Are you claiming a definitive understanding of the text? On what grounds.
And why make it personal, and claim some sort of deceit or unreliability.
Richard
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Their actual points arise from their context of origin, which includes their genre.
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And in Genesis 2 He made another pair, if you’re reading it as history.
Nothing tells us that He made male and female at the same time explicitly, it remains an open question.
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Look at the context. In Genesis 1 God created in this order:
- Every animal, “God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind and the cattle of every kind and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind.” This would imply male and female.
- Every human, “So God created humans”, just like the animals, male and female.
Well it is personal. It is my judgement. You make your judgements and I make mine.
But the context makes it clear, IMHO.
From the Hebrew I could argue it either way.
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That seems to be a common “feature” of Hebrew.
St. Roymond, what do you take those “actual points” to be in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2? And which of them do you think my reading sets aside?
Bill, I think I understand your interpretation of Genesis 1 now. How, then, do you read Genesis 2? What do you think the Eden narrative is describing?
What it means to be a human. It shows a dependence on God and the purpose of marriage.
BTW, it has always struck me as unusual that the purpose of marriage would be included in a story of two people who had no mother or father. Obviously this would be a later addition to the initial story (for those that take Genesis to be literal history).
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LOL
To a degree larger than with English (or Latin or German), probably so.
Genesis 1:
- YHWH-Elohim doesn’t need to engage in battle to put chaos in its place,He just commands it
- Light does not exist on its own, it is also a creature of YHWH-Elohim.
- The greatest gods of Egypt (the nations) aren’t even worthy of being named.
- Night is not a time when Heaven has to oppose the underworld so a new day can start, it is an orderly part of a rhythm with darkness divided from light.
- The universe is a temple YHWH-Elohim made for Himself; it wasn’t built by worshippers
- the “statue” of YHWH-Elohim in this temple, through which He relates to the inhabitants of the temple, is mankind
- a major part of the tasks of mankind is to care for the world
Those should do for starters.
Uncontested?
eg
Thou shalt not make a graven idol of God
Any statue of a human ?
I dread to think what other crazy ideas you assert.
Richard
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Bill, I understand now what meanings you see in the Eden narrative. What I am more interested in is what you think the narrative is describing.
Do you take Adam and Eve in Eden to be ordinary biological humans in an ordinary earthly setting?
I see three basic ways of approaching the passage.
One is to read Eden as an ordinary earthly historical scene. But then the text itself raises questions: how are we to understand, within that same setting, the serpent speaking, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the tree of life, and God “walking” in the garden?
A second is to move between straightforward and figurative readings without a clear textual criterion for where the register changes. The danger there is that the reality of what the narrative presents — the encounter with God, the command, the human choice, and the fall — can gradually dissolve into allegory.
A third is to read the Eden scene as a whole in a different, image-mediated register: the events and relationships are real, but they are expressed through human images without assuming that the reality being described had the same mode of existence as ordinary earthly life.
Which of these approaches is closest to your own reading, or do you see another way of understanding the passage?
St. Roymond, I am not sure what you mean by describing the universe as YHWH-Elohim’s temple and humanity as His “statue” within it. For now, I would prefer to leave those two formulations aside.
But if by your other points you mean that creation does not require a divine battle, that light and the heavenly bodies belong to the created order rather than being gods, that the world is ordered by the Creator’s command, and that humanity is given a distinctive status and responsibility within creation, then I agree with those points.
But the question remains: which of these “actual points” do you think my reading sets aside? EPT denies none of these four points. I still do not see why these theological meanings would be incompatible with Genesis also referring substantively to the real created order through ancient literary forms and imagery.
Perhaps there are other views. Other valid views.
The Genesis narratives express a very human view of both God and man that precede and predate god’s revelations of Himself. As such they are not God’s views. The truths they express about God are basic, and wrpped in human vanity and ignorance. The whole idea that we are special, and as near Gods on earth as possible is very human. As is he idea that we did something wrong to make the world suck
Have you ever heard a child’s view of their parent’s divorce? They are convinced it was their fault. Likewise the view of Adam and Eve. It must be our fault! God would not create the world as it is!
No matter how often God repeats that we do not understand His ways, or His justice, or His view of Life, we still cling to the ancient view that somehow humanity mucked the world up!. And now we really are mucking the world up we see it as proof!
Scripture does not need to get it (all) right from word four. (In the beginning God is pretty accurate)
People read too much into early Genesis and spend too long trying to rationalise or harmonise or just understand it. Take it for what it is. A primeval view of God as a being instead of the Sun or the moon or fire.
And chances are it has a great deal to do with keeping faith during the Exile and combatting other beliefs.
Richard
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They certainly appear to be normal human beings (did they have a belly button?), but the location certainly isn’t ordinary, magical trees and God walking around.
Why would allegory be a bad thing? It was a common way of reading the OT. If it was good enough for Paul why would you question it?
A fourth is to read Genesis 2 as a parable. Again, a method good enough for Jesus.
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Are you just stating your understanding of theistic evolution/evolutionary creationism or proposing an alternative? I don’t see a problem with your framing, but it mostly just seems like theistic evolution.
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I wasn’t aware that Theistic Evolution had a framing, or any separate integrity. The general view is that God is a part of Evolution, but as for how or where? For most, it would seem to be unimportant. “The Devil is in the details”.
Richard
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Richard, it seems to me that, in a broader sense, this really does represent a fourth possibility. But it stands somewhat apart from the three I proposed, because it changes the underlying assumption about the status of the text itself.
When it comes to the human side of Genesis, I actually agree with you more than it may seem. I have no difficulty with the text coming to us through human language, culture, literary forms, memory, composition, and a real history of transmission. The Exile, polemic with surrounding religions, and the historical concerns of the community that preserved the text may all be important for understanding its form. I do not imagine Revelation as bypassing any of this. But I approach the text that has come down to us as divine Revelation expressed through human forms.
Here is one reason why I am not inclined to accept this understanding of early Genesis:
Earlier I proposed a thought experiment with Genesis 1:1–5, replacing its ancient imagistic language with a modern conceptual vocabulary:
I am not claiming that the ancient author knew about photons, plasma, or modern cosmology, and I do not regard this paraphrase as the only correct reading. My question is more modest: why does this ancient text allow such a coherent ontological reading at all, without requiring us to turn almost every element into something contrary to the function it has in the text itself?
This, by itself, certainly does not prove Revelation. But for me it is one reason not to regard the hypothesis of Revelation as groundless. I am interested in the more ambitious question: if a text that emerged within an ancient conceptual world can preserve such a substantive relation to the modern scientific reconstruction of the early history of the universe, what best explains that capacity?
I would also distinguish the special status of humanity from the idea that we are
The claim I am exploring is not that Homo sapiens is the highest biological form in nature or an almost divine being. The distinction I am interested in is a different one: between a subject of experience and a personal subject.
In the proposed model, sentience and subjective experience do not begin with human beings: many animals may well be genuine subjects of experience. The distinctive novelty that I associate with the human personal line is not greater biological complexity, but a personal mode of being — the capacity to relate one’s lived life to oneself as one’s own biography, to recognize an action as one’s own deed, to be bound by obligation and responsibility, and to enter into a personal relationship with the Creator.
Nor does the model claim that personhood is possible in principle only for Homo sapiens. The possibility of nonhuman, extraterrestrial, or nonbiological persons remains open. So I understand the “special status” of humanity not as the top of a hierarchy of natural value, nor as a claim that human beings are almost gods, but as a description of the particular personal line to which we ourselves belong and which, in this reading, is the subject of the biblical text.
At the same time, the model treats all present-day human beings as belonging to a single human personal class. It does not derive the biological species Homo sapiens from a single original pair. Earthly Adam and Eve are instead understood as the first two embodied persons, after whom the personal line spreads genealogically through an already existing wider population. The model therefore allows all present-day human beings to share that original pair among their genealogical ancestors without implying a genetic bottleneck of two individuals.
This is important to me: personal status is not something one earns by possessing a sufficiently high level of memory, language, intelligence, self-reflection, or moral reasoning. Those capacities may express personhood and may develop to different degrees, but they are not an examination one must pass in order to count as a person. That is why a newborn remains a person before the development of sophisticated language and autobiographical memory, while severe cognitive impairment or the loss of those capacities does not deprive an adult human being of personal status or make that person “less of a person.”
So I do not understand human personhood as an expression of human vanity or as a claim that we are almost gods. It is a claim about the character of personal existence and the equal personal status of human beings, not about degrees of superiority.
Nor does your analogy with a child blaming himself for his parents’ divorce describe my understanding of the Fall. I do not connect the origin of pain, disease, predation, and death in the biological world with the personal rupture that the Eden narrative expresses as the Fall. All of these belong to the natural history of life and existed before the emergence of the human personal line. I distinguish natural suffering from moral evil. Human beings can certainly multiply suffering and moral evil, but that is a different claim. In my reading, the Fall is a free personal rupture in the relationship with the Creator, after which the former immediacy of that relationship is lost. The relationship itself does not disappear: after the transition into earthly history, turning toward the Creator remains possible, but the former Edenic immediacy is no longer a constantly given condition of earthly personal life.
So for me the question is whether Revelation can genuinely enter human history, making use of its language, images, and cultural forms, without being exhausted by them.
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Bill, allegory is not a bad thing, and I have no objection to allegorical or parabolic language as such. My question is what determines whether a particular text, or a particular element within a text, should be read in that way.
As for Paul, I think you are right about an important point. Paul does, for example, read the Hagar and Sarah narrative allegorically. But that by itself does not establish that the original Genesis narrative is itself an allegory by genre. An allegorical reading of a particular narrative and a claim about the genre of the source text are not the same thing.
Jesus certainly taught in parables. But I do not know of a passage in which Jesus identifies Genesis 2 as a parable.
So yes, reading Genesis 2 as a parable is a possible fourth option. What, in your view, gives us reason to identify Genesis 2 specifically as a parable?
Given that distinction, what criterion tells us, within the Eden narrative, when to read something figuratively and when in a straightforward earthly sense — and what tells us when to switch back?
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