It’s not liberal or conservative theology. It’s not even traditional or modern theology. Ancient Jews was aware of myths. Ancient Jews were aware of parables. Ancient Jews were aware of things like Jonah was satire.
And yes there are two contradictory stories of genesis side by side for thousands of years. They obviously knew it was not literal history.
I can’t imagine Paul not being aware of Jonah being satire and yet he points towards it as a sign of Christ. So even for something that important a fictional tale was referenced. The story Jesus referenced with the rich man and the beggar was not literal.
So it has nothing to do with some kind of inerrancy view. I don’t believe it’s inerrant. What I do believe is that it’s written following their ancient tropes and patterns. One theme I see again and again throughout the entire Tanakh and even the New Testament.
A person(s) is set apart by God and is sent to a promised land where they fail resulting in death awaiting restoration. We see that several times.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
23
That they got it wrong by anachronistic Enlightenment criteria from one and a half millennia of evolution, is of course irrelevant. They got it right by their myth based rhetoric that nobody at the time could possibly trump. Apart from a few obscure Greeks from half a millennium before…
I am pretty sure that I concur. However, because I don’t have a comprehensive list of male AND female human origin accounts, I don’t think I can be sure.
Is there a proposed story of human origin which takes us from the absolute minimum reality necessary to minimally-functional humans and gets us there without sin and requires a Savior? Gee, I don’t know, … yet. Personally, I suspect not but, go ahead, show me one and I’ll entertain the possibility.
Luke presents Jesus as 76 generations removed from Mr. Adam and one generation removed from Ms. Wisdom. Proverbs 8 portrays Wisdom as a woman, which together with a wider intertestamental wisdom tradition sets the groundwork for Luke to refer to John the Baptist and Jesus as among her children. “Wisdom is vindicated by all her children” (Luke 7:35).
We easily read such references without getting tied into knots about the importance of the historical Wisdom. This kind of personification is common, and as long as it’s not about Adam, it usually doesn’t trip us up.
Whether it’s liberals claiming Paul got Adam wrong or conservatives claiming Paul bases the Christian faith on a historical Adam, both seem to agree that we must limit Paul’s Adam to one man. This puts Paul in a straitjacket that we don’t force on other biblical writers when they refer to other biblical characters.
In Genesis, Israel refers to both a person and a nation. More interesting is that a biblical author can invoke Israel to blur person and nation together:
When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son. (Hosea 11:1)
The next verses switch to plural pronouns, but here Israel is a “child,” a “son,” a “him.” And while the man named Israel did go down to Egypt in his old age, he never came out of it alive. His embalmed remains were carried to Canaan, but Hosea’s words from God have something greater in mind. They speak of the exodus: how the whole nation was freed from Egypt.
While these events are late in the life of Israel-the-man (or after the man is, himself, late), they are early in the nation’s life – in it’s childhood. When the nation of Israel was a child, God lovingly rescued them from Egypt. I’m sure Hosea believed in the historical existence of the man named Jacob and Israel (as do I), but his words from God are not about that man. They are about a people that is personified as a son (and in Isaiah and elsewhere as a servant, another rich image that New Testament writers layer on Jesus).
Matthew connects this son brought out of Egypt to Jesus:
Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Out of Egypt I have called my son.” (Matthew 2:14–15)
Matthew isn’t simplistically connecting Jesus leaving Egypt to Hosea’s words about “out of Egypt.” He sees these words from Hosea filled fuller as Jesus’ family escapes to Egypt, not later on when they leave Egypt to return to the land of Israel.
There’s a lot of code-switching going on here. The roles of hardened Pharaoh and oppressive Egypt are now filled by Herod and Judea/Israel. The safe place God calls the son to is not Canaan but Egypt. The land of Israel moves from the son to the threat to God’s son, Jesus. God once rescued his son – Israel – from Pharaoh by calling the people out of Egypt. Now God has rescued his son – Jesus – from Herod by calling him out of the land of Israel.
Matthew asks us to juxtapose Israel with Jesus, and it is Israel the nation, not Israel the man. It’s because the whole nation can be called God’s son that the parallel works! And the parallel does work: Jesus doesn’t become a nation just because Israel is.
These two passages use Israel in ways we’re told that Paul can’t use Adam. Yet Adam, like Israel, has a dual meaning right from the beginning. In Genesis, it is both a name for humanity and a name for Eve’s husband. The flexibility that is easy to grant to Hosea and Matthew talking about Israel should also be given to Paul as he talks about Adam.
In Genesis, chapter 1 is the general story of Creation, including that of both men and women in God’s Own Image in six days so God "rested "on the seventh day. Chap 2is about the creation of the first humans, the Man and Eve, while Chap 3 is about the Original Sin.
The question of how the first humans came into existence is a scientific question. Basically it is answered in Gen 1,so we do not need Gen 2 theologically, except to set up Gen 3.
Scientists think that our species, homo sapiens, did not arise from an original pair, but from a community of a few thousand hominids. I know no serious reason to question this, but this is a scientific question, not a theological issue, unless you insist that God dictated that information to Moses as the author of Genesis. It is convenient, but certainly I would think unlikely that the first genetic humans be the ones who committed the first sin.
That leaves Gen 3. We cannot really ask if it is literally true because some of the details are figurative, but we can ask if it does give us a spiritual description of how sin began. If it does, it is theologically important to our understanding of our faith. I think that it is, but we have becomes so involved with the question as to whether Adam and Eve are real, that we have lost sight of what they did…
I think that these discussions may miss the central theme in Genesis - the basic problem has been theodicy, summarised by, “why did God not created a different world where we could avoid the evils we face”? Yet scripture shows that God created a perfect setting (world) for a perfect couple, who could communicate with God freely, had free access to all that they needed,… ie., no problems. God said all this is yours, and you must avoid one thing (indulging in matters and consequences of good and evil) because you are mortal and would die. One would think that would be the end of scripture and Adam and Eve would have lived happily ever after - but no, they did not because of a decision they made.
I suggest this ‘narrative’ points to what is theologically necessary.
I agree with your point of the narrative of good and evil, and would suggest that many Christians really do not know what sin is, because they spend their time in asking whether Adam and Eve are real, rather than why they sinned.
I do not agree with your understanding of the story.
I agree that’s a major reason many hold on to a literal first couple (@jammycakes also mentioned that near the top of the thread). I don’t think Genesis tells us where evil comes from, though. It presents temptation right in the garden in the character of the serpent, presumably one of the beasts God made from the ground and Adam named. Rather than showing the first humans in a perfect setting and yet somehow sinning, we have a picture of humans facing evil dolled up to look appealing just as it is today, and failing just as we do.
Further, Genesis shows a continuity between the evil desire Adam and Eve confront and the evil desire facing Cain. They each feel the temptation and could have mastered it. Cain isn’t presented as hopeless because of what his parents did. Later stories in Genesis continue to show people tempted and giving in, not because they have to but because they want to. Even Noah, who God originally looks on as blameless, has a fall. He takes a different fruit, drinks, becomes naked and curses his progeny.
While we may come to Genesis asking where evil comes from and who put us in this mess, the early chapters appear to have a different focus. They show us who we are, not who to blame.
I do think so. I think that is precisely the point of the story and its explanation is the correct one. The explanation is that God created children, and this means free will and being created as an end in themselves to decide the purpose of their own existence for themselves. For this reason the possibility of evil was unavoidable.
I would only agree that it is not quite so simple and clear cut. The process of creating such children involves the creation of life where free will and the possibility of evil is involved from the get go. So if you point to various species as examples of behavior which looks very much like the epitome of evil, I would not be able to refute this. In that sense you might say that evil did not begin with with Adam & Eve any more than death did. On the other hand, this doesn’t change the fact that giving free will to Adam & Eve was really the point of all that. That possibility of evil which is part of all living things only exists because it is part of God’s creation of children not servants/tools. Furthermore, I can make the argument that as long as evil had not taken root in God’s children with the limitless possibilities of the abilities given to them then evil would have remained a fairly small detail in our existence rather than an overwhelming reality. So in that sense it really did begin with Adam and Eve.
Agreed. I was trying to say that Genesis isn’t getting God off the hook by showing how humans created evil. Both Genesis and Job aren’t interested in that kind of theodicy. For both of them, the buck does stop with God. People are responsible for their choices, but God has allowed us the dignity of making choices while not leaving us on our own as we live with them.
I agree with that too, even though I read Adam and Eve as representative. Either way, Genesis shows a progression. The evil inclination comes through another creature for A&E (3:1), through a foreign power for Cain (4:7), and through the human heart itself by the time of Noah (6:5; 8:21). Like you say, it takes root. The more humans fail to master the evil inclination, the worse the situation for their descendants. Not because of genes or some invisible change in human nature, but because evil horribly scars the world and our interactions in tangible ways.
Are we in agreement with the concept that the theological aspect of Adam and Eve event is the story of good and evil and not the Creation of humanity? meaning that it really does not involve the question of evolution, which is a scientific one…
The progression that you refer to is implicated in the genealogies found in the bible - it seems to me that from Adam and Eve the realization that came from the consequences of bad choices freely made (but also involving temptation and deceit), as you say, scarred each person and these scars were (for want of a better term) passed on to their offspring and neighbors. I think this may resonate with @mitchellmckain comments regarding language.
I agree that as with Job, the buck stops with God, and we may contemplate our limited understanding regarding theodicy.
This has been a very interesting and useful thread. Thanks all.
Wouldn’t that place us in conflict with Paul?
It seems to me, it would. Isn’t Paul saying precisely that because of one man, we need a Saviour?
And yet, it makes no difference. We and Paul alike recognise the need for the Saviour. We are all sinners. The historicity of a singular Adam isn’t essential to Paul’s argument about the purpose of the Saviour. It just makes for aesthetically pleasing symmetries in the exposition.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
39
Soteriology is human: a story. Not divine. I don’t need it. I don’t want it. God is better than that.
I don’t think so. The opening chapters of Romans already showed how we all, Jew and gentile, need a Saviour. Since creation, even while knowing something of God’s nature, people have exchanged God’s image for idolizing creation; while claiming wisdom they spiralled into degrading depths of folly (1:20–32). Paul retells the Eden story without any mention of Adam or one man.
Just when his Jewish audience is happy that Paul’s judging those idol worshippers, he says they’re all in the same boat (2:1–5). “All, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin” (3:9); “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (3:23).
Chapter 4 brings in Abraham. Even though Abraham is a real man and Paul speaks of him as an “ancestor,” he doesn’t have biological ancestry in mind. Abraham’s faith was reckoned to him as righteousness before he was circumcised. Why? “The purpose was to make him the ancestor of all who believe without being circumcised” (4:11). That’s an astounding claim! His story happened a certain way so that more people could see themselves as his children. Yes, Paul adds, he is the ancestor of Israelites too, as long as they follow his faith (4:12). It doesn’t matter if we can trace our ancestry to Abraham. He is our ancestor if we find ourselves in his story.
Then, Paul shows how Christ’s death reconciles us to God (5:1–11). Only at this point – having shown our universal need of a Saviour, God’s ability to save, and who that Saviour is – does Paul introduce Adam. This chapter doesn’t establish that we need a Saviour. Paul now illustrates what he’s already established through two contrasting pictures of humanity, Adam and Christ. We need a Saviour because of Adam, yes, but only because Adam shows us ourselves. Sin and death spread from one man, Adam, because all sin (5:12). Just as we’re Abraham’s child if we model his faith, we’re Adam’s child because we exhibit his sin.
But Paul doesn’t just want his readers to see themselves in Adam’s sin and condemnation. He wants them to accept Jesus’ free gift of righteousness so they see themselves justified in Christ. Having died to the old humanity, Adam, they now live in the new humanity, Christ.