputing that it is appropriate for husbands to be heads of households; I'm just disputing that there is a logical progression from (a) what body parts were removed from Adam to (b) any conclusion whatsoever about who has authority over whom. For that matter, God could have taken off Adam's head, formed a helpmeet companion out of it, and created a partnership in which the headless Adam still would have been the 'head' of the partnership -- a partnership in which the two would thoroughly depend on each other to be whole because one would be all brain and no brawn and the other one all brawn and no brain, experiencing ultimate passionate bliss when holding hands like a couple of Star Trek mind melders.
We are on solid ground when we contemplate parables and metaphors as being accurate but generalized and fuzzy symbolic parallels to reality. We are instead walking in quicksand if we take the metaphors too literally, and we're up to our necks in quicksand when we start
extrapolating on those metaphors to the point of assigning interpreted definitive additional meaning to them (e.g., because I'm the head I'm going to be the ruler). And, in addition to everything else about this part of the discussion, it happens to ignore the God-created biology of the head's relationship to the body. In modern scientific terms, the brain is decreasingly assumed to be in charge of the body. It is just the central processing unit, more of a 'server' than a command center. Our sense of self isn't even strictly located in the brain, instead taking up something akin to a holographic space probably located throughout our physical being and energy field (aura). Even the instructions that come from the brain are at the very least echoes of the original commands that come in a Creator-determined fashion from the genetic instructions encoded into every cell but most intensively from our reproductive organs. The old jokes about men being ruled by the lesser head actually have science behind them, and the same thing is true for women. Decisions are more frequently inspired in both men and women by hormones than they are by logic and reason.
All of which -- genes, chromosomes, DNA, cell structure -- are part of Father's very purposeful design.
1 Cor 12:22-26
Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary: And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness.For our comely parts have no need: but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honour to that part which lacked: That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another. And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.
Well, amen to
all that. The profundity is ripe on many levels, not the least of which occurred to me back in adolescence: if it weren't for the amazing uses to which a penis can be utilized to bring pleasure and relief to the rest of the body, it is so thoroughly
uncomely that we'd probably otherwise hide it out of sight even from ourselves from the time we discovered it until the day we died. But, hey, all the other members rejoice right along with it!
But must not ignore:
Mat 5:29-30
And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. And if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.
Side note tangential warning: not directly relevant but not entirely irrelevant, either: 'hell' is a mistranslation promoted by the corrupted textus receptus. The original word was 'Gehenna,' which was the landfill trash dump outside of Jerusalem, the invoking of which was akin to our modern-day use of the phrase 'white trash'. As in, "Might as well throw that offending eye in the trash as let it go on mucking things up!" or, "That person belongs in the trash dump."
So the take-home message is the same even sticking solely within this illustration. The head directs the entire body, lovingly and tenderly, but also fully. Absolutely this should be a loving and natural arrangement. However the authority of the head is still real. We are taught how to exercise that with care, love and restraint.
I agree that we are taught how to exercise our headship with care, love and restraint. And, at the same time, even though it may seem like semantics to you or others, I continue to assert that we improperly and extrapolate rather than stick to the plain meaning when we make the leap from headship to authority. The lead dog has no authority over the others in a dog sled race. One could very usefully assert that the lead dog is the head of the other strapped-together dogs just as the dogsled driver is the head of the lead dog just as Christ is the head of the dogsled driver just as God is the head of Christ. But just because authority exists in some of those relationships doesn't necessarily imply that authority exists all the way down the chain, anymore than we could properly infer that it meant that lead dog is going to resurrect a follower dog from the dead (or that a widower is going to resurrect his dead wife) just because God did that for Christ.
It just may be that where this line of thinking goes wrong is when it translates headship as authority rather than perhaps more properly translating headship as being the one who is 100% responsible for how things turn out.
