“And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him. . . . And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam” (Genesis 2:18, 21). In between the Lord’s observation that it is not good for man to be alone and the deep sleep that he caused to fall upon him, the animals were formed, but not one of them was “an help meet for man.” God made man and then rested (2:2ff): Man must have rested too, as we know that he was put to sleep. Then God made woman, and since then neither God nor man has rested.

In a book written at the end of World War II, Victors, Beware!, Salvador de Madariaga, a former minister in exile from Franco’s Spain, warned that the push for equality (or rather, sameness) will not stop until it attempts to create equivalency in the one place where nature itself will not permit it, namely, between the sexes. De Madariaga comments, “Men and women are two equal exemplars of human being, without whose conjoined action life is neither possible nor pleasant.” This seems intuitively true, but that intuition is increasingly unacceptable. Discrimination is forbidden, and with it every principle of order and distinction. The two sexes are equal in dignity and worth, equal before God, but they are not equivalent in role and function, and the effort to make them so is injurious to the Church, to Christian faith, and even to the doctrine of God itself.

The distribution of rights, responsibilities, and roles between the sexes has proved very hard to establish by civil law. If we look only at laws and social conventions, we may misunderstand reality. Cicero reportedly said, “We Romans rule the world, and our wives rule us.”

What the Genesis 2 story tells us, if an allegorical interpretation may be permitted, is that the Woman made her entrance when the Man was not paying attention. Perhaps if he’d had his eyes open from the beginning, he would not have allowed himself to get into the trouble that followed. He would never have needed to utter that most ancient of all male excuses: “The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” (Genesis 3:12).

What these and similar passages hint is that the relationship between the two sexes is too complex to be summed up in a single slogan such as “equality” or “submission.” From a biblical perspective, two things ought to be evident: first, that both sexes are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26ff.) and that there is no sexual priority or preference with respect to salvation (Galatians 3:28); second, that in both the Old and the New Testament there is a difference of rights, responsibilities, and roles between the sexes, a difference that in some cases is explicitly termed submission, as in Ephesians 5:22, the celebrated instruction to wives to submit to their husbands. In other words, the equality of the sexes in nature and dignity is not incompatible with a relationship of submission. This is precisely what the feminists cannot endure.

Outside of the Christian sphere—and to a certain extent even within it—there is a desire to redefine God as goddess, or at least to discover a feminine side. Among the neopagans emerging from a Christian context, there is talk of a feminine Christa, of Sophia as a feminine counterpart to the masculine Jesus, or even of an Earth-goddess Gaia. None of these ideas is compatible with orthodox Christianity—Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant. For them, Christ is the husband, and the Church, His bride; a similar relationship is seen between God and his people Israel. But one does not need to become a worshipper of Gaia to lose important aspects of Christian faith and life. There are feminists within more orthodox Christian circles, and to them too the principle of submission is so odious that they will reconceptualize the very nature of God as Trinity in order to abolish it.

To return to Adam’s sin, there arc several ways of interpreting his motivation: some say unbelief, some say pride, some say the desire to be autonomous, a law unto himself. The idea of human autonomy is foreign to the most fundamental themes of biblical faith, beginning with the Creation, for if there was a divine Creation, then there is an order of being, and no creature can be autonomous. Among nonbelievers, one way in which the human desire for autonomy expresses itself is the zeal with which the doctrine of naturalistic human evolution is proclaimed and the ferocity with which those who question it are attacked. The nonbeliever cannot tolerate the idea of Creation, with its concept of a divinely established order, for if man is a created being, who owes gratitude and obedience to the Creator, he cannot be truly autonomous. If he is only the product of natural forces, then there is no order to which he must conform.

Believers, of course, cannot deny Creation and the biblical concept that man is made in the image and likeness of the Creator (Genesis 1:26). If there is an order or hierarchy within the deity, then there is nothing surprising about an order within humanity. The hostility of Christian feminists to the biblical instruction that the woman shall submit to her husband, the husband being “the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church” (Ephesians 5:23), is so strong that some feminists are not content with eliminating subordination in the human family but want to eliminate it as a principle from the life of God Himself For present-day feminists, any form of subordination or submission is odious and means that the subordinate is being treated as inferior to the superior. What then do they make of the passages in Scripture where the Son, though equal in nature and dignity to the Father, clearly subordinates his will to the Father’s? They interpret the subordination out of these passages and out of the understanding of the Trinity that they convey.

Where there is subordination, there cannot be equality. Therefore, some feminists go so far as to redefine the relationship of the Persons in the Trinity in order to reaffirm the contention that subordination by its very nature destroys equality. This interpretation runs afoul of the traditional understanding of the relationship of the Persons in the Trinity, where there is both equality of nature and dignity and an economic or “household” subordination of the Son and the Holy Spirit to the Father.

Traditionally, Christian theologians have made a distinction between ontological and economic subordination. Ontology refers to being, and orthodox Christian doctrine teaches that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit possess all of the attributes of deity equally. Economy refers not to the Person’s essential nature, but to His role. Thus the Father “gives” the Son (John 3:16) and “sends” the Holy Spirit in the Son’s name (John 14:26) after the Son “prays” the Father (14:16); in the next chapter, Jesus speaks of “the Spirit of truth, whom I will send unto you from the Father” (John 15:26). The Father does not “pray” the Son; He sends Him. The ontological co-equality—the equality of nature of the Persons of the Trinity—is affirmed in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 and strongly stressed in the so-called Quicumque vult or Athanasian Creed of perhaps two centuries later.

It took the Christian Church several centuries to understand that the Persons of the Trinity can be equal while two of them submit to the third. Today, some Christian feminists argue that submission is not possible between equals, and that it therefore cannot be found within the godhead. Of course, this implies that there can be no roles or tasks reserved for one sex, or denied to the other.

Three spheres in which roles and responsibilities have been defined differently for men and women within Christendom are the family, the military, and the church. Because a male cannot be a mother nor a female a father, we drop that sex-specific language and say “parents.” Within both Judaism and Christianity. indeed almost universally in all human culture, the military profession has been reserved for males. The passage in Ephesians mentioned above continues by saying that Christ loved the Church and gave Himself for her, strongly implying that husbands should be prepared to die for their wives rather than vice versa. And within both Judaism and Christianity, the rabbinate, priesthood, and ministry have been restricted to men. This is breaking down among both Jews and Protestants, while Orthodox Jews, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and conservative Protestant Christians retain it, at least for the time being.

In personal correspondence with this writer, philosopher Steven Goldberg, author of Why Men Must Rule, expressed the conviction that, if the Christian ministry is an authority position, few women will be attracted to it; if, however, large numbers of women are brought into it by the setting and enforcement of quotas, it will cease to be an authority position. Thus the feminization of the Church is rendering her increasingly impotent to exercise moral or even spiritual authority.

According to biblical doctrine, the human predicament is the result of the Fall of Man. Even though Eve first disobeyed and ate the forbidden fruit, Christian theology attributes the Fall and our consequent damaged nature to the sin of Adam, according a sad preeminence to our male progenitor. Thus, as there was a certain “order” in rebellion, there has traditionally been a certain order in restoration and submission. This order does not entail or even suggest a difference in dignity or worth between man and woman; when it is assumed that it does, and that it must be rejected for that reason, the ministry, the Church, and ultimately the way of salvation are all damaged.

Interestingly, one of the great fourth century theologians, St. Gregory of Nazianzen, uses the imagery of submission found in Ephesians 5 in the reverse sense: Just as both the wife and her husband are equal in dignity and honor, and she nevertheless submits to her husband in marriage, so the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are equal in dignity and being, yet the second and third Persons submit to the Father. Gregory’s argument is interesting because it reveals two things about the relationship of husbands and wives in the early Church: First, equality of dignity and honor was taken for granted, for otherwise the argument could not have been used; and second, equality between partners is compatible with the “economic” submission of one partner to another.

In our own day, the idea of personal autonomy is so compelling and the idea of submission in any form so repugnant that even among conservative Protestant theologians, some feminists, such as Gilbert Bilazekian, insist that there is no submission within the Trinity, not even “economic” subordination, for if there is, it is possible to argue that the principle of wifely submission implies an ontological inequality between the sexes, and inequality between the human sexes is the one thing that absolutely cannot be. Although the non-theologian may not sec the significance of this feminist reading back of the principle of non-submission into the relationship between the Father and the Son in the Trinity, it shows that the principle of non-subordination (insubordination?) is so fundamental for the feminist that it requires a redefinition of the godhead itself.

Must all offices in the church become coed? There may come a time when it will be so, when pope and patriarchs, Missouri Synod Lutherans and Orthodox Jews, will fall in line and accept it. If and when that happens, we may assume that Church and synagogue will forfeit those vestiges of authority that remain to them. And indeed, if God Himself must be “restructured” to conform to the human demand that equality equal equivalency, how can the Church claim immunity?