Cheryl Schatz

To carry on…

Whether one calls this case sinful or only a bad choice, it had terrible consequences that you cannot deny

I honestly do not see Eve as leaving the garden as a bad choice. In fact I am glad that she did because if she had not left, I would not be here. I praise God that I have been given the opportunity to exist and to live to serve and love God! The consequences for Eve leaving the garden has been extremely positive for me. How about you?

And the Song of Sol. reference is not at all about Christ, unless one wishes to highly allegorize the whole book, as many do. But the immediate and non-allegorical view does not see Christ even inferred, but only the ‘desire’ of a wife for her husband.

Seems to me that Bushnell saw the Song of Solomon as about Christ. But whether it does or doesn’t image Christ, the desire there is not a bad thing.

That particular context is certainly about sensual desire, while Cain/Sin’s is about hatred, and Eve’s is about not wanting to be separated from her husband who was being driven out of the garden.

Marriage is more than a sensual desire on the woman’s part and the woman is not an antagonist as sin is. There is no comparison. Eve not wanting to be separated from her one-flesh spouse is a normal and natural result of marriage. She was his soul mate.

All three are ‘desire’ or ‘turning’; that is Bushnell’s point. It is NOT that all must be positive or negative!

That isn’t the understanding that I got as she said they had the same sense. And if there is a same sense in each case then why is there no turning away from in the other cases? The fact is that the turning of Eve toward her husband is not required to be negative.

And the major point of Bushnell and all egals is that this is NOT about lust or usurping authority, and that God did not command it but only predict it.

I agree!! Yeah! It is not something that was sinful for Eve nor was it lustful (another act of sin) or usurping Adam’s authority or any other charge of sin. It was allowed for Eve for her to be with her husband and to complete her command to fill the earth. The only way that this would not be allowed would have been if God had forbade it and broken their marriage. I don’t think He did that.

No, she assumes nothing like God being restricted to the garden; that is preposterous. That Eve turned from close, face-to-face, RECONCILED communion with God cannot be denied, for to leave with Adam was to reject that she herself would bear the Messiah.

Who says that Eve had no reconciled communion with God outside the garden? And the fact that she believed her first child was one who was created with YHWH shows that she did not believe that she had rejected God’s promise that her seed would be the Messiah. She still believed God and acted on that belief.

I thought I made it clear that I do not believe God was restricted to the Garden, especially when we remember that God Himself gave the reason for Adam’s expulsion: to keep away from the Tree of Life. But who can deny that people after Adam and Eve had a more distant relationship to God than had been the case inside the garden?

I agree again! But God no physically walking with us on this earth has nothing to do us having a more distant relationship. Moses had that close face-to-face relationship with God even outside the garden. The Bible doesn’t talk about Eve’s relationship with God and how His walking with her in the garden was replaced outside the garden. However we can’t assume that Eve had turned her back on this relationship with God. If the Scripture said this I would believe it with all my heart. But the Scripture makes it clear that Eve received mercy from God and He had no condemnation for her except the original promise that if she ate of the fruit she would die.

These discussions are very helpful, I believe to many who read and weigh in on the inspired text. What is written there and what is not? We need to continue to test all things by God’s word and accept what it says. There is no doubt that many complementarians will read these comments. I hope that they can see that the heart of the egal is to know what the Scripture says and not to accept tradition. We want to know truth. Our purpose is no to accept a person’s word just because they have egal leanings and I don’t ask anyone to just accept my word. Read and study and show yourself approved by knowing for yourself. This is my challenge to complementarians who are reading this and getting a new view of who and what egalitarians are.