Adam and Eve/Adam and Steve? A Challenge to the Hermeneutical "Complementarity" Argument (Critical Essay‪)‬

The bumper sticker slogan "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" captures well one position in the contemporary debate about homosexuality. This position, often referred to as the "complementarity argument," relies heavily on a particular interpretation of Genesis 1-2 to condemn same-sex sexual relations as a violation of God's design for creation. This essay challenges the complementarity interpretive approach to Genesis 1-2 on two interrelated grounds: (1) it imposes on Genesis 1-2 questions foreign to the issues the texts are addressing, and (2) it assumes that the modern anthropological model of two sexes differentiated on biological grounds has been constant from ancient times to the present. Robert Gagnon has emerged as a primary spokesperson of the complementarity argument, and his work (1) provides the lens through which the complementarity perspective is presented here.