Cheryl Schatz

gengwall said:

Of course, as Mark surely knows, this is half what I believe. I would not say that her desire is to usurp her husband’s authority because I do not believe any authority has been granted to the husband. I am not certain what her desire is for. I only believe that it is negative to the marriage. But her husband has no authority over her to usurp, so that can;t be it.

I think that to understand the after fall account we must be able to separate Eve from the daughters of Adam. Eve did not inherit a sin nature from Adam but all women since then have inherited his sin nature. What women do in their sin now cannot be read back into Eve’s actions because of the issue of our sin nature is not there for Eve.

I think that there is a lot in Scripture that we can use to teach on marriage and Genesis 3:16 certainly has some problems with man’s rule, but can we really attribute sinful characteristics of all women to what Eve did?

I think we must think this one through. Inherited sin is rebellion against God. While Eve showed shame after she sinned, did she also show rebellion? I just can’t see any Scripture that tells us that she was in rebellion. And if she was not in rebellion, then must her “desire” be a sinful thing? The context will be key. Where is any negative word used of Eve toward Adam? Where is any sinful word used alongside of “desire” to make it sin? We can’t use Adam’s actions to qualify “desire” as sin, since it is said to be her action not his. So if we really want to seriously think this one through, where are we going to research and find a sin nature attributed to Eve?

Now all of Adam’s daughters struggle with some kind of sin. They are not perfect and they are not usually 100% blameless for a marriage breakup because both parties are sinners. But I don’t think that it is fair to Eve to attach our sin to her character. Thoughts?