The Surpassing of Dog
In the book of Genesis, when man is created God seeks to find a helpmate for him. He searches all the animals in Eden and is unable to find an appropriate mate. And so, in the end, God chooses to make Adam fall into a deep sleep and from his own flesh creates woman.
This is story has sometimes been rejected by feminists because it makes woman appear to be inferior to man. It seems as though she is “derived from man”, a sort of second hand human.
The one part of the story that is often over looked in the creation of woman is that all the other animals did not fit man. This is important. It means that men and women are, in truth, the best possible fits for one another. They are the completion of one another - woman for man and man for woman, since God surely would not have made a woman incomplete in her mate.
And consider also this: if all other animals were passes up, then that means the dog was not a sufficient mate for a man. Dogs - who are subservient, obedient, stupid, ignorant, loveable, hard-working, quick to do as they are told, etc., etc., etc - are not what man needs, according to God. Thus, any doctrine of the relation between men and women that would require a woman to be a dog or dog-like in anyway has slipped into heresy by making a woman something which God passed up as the proper mate and love of a man.
The story may be chauvenistic in more than a few places, but it is not without it’s radical underpinnings of the equal but different and different but equal nature of a woman. If you doubt me, then ask why would God have later spoken through Paul that in Christ there is neither male nor female.
