The Bible, and Christianity with it, has been condemned time and again as phallocentric. The fact is overlooked that the dominant discourse during the time of its inscription was phallocentric. The Bible, after all, is the word of God inspired in men and not the actual word of God. So why should contemporary feminists fault Biblical writers for not being feminists? And even if the Bible were hypotetically the actual word of God, like the Koran is believed to be so, why should God (who would be speaking to humanity in order to be understood) speak using a discourse that would be centuries ahead of its time culturally and politically? In short, we should always be conscious of the gulf between us and the original audience of the Bible. Instead of condemning it for failing the discursive standards of modern cultural politics, why not praise it for the radical elements that allowed it to transcend its cultural context? After all, St. Paul talked about how there was neither slave nor freeman (and neither man nor woman) in the presence of Christ. And this, eighteen centuries before the abolition of slavery in Western society!
But non-Christian feminists can also not be blamed for their reaction to the Bible. In truth, they're not really reacting to the Bible but to the phallocentric discourse of our time that uses the Bible to justify itself. I hate it when the Bible is used to justify the most reactionary of views, further giving the impression that Christianity is a reactionary religion. The Bible is presented as an unassailable arbiter of issues, but it is presented through the kind of commentaries written in the Middle Ages.
One particular discourse that seems to promote patriarchy is this whole reading of Eve as the sinner who led Adam to sin. The popular view is that Eve bought the serpent's sales talk when she ate the forbidden fruit and gave some to Adam who unwittingly ate some as well. A close reading of the text, however, would show that this a false reading:
"And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and thatit was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make onewise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also untoher husband with her; and he did eat." (Genesis 3: 6, King James Version)
Notice that the husband was "with her." Other versions make this fact even more self-evident:
"She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it" (New International Version).
"She also gave some to her husband, who was with her" (New Living Translation).
"She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate" (New King James Version).
In other words, the view that Adam was off somewhere while Eve listened to the serpent and eventually seduced him into sin is wrong. He was with Eve. He was listening to the serpent, too. But it was Eve who was doing all the talking. Some of the modern commentaries call this episode not the "The Temptation of Eve" but "The Silence of Adam." This is actually the basis for Dr. Larry Crabb's book, The Silence of Adam: Becoming Men of Courage in a World of Chaos.
Catholic commentaries in the Middle Ages drew heavily on St. Paul's interpretation that Eve led Man to sin and would be redeemed through the pain of childbirth. But we should take Paulinian epistles for what they are--commentaries bound by their culture. This is what exegesis and hermeneutics are for--to find out the original meaning of a text relative to its cultural context and to see how this meaning translates into ours. Ignorant Christians do the exact opposite--they read the text using modern systems of meaning (such as the meaning that condemns the homosexual when the homosexual subjectivity, as opposed to the homosexual act, is a product of modernity), and then try to apply the wrongly perceived meaning of a centuries-old text into our own time.
Paul's interpretation of The Fall was his commentary, his exegesis and hermeneutics that were a product of his age, not ours. It is our task to investigate the truth not only by examing Paul, but by going straight to the source: Genesis 3: 6.
Genesis 3: 6 tells us that Adam was with Eve while the serpent was giving them the sales talk. What was the motivation then for Adam's silence? The context was that God told them they could eat from the tree of life, but could not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Prohibition from the knowledge of good evil here does not refer to the trite interpretation that our ancestors were amoral like innocent animals. Good and evil are categories that shift according to subject positions. Good and evil are not pre-existing categories; certainly they do not pre-exist God. It is the ultimate Subject, God, "the ground of our being," who has created these categories because all things emanate from Him. Therefore, it is in the nature of good and evil to become categories not in the process of discovering a pre-existing moral condition, but in creating that moral standard. To "know" good and evil is not to find it, but to create it. In other words, God forbid Adam and Eve access not to the moral order but to the means of creating a moral order. Defining good and evil is supposed to be for God alone. To chart your own moral course, to be existentially "free" in an absurd world with no script to follow but your own (because God's moral order, representing God in our consciousness, is dead) is to become like God. Adam and Eve were, during that time, immortal but were not like God. By partaking of this tree with the power over good and evil, they would become like God.
So Adam was silent because on the one hand he was seduced by the power, but he was also afraid of God's warning that they would die. He thinks: what if the serpent is wrong? What if i eat and fall dead. So he allows Eve to be led by the serpent, allows her to eat the fruit, observes whether or not she will fall down dead, and when he realizes that she did not die and therefore the fruit of power was perfectly safe to eat, he had some himself. Adam turned Eve, the love of his life ("flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones"), into his personal guinea pig.
The Silence ofAdam marks an event in the history of male/female relationship when the unity of marriage was torn asunder by personal desire separate from the desire of the diffused identities of Man and Woman as a couple. There was a breakdown of communication, not because they passively lost the means to understand each other, but because Man deliberately and actively decided to pursue his own desire (for godhood), structuring the woman's subjectivity to fit this desire and turning her into a mere object for the achievement of power. The Silence of Adam (not the Temptation of Eve) marks the the birth of the patriarchy.
Phallocentric Christian discourse claims God put Eve under the dominion of Man because of her sin. On the contrary, by destroying the original unity of man and woman through his selfish desires, it was Adam who had already subjected Eve under his dominion in order to become like God. Patriarchy was thus born before they were even driven from Eden, and patriarchy is the is the reason why God drove them from Eden. Patriarchy represents the rending of Man's (and Woman's) relationship with God and the rending of Man's unity with Woman. Driven out of Eden, Man and Woman attempt to restore this unity by making a family, but it is gone. They speak different languages, create different meanings, and experience different desires. The sacrament of marriage becomes the imperfect vessel through which we try to restore the unity of Woman to Man, as well as our unity with God. It is exactly when communication breaks down in the marriage, when desires and priorities become so incompatible and irreconcilable and both parties give up communicating in order to pursue isolation, that marriage fails and mirrors the original failure of humanity to achieve wholeness caused by The Silence of Adam.
The battle of the sexes is a fallen condition, a fallenness structured by patriarchy or the Law of the Father. The Father of this Law is not God but Adam whose "genes" we men indeed share. These genes are asleep during the masquerade of romance but awakens like a hidden monster as we move through the fallen structures of culture in which we play and re-play in an endless dialectic of "what-could-be" and "what-could-have-been" the institution of marriage, beginning from the honeymoon of our youth, the having and rearing of children, all the way to aging and the confrontation of mortality.
