Dust and Patriarchy in Eden? An Unconfident Reading of Genesis 2

In his recent essay “The Burden of the Gospels: An Unconfident Reader.” Wendell Berry writes:

"Anybody half awake these days will be aware that there are many Christians who are exceedingly confident in their understanding of the Gospels, and who are exceedingly self-confident in their understanding of themselves in their faith. They appear to know precisely the purposes of God, and they appear to be perfectly assured that they are now doing, and in every circumstance will continue to do, precisely God's will as it applies specifically to themselves. They are confident, moreover, that God hates people whose faith differs from their own, and they are happy to concur in that hatred."

Clearly, there’s much in these sentences to reflect on. For instance, we could talk about the political implications of Christian self-confidence and excess— the way in which knowing “precisely the purposes of God” feeds into a religious ideology that requires the State to become a Christian State before the second coming of Christ can occur. Or the way in which Christian self-confidence and excess sustains a political and cultural climate in which torture, well, really isn’t as bad as it used to be…
But this isn’t what I’m going to be typing about—I mention it simply because it weighs on me.
Instead, what I want to focus on is the first sentence from the passage from Berry:
“[T]here are many Christians who are exceedingly confident in their understanding of the Gospels and who are exceedingly self-confident in their understanding of themselves in faith.” As I read Berry, such excess is far from virtuous. Indeed, it’s debilitating, leading inexorably in the direction of hatred and sin.
For my part, I have to confess that such extreme confidence doesn’t come naturally to me—neither in my understanding of the Gospels, the Biblical narrative, nor in my understanding of my faith. There’s much I don’t get. Berry teaches me to see this uncertainty in a positive light.
Often my lack of understanding takes the form of questions. If I can be forgiven for using an allusion to the writings of a pagan philosopher in the context of quasi-theology, reading the biblical text often leaves me feeling like the young Theatetus in conversation with Socrates: My head is swimming when I think about these matters!
So let me share with you some of my perplexities— some of the things I don’t get—when I experience when read Genesis 2-3. Seemingly even before the so-called fall, things in paradise seemed far from perfect. Consider the following two points:
First, Adam is made from “dust from the ground”. Dust is associated in our story with sin, punishment, and death. What’s it doing there from the beginning? Why the reference to sin, punishment, and death before the eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, indeed, before the creation of the woman?
Second, Adam and the Woman exchange not a single word in Genesis 2.
Recall the making and creating of the woman… Noticing Adam is alone; God acknowledges that his creation isn’t “very good”, so he decides that Adam needs a helper. Now, in Hebrew the word for “helper” is ‘ezer kenegdo, which doesn’t mean servant or that the man is the head of the household. It means equality. In fact, it suggests cooperation and otherness. There’s something of the face-to-face relationship at work here.
First, God makes the animals, but they won’t do. Then he creates the “woman”. But when God brings the helper to Adam something very strange happens, and it’s not positive. Adam names her, like he named the animals. And, in doing so, he refers to her in the third person: “This one (zo’t) at last is bone of my bones / and flesh of my flesh; /this one (zo’t) shall be called Woman, / for out of Man this one (zo’t) was taken.”
Note that Adam doesn’t address the “woman”. He doesn’t speak with her and the woman is silent. What are we to make of this failure of dialogue from the beginning?
Why is there no shalom? How does this failure at the interpersonal level condition the emergence of so-called original sin? Certainly this failure of dialogue occurs before the man and the woman disobey God’s commandment.
Sometimes Christians refer to Jesus as the second Adam. It’s in Jesus’ role as the second Adam that I read the following words from the fourth Gospel (John 4:27): “Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman.”
Unlike Adam, Jesus does speak “with a woman”, but not only that, he speaks to her across the division of religious intolerance. I think it is significant that the woman is a Samaritan woman. The Samaritans were the hated other during the Palestine of Jesus’ time.
There are two sets of questions with which I want to end these unconfident ramblings:
1) I think that most would agree that Creation prior to the Fall wasn’t perfect, there was (and is) an intended eschatological movement toward God being “all in all”. However, was there sin in Eden that precedes the disobedience of eating from tree of the knowledge of good and evil? If yes, what are the ramifications? If no, how do you deal with the “dust” and the apparent patriarchy?
2) In what way does Jesus model for us—in John 4 and other places—a way of life that mends the effects of the “sin” in Eden? In what way does dialogue across gender/sexual differences—dialogue that affirms such differences—mend the brokenness of creation? In what way does dialogue across religious differences—dialogue that affirms such differences—mend the brokenness of creation?