What you have written is a beautiful description of the text. Love it. You understand far clearer than most Christians, and dare I say, many theologians.
Not sure if you are referencing the genealogy or Gen 5:1 a recap of Gen 1 creation of mankind. Let me see if I can fill those sails.
For genealogy: There are several genealogies in the bible. They do not match. Nor do the genealogy in the several biblical canons. An old explanation is that these are multi-generational names not simply individual names. This means a clan carried its founders name until the next dominate leader became a new clan.
Gen 5:1 looks like a combination of Gen 1 and Gen 2 creations. Note that the Eden story never says God made Adam in His likeness or image, except just before they are expelled from the garden when God says knowledge made them like God, Gen 3:22. So, Gen 1 hints at the use of evolution to make humans, because it never says He changed the way He did things or created anything fully grown or perfect. Gen 2 focuses on one point in time, where God gives two of those creatures a spirit (Breath of God). This is not physical immortality but instead the possibility of second life after physical death. Knowledge made Adam the image of God stated in Gen 5. These passages do not conflict with science unless you force Adam to be a fully grown immortal without parents. God used a progression of events to make His image. That is part of our evolution lineage.
I liked the authorâs reference to the Genesis text that God made Adam out of dust/earth. The writer equates this to a flowery 20th century text that might have said (this is my own version of the example): âAnd Henry Ford made his new fangled wagons out of iron!â
Such a sentence is true in so many ways ⌠but it doesnât mean that Henry Ford stood in an empty field of grass and hammered iron ore into automobiles!
And the Genesis text makes for great word play!
Genesis 2:7 KJV
And the LORD (H3068) JÄhovah
God (H430) 'elohiym
formed (H3335) atsar
man (H120) adam
of the dust (H6083) aphar
of (H4480) min
the ground (H127) adamah . . .
What a beautiful poetic sound the sentence makes.
Later, the writer makes further poetic connections, where
the Hebrew word âdamâ (H1818) is used to refer to blood
and/or red.
Thank you for your kind words! I was indeed specifically thinking of Gen 5:1, sorry for not being more clear!
The paper makes a fascinating case for âBreath of Godâ meaning divine inspiration, as it is used elsewhere in the Old Testament, which again evokes something that would be passed from person to person by word rather than by descent. Food for thought!
Another interesting (to me) case that this paper makes, or supports, is that it challenges the (recently traditional) assumptions that Genesis 1 and 2 are describing the same creation even if in different ways. Clouser, if my one reading of him is correct, supports the idea that the two accounts are actually describing two different creations. He understands Genesis 1 to be describing the actual [prehistoric] origins of the world and all its living creatures including us. Genesis 2 then (on Clouserâs reading) is a description of when God puts the divine breath of life into humans and they become elevated from their mere âcreaturehoodâ into morally responsible, image-bearing agents.
He argues that Paul himself would not have seen Adam as the first biological human being (with no other existent human populations at the time) because Paul makes the statement that before the law, people were not held accountable for sin, and we may casually think this must refer to people prior to the law of Moses, but Clouser argues that this canât be the case because obviously sin (of the highly accountable sort) did exist prior to Moses; and Paul and his contemporaries knew that very well! The whole flood story rehearses the wickedness of people then (and holds them accountable enough to justify capital punishment no less!) Not to mention Cain and Able, or positive accounts too of people like Abraham trusting God and being called to abandon other gods. So Clouser argues that Paul would have been referring to humans prior to Adam that were actually the ones not held morally accountable. They existed prior to the âmoral awakeningâ of humans as it were (I donât remember if Clouser used that exact phrase, so it might be my interpretation here.) Clouser points to Hosea 6:7 as a verse Paul would have known about. So when Paul tells us in Romans 5 that sin came into the world through Adam, we can understand this as the first sin for which someone will now be held accountable. Paul does play loosely with terms like these sometimes (on my recollection) referring to sin even as if it didnât actually exist prior to a rule of law, but yet on reading Paul more carefully he is actually teaching that we just arenât aware of our sin apart from the law.
On Clouserâs view the church went wrong with Paulâs teachings ever since Augustineâs view in which any creation that gets referred to as âgoodâ must indeed have been perfect and, of course then, without sin. And ever since following Augustineâs lead on this, the church has become blinded to Paulâs actual teaching in Romans that we now force-fit into our modern categories.
My attempted summary in a few short paragraphs here may have done some violence to Clouserâs more developed arguments, but nonetheless, I think I captured some of his main thrust, and at least it puts it out here for perusal and reaction (if not making you want to read it for yourself!) for those who find themselves stymied by inaccessibility of the material.
What do you think? Does it sound like a reasonable case? I left some of his good arguments out here, understandably, since Iâm not reproducing his entire paper here.
I could say more about how Clouser then speaks of death which also (Romans 5) came through Adam, but Iâve already made this post long enough, and this is already material enough for digesting here.
Well, clearly I think he does, and I think you did a great job in summarizing it, Merv.
I have heard Roy Clouser speak a few times, most recently at a DC metro Section meeting of the ASA, which was when I first heard his ideas about Paul, Romans, sin and death. I was thrilled to hear what I thought he was saying, and I asked him if this means that the main theological argument against evolution (no death before the fall of Adam) could be dismissed as incorrect, and he said yes. Many of us at this meeting asked him if he had any plans to publish these insights, since it would be wonderful to be able to cite them in our own work, and now he has done so.
I would also reiterate my offer to send a copy of the paper to anyone who sends me a PM with their email address.
And thank you for drawing our attention to it â and then being willing to email it as requested. Iâm already a member of the ASA and might have eventually have seen this article in my paper copy of the journal, but your plug for it here made that happen more surely for me.
I think he does make a reasonable case and certainly shows that even the centerpiece for so many anti-evolutionary biblicists (Romans 5) may (most probably in my view) turn out to be based more on post-biblical traditions than it does on the apostolic writings themselves.
Clouserâs explanation of death involved the assertion that Paul would only have been speaking of human death, and he makes that case from Scripture as well. I wonât say much more of where he takes all that here yet, though. Thank you for your affirmation that I summarized him well. That is good to hear since I only read the paper once â and not very carefully at that. So I really was in doubt as to how faithfully Iâve picked up his ideas thus far.
This is also consistent with John H. Waltonâs thought in The Lost World of Adam and Eve, and after reading about it I canât really see it being anything but true.
This is a new-ish thought for me, at least expressed explicitly in these terms (the most Iâve heard is that Paul probably assumed Adam was the first human being, but wasnât teaching that idea). But this makes quite a bit of sense. Speculating wildly here, but if we take the Genesis 2-3 account to be mythologized history (based very much on real people at a real time but mythologized to get at the truth of what happened) then it would probably have been a story passed down orally from the time that it happened. Perhaps, then, people wouldâve known that there were other humans before and/or contemporaneous Adam and Eve, but the concern of story isnât to relay that information.
Does that make sense? It does in my head but I found it difficult to put it into words.
Clouserâs take on Paul was new to me too â and actually even the division of Genesis 1 / 2 â if I had heard it put that way before I guess I hadnât really digested it that way.
I agree that the case for understanding Paul in this more âbiblically attentiveâ way is compelling. To the extent that Clouser wants neat divisions in order to make creation passages comport to strictly modern understandings, I donât necessarily follow him there (and nor do I think he leads there --but Iâm not entirely sure on my one exposure to him). I donât think our modern tendencies toward various concordisms have served us well toward better understanding the biblical message, and so I have for some time now been pretty comfortable holding those at armâs length for critical appraisal, and think it may be the entirely biblically-faithful reading to not insist on literal historicities. The whole objection thrown against this by asking âwhere then from Adam to Abraham do people start being real?â or âso what of the eternal destinies of Adamâs alleged contemporaries?â has bothered me less and less, being challenges more motivated by loyalties to modern ideas than loyalty to biblical understanding. So it hadnât been any huge issue for me if Paul had (incidentally to the thrust of his teachings) thought of Adam as the first biological person. But here Clouser has brought up a very plausible case that a lot of modern Christians have been following lines of thought owing more to Augustine than to what we read from the Apostles themselves.
What is interesting to me (since Augustine is usually not accused of being a âmodernâ phenomenon) is: how did the Catholic church, (which holds Augustine in high esteem indeed!) escape this same modern misunderstanding with its [the Catholic churchâs] embrace of evolutionary biological origins? What made some contemporary fundamentalist protestants so vulnerable to this (on Clouserâs reading) highly Augustinian misapplication of Paul?
I am not certain, since I have not followed the history of the Catholic Church in the 1900âs all that closely ⌠but it seems that the Catholic Church simply starts with a different premise!
Instead of Starting with the Premise that Augustine must be right, the Catholic Church starts with the premise that no finding in Nature can contradict the Bible. And so, if the findings of Nature tell the Catholic Church that the Earth is really old and that humans and other animals share a common ancestor - - then there is a solution for reconciling it with the Bible, even if we havenât formulated one that sounds correct quite yet.
If we begin with the premise that the Genesis story is a correct reporting of a creation story, I think one of the erroneous conclusions we make about that creation story in Genesis is that it is the complete and the only possible report of the creation. Think about it. If you were God and colonizing this planet with humans, would you create just one garden of Eden? Wouldnât you create many âgardens of Edenâ all over this planet and introduce humans at these locations? As a creator would you want to bet on just two humans (or one small group) surviving to populate the planet? As the creator could you might introduce humans in these other locations with different characteristics to see how those traits survive and evolve? Could this account for how we really got the different races we now find on Earth, not years of random mutations? There might have been hundreds of unique human creations and due to natural disasters and warfare only five (or six or seven depending on how you are counting) distinct races have made it this far. If other groups had the language to record history as the ancient Hebrew people did, we might have some other interesting stories about creation.
Anthropomorphizing God seems to be a long and venerable (not to mention scriptural!) tradition â and thinking of God as having to âseed the chancesâ so as to make his favored outcome more likely is a very human engineering way to think of it. The conception of a sovereign God (if you share in that) could not, by definition, be a gambling entity in the same way that we humans are. What looks like random dice play to us is certainty for God. So itâs not as if God had to fret over whether or not any of his projects would pan out.
Regardless of any historicity or even multiplicities of literal Edens, we can be sure of one thing, the Eden spoken of in Genesis does have symbolic significance, and that is where it counts.
Thank you for joining the discussion Walter. I would first say that if , as you state, the Genisis story is a correct reporting of the creation story, we have to qualify and define that a bit before we can proceed. My feeling is that it is indeed correct, but is technically not a âreportingâ as it does not describe something that happened as someone observed, as the term reporting implies. Instead, it is a God inspired rendition of what He wants us to understand about His nature, our nature, creations nature, and the relationship between them all, in a way that could be understood by early bands of goat herders, as well as by us today.
Next, I would comment that the concept of races is thought to be more a geo-political division rather than scientific, and from a Bibical standpoint is also not supported, as the only real Bibical division was Jew and Gentile, and that was also initially more geo-political at first, and now in the Christian Era is perhaps more a spiritual division (or perhaps it has always been such), as we as Christians are the children of Abraham.
In any case, the racial differences in humans are trivial, though can be fairly accuratately traced though measurements of shared mutations. In short, while your idea of multiple Edens is interesting, it has neither Bibical nor scientific support. If fact, there is considerable evidence to the contrary.
The âstoryâ of Adam and Eve concludes with a god whose vengance endures forever. The curse on the couple going out of the garden was death and pain in childbirth for all women for all time,sweaty work for men. That was not reversed by Jesusâs passion and death. Even baptised women have pain in childbirth. The sin of two innocents who were tricked by a wily talking serpent and they had not yet knowledge of good and evil. that sin out weighs Jesus? I donât think so. Neither is it the same God, otherwise depicted in the bible as merciful, who could be argued with by Abraham to save Sodom, the same God who forgave David and Bathsheba. That was a sinning couple, adultery and murder. And they knew what they were doing. That was a God whose mercy endures forever. There are biological, geological, etc arguments, but the story of Adam and Eve, is not a serious depiction of God. The religious view point is borrowed from some old story. If taken literally about a God whose mercy endures forever, it is like slander against God.
I think the eternally vengeful God in the Adam and Eve story disqualifies it as being intended for a literal interpretation, as to the relationship between God and man. Do you believe in an eternally vengeful god ? or an eternally merciful God?
That is a rhetorical question. if you did not pick merciful God, go back and do it again.
I wonder if you have read Clouserâs article at the top of this post? He opens with the importance of not interpreting biblical events in the broadest possible terms. So, for example, God did not invent childbirth pain for Eve, he specifically said that it would be increased; implying that there was some pre-existing level of pain during childbirth. I would think that the backbreaking work of agriculture certainly wouldnât make it any more pleasant!
Indeed, farming is more labor-intensiveâand less natural movementâthan a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in general, and probably not as ideally nutritionally balanced. And yet the yield from the land is higher, so in a choice between back problems and having more food (and more reliable food) for your children, thereâs no contest. Even knowing that your descendants will run into more complicated problems down the line due to the changes youâve made in the world, thereâs still no going back to a time before things changed.
I would definitely interpret the references to âdeathâ and âlifeâ spiritually rather than physically, but perhaps thatâs just me. In any case, I reject your extreme options of eternal mercy and eternal vengeance in favor of simply saying: God is what is.
Nope. There was one creation, âmale and female he created them.â All humans are descended from a common population which spread throughout the world. Science and Gen 1 are in agreement on this much, at least.
It doesnât say Adam was created for the Garden, it says he was formed. Formed just means changed shape. Is it possible other humans were âformedâ by different foundational events elsewhere in the world? Of course! There are lots of different creation myths all over the world.
I am puzzled that you donât think we do? The Hebrews certainly didnât invent language or writing!
The use of the Hebrew Adam in Genesis 5:1 is translated in the New International Version as âmankindâ, so I think this problem might not be serious. In fact the language (including the phrase âmale and femaleâ) reflect the Gen 1 version more than the Gen 2 version. I think you are right that Genesis never says that Adam was the first human being. It does say there was âno man to till the field)â which in Hebrew could be interpreted to mean there were no men, or that there were no men with the ability or knowledge to till fields (no farmers). [I wrote about this](. Opinion: "Adam and the Origin of Man") at some length a while back, it isnt very scholarly, but it expands a bit on the idea. (And its freely available).
Genesis 2-3 is the older narrative, with a Nilotic context. This is evident from the binary organizations. Genesis 1 is the more recent with a Babylonian context. Evident from the organization using 7, a priest device that came later.