Marshall
March 5, 2020, 5:02am
4
That’s one of my favourite topics! Rather than write an essay, I’ve quoted below some of what I’ve already said about some of the verses that often come up. If you’d like to drill down to a specific text or follow up about anything in these posts, let me know.
Creation used to establish Sabbath (Exodus 20:11 and 31:17):
There are of course many Christians who think an ordinance has to be equivalent to what it memorializes. So, if God worked six days and rested one day as a pattern for the Sabbath, the days are the same whether ours or God’s, and the rest is the same whether ours or God’s. Likewise, if Jesus tells us to eat the Lord’s supper because “this is my body”, then for it to be meaningful it has to be real flesh and not bread.
But as I’m sure you know, not all Christians agree. Many think the Lord’s supper can have real meaning even without the bread literally becoming Christ’s flesh. Many think the Sabbath can have real value for humans without it corresponding one-to-one with God’s own rest. The suggestion in Hebrews 4 that God’s rest – the seventh day – continues, and we are still called to enter it, suggests there may be something more profound in the seventh day than a time of divine refreshment and breath-catching after strenuous labour (Exod. 31:17).
The portrayal of God as a human labourer in Genesis 1 also suggests we shouldn’t expect this picture to reveal the mechanics or timetable of how God works. Each day, the account describes God working only during the day. After each day of creation, the narrator tells us that evening comes, then morning comes, with no creative work during this span. The refrain “there was evening and there was morning” does not define a day – it describes the uneventful passing of a night. So the whole picture of God working six days with the nights off, then resting on the seventh, makes sense as an anthropomorphic picture of God.
God is described this way, not because God really does sleep at night and take Sabbaths off, but because this gives humans a template for their own work and rest. And the structure of a literal week can indeed help us remember our creatureliness, just as certainly as bread can unite us as Christ’s body who partake together, discerning his presence among us as we await the feast to come.
Paul’s use of Adam (Romans 5; 1 Corinthians 15):
the use Paul makes of Adam depends on the symbolic Adam rather than the actual man Adam. Paul speaks of us being in Adam or Christ, not descended from them. Adam is a type of Christ. Jesus is the second Adam. While Paul may have thought Adam was a literal man, what he writes depends on Adam representing humanity, particularly sinful humanity. (And if one thinks pairing Adam and Christ requires both to be either actual people or larger representations, consider who Paul thinks is Christ’s bride.)
Romans 5 isn’t the beginning of the letter. By that point Paul has already established how all kinds of people sin and need rescue. Paul doesn’t rest his theology or his thinking about sin, death and salvation on Adam.
Romans 1 retells the Eden story without Adam, Eve, a serpent, a prohibited tree or magic fruit. Yet it still speaks of humans (collectively) having some knowledge of and connection to God from their creation, but breaking that fellowship in a misguided pursuit of wisdom that leaves them confused about creatures and Creator. Certainly there are questions about God’s “wrath” and “giving over”: it’s not an easy passage. But once again, like Eden, both accounts give a theological take on the history of humankind while also confronting us with our own story. Paul just does it with less symbolism and more rhetoric.
In the second half of Romans 5, Paul restates some points he’s already made, now using the figure of Adam parallelled to Christ. And much like his muddle over which Corinthians he baptized, here he seems to recognize the complexity that overwhelms his parallel just after he commits it to paper. Before he finishes his first sentence, he starts clarifying all the ways the two are not equal and opposite. The passage ends up focusing more on differences than similarities, and even the similarities have to blur things to make the two compatible (such as collapsing Jesus’ lifelong obedience into “one man’s act of righteousness,” as Jay noted up-thread).
Since Adam functions as a sermon illustration, not as the evidential basis for Paul’s thinking, the weakness of the parallel doesn’t undermine it. It gives us a mental picture and exposes how much greater Christ is than Adam. Focusing on some of the phrasing, such as “Adam to Moses,” could suggest Adam was a man who lived at a certain time. But when Adam is read as both a symbol for each human and the first humans (much like the “those”/“they” of Romans 1:18–23), “Adam to Moses” can still convey from the beginning of humanity to the giving of the law. A symbolic reading can still make sense of that phrase, and it makes much better sense of how Paul explains death’s dominion by simultaneously pointing to Adam and saying “because all sin.”
Jesus’ use of Adam (Matthew 19:4–5; Mark 10:6):
There can be many beginnings, but Mark’s version of this saying is more specific, “from the beginning of creation” (10:6). So, how should we understand “creation”? Is creation an event that took six days? If so, the beginning of creation would be the first day, or at least surely not the last day of creation. But according to Genesis 1, it was only on the last day of creation that humans were made, male and female. Since that reading leads to Jesus saying something obviously wrong, perhaps we shouldn’t understand “creation” as referring to the entire creation event.
The context of both Matthew and Mark’s versions of this saying is divorce, a decidedly human activity. And Jesus is referring to what was made “male and female,” which is not rocks, bacteria, bees or dandelions. Jesus isn’t talking about all creation, he’s talking about humans. If we interpret this saying as speaking about human creation, it makes a lot of sense: our Creator made us male and female from our beginning. Science has no disagreement: there never was a time when humans existed without being male and female.
The trouble, perhaps, is that once the verse is interpreted in a way that doesn’t contradict Genesis, it also doesn’t contradict mainstream science. But should that really be a problem?
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