Adam And Eve Literacy

For all of us (me included)that believe in a literal Adam and Eve hpw do we reconcile the biblical account?Did God made them special out of the thousands who evolved?Or did God chose them as representatives out of the thousand who evolved ?And if the latter is true how do we reconcile it with the creation of Eve out of Adam?

Just go with the story Nick. You don’t have to try and make it work with other stories. Unless you have to. Until relatively recently I believed in both, that God stepped in at Eden. Many people here do. That’s fine.

No i cant just go with the story. You i and nobody cant prove neither disprove that they were literal . I do believe they were. But im just raising some questions of reconciliation within the text. Why is it everytime we need to just allegorize everything here instead work together to provide possible answers? Of course i can take the other route saying they werent literal etc etc but i really dont believe that. Thanks for the response though Klax.Appreciated

Plus forgive my grammar and vocabulary. My English are getting worse everytime and it really pisses me off. Gonna need some classes in the university soon lol :sweat_smile:

Well - that is an eminently “playable game” with much good company and valiant intellectual sweat invested. Glenn Morton has written volumes even here in this forum to preserve the literal characters of the narrative. Dick Fisher and many others will have similar (but different enough to be competing) theories about how that could play out. Many here see how the theological side of that could plausibly have played out. Nobody seems to have a complete monopoly on one coherent large picture that successfully takes everything into account - or at least not in a compelling enough sense to unify everyone around it. So you may still be left doing some picking and choosing even from within the context of the faithful.

Why dismiss that possibility out of hand? Those today who have convinced you that all truth must only come in literally physical manifestations - why does that man-made [and very modern] assertion get to enjoy the cloak of infallibility? Do you have any skepticism left to apply to that? Or have you already spent all your skepticism trying to take down all things allegory?

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First of all i havent read yet Glens book though i plan too.But these are just theories.Just like the they werent literal route.You dont know what happened.Just like we have theories about the "Sea People " for example who contributed to the fall of the Late Bronze Age we have theories on the Adam and Eve narrative.If this is all allegorical it really doesnt add up to the later characters .ie Jacob Abraham etc.Plus no one claiming its allegorical have tried to explain what the allegory really is about.They only claiming that it is

Turning all things into allegory isnt the right route .

What the narrative (whether allegorical or not) is about is … everything. That is indeed what all the ruckus and activity of faith is about up and down the ages … discerning what the story is about. Getting stuck on whether or not parts of it are parable or vision or allegory or straightforward history has never (until recently) been what this is about. In fact, just dropping all this part of the discussion away and listening to your pastor or priest or Sunday school teacher, none of whom would have spent much time agonizing over what parts might have been visionary vs. literal, then you should be getting good insights into what the story is about. There are times to get our dander up about something’s historicity (Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection being the prime though not sole example), but to try to blanket that same demand for historicity over the entirety of scriptures is a huge category mistake. Not least because that very question then does distract you from concentrating on what those scriptures are actually about. It occurs to some of us that this latter concern may actually be the thing worth concentrating on. And whether or not the vehicle used to deliver that truth to us was a vision or a parable or a description of a literal event may be a secondary concern (and probably not even that in many cases).

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I think the church fathers pretty much struggled with this.But how can we find the truth if not search for it?i cant live all my life for example believing"Well Adam adn Eve werent real " when in reality they were.So i suggest looking for things on the long way

I dont understand that statement sorry.What do you mean by “everything”?

I mean … if we went to a typical church-teaching event in a typical Christian church of nearly any of the last dozen centuries we might hear exhortations about how to live, whom to model our lives after - and what sorts of things not to model our lives after … what faith in God looks like; what it does and does not do; calling us into relationship with God, through Christ. All of that up and down history has been the everything that this narrative is really about. So when you wrote …

My response is that our current little food fight over “allegory or not” is a distraction from what it has always and ever been about. It might be a necessary squabble, so long as some want to make the focus all about that and therefore discredit the bible using that lens. But removing that stumbling stone is simply to then restore the story to what it has always and ever been about. The “allegorists” aren’t trying to come up with a new story. They’re trying to restore to us the old one.

I really do empathise on the "Focus on Christ"statement as you have made several times.But it really needs to be adressed.The church has been like that in the begining because they whole concern was to be an immitation of Christ.Once the behavioural status of the church (meaning when they figured out how to behave)faded away the theological and the interpetational debates started happening.And these still havent been adressed.You have interpatations from the most literal to the most almost “fictional” scale .So i ask you :Are they stumbling block to faith?For you it might not be,but for some it is.

Plus my two questions above are relly pointed out to the ones believing in them beign literal.So our debate is kinda mehh,although its quite good :smile:

Your gentle and loving hint here is well-taken! I’ll shut up now and we can see how others chime in to whom you actually did address these challenges. …and it’s good timing anyway since I really need to be getting on to some other responsibilities here. Will check in with interest later.

For me it comes down to how was that story wrote.

Does the context of that story present itself as literal actual events in history or does it present itself as something else. I think genesis 1-3 is clearly wrote in a mythological fashion. I see Adam and Eve being referred to throughout various scriptures as being actual people.

So when I see a fictional story centered around real people and events I call it an ahistorical narrative. A ahistorical is distinct from an historical narrative. A historical narrative is meant to be taken as 100% true and 100 literal. An ahistorical ( historical fiction ) is meant to be taken 100% true but 0-100% non literal.

Say there was a story about a evil emperor who got mad all the time who lived a long time ago. He would kill people almost daily.

A historical account might say, King Hern born 3000bc in Jutland was known to be a cruel leader who killed his own people over little things.

An ahistorical account might say, “ A long time ago when monsters still roamed the land one dragon took the form of a man who held all in fear of his power and hated him because every morning he ate one villager for breakfast”

Or it may some something like, “ In the ancient times there was a king, Hern, who got so angry steam poured from his glowing red face. All
The villagers knew this angry man had a grandfather for a dragon and so they feared him because even if you breathed to loudly or laughed to loud he would spit fire out and kill you”.

All three stories are true on a evil king from a long time ago that routinely murdered innocent people. However, the way they wrote the narrative ranged from very literal to less literal.

Ok but thats really not asnwering the question.I mean it does but only if you believe that they were real but that God didnt made contact with them?

For me it answers it.

Adam and Eve were real people and were in the lineage of the Jews. But the stories surrounding them is not. I still believe God reaches out to a couple. I believe that he brought them to a promised land, a Jerusalem on Earth and blessed them including with the chance to never die. But they messed it up. The Bible never says how it all worked, just uses symbolic hyperbolic language to explain it.

So o assume God brought forth a man and was teaching him righteousness just like he taught Abraham, Moses, and and even his son Jesus. At some point he gave this man a mission ( deep sleep is often associated with visions) of being cut in half and the other half became a woman ) and then a woman god was leading showed up there. Throughout the Bible we see these same things again and again. A man is called by God and has visions and a woman is brought to him or he randomly sees them and so on.

So you have this couple loving one another and loving a god living in a promised land and sin disrupts it and they fail and are banished from the promise land. Wet similar story to moses and Israel
As a whole.

I dont think its common seeing visions of “women” on their visions in the bible but anyway.Its a good possible explanation .Thanks mi krumm

God talked to them (A&E). The divine breath is inspiration. It’s not magic. There is no “life stuff” either which you can add to something in order to make it alive or even more alive. But ideas are powerful when we have an abstract capable language. They can expand our awareness, creativity, free will, and completely change the order, meaning, and structure of our lives.

What made Lazarus come to life again?

People are revived and come out of death like states all the time. I believe in miracles – the involvement of God in the affairs of man and nature – but no, I don’t believe in magic. I don’t believe that God violates the laws of nature which He Himself created, especially not so He can impress a bunch of ignorant savages who wouldn’t know the difference anyway. He made those laws of nature for a reason and He doesn’t need to break them any more than a good stage magician just to impress and amaze an audience. I don’t believe God lacks integrity in such a manner that He wouldn’t stick the rules He made. But I do see plenty of lack of integrity in religion mongers who don’t see why any rules should apply to them or to the rhetoric the spread so liberally over people in order to manipulate them.