ABSTRACT
Obedience is a scriptural and theological virtue that has been urged upon all Christians in imitation of Christ. Scripture and biblical interpretation support the concept of human surrender of the will to God in an obedience that mirrors Jesus’s obedience to God. Perhaps the best-known formulation is found in Romans 5:18–19, where Paul associates the disobedience and sin of Adam with the obedience of Christ and the salvation of all. The text reads, “Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” Hebrews 8–9, as we observed in the previous chapter, states that Christ’s obedience was learned through suffering. Christ’s obedience, whether chosen or learned through suffering, is not the only biblical model at work in the theology of obedience. The concept of disobedience and its punishment in Gen. 3:16–17, the passage assigning punishment to Adam and Eve (or 3:16 alone, on Eve’s punishment), undergirds the theological understanding of obedience and the differentiation of punishments by gender, as it does the justification for women suffering.
