This is a case of right doctrine, wrong verse. Looking into it a bit more, Gen. 7:22 pretty much kills Clouser’s thesis for me. In context, the passage reads: “21 All flesh that moved on the earth perished, birds and cattle and beasts and every swarming thing that swarms upon the earth, and all mankind; 22 of all that was on the dry land, all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life, died. 23 Thus He blotted out every living thing that was upon the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky, and they were blotted out from the earth; and only Noah was left, together with those that were with him in the ark.”
To be fair, Clouser tries to deal with this passage (pp. 254-55). In arguing for a regional flood, he says that v.22 refers only to mankind, by virtue of the fact that translators have “misunderstood it (the ‘breath of life’) to refer to the air a living human breathes—to metabolic respiration—rather than to the redemptive indwelling of the Spirit of God. Thus they mistakenly assumed that the entire human race was being judged by the flood, rather than its being a judgment only upon the people who had received God’s word and then abandoned it for false gods.”
I’m sure that Clouser would rephrase “the redemptive indwelling of the Spirit of God” if he could. This is clearly incorrect, as the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, especially in a redemptive capacity, definitely was NOT what happened in the Garden.
Second, the parallelism of the verses hammers home the point that “all in whose nostrils was the breath of the spirit of life” cannot be limited to mankind alone. Observe: “All flesh that moved on the earth…” “all that was on the dry land…” “every living thing that was upon the face of the land…” Even if we grant that this was a regional flood, animals and birds and insects died on Noah’s farm, not just men and women.
Third, notice that the phrase is not “breath of life,” but “breath of the spirit of life” (hayyim ruah nismat). Here, Hebrew parallelism sets ruah and nismat together under one descriptive umbrella, so trying to make a distinction is somewhat akin to saying the Kingdom of God is a different thing than the Kingdom of Heaven (which an older generation of Dispensationalists actually attempted). As Ken Matthews observed in commenting on Genesis 6:17: “‘Breath of life’ (ruah hayyim) pertains foremostly to the animal world as in 7:15, but not exclusively (7:22). … ‘Breath of life’ is inclusive for all living things in 7:22…” Unfortunately for Clouser’s thesis, “breath of life” in 7:22 is not limited to man alone and does, in fact, refer to metabolic respiration, i.e. physical life. The divine breath animates all physical life – both man and animal are nephesh hayya, “living souls.” To have the “breath of life” is simply to be alive (Job 27:3), not to be indwelt by the Spirit. Waltke says much the same. Clearly, the translators have it right.
But … All is not lost! Clouser’s main contention is that what makes man “man” is the capacity for religious belief. As he said, “For although Genesis never offers a formal definition of “human” as such, it clearly depicts humans as having been created for a relation of love (hesed) and communion with God—in other words, it treats humans as essentially religious beings.” This is found not in Gen. 2:7, but in 1:26-27. Sorry to repeat myself, but being created in the Image of God means being created to love God, love others as ourselves, and “rule” the creation as God’s representatives. Clouser, in my opinion, has the right idea, but his focus on locating a literal Adam somewhere in the historical timeline led him to the wrong verse to make his point. Based solely on Gen. 1:26-27, God created mankind as a religious being, so we can probably locate the “first man” somewhere at that point in history where a religious awareness makes itself apparent (i.e. ceremonial burials and the like). I hope that’s good enough to satisfy those of you who are dying to locate Adam in history! haha
I’m sorry, @Christy, but this has taken so long that I’ll have to get to the rest of the Imago Dei and Paul tomorrow. Mea culpa!
This quote from Ecclesiastes 3 is for you, @gbrooks9!
18 I said to myself concerning the sons of men, “God has surely tested them in order for them to see that they are but beasts.” 19 For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same. As one dies so dies the other; indeed, they all have the same breath and there is no advantage for man over beast, for all is vanity. 20 All go to the same place. All came from the dust and all return to the dust. 21 Who knows that the breath of man ascends upward and the breath of the beast descends downward to the earth? 22 I have seen that nothing is better than that man should be happy in his activities, for that is his lot. For who will bring him to see what will occur after him?
I see what you mean here, but I can’t shake the fact that someone had to have been the first man to sin, per @gbrooks9’s above point. What’s more, I can’t imagine this “first man” being just somebody who happened to have an awakening and then sinned, and that was that.
It seems apparent to me that the first sin was important–and spread through that first man. The Bible is clear that God’s people are chosen by him out of larger groups, why would the first man to have a loving relationship with him be any different? What I’ve quoted above, I think, is what I’ve been saying this whole time–there had to have been a “first man” (or men, as Jon indicated) in the definition of man that Clouser gives, and he had to have sinned at some point, which if sin is as bad as the Bible makes it out to be, had to have been a big deal. I don’t see why the story in Genesis 2-3 couldn’t be his story but not told in an historical manner. Unless you mean that Abraham was the first person to sin because he was the first to gain direct revelation from YHWH.
Though I do agree (as to your above reply to me) that there is an archetypal aspect to Genesis 2-3, which applies to all of us collectively and individually, but I don’t think that precludes a deeply-buried historical truth to the story, especially since the first since, again, there had to be a “first” sin and it would seem that it would probably have been a big deal.
I’m dumbfounded that I never made this connection–thanks so much for teaching me something new again. It simply cannot be denied that the coherence of Scripture is something else entirely.
It reminds me of Pete Enns’ series on 1&2 Chronicles on here from a long while back, where he talks about the differences between Kings and Chronicles, and how Chronicles is a theological reworking of Kings, where the former depicts the kingdom as David’s and the latter depicts the kingdom as God’s, since the exile was such a blow to the Israelites’ identity. The connection to Jesus being that he’s in the line of David and is God’s Son, so he fulfills the truthfulness of both Kings and Chronicles (whatever their historical inaccuracies). I wasn’t a huge fan of Enns, but that is a profound insight that made me echo C.S. Lewis: it feels exceedingly unlikely that anyone would make that up.
I’m not a theologian, but it seems to me that it is a mistake to conflate sin and immorality. Sin is repeatedly associated with law in the Bible. James says sin is lawlessness. Romans says their was no sin apart from the law. Assuming “law” is more generally understood as God’s covenantal rule, (not exclusively the Mosaic Law), sin can’t exist apart from God’s self-revelation. So for me, it doesn’t matter when humanity developed the capacity for moral reasoning or accountability. What matters is when God decided to reveal himself and call them to submit to his rule. Apart from his revealed law, there is no rebellion. I don’t think it necessarily follows that because an individual is capable of some degree of moral thought, God is required to hold them accountable for sin. That is not how we treat moral accountability when we are talking about children or the mentally disabled.
I agree with you, Christy; my response wasn’t entirely clear–I meant to say that there had to have been someone who first broke the law while in a relationship with God (i.e., there had to be someone who first had a relationship with God, and he had to have sinned) so unless you make that man Abraham, I see no reason for it not to be ‘Adam’ (whatever his real name was), though the story we get about him is highly mythologized and theologized.
I have always felt that God, and God alone, can determine when someone is morally responsible.
In the span of a human life, most Westerners agree that some time between one’s Birth and his 21st Birthday, a man or woman achieves moral responsibility adequate to God’s desires and expectations.
But how brave we must be to try to narrow the gap further between Day 1 and Year 21 !!!
Many a Baptist church has a specific age for a child before they will consider them for baptismal rites. I won’t quote any Baptist literature on that.
But certainly we start treating our little human “primate cubs” as capable of moral thinking (though flawed at times) sometime AFTER their ability to talk, right? After all, can we be sure that a toddler is really being immoral when he takes a toy from a sibling and causes the other child to cry? - - even if we are absolutely certain the child did it intentionally or with meanness in mind?
Is the threshold of moral agency equivalent to when a boy can biologically father a child? … or when a girl can biologically give birth to a child? I’m inclined to think that boys and girls arrive at moral responsibility long before their biology affirms the gravity of their future decisions.
Not quite, Jay, for the reasons I outlined above: there is a profound difference between an emergent sense of religion, which could conceivably be of biological evolutionary origin, and the specific personal relationship with the true God which begins, and can be broken, which is how Adam is presented.
Likewise, consider that, from the very start in Adam, relationship with this God is associated with eternal life, which is necessarily “saltational” rather than emergent.
And yet, @Jon_Garvey, Genesis makes it clear that even With Adam’s sin, he was still able and eligible to benefit from the Tree of Life - - but God simply Preferred that Adam would not, rather than any expectation that Adam couldn’t benefit from the Tree of Life due to his sinful nature. That is the way of flesh… the difference between flesh and Divine substance.
In a way, the purported Fall of Angels is a much more impressive and difficult thing to comprehend!
I think we have to allow for genre, George. Eternal life has been represented as a fruit-tree in the story. Perhaps (as Clouser allows) it was, in the way that water is given a sacramental role in baptism. But whether it was, or whether it the tree is emblematic of being in God’s sacred space with God, the thought is surely that eternal life whilst retaining a sinful nature would be in some way wrong, whether that means unjust or harmful - perhaps it would even be defined as hell.
I think this was Augustine’s pet peeve… that it was just wrong.
But I think that’s part of the millennia of a poor understanding of what happened in the Adam & Eve story.
Let’s read it again:
Genesis 3:17-19 - THE SIN PUNISHMENT:
And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.
Genesis 3:20-21 - SIDE NOTES:
And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.
Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them.
Genesis 3:22 - TREE OF LIFE IS REMAINING PROBLEM:
And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: ****
and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
Genesis 3:23-24 - THE SOLUTION TO THE REMAINING PROBLEM:
Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.
CONCLUSION?: Even as a sinful creature, Adam could still obtain divine immortality if he ate of the Tree of Life. So God must arrange physical expulsion, and a rotating “laser sword” ( !!! !!! ), in order to make sure that sinful Adam’s ability to benefit from the Life was absolutely blocked.
The readers who think Adam’s mortality was metaphysically changed because he corrupted his pristine qualities with sin - - seem to be missing Yahweh’s quite specific concerns: Adam’s mortality had always existed, and was to be mitigated by the Tree of Life. And when Adam sinned, he could still benefit from the Tree of Life.
I would say neither the geo- nor the historical setting of Gen. 2-3 is specific. We can’t exactly locate ancient Eden on a map, and the dating is a little iffy, as well. I also was thinking, it is not until Gen. 4:26 and Enosh that “men began to call upon the name of the Lord.” But, we can figure that one out later. haha
Certainly you’re a theologian! We all are!
All right, instead of focusing on Clouser, I’m going to attempt the impossible and try to address all these issues in one, somewhat coherent account of my opinions. I’ll try to be clear when I am speculating (going beyond the text).
In analyzing any text, biblical or otherwise, the first thing to consider is the author’s purpose. The purpose of Genesis 1 is to explain the origin of being, culminating in the origin of mankind as created in God’s image and declared “good”. That seems clear. What is the purpose of Gen. 2-3? Is its purpose to describe man’s (Adam’s) creation? No, for in that case, as Clouser ably points out, the two separate creation accounts are in conflict. The purpose of Gen. 2-3 cannot be to describe Adam’s creation, or else it hopelessly contradicts Gen. 1; therefore, we should not read Gen. 2-3 for the purpose of locating our historical origins as “man.” What, then, is the purpose of the story of Adam & Eve in the garden? It is to explain why man is alienated from God, from his fellow man, and from creation itself, and the reason given is tied to human choice. Because of the choices that we and our parents and every human who has ever lived have made, we are shut out of God’s presence. That is the main point of the story. We shouldn’t lose sight of that and make it primarily about something else.
Next, I want to return to Adam as both “The Man” (corporately) and “the individual” (as each one of us recapitulates his experience) in Gen. 2-3. In thinking about Adam as representing our own personal experience, think about the development of a child. As an infant, he is naked and innocent. By the age of 2, he begins to assert his independence as an individual with a separate existence from his mother. (The “terrible twos” – “No!” is the favorite word.) As soon as the child acquires language, he lies. (My son in potty training would deny pooping his pants to avoid sitting on the pot.) Still, he does not necessarily feel guilt, because he has not developed a moral sense. (God is unlikely to have considered my son’s denial of a turd in his shorts a sin.) As the child grows and matures, though, he comes to realize that there is a law written in his heart, the conscience, which accuses or defends every choice that he makes, and it is in the awareness of our morally responsible choices that we confront God, whether by suppressing the truth or in seeking a remedy. The same trajectory from innocence to spiritual awareness and guilt before God took place in the history of the race (the corporate Adam). Early man, like the animals, was innocent. The acquisition of language entails symbolic thinking, which allows and encourages moral thinking (and lying), conscience, and ultimately spiritual awareness of God and guilt.
In all of the above, I obviously take Adam as a symbol, not a historical person. Nevertheless, I think it reasonably connects the story of Adam to “history,” both our individual histories and the corporate history of the race, and I think it fits well with the universal state of mankind as described by Paul in Romans 1:18-25 (since the creation of man, he has been aware of God) and 2:12-16 (those who do not have the law have it written upon their hearts). Notice that the spiritual sense of God that Paul ascribes to all men in Romans 1 does not depend upon their being in covenant relationship with God, nor upon God’s personal revelation of himself to them:
because that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. 20 For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. 21 For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22 Professing to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures."
In a nutshell, Paul is describing the history of our race here – how men once knew God but chose not to honor him, and how our collective heart was darkened. The same rules that applied to the Gentile nations of Paul’s day also applied to the first homo sapiens as soon as he became spiritually aware. It did not require a direct, personal revelation of God for this to happen. On the contrary, Paul says that all men everywhere since the creation (of man) have this awareness. (It is also important not to conflate or confuse the spiritual awareness that Paul says all men – even ancient men – possess with a “saving knowledge” of God or love for God.) God need not personally reveal himself to every single person in China in order for every single person in China to have an intuition that he exists. According to Paul, each of them already has that knowledge. And if Paul’s proposition is true for modern man, it was just as true 40,000 years ago. Just as with a modern person, God does not have to personally reveal himself to ancient man in order for ancient man to become aware that God exists. Therefore, the dawn of spiritual awareness of God in the human race does not require that God personally interacted and revealed himself to any single individual, whether a historical person named Adam or otherwise.
Here is my theoretical speculation, and it runs along the same train of thought. We know that God chose one man, Abraham, out of all the families of the world, and God chose one nation, Israel, out of all the nations of the world. For many centuries, God singled out these few dozen and then hundreds and eventually thousands to be in covenant with him, while the rest of mankind (millions) he left in a darkness of their own making, so to speak. Now … What if, prior to Abraham, the situation of “the Gentiles” was the situation of all of mankind? In other words, what if God left humanity to its own devices for thousands of years until he decided the time was right to intervene with Abraham? After all, “the nations” were allowed to go their own way for several thousand years while God served his redemptive purpose through a relative handful of people – Abraham and his descendants. I don’t see any reason why the situation could not have been the same for all of humanity in the centuries prior to that revelation. This does not mean that there were none who knew God. It does mean that Abraham and his fathers worshipped other gods before YHWH called him, and I suspect that so did the rest of the entire world. It is no accident, in my view, that God revealed himself to Moses as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and not as the God of Adam, Noah, and Shem. I could flesh this out a lot more, but you get the idea. That’s my speculation, anyway.
Anthropology – What is Man?
Where previously I was “going beyond the text” in my speculations, now I want to do the opposite, and look closely at some areas where many people, if not most interpreters throughout history, import ideas into the text that it does not, in my opinion, support.
To reiterate, Gen. 2-3 make no mention of a covenant between God and Adam, and the details of the story do not support that inference, either. (I’ll skip the evidence, unless someone demands it.) Just as many have read a covenant back into Eden, so also many have read the conditions of a test and a possible reward into the story. Nowhere in the story does God set forth the possibility of Adam eating from the Tree of Life as a reward for his obedience. The command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge has a penalty for disobedience, but the text does not present this as a test. Rather, it is more accurate to see it as a straightforward warning of the consequences of an action, just as a parent might tell a child, “Don’t eat raw chicken. It will kill you.” This is not a test; it is a simple statement of fact. Has the parent implicitly promised a reward for obedience? No. Would the child understand the statement to imply that after a year or two of compliance, he would earn some type of reward? No. Therefore, the idea that Adam would somehow earn the right to eat from the Tree of Life and gain eternal life if he passed his probation in the Garden is not supported by the text. Even calling it a probation is troublesome, since probation inherently requires some set duration of time. How long was Adam’s probation before he would gain eternal life? The text doesn’t even hint at such a thought, as far as I can see.
As previously discussed, man as created in the Image of God (Gen. 1:26-27) was good (not flawed). The Tree of Life certainly represented eternal life, but it exists in the garden of God’s presence, at the entrance to the later temple’s Holy of Holies. As Gen. 2:7 (and the passage from Ecclesiastes previously posted) show, man and animals are alike physical beings, subject to mortality. Death equals banishment from God’s presence and loss of communion with his Spirit. Jon is right. Only in relationship to God is there the possibility of eternal life. (My conjecture: There was no test. As long as Adam remained in the garden, which represents the very presence of God, he would have lived forever without eating the fruit of the Tree of Life. But … not in the story!) God is the source of all life, both physical (in whose nostrils is the breath of the spirit of life) and spiritual (you must be born again). Banished from God’s presence, man is not just subject to death, he is dead already. Consider, for example, Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones, or Jesus’ statement to “let the dead bury their own dead, you go and preach the kingdom of God,” or “whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be judged, but has crossed over from death to life.” In my opinion, the biblical view is that man does not possess immortality, whether of the soul or otherwise conceived. (No time to support this assertion, unless it is demanded.)
Finally, I think the focus on Adam detracts from the true foundational passage, which is Gen. 1:26-27. Forget all the speculation that you’ve read and heard about what it means to be human, or whether this or that aspect of man can rightly be called the Image. All that we need to know is summed up by Paul in Col. 1:15: “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.” In Christ, we see the Image of God – man as man was meant to be. Our redemption is nothing less than the restoration of God’s image in us. It is, as Paul said, a “new creation”! Our sanctification is the gradual growth in Christlikeness as we imitate him, “imaging” God as best we can until we finally become like him, and image God as he is, not as we imagine him, “for we shall see him as he is.”
So, I’ll close with a quote from Kempis’ Imitation of Christ:
Many often err and accomplish little or nothing because they try to become learned rather than to live well. If men used as much care in uprooting vices and implanting virtues as they do in discussing problems, there would not be so much evil and scandal in the world, or such laxity in religious organizations. On the day of judgment, surely, we shall not be asked what we have read but what we have done; not how well we have spoken but how well we have lived.
May I take it to heart! Blessings to all. Christy, I will get to Rom. 5 one day!
Not to change the subject or anything, but this is a particularly thorny and real issue in the juvenile justice system. For example, the state of Texas draws the line at 10 years old. Before the age of 10, a child cannot be charged with a crime because he/she is judged as unable to comprehend the consequences of their actions. I have known many children younger than that who were morally aware, but just as many who were older and had no concept of consequences. (I once had a 12-year-old who shot and killed her own mother so that she could go to a party.) These questions actually do have real-world ramifications.
Absolutely agreed! So here we have TWO real situations in any Evolutionary scenario that can be relevant to what we read in the story of Adam & Eve.:
In any population of Hominids… in the Evolutionary scenario … there is going to be the First hominid that a Christian evolutionist would agree God considers the first human with moral agency.
and
That even as the first moral human … he encounters his Moral Agency . . again in the view of God, some years after his birth, and perhaps long after he acquires the basics of his population’s language - - but still before he might be considered a full adult by his population or by God.
There is always a “first” … and there is always a “first” flawed moral behavior, even in a person who up to then may not have been recognized as a creature with moral agency.
Logically, yes, there must have been a “first,” unless there were virtually simultaneous “firsts” in various locations of emergent “human” populations. All sorts of plausible scenarios could be concocted.
But granting the idea that someone had to be first, I suspect that an account of the actual first sin of the actual first man would be entirely banal and teach us nothing. God had bigger fish to fry than satisfying our curiosity about how it actually happened. Just my 2c
Obviously Genesis isn’t about satisfying someone’s curiosity.
It’s the Human Discovery of Good and Evil !!! This is a foundation event for humanity. But frankly, I think Shakespeare did more to capture the drama of lesser ideas than the writer of Genesis did.
I think the Adam & Eve story is a spoiled bit of writing. I know, I know… how could I think that?
Because the whole idea that God imposes penalties on someone who does Not know the difference between Good and Evil … is like giving a machine gun to a 4 year old and telling him: Whatever you do, do Not touch the trigger !
But in the case of the Bible story - - imagine giving a machine gun to a 4 year old, and if he fails the test, not only do you punish the child, but you punish all his progeny for hundreds of generations.
That’s pretty big fish frying …
A more clear demonstration of a non-divine story cannot be found in the Bible. But others sure beg to differ…
Again, the story is not about a “test.” That is an idea imported into the text. And, again, the story applies to all men everywhere. Every 4-year-old in every corner of the globe has been given the same machine gun. As for the divine origin (inspiration) of the story, I simply note the protoevangelium of Gen. 3:15. But if others beg to differ, that is their choice, and like all moral choices … Well, you get the idea. We’re right back where we started in the garden…
Phil, Thanks for the reply. The Bible stories of the Hebrew people contain stories about them and what experienced in their relationship with God. To them, they were God’s chosen people. Other than a few Gentiles that they met (and frequently had to do warfare with) what they reported in the Bible was their world as they knew it. They certainly couldn’t comment on what was happening in (what is now called) the Americas, Australia, Russia, South Africa, etc. God could have been doing His “good works” all over the world. Because the Hebrews didn’t mention any of “God’s other works” doesn’t mean they couldn’t have happened.
So is that your apologia - - your explanation - - for why the Table of Nations in Genesis 10 is so flawed?
Why don’t we say the same thing about Creation? The Hebrew were never going to know about the Theory of Relativity … so we don’t need to know that stars are not angels?.. and that if a star crashed to Earth, a lot more than a camel would be destroyed …
!!! ), in order to make sure that sinful Adam’s ability to benefit from the Life was absolutely blocked.