My special interest in Eve began through exploring the idea of Eve as natural revelation. Natural revelation is what we can know about God through the things he has made. Several years ago, I was emailing with a friend, a PhD candidate at Westminster Seminary. He was bouncing ideas for his thesis on interpretation off me, and I was bouncing ideas for a book on women and work off him. In the course of our e-correspondence, he suggested I read up on natural revelation, because he didn't have time to. I thought it would take up an afternoon, but instead it started my looking at Eve in a whole new way. Let me explain.
How many of you have read Pat the Bunny? It’s a “touch and feel” children’s book. As you read with your child, she interacts with you and the book, hearing and touching and feeling and smelling and learning. The world God made is like an interactive picture book. Everything we see, hear, feel, taste, and smell reveals something about God. Everything tells of his glory, power, and nature (Psalm 19; Romans 1:19-20). As John Calvin wrote, we cannot open our eyes without seeing him, and we cannot even know ourselves without knowing something about God.
As part of creation, Eve was a "touch and feel" revelation of God. She was the last creature God made, the one and only suitable helper for Adam (Genesis 2:18-22), a more complete interactive visual aid than any other thing God made. In fact, like Adam, she was made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-28). She showed Adam (and she shows us) many things about who God is and what he is like. Sparks of God's glory shine in her and in every woman.
But in God's glorious theater Eve played a dual role. Not only was she an image of God, showing Adam and us what God is like, but as Paul expressed it, she was also "the glory of man" (1 Corinthians 11:7). "Glory" can mean honor, renown, beauty, splendor, magnificence, exhaltation. Commentators have often tried to explain woman as the glory of man in this sense. I don't think this is what Paul was getting at. He was using glory in the sense of natural revelation. Glory in this sense is "the spiritual made visible" (Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage). The "glory of God" is God's appearing in ways that we can perceive by our senses, by sight, touch, taste, hearing, smell (Mark Futato, Creation: A Witness to the Wonder of God). Radiant light, dark clouds, thunder, wind, earthquake, and an audible voice are examples in the Bible of God's "glory."
And so when Paul says woman is "the glory of man," he is saying that woman is man made visible. That is, Eve and women/wives in general show us what mankind in relationship with God is like. We are back to the metaphor of marriage. Eve was Adam's "glory." She was a "flesh of his flesh" likeness that he could see and hear and handle (Genesis 2:23).
Paul tells us this is a great mystery (Ephesians 5:22-32), and that's why I find Eve so interesting. I hope you will too.
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