Covenant Theology at Work in Anthropology

Love Seeking Understanding

I recently have been writing about how our covenant theology is inclined to see asymmetry in the man and the woman of Genesis 1-2. For example, Meredith Kline suggests that Adam represents the Creator over Eve who represents the creature.¹ Covenant theologians propose a categorical distinction between the male and female of Genesis 1:27 in the unique and ordered reintroduction of Adam and the woman in Genesis 2.  This imbalance is central to their understanding of covenant. I have been suggesting that they have missed the woman’s representation.

God formed Adam from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, animating him unto life in his presence. Then God planted a garden, placing Adam there  to “keep and guard it.” Next God announced that Adam needed a helper, an ally, a corresponding strength. The question for Adam became, “What will God now cause to spring up from the earth to help me?” Then God formed the animals.  The animals become the third thing to come from the ground (min-adamah): first the worker of the garden; then the plants and shrubs; finally the animals were formed '“out of the ground.”  But Adam soon discovered that the earth does not contain his corresponding strength.

Eve’s creation in Genesis 2 as Adam’s helper comes immediately after God gives Adam the command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  As Lane Tipton suggests, the command from God is nothing less than a test of Adam’s whole-souled love for the One who formed him and breathed into him the breath of life.² Beneath Adam was the earth from which he came. Above Adam was the realm of Sabbath rest from where God beckoned him upward. Before Adam stood two trees. And then God gave Adam the woman. 

She comes from his side, zela, a word used only for sacred space where God communes with man. About one-fourth of the 49 times that zela occurs are found in one chapter of the Bible, walls or sides in Ezekiel’s end times’ temple complex in Ezekiel 41. This is just one of several reasons that I believe that the woman stands before Adam as the symbol of the Sabbath realm, a city built without hands, an epiphany of the Holy Spirit in the heavens. I suggest that this was further confirmation to Adam of God himself as Adam’s very great reward. She beckoned him as a representative of the Son’s glory, the Spirit who proceeds from the Son (Ps 104:1-4; Rev 22:17). She pointed him beyond herself.  This is her equal, proportional, and corresponding representation as she stands with the man of the garden.

To be clear, this is the typology that I see at work in Genesis 2: 

1. The man came from God. Adam was the son of God. His heavenly archetype is the eternal Son, and he was called to return to God in Sabbath rest. 

2. The woman came from the man’s consecrated side. Her heavenly archetype is the eternal Spirit, whose incommunicable personal property is that he proceeds from the Father and Son. The Spirit is the Son’s glory, a tent pitched in the heavens destined to descend to earth on the last day.

Notice that the woman is never told to help the man in Genesis 2. God told Adam that she simply was his corresponding strength. As I see it, he is to find in her what points to the joy set before him, as she inclines herself to that realm. Her other-worldliness as the creature of Sabbath rest fortifies him to pass the test before him. 

Genesis 3 makes explicit why Adam is front and center in Genesis 2:5-25 contrasted with the equal emphasis given to male and female in Genesis 1:26-28. Adam’s work of obedience will determine the future of mankind and all that pertains to the earth. In other words, Genesis 1 gives us the common essence of the man and woman, their substance as God’s image-bearers. The first chapter displays their unity as mankind, and yet they are a diversity of persons, male and female.  Both receive the image and likeness; both receive the same commands; both are pronounced “very good.” However, when we get to Genesis 2, the focus shifts and covenantal unfolding comes into view. The testing of the man Adam is front and center because Adam is the means to consummate fellowship with God in Sabbath rest for mankind. He will obey or disobey as a representative of God’s earth and all that is in it, the world and all who live in it (Ps 24:1-2).  He specifically is commanded not to eat, and his obedience or disobedience will be determinative for all. This is what we find in Genesis 3:7. After Adam eats “then the eyes of both of them were opened . . .” Eve eats; the world is not undone. Adam eats, and all hell breaks loose. Adam and Eve’s eyes open. They see their nakedness; guilt and shame drive them to hide from the Lord amidst the trees and cover their nakedness with leaves. Once wholly inclined toward God, now they are disinclined to God through Adam’s disobedience. 

I suggest that Adam as representative of mankind does not make him prophet, priest, and king of the garden. It does not mean that Adam must take responsibility for mankind’s sin. It means that mankind will be held responsible for Adam’s sin. So how do so many of us go wrong here? Well, it seems to me that we make Adam a first Christ, instead of Christ the Second Adam.  We turn passages like Romans 5:17-21, which magnify Christ’s condescension, to the purpose of exalting the Genesis 2 man Adam over the woman. We read in Romans 5:14 that Adam is a type of the Coming One, but is Adam’s maleness central or his person? Just as the disobedience of the one person (ἑνὸς ἀνθρώπου [Rom 5:19]) was determinative for all those united to him, so the Coming One’s obedience is determinative for all those united to him. Though assuredly Adam and Christ are male, their maleness is not forefronted in Romans 5.  Rather, their representation of humanity is.

When CBMW rooted “biblical” manhood and womanhood in the trinity in the 1990s, the Reformed covenantal tradition did not seem too disturbed. They too had found asymmetry. Many theological streams traced back to very different headwaters end up in the same place, and with it they find the liberty to say to their neighbor, “Sit here; stand over there” (James 2:3). I suggest that the Reformed tradition did not require the trinity for asymmetry. Their understanding of the Genesis 2 Covenant of Works provided a more thorough and radical distinction. Whereas many evangelical proponents of the eternal subordination of the Son found the basis for the subordination of women in divine personal relations, the Reformed set forth the subordination of woman by appeal to the Creator-creature distinction beginning in Genesis 2. The gaping chasm between male and female and inferred “roles” is found there: Adam represents God and Eve does not. Can there be any more foundational “poverty” than that?

At this point, please hear what I am not saying.  I am not saying that all Reformed theologians have “evil thoughts” and have developed their anthropology to indulge them. I also am not saying that all Reformed theologians apply their understanding of man and woman based on the covenant of works. Most of what I read from Reformed writers on the differences between male and female varies very little from what other traditions say. What I am saying is that for those with evil motives, the prevailing Reformed view of Adam as the garden’s prophet, priest, and king, who alone bears the image and likeness of the Creator-Lord in Genesis 2, backs them up. I would agree that Adam is bound by his maleness to the incarnate son, and the incarnate Son is the eternal Son who took on flesh. My question continues to be, what about Adam’s corresponding strength? There is no ally. Eve is only tied to the bride who after Genesis 3 must be cleansed, the Ezekiel 16 woman who must be washed from her impurity.³ There is no fixed correspondence in Genesis 2. The prevailing view is that Eve’s correspondence to Adam is superficial, transient, and mundane, serving the purposes of marriage as mutual help, procreation, and the prevention of uncleanness (WCF 24.2). In innocence, she is said to represent the creature in the garden under Adam, her lord; and under sin, she represents a fallen version of the same.

I suggest that by overlooking the representation of the woman as rooted in the God of the covenant, those “in the know” have not helped us better understand our differences. They have neglected the woman’s divine and covenantal representation. Add to this that women who feel this asymmetry have been distanced from the spaces where the discussion of their identity is taking place. This happens for many reasons, but it creates the perfect dilemma for women. Women cannot effectively address perceptions of who they are in institutions that hold sway because of how men in those places perceive them. Yes, a perfect storm for many of us. A thoughtful woman recently made this comment on my Substack, 

 . . . on an existential level, what I have experienced as a female believer is that I am the "not-good" foil to the male "good" reflection of God. My unwillingness to just let go of the issue and trust that God has His reasons is that my soul - my humanity - screams that there has to be more to it. Either we are missing a vital aspect of the design in our teaching, the restoration of which will restore and broaden our understanding of female dignity, or the design for male and female that we have been taught is itself wrong.

She is right. Either part or the whole is wrong. Yes, my image-bearing humanity as female reflecting God himself in Genesis 1, as well as my dignity as a woman tied to the revelation of  himself in covenant with mankind in Genesis 2, are written large on my soul. My identity as representing him is firmly established at the core of my being. It screams that something is missing or wrong in what women have been taught about themselves— namely, that the gist of woman's derivation from the man in Genesis 2 is that he is lord representing God and that she exists under his lordship. To be honest, as I read some of Meredith Kline’s statements like this one, “And the man-husband received the woman, his image, in a covenant of marriage (Gen. 2:22-24), under his lordship, to bear his name, and to be his glory, not least by bearing him image-sons to fill the earth with his name,” I cannot help but wonder if Kline might have been helped by reading that sentence for effect to some of the women in his life. Maybe he did. I know little about Kline’s life, but I have observed that women’s contributions to a better understanding of women are generally unsolicited and unwelcome, unless like Susan Foh they advance the status quo.⁴ This can make women in Reformed spaces cautious about saying out loud what their humanity screams, while men are inclined by the prevailing anthropology to be skeptical or suspicious about anything women intuitively recognize. I believe that in Genesis 1-2, we are hard-wired to understand our essential distinctions in light of the radical egalitarianism within the triune God existing as consubstantial divine persons, equal in power and glory. 

It simply is untrue that God gives us a glimpse of himself by tying maleness to his triune person, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, over against femaleness as finite, temporal, and mutable creation. Man and woman both are in the likeness of God, representing to one another in their distinctions corresponding aspects of God’s being and his work in creation and providence. He seals this revelation of himself by making us corresponding image-bearers called to love and honor him and our neighbor who represents him, regardless of the enduring differences of ethnicity and gender, as well as the momentary and fleeting distinctions like age and social status. I admit that we have to dig deep to find this proportional representation, but as I mentioned before, this is the same digging in the same passages that covenant theologians have done for decades, and even centuries, and discovered disproportionate representation.

To summarize, I suggest that seeing the man and the woman in their representation will shed light on the entire canon of Scripture as the unfolding revelation of the Son, begotten of the Father, and of the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son. God is revealed in his triunity as he creates all things visible and invisible. All creation comes into being from the eternal Father as Creator, through the eternal Son, the Mediator, by the eternal Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life.  I suggest that Genesis 2 reveals the triune God as he is in himself through his works which proceed from him and fall in time and space, whether the history of heaven or the history of earth.

Adam is uniquely associated with the earth and all that comes forth from the earth, like himself.  Up until the creation of Eve, everything in Genesis 2:4b-20 springs up from the earth, including the mists which water it. The woman is the first thing to not come from the earth. Some would say that she is derivative from the earth because she is from Adam, who is from the adamah, but that is not what the text indicates. The word used for Adam’s side (zela) is always associated with what is set apart, things that point to the climax and omega of God’s plans for his people.

In Genesis 2:4b, God starts with Adam and the earth, not Eve and the Sabbath realm. God himself has just moved from six days of earthly work to the seventh day of Sabbath rest (Heb 4:9). Now it is Adam’s turn. He will move on behalf of the earth (adamah) and mankind (adam) toward Sabbath, both a time (never-ending day) and a place (the manifestation of God’s consummate and enduring presence). The progression of Genesis 2 is from Adam, the man crafted from earth, to Eve, built like a city. Adam moves from the ground to the garden, step one. But there is step two before him, visible garden to invisible garden.  Eve is brought to him as representing the veiled realm, a city not built with human hands. Like the tree of life (Rev 22:2), the river of Eden (22:1), and the spice laden hills of Havilah (SoS 8:13-14), the land of pure gold and precious onyx (22:15-21), the woman represents to him his exceeding great reward, the glory-Spirit of the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb, who are its temple. The manifestation of the Holy Spirit, the glory of the Father and the Son in the realm of Sabbath rest, must command Adam’s whole-souled love and allegiance to his triune God. 

After sin enters, the basic plan does not change. Genesis 3:15 gives us the gospel of grace and the man who will do the work of obedience for the joy before him. That joy is a Sabbath bride, a Sabbath bridal city, and an eternal Sabbath day. We finally see the Sabbath creature in her glory in Revelation 21-22. All the Scriptures tell this story, the first story of Genesis 2 recapitulated in Genesis 3:15 to Revelation 22.  In the second story, the Second Adam, the immutable Son, takes on mutable flesh to repeat the same movement of Genesis 2 and embrace his bride. The eternal Son from heaven, the promised Seed of the woman, consummates the covenant. The ever-dying become the never-dying in union and communion with him, and heaven comes down for the cosmic wedding of the ages foreshadowed in Genesis 1:1. I long for the day when the church will see our differences in the light of truly corresponding representation which sets our minds on things above that await us.

1. Meredith Kline, Images of the Spirit, 34.

2. Lane Tipton, Foundations of Covenant Theology, 82.

3. Ed., G. K. Beale and D. A. Carson, Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament, 826-828.

4. Susan Foh, “What is the Woman’s Desire?” Westminster Theological Journal (1974-75), 383.