Why The Fault Line Runs Deeper Than The Debate
Reading Gender Through Eden
I wrote my Ephesians 5 paper hoping to be proven wrong.
The church Alley and I were attending at the time had female pastors — in title, at least. The function was murkier. And I wanted the research to give me permission to stop worrying about it. I wanted Paul to be doing what a lot of scholars said he was doing: responding to a specific problem in Ephesus, not laying down something permanent. I wanted the text to be situational.
I read everything I could find. The egalitarian case is not a lazy case. Serious scholars make it seriously — Preston Sprinkle’s From Genesis to Junia is probably the most careful and charitable version of it I’ve encountered, and I’ll be reviewing it later this year. I followed every argument as far as it would go.
But Paul’s logic kept doing something I couldn’t account for. He didn’t ground his argument in Ephesian culture. He grounded it in Eden. The language he used wasn’t tied to the Ephesian story — it was tied to the biblical one. Creation. Design. The arc that started in a garden.
I finished that paper more complementarian than when I started. And something I didn’t expect: relieved. Not because I’d won an argument. Because I’d seen something — that God’s design for men and women isn’t a power structure. It’s a purpose structure. Equal in value, diverse in function. Higher than our intentions, and older than our debates.
That’s where this piece starts. Not with a position. With a question I genuinely wanted answered differently.
You’re not the only one who wanted a different answer.
The gender debate has produced two exhausted camps. On one side, people who’ve watched the church weaponize complementarianism — using headship language to cover abuse, silence women, and baptize control as theology. On the other, people who’ve watched progressivism dissolve the category of embodied sex entirely, leaving nothing but individual preference where design used to be. Both sides are reacting to something real. Neither has reached the people who are actually hurting.
Because the people who are actually hurting aren’t primarily asking about roles or pronouns. They’re asking something prior: Does my body mean anything? Does the way I was made — as a man, as a woman, as a creature with a particular kind of flesh — carry any significance? Or is it just a costume I happened to be born in?
That’s not a political question. It’s an anthropological one. And it’s the question the culture is answering loudly, the church is answering poorly, and Scripture has been answering all along — if we’d start reading it from the beginning.
The fault line isn’t where most people think it is. It doesn’t run between egalitarians and complementarians. It runs between everyone who’s building their theology of gender on Genesis 1 and everyone who’s — often without knowing it — building it on Genesis 3.
That’s the distinction this piece is about.
Both sides are reading the Fall as if it were Creation. One calls the curse “design.” The other abandons the design to escape the curse. What if Genesis 1–2 gives us something better than either side is offering?
Equal Dignity, Shared Vocation
Genesis 1:27–28 does not say: “God created the man in His image, and gave the woman a supporting role.” It says: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Both bear the image. Both receive the blessing. Both are given the mandate: be fruitful, fill the earth, subdue it, exercise dominion.
Genesis 2 adds differentiation without introducing hierarchy of value. The woman is called ezer kenegdo — a helper corresponding to him. The word ezer is used elsewhere in Scripture almost exclusively of God Himself (Psalm 33:20, 70:5, 121:1–2). This is not a term of subordination. It is a term of strength brought alongside. The garden mandate requires both. Neither can fulfill it alone. The design is complementary partnership, not command-and-obey hierarchy.
This is the creational baseline. Before the serpent, before the fruit, before the curse — there is equal image-bearing, shared vocation, and differentiated partnership. Any theology of gender that does not start here is starting in the wrong chapter.
Domination as Curse, Not Design
Genesis 3:16 is the hinge on which the entire gender debate turns — and it is almost universally misread by both sides.
“Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, and he shall rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16b, CSB)
This is a description of the curse, not a prescription of the design. Read in context, this verse describes what the Fall introduced into the male-female relationship: a power struggle that was never part of the original architecture. The man’s “rule” here is not a divine mandate for leadership. It is the tragic distortion of what was meant to be partnership.
Here is where both camps get it wrong. When the “biblical masculinity” movement treats male authority as the central organizing principle of gender, they are building their theology on Genesis 3, not Genesis 1. They are calling the curse “design.” They are baptizing the power struggle as God’s intention.
And when the progressive response abandons complementarity altogether — erasing any meaningful differentiation between male and female — they are overcorrecting the curse by dismantling the design. The answer to Genesis 3 is not to pretend Genesis 1 and 2 don’t exist. It is to recover what was lost.
Christ Undoes the Curse
Galatians 3:28 is often drafted into the egalitarian argument as a proof text, but it is doing something more precise than that: “There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female; since you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Paul is not erasing the categories. He is announcing that in Christ, the curse-driven hierarchies those categories produced are dismantled. The Jew/Greek hostility, the slave/free power differential, the male/female power struggle — these are the fruit of the Fall. The gospel reverses them. Not by making everyone identical, but by restoring the dignity and partnership the Fall distorted.
Ephesians 5 — the passage I spent a semester with — holds both truths in tension. The husband’s headship is defined not by the Fall’s power dynamic but by Christ’s self-giving: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her.” (Ephesians 5:25, CSB) This is not domination. It is cruciform leadership — authority expressed through sacrifice, not coercion. The mutual submission of verse 21 doesn’t erase the husband’s role; it defines how that role must be exercised.
The Bride, Not the Hierarchy
The New Jerusalem gives us the final image. Revelation 19 and 21 give us a bride — the whole church, male and female together — united with Christ in the most intimate relational language Scripture can offer. The power struggle of Genesis 3 is over. The design of Genesis 1 is fulfilled. The partnership that sin corrupted is healed.
If this is where the story ends, then any theology of gender that enshrines male dominance as permanent design is telling a story that contradicts the conclusion. And any theology that erases differentiation entirely is telling a story that contradicts the opening. The full narrative — Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration — holds what both sides are grasping at, without the distortions either side introduces.
What This Demands of You
If you’re a young man who came back to church through the masculinity pipeline — welcome. Genuinely. The hunger for purpose, identity, and transcendence that brought you here is real, and it is good. But test the framework that brought you. Is the “biblical manhood” you’ve been taught rooted in Genesis 1 or Genesis 3? Does it look like Christ washing feet or Adam naming and claiming? Does it produce the fruit of the Spirit or the posture of the conqueror?
If you’re a woman who’s walked away — or you’re standing in the doorway wondering whether to stay — hear this: the church that made you feel small was not preaching Genesis 1. It was preaching Genesis 3 and calling it God’s design. That is not the whole story, and it is not the end of the story. The God who made you as ‘ezer’ — the same word used for Himself — did not design you for subjugation. He designed you for partnership in the most consequential work in the universe.
For all of us: read Genesis 1–3 this week. Slowly. And ask yourself: which chapter is my theology of gender actually built on? The answer might surprise you — and it might set you free.
Imagine churches where the return of young men and the departure of young women were treated as the same crisis — because they are. Imagine communities where complementarianism meant genuine partnership rather than soft patriarchy. Imagine theological spaces where men and women could explore what Scripture actually says about gender without the conversation being hijacked by culture warriors on either side.
That’s the Edenic vision. Not egalitarianism that erases design. Not complementarianism that enshrines the curse. Something older and better than both — a partnership that begins in a garden, survives the worst the Fall could do, and ends at a wedding.
That’s what we’re reading toward.
This piece is part of the Reading ____ Through Eden series — applying the Creation-Fall-Redemption-Restoration arc to the questions our culture is actually asking. The framework behind this series, Redemptive Correlation, is explored in full in my forthcoming book, currently in editing and under proposal. If this kind of theologically grounded, culturally engaged thinking is what you’re looking for, you’re in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.
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