gengwall

Hello all. As I said to Cheryl personally, I was not insulted in any way in our ongoing conversation. I was just frustrated and needed to walk away for a while. It was just the male in me. LOL.

So where does this verse actually say that it is about all marriages not just one marriage? Perhaps we have all gone too far with trying to relate all of us to this verse.

I guess maybe this is the crux of the matter. We have been arguing without a base concensus on the situation we are arguing about. Here is what I see, and then I will leave it at that for now.

Both Jesus and Paul refer to Genesis when specifically discussing marriage. Paul even refers to the fall in 1st Timothy 2 when specifically (in our egal view) talking about a married couple. And Gen 3:16 certainly is talking about the relationship between husband and wife. Just as Genesis 2:24 has been considered the “template” for godly marriage, Gen 3:16 has been considered by many (and I thought, everyone) as the “template” for marriage in a fallen world. The argument, I thought, was not whether or not Gen 3:16 was predictive of men’s and women’s behavioral inclinations as fallen husbands and wives, but what specifically that behavior would look like. Boy was I wrong.

I don’t think we can have it both ways. Either Gen 3:16 is predictive about ONLY Adam and Eve’s relationship or it is predictive about all human marriage. I can’t fathom it being mostly about Adam and Eve, sort of about all marriage, or the worst of them all, all about husbands but only a little about wives. For me, Gen 3:16 is as much about all marriage as Gen 2:24.

I thought everyone believed this general view of Gen 3:16, regardless of what actions they believed would result and how godly or otherwise those actions were. I guess I was wrong. I guess some people, while viewing Adam as fully representative of the worst inclinations in husbands, view Eve as only marginally representative of wives, and even in that, only representative of their good inclinations. If so, Gen 3:16 really doesn’t tell us anything conclusive about human marriage. The only conclusive thing it tells us is how bad husbands are inclined to be. We are left without any predictive guidance from God on any other marriage dynamics.