Understanding Paul’s Prohibition in 1 Timothy 2:12

I recently was asked whether male authority in the family and church is the result of the Fall. Was there, the questioner wondered, an equality of person and rank that would have continued forever had sin not marred the relationship between the sexes?

To answer this question, I pointed the questioner to 1 Timothy 2:11–15:

Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.

This is a well-known section of Paul’s letters, if for no other reason than that it is controversial in debates about male and female roles in marriage and the church. This text is particularly important because it reveals that male authority is a pre-fall institution. It is part of God’s creational design.

Paul’s reasoning in this passage is twofold: Adam was formed first and it was Eve who was deceived. It may be that the second reason is a consequence of Eve’s sin, but Paul first grounds male authority (specifically teaching authority in the church) in the creational order. This order is clearly stated, but Paul does not elaborate in this section. What is it exactly that Paul saw in the creation account that led him to argue in this way? Being able to answer this question is important since Paul does not explain his application of Genesis 2–3. I think we can confidently say the following.

“It is not mere chronology,” as the New Testament scholar George Knight III puts it in his comments on 1 Tim 2:13, “that Paul appeals to here but what is entailed in this chronology” (emphasis added). Consider the order of creation. Adam is made first (Gen 2:7). What, however, is the significance of this fact? It is this: Adam was given the task of working and keeping the garden (Gen 2:15) and naming the animals (Gen 2:19) before Eve was created. Naming implies authority, something Adam will subsequently do for Eve as well (Gen 2:23; cf. 3:20). Even more so, the task of working and keeping the garden is the fundamental task of dominion given to mankind, and it is given prior to Eve’s creation. Eve has an indispensable and vital role to play in this dominion; man and woman together are to “fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen 1:28), but their roles are fundamentally different. Adam was created first and given the commission to rule before Eve was created. Eve was created to help Adam carry out this task. She is a “helper fit for him” (Gen 1:18). Adam, in fact, cannot carry out his task alone: “it is not good that man should be alone” (Gen 1:18). Eve, however, is a helper suitable for Adam as he exercises his God-given authority, rather than a coequal authority, which is powerfully displayed in the fact that she “was taken out of Man” (Gen 2:23). The creational order, then, as seen in Genesis 1–2, and as stated by Paul in 1 Timothy 2, clearly shows that male authority is built by God into the very fabric of nature.

Admittedly, Paul’s second reason—that Eve was the one who was first deceived—is more difficult to explain. Some would even say this part of Paul’s prohibition is based on the pre-fall situation, that there is something inherent to the female constitution, while not in itself sinful, that is more easily twisted in a sinful direction than is the case with men. On this way of thinking, man is made to rule and to fight for the cause of righteousness in the world, while the female disposition, in this particular instance the female disposition to submit to authority—“woman, who by nature (that is, by the ordinary law of God) is formed to obey” (John Calvin)—is twisted in Eve’s submitting herself to a false authority. Most interpreters, however, because of Paul’s use of the verb “was deceived” (1 Tim 2:14; see Gen 3:13) would argue something along the lines of Calvin: that Paul “alludes to the punishment inflicted on the woman,” which is itself stated in Gen 3:16: “Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you.” Paul’s second reason, then, most likely is based on the fall.

Some (but certainly not all) complementarians have been rightly criticized for arguing, in effect, that male leadership in the family and church is an arbitrary decision on God’s part. This is a version of complementarianism that insists that “women can do anything un-ordained men can do,” and that there is no difference between men and women in family, church, and society apart from the status of office and authority. That authority, then, appears to be arbitrarily delegated since women are just as capable as men of carrying out the same tasks. They just don’t have the authority from God to do so. This way of thinking either denies, or does not rightly emphasize, that male leadership in family, church, and society is firmly rooted in God’s creational intention and design. This leadership is not, in the first instance, a result of the fall, though the fall is also a part of the equation. Paul’s grounding of male authority in 1 Timothy 2 in the creation account in Genesis 1–2, therefore, is essential for rightly understanding the authority structures God has built into the world.

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