Rev. Deborah Duguid-May and Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe critique the harmful practice of pitting women against each other, as exemplified by the historical contrast between Eve (sin, death, fall from paradise) and Mary (grace, salvation, reclaiming paradise). They argue for a re-examination of Eve’s story, highlighting her agency, pursuit of knowledge, and moral responsibility as positive attributes rather than sins.
Transcript
DDM [00:03] Hello and welcome to The Priest and the Prof. I am your host, the Rev. Deborah Duguid-May.
MET [00:09] And I’m Dr. M. Elizabeth Thorpe.
DDM [00:11] This podcast is a product of Trinity Episcopal Church in Greece, New York. I’m an Episcopal priest of 26 years, and Elizabeth has been a rhetoric professor since 2010. And so join us as we explore the intersections of faith, community, politics, philosophy, and action.
DDM [00:38] Welcome! So today we thought given that we’ve done an episode on Mary, it only makes sense to look at Eve. And the reason being is in tradition, Mary and Eve have often been held up as a contrast. Now, let’s be honest, Elizabeth, contrasting women against each other, that’s already hugely problematic. In fact, I think this is one of the outcomes of patriarchy.
DDM [01:04] As women, we’re taught to compete with one another, to hold up other women as examples of what not to do or what not to be. And really, I’m not okay with this. And I find this whole compete and contrast of women very unhelpful. I know I’ve hated it when it happened to me in my life.
DDM [01:22] And I hate it equally when I see it being done to other women. And so I’m hoping we can find a way today to look at Mary and Eve in ways outside of this patriarchal contrast, while also highlighting the danger of this contrast. In the patriarchal narrative, sin enters through Eve, but grace enters through Mary. Death enters through Eve, salvation through Mary.
DDM [01:54] The fall from paradise happens because of the choice of Eve, but the choice of Mary leads to the reclaiming of the heavenly paradise. Very neat and tidy theology, isn’t it, right? Black and white. But of course life, and I believe the sacred, is never black and white, never neat and tidy, as Elizabeth and I will unpack today.
MET [02:19] Before I jump into a lot of content, I do want to make a comment about the way Deborah has started talking about contrasting women and comparing them, and even setting up this situation where, “Oh, you know you’re not like other girls, or this woman does this, etc., etc.” And I think it’s really interesting to think about the Mary episode we just did and we talked about the cult of motherhood, and that’s precisely what we were talking about. “Oh, I’m a better mother than you, because of X, Y, and Z. Which of course, women don’t say out loud, but that’s 100% what that cult of motherhood is, right? The “I want to compare myself to other mothers.” So that’s really what we’re talking about at a fundamental level, this tendency to pit women against each other. So I think it’s really interesting that you started with that. Okay, so now I want to jump into some commentary about Eve specifically. So we know I grew up Baptist.
MET [03:27] Baptists don’t really have a concept of original sin, the way some denominations do. And for a lot of people in churches, Eve is this kind of originator of that concept. We don’t think of we, Baptists, as I once was, we don’t think of people being born into a life of sin that way. People are born largely innocent, and then we make bad choices.
MET [03:57] I think I’ve talked about things like the age of accountability before. And that is where you are born largely innocent, and then you get to an age where you are then accountable. And after that point, it’s complicated. But there’s also… Baptists do adult baptism, so there is a point where you get to a point in your life where you say, “I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.” So it’s not like you have this original sin, that you are automatically condemned in some way, but you grow up to say, I accept Jesus Christ, and at that point, okay, so all of that is to say We are not born with this concept of damnation so much as we choose our sins. And that’s actually kind of important to the Eve story.
MET [04:50] Eve chose to disobey. She and Adam were created without flaw, but Eve, being so wily and deceitful, chose the wrong path. But it’s not that we’re all immediately damned because of her. We’re damned because we’ve all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
MET [05:12] I don’t know if you remember me talking about the Roman road in an episode.
DDM [05:16] I do. I have dreams about it.
MET [05:17] So Eve’s problem is that she is inappropriately willful. Now that is 100% woven into the Baptist narrative. Women are supposed to be submissive, and we can totally see what happens when they are not, right?
MET [05:36] Women can’t be trusted. Women will choose the wrong path. I remember when I was a kid, maybe late elementary school, early middle school, and a friend’s parent was complaining to mine about their kid’s Sunday school teacher. And I need to clarify. We weren’t even from the same church. This was a friend’s parent at another church complaining to mine about a Sunday school teacher, and it speaks volumes about our community that it was totally normal for parents to just stand around and casually discuss their kids Sunday school teachers, like they with their math teacher or their English teacher. That’s just how ingrained in the community this was. So this mom was mad about how the Sunday school teacher was teaching the creation story.
MET [06:26] And the teacher in question kind of skimmed over the serpent and Eve story and gave a rosier view of it than this mom would have liked. Because the Sunday school teacher didn’t want to tell the kids as young as this mom’s kid about sin in a really harsh way. And the teacher didn’t want these kids to think of God as judgmental or vengeful. And my friend’s mom was having none of it.
MET [06:52] If there is no sin, then why did Jesus die? This is what she demanded of my father. And my father just kind of shook his head and didn’t say anything because he recognized that he did not want to get involved in this furor.
MET [07:04] But this is indicative of a very particular theology that I and my friends grew up with. Eve didn’t imbue all of us with sin. She was the first to make a sinful choice and thus opened up the way for all of us to make sinful choices afterward.
MET [07:23] She was disobedient and we are following in her footsteps. It is because of this disobedience from Eve down to me that Jesus had to die. Our disobedience to God is so bad and makes us so rotten to the core that God had to sacrifice his child to make up for our disobedience, and that was the only way we could be forgiven. We required atonement, and our sins were so bad that the sacrifice had to be that great.
MET [07:50] It’s kind of a loveless and gruesome theology, right? We’re told God sacrifices Jesus because he loves us that much. I mean, there’s a part of me that’s thinking, if he really loved us that much, why wouldn’t he just forgive us?
DDM [08:05] Yeah, Elizabeth, I mean, that kind of theology, I really don’t even know where to start, sis. It’s pretty horrendous. But I need to say that it is frightening to say that for many, this is how they both see and teach our faith. And it’s very common to find this kind of thinking out there.
DDM [08:24] But let’s just go back to Eve in the beginning of Genesis. First of all, in the Genesis story, God commands Adam not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. So that’s really important for us to remember. Adam was commanded not to eat.
DDM [08:41] Eve really only heard of this commandment secondhand through Adam. It was never a commandment given to her by God in all the times that they walked in the garden and spoke. So I think that’s a very interesting distinction there that sometimes we just gloss over or forget about. We’re very quick to blame woman, to blame Eve for this fall from paradise.
DDM [09:05] And as you’re right, this has been used to justify the subordination of woman by naming all woman now as morally weak, easily deceived and spiritually inferior. But what if Eve’s choosing to eat that fruit was, as scripture says, for gaining wisdom? What if Eve was actually simply seeking truth and maybe her choosing to eat of that fruit was in fact the first human act of freedom and of taking moral responsibility? You know, what if Eve was the first to question, to want to understand, and that she chooses to want to know for herself, even if that’s going to come at a cost.
DDM [09:49] It’s interesting as well in the Genesis text that Eve chooses to have her eyes, as Genesis 3 verse 7 says, opened. I think that’s a beautiful phrase. You know, maybe having one’s eyes opened is the beginning of adulthood. Or moving from a child-like way into an adult seeing.
DDM [10:11] Her eyes were literally opened. And so in scripture, Eve is not seen so much as passive. She’s not silent. But in Genesis we actually see that Eve is a full person with integrity in her own being.
DDM [10:25] She speaks, she questions, she acts, she learns. And I think, let’s be honest, that is what it means to be an adult human being. And I sometimes wonder about this, because it’s almost like very often in our cultures, we almost want women to almost be the perpetual child, and we even think about how women are often infantilized. But we might say that without Eve, without our eyes awakening, there was no free will. There was no free will, then there is no freedom to even be able to choose to love. Then there’s no need for grace, compassion, all the qualities that really make humanity, I think, quite incredible.
DDM [11:10] So if Christ grew in Mary’s womb, maybe Eve was the soil out of which the entire story of Jesus will grow. Maybe hers was that fertile soil for moral choice, for questioning, for searching for wisdom, for free will, and ultimately for the capacity to be able to love and receive grace and grow in some ways into full consciousness as adult humanity.
MET [11:40] There is this poem that you reminded me of that I want to read to you, because it relates a lot to what you were talking about. And it is called “The Autobiography of Eve” by Ansel Elkins.
Wearing nothing but snakeskin
boots, I blazed a footpath, the first
radical road out of that old kingdom
toward a new unknown.
When I came to those great flaming gates
of burning gold,
I stood alone in terror at the threshold
between Paradise and Earth.
There I heard a mysterious echo:
my own voice
singing to me from across the forbidden
side. I shook awake—
at once alive in a blaze of green fire.
Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.
I leapt
to freedom.
DDM [12:37] Oh my word, that is profound.
MET [12:43] Every time I read it… I just think, man, that image… It just it gets me every time. Okay, that’s an aside.
MET [12:57] When I got to a point that I was actually thinking about Eve and not just using a blank stock figure for her every time I thought of her, and I admit that this happened shockingly recently, I decided I had a real problem with her sin. I think it’s really awful that it was a sin to know the difference between good and evil. Why wouldn’t a person want to know that? Why would a person choose to remain ignorant?
MET [13:28] Okay, I’m about to say some really controversial things here. I can’t imagine being told, and as you know, it’s really Adam who has told these things, but I can’t imagine being told, this tree will grant you knowledge and wisdom. It will be a grave act of disobedience, however, if you eat of it. And I can’t imagine not immediately thinking the guy making the rules was a fascist.
MET [13:54] Honestly, don’t we talk about how keeping people ignorant is how authoritarians remain in power? Like we have literally said that on this podcast, but Genesis gets a pass. And it comes right back to that obedience thing. In some ways, this is kind of a pre-Frankenstein story.
MET [14:15] Someone wants to be God, so they choose to seek knowledge they should not have, and things go terribly awry. The reason that it never seemed to me that Eve’s punishment fit the crime is because nobody ever made it clear to me what the crime was. In the beginning, God knew good and evil. Humans, being innocent, knew nothing of either.
MET [14:38] Eve wanted to understand these things. In short, she wanted to be like God. It wasn’t Eve’s disobedience. It was her ambition.
MET [14:49] And maybe she was taken in by the serpent. Maybe none of that would have happened. She could have been very naive. But she wanted it.
MET [15:00] She desired to know what God knew. In that way, her story is much more similar to Lucifer’s in Milton’s Paradise Lost than this kind of gendered tale of deceitful and wily women, but also somehow dumb and malicious woman. Because in any other telling than what we get in Genesis and church tradition, Eve would have been the hero. And then there’s Adam.
MET [15:26] Oh my gosh, talk about throwing somebody under the bus. Eve says, Hey, babe, have a bite. And Adam says, Thanks, Shug. And when God shows up, Adam immediately throws Eve under the bus.
MET [15:37] And now for the rest of Western history, women are mendacious, manipulative and deceitful. But Eve’s sin, as I said, was less about disobedience and more about ambition. So Adam’s betrayal is even more spineless than it seems. Because Adam isn’t just throwing Eve under the bus.
MET [15:55] Adam is assuring God he would never seek such knowledge, but his ambitious wife convinced him to take a bite. Eve isn’t a seductress. She’s not a manipulator. She’s an explorer, and that is unacceptable. So it’s really weird to me that we’ve been defining gender roles based on this story for generations. Eve is fearless, provocative and displays leadership, which is ultimately why she’s punished. Adam is cowardly and lacks initiative, and he’s punished too. It’s important that most of us never learn anything beyond the narrative that this story is about Eve’s disobedience, because if we looked into it any further, we’d find some uncomfortable lessons about authority and what it means to be a leader.
DDM [16:37] And you know, Elizabeth, you’ll stress on the phrase, “she wanted this knowledge,” and you’re framing in terms of ambition. Theological traditions use the word desire. And it’s interesting because I think there has been this very passive way of seeing Eve.
DDM [16:55] Eve is silent, only hears the commandment of God through her husband. She’s deceived, cursed, used as a warning. But what if we began to see her, instead of being passive, as an active person? She looks, she reflects on what she sees, beautiful fruit.
DDM [17:13] She knows, as you say, knowledge is a good thing. She questions, she challenges the snake. She chooses, and then her eyes are opened. I really can’t help but stress again that she really is the first act of free will in that garden, because she does want to be like God.
DDM [17:33] And I don’t think that that’s a bad thing, because she was created in God’s image. She was made to be like God, and she knows this deeply. She wants to be more like God than she is, and so she eats. But I think there’s also more to this.
DDM [17:51] Eve survives the eating. She moves from childhood into adulthood morally and physically. She goes on to create life after leaving paradise as God created life. She births.
DDM [18:06] Except she does this now all with her eyes open. And she knows that there is good and evil. I think it’s also interesting for us to look at that word know for a bit. Because in biblical Hebrew knowledge was not something we know with our heads, but it was something that we knew in relationship with.
DDM [18:28] It was a deeply intimate way of knowing. And so to know something is the same word that is used for making love in the early part of Genesis. Adam we’re told knew Eve. It was about a knowledge that came from deep experiential intimacy.
DDM [18:47] And I think part of the problem of the story is that we’ve idolized innocence and childlike faith But I think what is more profound is when sacredness is birthed out of struggle, out of deep adult faith that knows it’s okay to question. It’s okay to reclaim our voices. It’s okay to seek knowledge. And even when we are exiled and pushed out of systems, to still know we will survive and we will create new life and we will birth a new world, and ultimately refine salvation and wholeness again in new ways.
DDM [19:21] But certainly, let’s be honest, this is not the way that the patriarchy has interpreted the story, nor, I think, has it been the way that Western empires have interpreted it. The powerful want to read into the story submission, obedience, and divine punishment. But we know from the life of Jesus and Mary that God is not the God of the powerful, but the God of the hungry who will be filled.
DDM [19:57] Again, that desire that the poor will be exalted. So maybe we should really be reading the story of Eve and Genesis through the eyes of God and through the eyes of Jesus and not through the eyes of power.
MET [20:14] That is a really important message for me personally. And I don’t mean to individualize my experience and say, “Oh, you should only think about this through my eyes.” But I do want to tell you a little bit about where I’m coming from. It has been really hard reckoning for me anyway, with the fact that my faith actively works to oppress and harm people.
MET [20:43] That is very sobering for me. And that’s more true or less true depending on the tradition and location. But as a whole, Christianity is an institution steeped in patriarchy and colonialism, and that’s putting it lightly. And if those are our guiding lights, then it is hard to be a force for good in the world.
DDM [21:05] It’s such a demonic subversion of our faith.
MET [21:07] Yes. So I think about how we have used and abused Eve over the centuries and what she would say about the church today sometimes. Would Eve have rocked some important foundations during the #MeToo movement?
MET [21:26] Would Eve have warned us about the scandals in the Catholic or Southern Baptist churches? Would she have known about the abuses of children and women because she has dealt with powerful men? Would Eve have called out the blatant racism against Bishop Curry from his own members of the faith when he spoke at the royal wedding? See, I think she would have done all of these things, because more than any of us, she knew the difference between good and evil.
DDM [21:56] And that’s a blessing. And that is a blessing.
MET [21:59] Yes. Institutions do not always make good choices. Institutions are mired in systems of power and ideology that actively keep some people under a boot and some people in a silk slipper.
MET [22:15] Eve may have been ambitious, and if you think ambitious is a sin, then I guess that’s a mark against her. But in the end, she knew the difference between good and evil. As you say, her eyes were opened. She knew the difference between right and wrong.
MET [22:29] So maybe she’d have had a lot to tell us about if we’d stop thinking of her as the root of the problem and not the start of the story.
DDM [22:37] Absolutely, and don’t we need today more and more men, women, children who know the difference between good and evil? I think also we need to reject that blame narrative whenever we find ourselves slipping into it. Both Eve and Mary are two remarkable women who made choices that shaped our world. Eve acting despite the cost to enable us to grow in knowledge of good and evil, to move from that childhood innocence into adult faith, and that first person to exercise free will.
DDM [23:10] Mary also acting and despite the cost having the courage to birth God as an unmarried woman and to take on the responsibility of in some ways teaching God what it means to be human. You know, these two women really are bookends to the scriptural story of what it means to be human, to grow in knowledge and love, and to have to navigate these choices in ways that may cost us, but also remind us that we are survivors and more resilient than we may have ever known, and that to want to be like God is our birthright.
MET [23:58] Thank you for listening to the Priest and the Prof. Find us at our website, https://PriestAndProf.org. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us at podcast@PriestAndProf.org. Make sure to subscribe, and if you feel led, please leave a donation at https://priestandprof.org/donate/. That will help cover the costs of this podcast and support the ministries of Trinity Episcopal Church.
MET [24:24] Thank you, and we hope you have enjoyed our time together today.
DDM [24:28] Music by Audionautix.com
Leave a Reply