The most primal relationship mirroring the relationality of divine life is the male/female relationship. This is a point highlighted in the theology of Karl Barth1 and Hans Urs von Balthasar.2 In Genesis 2 we are told that God sees that it is not good that man is alone and seeks to make him a counterpart as a “helpmeet.” As helpmeet, the woman is created to share in man’s creational/vocational tasks as a partner. This is what St. Paul means when he states that “man [was not] created for woman, but woman for man” (1 Cor. 11:9). He does not mean that woman was created as man’s plaything, or a slave to be dominated. Rather, man was first created and given certain creational tasks which woman was created to share in.
In Genesis 2, woman is derived from man, but not because she is inferior to man. As we may recall, the idea that realities which are derivative are inherently inferior is an aspect of the metaphysics of tragedy. The Bible works on the basis of a metaphysic of comedy, in that movement and generation do not lead to degeneracy but go from the good (the man alone) to the better (man and woman together in relationship). In support of this, Genesis 1 makes both the male and female equal image-bearers of God. This is confirmed in that when seeing the woman in Genesis 2 the man cries out that she is precisely what he is: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen. 2:23). In an analogical sense, the man is homoousios with the woman.
Hence, when Paul writes that: “[man is the] image and glory of God, but woman is the glory of man” he obviously does not mean to deny an equal share in the divine image, but rather to say that woman is a derived image like the Son. This does not make the Son in any way inferior to the Father. Hence, man and woman are therefore organically united, and there is a perichoretic mutuality between them, since as Paul remarks “woman is not independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as woman came from man, so also man is born of woman. But everything comes from God” (1 Cor. 11:11-12). …
In Genesis 2, we are told by the text that the man “calls” (yiq·qā·rê) her woman (that is, recognizes what she is), but he does not “name” (šê·mō·wṯ), her in a verbal parallel with the animals that he possesses dominion over (Gen. 3:20). It has often been remarked that the ability to name,3 or merely to possess the name of another in the ANE was a sign of power over the other.4 Eventually, the man does “name” the woman “Eve,” but this is after the Fall, when YHWH predicts that “your husband . . . shall rule over you” (Gen. 3:16). In a word, the domination of men over women in subsequent history is a result of the curse of sin, and not hardwired into creation. As Luther writes in the Genesis commentary:
In this way, although your wife has not been made from your bones, nevertheless, because she is your wife, she is the mistress of the house just as you are its master, except that the wife was made subject to the man by the Law which was given after sin. This punishment is similar to the others which dulled those glorious conditions of Paradise of which this text informs us. Moses is not speaking of the wretched life which married people now live but of the innocence in paradise. Their management would have been equally divided, just as Adam prophesies here that Eve must be called “she-man,” or virago because she performs similar activities in the home. Now the sweat of the face is imposed upon man, and woman is given the command that she should be under her husband.5
As should be clear, the relationality between man and woman is itself a vestigia trinitatis as Genesis 1 hints at (“let us make man in our image” Gen. 1:26). Similarly, Paul makes more explicit the vestigia trinitatis present in the male-female relationship in 1 Corinthians: “But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God” (1 Cor. 11:3)…. However, the Trinity is not an eternal legalistic-hierarchical archetype to which humans must conform…. As Jesus clearly states:
You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave, even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many. (Matt. 20:25-28).
The self-donating love of the head is based on Christian freedom, that is, freedom to give all since one possesses all. Ultimately, this ability to surrender in freedom is exemplified and rooted in God’s eternal life. From all eternity, the Father begets the Son and communicates to him the fullness of his being in an act of self-surrender. Because God the Father possesses an infinity of power and glory, he can infinitely give of himself in the begetting of the Son without losing himself. Likewise, the Son, having received the fullness of the divine being from the Father can also surrender himself to the Father through a return of the fullness of his being in the spiration of the Spirit.
Hence, God is constituted as triune precisely as an eternal event of self-donating love expressing itself as mutual surrender. In a word, the divine being and divine persons are not constituted by individuals bound together by a set of rules (i.e., hierarchical or egalitarian), but in a primal act of self-surrendering grace. God is an eternal unity of sovereignty and self-surrender, the former making the latter possible. The unilateral self-surrender of the Father constitutes the personhood of the Son, who in turn is enabled to surrender himself to the Father in the spiration of the Spirit.
Returning to Genesis 2, the relationality of man and woman analogically follows the Trinitarian pattern of mutual self-surrender. Adam begets Eve from his side in an analogical similitude of the eternal begetting of the Son by the Father. The woman is not an inferior being but is what the man is (“bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh” Gen. 2:23). Likewise, their mutual love and bodily self-surrender results in the fecundity of childbearing (Gen. 1:28) in analogy with the mutual spiration of the Spirit.
Moving onto the New Testament, Paul is even more direct than Genesis in his comparison of the male-female relationship with the relationality internal to the Godhead. In 1 Corinthians 11:3 he speaks of Christ’s head/source (kephalē) being God the Father, just as the head/source of woman is man. In this, the male/female relationship is seen as an analogical parallel to the relationship between Father and Son. This parallel is rooted in the fact that (as many interpreters have emphasized) the term “head” can also mean “source.”6 The male is the protological source of the female in the Genesis narrative, just as the Father is the source of the Son both eternally and in his incarnate state.
As Paul makes clear in his Christological hymn in Philippians 2, it is precisely because the Son possesses the fullness of glory (“the form of God”) that he can surrender himself to the will of the Father as a “servant”- something that Luther also makes much of in Freedom of a Christian.7 Just as he eternally returns himself to the Father through the spiration of the Spirit, so too in time, he offers the fullness that he has received from the Father in his sacrificial death on the cross (“he offered himself up through the eternal Spirit” Heb. 9:14).
The implication for male/female relations in Paul is then clear. In Ephesians 5, we are informed that Christ is the head of the Church just as husbands are heads of their wives. This is not in the manner of hierarchical domination, as with the Greco-Roman Paterfamilias. Christ became the head of the Church by surrendering himself to the Church in death on the cross. Indeed, John shows that the very substance of the Word and sacrament ministry of the Church is begotten from Christ’s side in analogy to Adam’s begetting of Eve (Jn. 19:34). This means that male headship does not mean carte blanche authority to dominate the wife. Rather, male headship consists in the willingness of the man to serve his wife in Christic self-surrender.
In analogy to Luther’s paradigm of Christian freedom (“Lord of all, servant of all”), the husband’s total surrender to his wife frees her to submit to him. The priority of the man’s surrender to his wife (as in the protological couple) therefore makes sense of Paul’s language of “submitting to one another” (Eph. 5:21) at the beginning of the passage. Both husband and wife submit to one another, but (to borrow a term from Trinitarian theology) there is a “taxis” to their mutual submission.
Much as in eternity the Father as the font of divinity surrenders his being in the begetting of the Son and the Son in turn surrenders himself to his bride the Church, so too, the husband as the head takes priority in his self-surrender to the wife. The wife submits to the husband in an analogical parallel to the eternal return of the Son to the Father in the spiration of the Spirit, as well as the Church’s free submission to Christ.
- CD III/1.182-206. ↩︎
- Balthasar, Theo-Drama, 5:91. ↩︎
- von Rad, Genesis: A Commentary, 83. ↩︎
- Mary Mills, Images of God in the Old Testament (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998), 31. ↩︎
- Lectures on Genesis (1535-1545); LW 1:137-138. Emphasis added. ↩︎
- Joseph Fitzmyer, To Advance the Gospel: New Testament Studies (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1998), 43. ↩︎
- Freedom of a Christian (1520); LW 31:365-366. ↩︎
From the draft manuscript for Lutheran Dogmatics: The Evangelical-Catholic Faith for an Age of Contested Truth (Lexham Press).
Cover image from “The Historical Adam and Eve,” Reformed Classicist, accessed March 12, 2025, https://www.reformedclassicalist.com/home/the-historical-adam-and-evenbsp. Other images from Amelia Higgins, “Tying the Knot – A Covenant with God,” Forsythia, August 19, 2023, accessed March 12, 2025, https://www.forsythia.blog/new-blog/2023/8/19/bk9315zh0rgncwiuu7yloe1ttbk4wq; “6 Ways the Eucharist changes you like a marriage does,” Aleteia, August 9, 2018, accessed March 12, 2025, https://aleteia.org/2018/08/09/6-ways-the-eucharist-changes-you-like-a-marriage-does; and Hannah Aster, “Matching Personalities—The Best and Worst Pairings,” ShortForm, January 8, 2022, accessed March 12, 2025, https://www.shortform.com/blog/matching-personalities/.