The Church

Art by Mary Fielding Summerhays

On June 26, Mary Summerhays is hosting a celebration of marriage with musical guest Alex Boye, Richard and Linda Eyre, and “America’s Historian” David Barton. You are invited. To attend, click here.

It has been widely noted that an edenic garden is a universal symbol. Of all stories shared, the divine primeval garden is the story that nearly all cultures make foundational. Threads of this story appear in almost every culture, from the Asian myth of Kunlun Mountain to the Arab conception of Jannah.

The story of Eden is not only the most repeated but is the most manipulated story, because it strikes at the foundations of who we are as a human family. It is little wonder that Joseph Smith returned again and again to this story, as he attempted to restore the temple ordinances designed to bind families together and to restore meaning-what it means to be a man, and what it means to be a woman.

It should be no surprise that the story of creation defines our relationship to the Creator. Likewise, the story of the first family-Adam and Eve-provides a pattern that socializes entire cultures. Defining Adam and Eve has a way of defining the differing gender roles as well as gender similarities. Defining the first parents’ marriage has a way of defining our family relationships.

As one scholar has pointed out, “In the mind of first century Jews and Christians, what Adam was, we are; what Adam could become, we can become. Therefore, if one could alter the way Adam was perceived in the popular mind, one could change the contemporary view of nature and function of man and what it meant to be human” (The Man Adam, 131). These foundational symbols make Eve, as well as Adam, vulnerable to manipulation.

Sadly, the foundations of Western philosophy largely stem from one man’s garden-story manipulations, which have long shaped our social ideals. After having lived for eleven years with a mistress, the theologian Augustine abandoned her and their son; rather than repent or find fault with himself (or even send some alimony), Augustine created a theology heavily based on blame.

Rather than calling for men to discipline their own minds, his solution was to place controls on women. “Thus the woman, but not the man, should veil herself to prevent her from causing this sinful response in the male” (Reuther, 2007, p. 56). What was once a tender garden love story was now set up to become a story of Eve and other silly women who cause the impulses found in men. But Augustine went further and placed the woman below the man: “The serpent . . . first approached Eve, because as a woman she had less rationality and self-control and was closer to the lower’ or female part of the soul” (Reuther, 2007, p. 53).

People will argue whether or not he intended it, but Augustine’s now centuries-old codependency and unequalization of the sexes caused a domino effect. He was a giant of both philosophy and theology, and his looming interpretations were the defining voice to which “every subsequent author was forced to refer” (The Man Adam, 151). His doctrine of human, especially female, depravity became an impetus for usurping the freedom of mankind, for men and women were not capable of controlling their natures: “Christians after Augustine . . . looked to the Church or the civil government to control humanity, to make right choices for them, and to enforce those choices” (p. 132).

Overreactions          

Since the day of Augustine’s writings, we have enjoyed the Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment, the rise of humanism, and the age of science. Today Augustine’s teachings on gender are viewed as extreme, and in kind there has been an extreme, overcompensating reaction against them.

With this modern overreaction, we naturally find ourselves overwhelmed with various ensuing controversies over gender. This gender-role confusion has led to various groups yearning to understand their gender’s nature and importance. This desire for importance and acceptance often leads to gender narcissism-including chauvinism, radical feminism, and the celebration of homosexuality as an important ideal. Other thinkers have reacted to gender not in narcissistic terms but as something irrelevant. Leaders in the highest political offices have gone so far as to advocate genderless marriage (or marriage that views gender as incidental) as a new social norm.

Because of its associations with female depravity, the story of Eden has become, to many, nonsensical. The beauty of Eden’s message about family and the nature of gender has been lost. Our Western society is left without an ethic based on religion and without an agreed-upon paradigm for social and familial interaction.

Gender Truth Restored

So, what is the true nature of gender? What was the order in Eden?

Joseph Smith was unafraid to address these theological issues head on. Where Augustine had philosophized, Joseph would rend the veil. He lost no time striking at sectarian ideas that became contagious the world over. As Augustinian theology placed much blame on the woman for man’s shortcomings, Joseph made clear that “men are punished for their own sins, and not for Adams’ transgression,” or for anything Eve did, for that matter.

He further taught that Adam and Eve “did not commit sin in eating the fruits, for God had decreed that [they] should eat and fall” (The Words of Joseph Smith, 63).

Beyond that, Joseph received the ultimate revelation that established the importance of gender. Only when a man and a woman enter into union-are joined and sealed together-can they enjoy the highest and most complete state of being possible: “Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue; then shall they be above all, because all things are subject unto them” (D&C 132:20).

Think of the implications. Mormonism basically establishes a system where the highest form of salvation requires that each of us embrace and rely upon the nature and inherent talents of the opposite sex.

We talk a lot about the roles of a man and the roles of a woman as being separate and divided. Fair enough, but the fact remains: the role of man is useless without the woman, and the role of woman is useless without the man. Without both, all existence falls to pieces. Lehi wrote that “it must need be that there is an opposition in all things” otherwise all things have “no life” and have “no purpose in the end of its creation” (2 Nephi 2:11). Lehi wasn’t just waxing philosophical or theoretical, he was explaining a cosmic fundamental, one in which opposition-along with the indispensable male and female oppositional forces-must interact for anything to even exist.

Other organizations may come and go, but man and woman are essential and eternal. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland taught, “There might be wards and stakes in heaven-I don’t know anything about them. . . . What we do know will exist in heaven is families.

---

  And most of anything that has been revealed about afterlife and our eternal life, our celestial life, focuses on family organization.”

A doctrine of heavenly families that includes masculine and feminine godhood leads us to another important consideration. We are commanded to worship only the Father, in the name of the Son, by the power of the Holy Ghost, a commandment that we fully endorse without any reserve (3 Ne. 18:19). The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost direct the affairs of the kingdom on earth and preside over the work of creation and eternal redemption. At first glance, the Godhead may appear rather male-centric. However, three males alone cannot carry out the full spectrum of creation. Three males alone constitute a priesthood function that must interact with other functions. When we unravel all the layers and get down to the most basic essence of godhood, we find another three-father, mother, and child.

As striking as this may sound to anyone who reverences the Godhead as we do, the truth remains that those who insist on “remaining separately and singly” apart from the opposite gender will remain “without exaltation” (D&C 132:17). Here is a startling principle to ponder: while three males preside over the governing Godhead, an exalted husband and wife who have posterity effectively comprise a fully creative and functional godhood. The male-female principle is the basis of all cosmic continuance and expansion, not male-male-male governing in some sort of gender-exclusive isolation.

Such ideas as found above transcend any masculinist or feminist ideal that tends to create walls of enmity between the sexes. When deeply understood, these big ideas make gender narcissism or gender loathing or gender competition seem, well, rather small.

When we understand that both male and female are the keystones upon which all eternity rests, we’ll have no more reason to build walls but instead to throw down all barriers and enter back into the garden, the garden that teems with abundance and life, the kind of life that can only flourish through the power of both woman and man.

Mary Summerhays is hosting a celebration of marriage with musical guest Alex Boye, Richard and Linda Eyre, and “America’s Historian” David Barton. To attend, click here.

James T. Summerhays is a senior editor at BYU Studies Quarterly.