Mother of All Mothers ("If God is my real Father, who is my real Mother?")

Religious feminists are rapidly producing a version of Christianity which would be unrecognizable to Christians as recently as the last century. Why should feminist writers and thinkers work so hard to change a religious institution that has endured for two thousand years?

Reasons vary widely from author to author, but underlying them all is the common sentiment that the Bible and the religion arising from it are unsympathetic (or even hostile) to women. Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is typical when she writes:

… the language of Christian preaching, prayer, and hymnody is still laden with exclusive-sounding references to men, man, brothers, sons, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And the pronoun for that God is “he.” As if to assure us that the lopsidedly masculine language in intentional, the leadership in local congregations and national church organizations is also lopsidedly male.1

Another pamphlet in this series looks at these efforts to envision God as feminine.2 In what follows, however, we take another look at the Bible, to point to the patterns of femininity contained in the Scriptures. Whether or not the Church, or any of its manifestations over the last two millennia, has adequately held up these biblical feminine archetypes is another question. Undoubtedly, carnal Christian men have at times undervalued and under-deployed their sisters in Christ. But, does this error originate within the Bible itself? We think not. The following discussion of biblical archetypes of femininity explains why.

"If God is my real Father, who is my real Mother?” asked the serious-minded six-year-old on my lap. I was stunned for a moment, not knowing whether to be more surprised, amazed, or pleased. In one question, my little daughter had penetrated a great truth of biblical archetypes and touched a source of great confusion in the modern Church about ultimate femininity.

What my daughter really meant by real was ultimate. She had learned and understood that God is the ultimate Father behind all the individual daddies in the world, including her own Daddy. She certainly understood that daddies and mommies are not the same thing. So, if God stands behind all the daddies in the world, she wanted to know who is the one, original Mother behind all the individual mothers, including her own Mommie.

The “grown up” word for an original or exemplary pattern is archetype, and archetypes are woven into the warp and woof of any culture’s values and world-view. Even though they cannot describe archetypes accurately, even little girls are aware of them, and they use them to organize, identify, and evaluate the persons and things they meet in the world.

Christians are not alone in seeing archetypes as the basis for identity and conduct. Carl Gustav Jung and his disciples among psychologists and psychiatrists are perhaps the most ardent proponents of sexual archetypes. However, Jung did not invent archetypes. They appear in any culture’s art, literature, and folklore; and, historians can detect them in the way they affect a culture’s politics, government, and economics. Jung made archetypes a key component in his overall theory of psychology, and his disciples have popularized the notion of archetypes.

For example, Moore and Gillette outlined their views of archetypal manhood in a book they entitled King, Warrior, Magician, Lover.3 Toni Grant, in her best seller Being a Woman 4, developed an archetypal schema for womanhood based on the four-fold patterns of Amazon, Mother, Madonna, and Courtesan. Clarissa Pinkola Estes even uses wolves as an archetypal pattern to explain and prescribe healthy female behavior (Women Who Run With Wolves5).

The problem with Jungians or pop-psychologists is not that they employ archetypes in their work, but that they acquire them from problematic sources. A culture’s archetypes might be uncovered by careful research into history, literature, and folklore. But, Jungians claim that the source of archetypes is “the collective unconscious” of a culture. One wonders how any archetype can be identified if it is located in something which goes by the name unconscious. But, a larger problem revolves around the deliberate attempt to create or elevate a model of behavior into “archetypal status" for the sake of social engineering.

How are we to know for certain if this or that is actually an archetype? Can we “choose” archetypes to guide our thinking? How do we evaluate any of them in the first place? Christians answer these questions by turning to the Scriptures. Only the Scriptures authoritatively reveal original patterns and panhistoric models for masculinity and femininity. Therefore, only the Scriptures provide the dependable and normative sexual archetypes we need to navigate the shifting sands of time and culture.

What are the explicit, original, and exemplary persons and patterns offered for femininity in the Bible? Eve, Israel, Lady Wisdom, the Virgin Mary, and the Church are all original, exemplary patterns of femininity. Others, such as Wisdom’s evil counterpart, the Woman Folly, and Jerusalem’s evil counterpart Babylon, can be studied as archetypal patterns of fallen or corrupted femininity. Men and women alike should avoid them in day to day living. In what follows, however, we will examine only the five exemplary archetypes of femininity in the Bible.

It is not hard to see that the Bible presents Eve as an original pattern of femininity. She is the first human woman ever created! As the original human embodiment of femininity, Eve “sets the pace” as it were, for all women. What we learn about her, the rationale for her existence, the details surrounding her creation-all these and similar matters illuminate our understanding of femininity per se.

Eve, for example, was made after Adam; she was made from Adam, rather than independently of him; and, she was made for Adam. All these details are related in the Genesis account of Eve’s creation. However, these details have a greater significance than the individual woman who first appeared in the Garden. On these details, the Apostle Paul anchors weighty doctrine concerning normative in which men and women relate to one another. The doctrine of male headship in marriage and the Church rest on these details (1 Tim. 2:11-13; 1 Cor. 11:7-9). The very dynamics of how we are born into sin and how we are saved from sin rest on these details, as Paul explains imputed sin and imputed righteousness in Romans 5.

The first hope of salvation in the Bible was tied to Eve, when God promised that the seed of the woman would eventually crush the Serpent (Gen. 3:15). Apparently Eve thought that this promise would be answered immediately. She named her firstborn “Cain,” a name with a meaning which could be paraphrased “the man from the Lord.” Alas, Cain was a murderer, not a messiah. The human race had many centuries to wait for the one woman Mary to bear the One Savior Jesus.

Only one woman was ever created directly from the side of her husband; all others are born from their mothers’ wombs. Nevertheless, the creation of the first man and the first woman is archetypal. Eve provides women with a pattern by which to understand all women who follow Eve. Before and after the Virgin Mary, mothers were (and continue to be) pivotal in bringing saviors into the world-not merely by birthing them, but by nurturing their sons’ masculine impulse to judge evil.

Lady Wisdom lays an astounding claim to archetypal status. Chronologically she is the first feminine thing God ever created. Before the first dust of the universe, God created the moral and physical principles by which the cosmos would function. Lady Wisdom is the totality of those creation principles. Wisdom in Proverbs, particularly the personification known as Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 1-9, is not God’s eternal attribute, nor is she Christ, nor a goddess. 6 Proverbs 1-9, especially Proverbs 8, presents wisdom as the body of creation principles by which God fashioned and sustains the universe. These include not only the physical laws of the universe, but also the moral and ethical laws by which the cosmos was designed to function.

Solomon presents wisdom as a woman because wisdom relates to God and to us in feminine patterns. Lady Wisdom is like a proto-typical wife in her relationship to God as described in Proverbs 8. Wisdom co-labors with God and rejoices in His works (Prov. 8:27-30; Job 28:12,23-27). She reproves fools as a good mother would (Proverbs 1:18ff). Like a good wife or wealthy benefactress, she exalts, praises and glorifies the wise, because she is their patron (Proverbs 8).

The fundamental femininity of the earth-indeed, the whole creation-is rooted in Lady Wisdom. The universe, like Eve, was created from and for her Masculine Head. In a real sense, the earth was the only “mother” which Adam had, and Mother Earth is one of the most pervasive understandings of nature in all human societies down through the centuries. Unfortunately, today New Age and Neo-pagan writers attempt to elevate Mother Earth to the status of a goddess, worthy of our service and worship. An insidious idea which percolates through much contemporary environmentalist agitation is the religious notion that Mother Earth (or Gaia, or the Cosmos, or Nature) has supreme worth and gives meaning and significance to us all.

This nature-worship is simply a modern version of what Paul described in Romans 1:18ff, where men worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator. Christians rightly name this modern impulse idolatry. However, Christians make a mistake if, when they reject the idolatry of nature-worship, they also reject or belittle the idea that the earth or the cosmos is feminine.

Christians must hold on to the fact that mother is a scriptural metaphor for the earth. King David, for example, likens his mother’s womb to the earth in Psalm 139:13 and 15. David, of course, knew that his mother’s womb was the venue for his earliest existence. On the other hand, by referring to that womb as “the described in Genesis 2, as He fashioned the first man out of the dust of the ground. Just as God was intimately and actively involved in Adam’s creation, so He was also in David’s creation. It is God who works in the womb of every woman, to form and fashion the child she brings forth. (cf. Ecc. 11:5)

Similarly, Paul speaks of the whole creation groaning in childbirth as it awaits the deliverance of the new creation (Rom. 8: 20-23). We do not “belong to the earth” as some earth-worshipers proclaim on their bumper stickers. We belong to God, and the earth belongs to Him as well. We were created to cultivate and rule over the earth. Jesus said that the righteous will inherit the earth. But, these truths clarify the femininity of the creation toward God and mankind. The earth is from and for God, created to glorify Him in life-giving cycles with fruitfulness, beauty, and praise (Psalms 97,104,148). The human race, like individual men, is nurtured by its cosmic mother in boyhood, but matures to husband and rule the femininity that nurtures them.

Like women, nature is diverse, changeable, fruitful, and beautiful in startlingly variable ways. Women, therefore, rightly feel a kinship and partnership with nature, because both they and nature are feminine. Consequently, as a woman becomes familiar with the rhythms, patterns, and ways of nature, she also learns about her own femininity and the femininity of other women around her. Nature is, in a sense, femininity expressed in gigantic, elementary, and impersonal ways. In women of flesh and blood, the femininity of nature is not diminished; rather it is intensified and made personal by possession of the image of God. Like a lens, a woman focuses and concentrates the femininity of the earth, to highlight the fragility, fruitfulness, faith, and beauty that are the hallmarks of all femininity.

Israel, God’s original covenant community, is an original pattern of femininity. She is the wife of God, the mother of his son (Rev. 12), and of his people (Gal. 4:26). Because Scripture contains so voluminous a record of her life, Israel is a particularly detailed archetype of femininity. As the matriarch of a large and prosperous clan, Israel sets the style and tone for the spirituality of the generations of believers which flow from her.

No other metaphor for God and His people is employed as often as marriage (Isa. 54:1-8; 66:10-13; Jer. 3; 31:32; Hosea 1-3; Gal. 4). Ezekiel 16 tells the whole story of Israel’s life-from conception to eternity-in the metaphor of a woman’s life. Because Israel and individual women share femininity in common, Israel and the history of her relationship with God provide women a rich tapestry of principles, object lessons, patterns to be emulated and avoided, and models to mimic.

Jerusalem, Israel’s capital, is the archetypal Mother of all believers. 7 God alone is the author of our salvation, but it comes to us through the ministrations of his wife, Israel. “Salvation is of the Jews,” Jesus reminded the woman at the well (John 4:22). And, “the Jerusalem which is above … is the mother of us all,” Paul tells the Galatians (Gal. 4:26). As mothers comfort and succor their children in distress, so those whom God saves will be comforted and succored by Jerusalem (Isa. 66:10-13).

The Bible speaks this way of Israel and Jerusalem because women and Israel share femininity in common. We know and understand Israel’s role in God’s plan of salvation because we know and understand the roles that mothers and wives play in our own lives. Conversely, a woman may look to Israel as a model of femininity which guides and shapes her own femininity. Clearly, Israel in Scripture presents both exemplary and disreputable patterns of behavior. Women may emulate Israel in her better moments, and grow wise by pondering Israel's failures and foibles.

The Virgin Mary is unique in history, a Second Eve. As Eve opened the door of Christ who brings salvation. Death came by a man through a woman; so also, life comes by a man through a woman. Mary is the one, from among all lifegiving women, whose seed finally crushed the Serpent (Gen. 3:15). Israel is the wife of God and the mother of Christ (Rev. 12); but, Mary is the one woman who embodied Israel above all others. She was the one Jewish woman who actually gave birth to God’s Son.

Is Mary an exemplar for Christian women? Gabriel’s prophecy that Mary was uniquely blessed among women (confirmed by her cousin Elizabeth’s greeting) seems to set Mary so far apart from other women as to make her inaccessible as a model for anyone. Yet, the Church has not only honored Mary for her unique believed God. His power overshadowed her. The person of Christ was formed within her with world-wide consequences for good. Her unique blessing brought her unique suffering; but, the consolation she found in her Son’s resurrection is a consolation she shares with all who sorrow for Christ’s sake.

Ephesians 5:21-32 is the most important New Testament passage on gender archetypes in the Bible. In one sense, there is nothing “new” in this passage. David Pawson summaries the theme of Ephesians 5:21ff well:

… the male/female relationship is seen as the best analogy for the divine/human relationship …. The analogy is specifically sexual. The male represents the divine side of the partnership; the female represents the human. … the analogy recurs many times in Scripture. See for example, Ezekiel 16 where Jerusalem is variously described as an abandoned baby girl, developing in puberty, courted and married, enthroned as queen, and finally turning to prostitution. The New Testament follows the Old. Jesus uses the feminine word for his church (Matthew 16:18); he loves her (Ephesians 5:25). … The fundamental feature in the analogy is the correspondence between the male and the divine, the female and the human. The parallel is nonreversible. Husband and wife are no more interchangeable than God and man! But, there is something new here too, a startling mystery which Paul reveals in Ephesians 5:31-32.8

After laying out the familiar analogy in verses 21 through 30, Paul quotes Genesis 2:24-For this cause a man shall leave his father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife and the two shall become one flesh (NASB). John Piper explains the point of Paul’s quotation from Genesis:

… Paul interprets God’s original design by calling it a mystery: “This mystery is great, but I am speaking with reference to Christ and the church.” In other words, the meaning of marriage is bigger than anyone had dreamed-it is Christ and the church. When God designed marriage in the beginning, he modeled it on his Son’s relationship to the church. This had not been fully revealed in the Old Testament. But now the mystery is revealed and it is stunningly great.9

Behind the pattern of Adam and Eve there is another pattern-Christ and His Church! Adam and Eve are archetypal in and of themselves with respect to humanity which follow them. But, behind the creation of male and female lies the cosmic masculinity of Christ and the femininity of His Church. Christ is the ultimate masculine head from whose pierced side a bride is being built. Adam, the first shadow of Christ, “died” in a figurative sense to open his side that a wife could be built from him. God knows the end from the beginning, and in His design of human sexuality, God had the end in view. Masculinity and femininity are shadows cast by that glorious finale toward which all salvation history is moving.

A comparative study of the Bible’s masculine and feminine archetypes discloses a pattern which can be outlined in the following eight points.

1. The masculine is first and alone. 2. The feminine comes from the masculine. 3. The feminine reflects the masculine, but is separate from him. 4. The feminine is created for the masculine as helper, companion, fruit-bearer, and glorifier. 5. The masculine and feminine are intended to live in union, achieved through 6. The union of masculine and feminine produces fruit which bears the image of the providing Father and the nurturing Mother. 7. The masculine and feminine mature as they co-labor, fellowship, and bear fruit.10 8. Both the masculine and the feminine find their glory and their dwelling place in the other.

This archetypal pattern in taught explicitly in key passages of Scripture (Gen. 2; Gen. 3; John 15; Gal. 4; Eph. 5:31-32; 1 Tim. 2:12-13; 1 Cor. 11:3-16). The clearest and most compact statement of this total pattern is 1 Cor. 11:7, where man is identified as the glory of God and woman as the glory of man. Man is God’s glory because he shares the roles of God and models His relationship to His creation and His creatures. Woman is man’s glory because she shares the roles of the creation and models the response of the believer to God.

Protestantism has been woefully silent on feminine archetypes. I think I reached adulthood with the same question that my six-year-old daughter asked me while sitting in my lap. I was quite sure about my ultimate Father, but I had never heard of the Church or Israel as ultimate mother. Eve and the Virgin Mary were simply unique women within the pages of the Bible. Lady Wisdom lay undiscovered in Proverbs. I have since learned that this silence is a peculiar and unfortunate weakness in the heritage of the Reformation. Whether due to ignorance or to some phobia about the Virgin Mary, this silence created a vacuum in my spiritual life.

Modern evangelical feminists resent this insulting silence, and rightly so. Men find ultimate and thrilling models for their sexual identity in God Himself, whose masculinity is bold on every page of the Bible. Is femininity so trivial by comparison that it merits no mention at all? Feminists seek to fill the vacuum; but, unfortunately, they embrace great error in doing so.

One feminist solution is to feminize the God of the Bible. He becomes He/She who is also a Mother God. But, this requires a thorough disregard for the Bible’s clear message about God’s masculinity. Other feminists go further and abandon the God of the Bible to return to pagan female deities of old, a flagrant apostasy. A third option, represented by the 1994 Re-imagining Conference in Minnesota, is the worst of all-to worship self and pagan female deities in the name of the God of the Bible. This neatly combines dishonesty, apostasy, and a horrific violation of the Third Commandment.

The Church cannot live in error or imbalance. She must live by truth. But, the Church must live by all the Bible’s truth. Overplaying the Bible’s masculine archetypes of spirituality and marginalizing its feminine archetypes gives strong impetus for religious feminists to revamp or to reject the Christian faith. Only clear teaching of the Bible’s gender truth can guide us out of the modern confusion about gender. And, only faithful obedience by Christians can attract lost men and women to the wholesome life that comes from living in the truth.

Biblical gender archetypes grate on modern feminist sensibilities because they cast males in the divine part of the drama while females take the creature’s part. Fathers, husbands, and pastors are to lead, rule, provide, and protect. Mothers, wives, and female parishioners are to respond, help, and follow. This “casting” becomes an occasion for resentment in sinful hearts. Satan was not content to be the most beautiful and wise of angels. He wanted to be like God. Humanists are not content to be in God’s image, crowned with glory and majesty. They want to be the center of the universe, the measure of all things. Female feminists are not content to be the quintessential creature, the glory and crown of man. They want to be like the man and often their own god(desses) as well.

The female heart often cries out, “But he is sinful. He cannot represent God. And, besides, I am equal to him.” On two out of three she is right. Woman is completely equal to the man in her humanity and in her sinfulness. But, she is wrong to think that a sinful man, equal to her, cannot represent God. God has fashioned men to represent God’s part in the divine-human romance in ways that He did not fashion woman. God designed her to epitomize the believer, the responder, the fruit-bearer, companion, and glorifier.

It is not which role we are given, but how we fulfill our roles that counts. Jesus is equal to God in every way, but when assigned the role of a creature, in submission and even in suffering, He did not reject the role. He fulfilled a creaturely calling, and that was the source of his greatest glorification. Similarly, a woman’s greatest glory is the one God designed for her. One of the best pictures we have of that glory is John’s vision of the New Jerusalem, “coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband” (Rev. 21:2ff). For verse after verse, John details her adornments, the wealth and majesty bestowed on her by God and brought to her by the nations. Any woman who fulfills her destiny as a feminine creature has value far above rubies. On her journey toward that destiny, she will find grand and glorious guideposts for her womanhood in Lady Wisdom, Eve, Israel, the Virgin Mary, and the Church.

1Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, The Divine Feminine: The Biblical Imagery of God as Female (Crossroad, 1994), p. 2.

3Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991).

4Toni Grant, Being a Woman, Fulfilling Your Femininity, and Finding Love (Random House, 1988).

5Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (Ballentine Books, 1995).

6See William E. Mouser, Jr. and Barbara K. Mouser, Who is Lady Wisdom? (ICGS, 1998).

7Though Israel is considered the wife of God (Jeremiah 31:32; Hosea throughout), it is noteworthy that much of the feminine imagery applied to Israel is actually focused on Jerusalem, its capital city. The femininity of cities is developed extensively in the Bible and deserves careful study.

9John Piper, Stewards of a Great Mystery, CBMW Viewpoints No. 2 (Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, PO Box 317, Wheaton IL 60189).

10God, of course, does not “mature.” He progressively reveals Himself over time.

The female heart often cries out, “But he is sinful. He cannot represent God. And, besides, I am equal to him.” On two out of three she is right. Woman is completely equal to the man in her humanity and in her sinfulness. But, she is wrong to think that a sinful man, equal to her, cannot represent God. God has fashioned men to represent God’s part in the divine-human romance in ways that He did not fashion woman. God designed her to epitomize the believer, the responder, the fruit-bearer, companion, and glorifier.

Can someone explain this to me, I have read it several times and feel as if I'm missing something.

To all:

...paganism? Count me out. I don't even condone the most popular and slippery of contemporary, romanticist (and modern, ancient, etc.) paganism. Here's some exposure of the slime beneath the glitter of revisionism, though.

[The Bible Resolution and Susan B. Anthony's comment, NAWSA Convention, Washington, D.C., January 23-28, 1896. Ellen DuBois, Deradicalizing Suffrage, Vote for Women: History of a Feminist Movement (syllabus), 1998.
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/history/dubois/classes/995/98F/doc49.html]

[Draft of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Woman's Bible, ca. 1895. (Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers), Words and Deeds in American History, Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division's First 100 Years, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/r?ammem/mcc:@field%28DOCID+@lit%28mcc/049%29%29]

"Susan B. Anthony wrote, 'Oh dear, dear! If the spirits would only just make me a trance medium and put the rights into my mouth. You can't think how earnestly I have prayed to be made a speaking medium for a whole week. If they would only come to me thus, I'd give them a hearty welcome.'23" (as quoted by Laurel Damsteegt, M.Div., M.S.P.H., in "Prove All Things: A Response to Women In Ministry," from Barbara Goldsmith, "Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull," pp. 38, 39, 48, 435. New York, N. Y.: Harper Perennial, 1998.)
http://www.adventistsaffirm.org/proveallthings/15.01chapter15.html#f022

On Anthony's statement of belief in spiritualism... [The Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, ed. Ann D. Gordon, et al. (Columbia, S.C.: Model Editions Partnership, 1999). Electronic version based on The Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997) Vol. 1, pp. 196-461.]

...Anthony's "spiritualist meeting" (Christopher Densmore, Friends of Human Progress, North Collins, Meetings, 1855-1930s, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College).

Some have been trying to turn our country into a whorehouse for over 150 years.

"I think that about hits what I was asking."

Ok. From that direction, I'll suggest that the part that that appears to be missing was the part that was added to this whole idea in the last 100 years or so: female equality, which is really not equality at all, but a Trojan horse for masculine abdication. The 'missing' part is that few folks bother to speak of what masculine abdication really portends for a new family, or how the results of broken families can easily be traced back to this.

It's not so much that women really wanted equality all along I think ... it's that given so many men have so greatly failed in their god given roles of headship and spiritual protection of those under their dominion --

--(whoever the Mrs so and so is/was, the fact is that her last name was changed on her wedding day, increasing his dominion, and in fact increasing hers as well - too many men failed, and continue to fail, to realize that a lot was added to their responsibility plate once they agreed to give their name to her) --

thus, the desires of feminism are a natural consequence of such abdication.

Only a very few modern women these days actively promote the headship of their husband(s) - the weight of abdication of those husbands is often a weight they consider a fair trade for the 'equality' they believe they have earned.

But for both, it's a basic cheat; Satan is quite content to not interfere once this kind of structure takes root in such a family, for it serves his primary interest: minimizing any and all bill boards that advertise Christ.

So, ordinary Christian marriages are the biggest targets on the spiritual battlefront. Anything to make such folks unhappy is fair game; and it's the uncommon husband and wife who team in Christian harmony and allow the light of Christ to beacon outward.

But there are some of us.

I can honestly report that none of this really started until my wife let go of the idea that she had the option of rebelling against me anytime my headship came up short.

Once she let go, and at the same time, I quit abdicating ... a long, unpretty process I confess, we now have folks gushing over our 'perfect' marriage, and wishing theirs were like ours.

I wish it was so simple and clear; but marriage in my view, Christian marriage, not Christians, are the number one bill board for Christ in this world.

So, it's no wonder the porn sites receive so much more traffic than FR... for all they play upon really is what the men continue to fail to realize that is the root of their trouble: their abdication of their responsibilities.

It all got started when Adam, fully present during the temptation of his wife, remained a silent onlooker while the voice of Satan commenced it's deception within her. Within him, it served his own purpose of rebellion .... but using a different agent, Eve, so he could deflect blame if caught. Adam, in effect, was an utter wimp for not protecting Eve.

Hmmmm. A bit wordy. Hopefully it addresses your question...

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