| dc.description.abstract | Popular ecclesial depictions of the character of Eve present women as inferior to men, while much scholarship has sought to liberate her character from negative stereotypes. Women are seen as responsible not only for the introduction of sin into the world, but also for the individual sins of men. Patriarchal receptions of the biblical garden story have made it easy for men to blame women for their own shortcomings and insist that men rule over women. Unfortunately, this has also led women to accept this interpretive tradition to their own detriment. Investigating ongoing congregational reader-response, which is necessarily rigorously ethnographic, this dissertation examines the ways in which the reception of the Eve narrative correlates with the understanding of the status and role of women in the French Broad Baptist Association of Mars Hill, North Carolina today. This work shows that the status of women correlates to prevailing interpretations of the narrative of Eve in Genesis 2-3. It will describe this correlation through a survey of women from the French Broad Baptist Association, the investigation of popular conservative Christian literature, scholarly literature, and finally suggest a re-reading of the narrative that can help in abandoning the damaging one that has encouraged the subjugation and oppression of women in our current society. | |
