Editor’s note: The following article by Professor John Schneider was originally commissioned by The Banner, “The Official Magazine of the Christian Reformed Church.” As a result of the uproar resulting from two previously published articles, including one by Rev. Edwin Walhout (“Tomorrow’s Theology” ), The Banner decided not to publish the article. It is offered here as a contribution to the discussion and thinking around these important issues.
In his article, Rev. Walhout noted that the theory of evolution (as a scientific theory, not a naturalist philosophy) will require re-thinking a number of crucial assumptions in existing Christian theology. Regarding the historicity of Adam and Eve, he wrote:
Traditionally we’ve been taught that Adam and Eve were the first human pair, Adam made out of dust and Eve from one of Adam’s ribs. But sustaining this doctrine is extremely difficult when we take seriously the human race as we know it today sharing ancestry with other primates such as chimpanzees. Where in the slow evolution of homo erectus and homo habilis and homo sapiens do Adam and Eve fit? We will have to find a better way of understanding what Genesis tells us about Adam and Eve, one that does justice to Genesis and also to what the Bible teaches about their connection to Jesus.
Fall into sin: We have traditionally understood Genesis to show the first human beings, in a state of innocence, living sinlessly in the Garden of Eden. They are then tempted. They yield to temptation and God sends them out of Eden. But if we take the discoveries of historical science seriously, where could we fit that story in? It would be extremely difficult to locate any such Garden of Eden, and even if were able to do so in modern Iraq, where is the scientific and historical evidence of a pristine origin and expulsion from that Garden? Furthermore, at which stage in human development would we place this event? We will have to find a much better way of understanding what sin is, where it comes from, and what its consequences are. Theologians will have to find a new way of articulating a truly biblical doctrine of sin and what effect it has on us.
This article and another of human sexuality generated overtures to the 2014 Synod of the Christian Reformed Church calling for sanctions against the Banner and its editor, Rev. Bob De Moor. According to the official report “Synod 2014 in Review“:
After impassioned debate about the contents and role of its denominational magazine, The Banner, Synod 2014 lamented the publication of two controversial articles last summer and ordered a review of the magazine’s mandate.
Synod turned down a request for a study committee to examine recent theologies that deny the historicity of the Genesis account of creation.
But Synod did acknowledge that this is an important topic and asked Calvin College and other CRC-related colleges to make resources on the creation account available, saying these are already plentiful and could be instructive.
What is not clear from the Synodical action is how the existing resources “could be instructive” unless the CRC is willing clarify the contemporary meaning of confessional statements reflecting the (naturally) unexamined cosmological and scientific assumptions of the 16th century and also permit these “resources” to be presented and discussed in the church’s official publication.
“The ‘Fall’ of Historical Adam and Eve” by John R. Schneider
©2014, John R. Schneider
In June 2011, Christianity Today reported on a controversy among Protestant evangelicals over the story of Adam and Eve. Some Christian scholars (including me) propose that Adam and Eve were not “historical.”
These scholars see need for more academically informed reading of Genesis in conservative churches, and for more constructive ways of relating Genesis to science. Using modern academic biblical studies, they propose that the creation story illumines our existence in the present—that our human condition requires redemption in Christ—but that the story does not relate events that really happened in the past.
While some welcome the work, others protest that a “historical” Adam and Eve are absolutely necessary to Christian faith.
It’s important to see a difference between two understandings of Adam and Eve as “historical.” Blurring them, as most media coverage has done, hinders discussion.
One understanding is that of “simple literalism”—reading Genesis as a simple record of events, exactly as they happened. On “simple literalism,” Adam and Eve were “historical” in the sense that Abraham was, or Moses. They were literal persons, who lived in Eden, were seduced by a snake, ate fruit from a literal tree, and literally “fell.”
Numerous other Christians view the story as “historical,” but they reject “simple literalism.” The official CRC Synod Report 44, for instance, recommends a more complex kind of “historical” literalism (Acts of Synod, 1972, 525-29).
Many scholars see the growth of “simple literalism” in churches as similar to a movement that the great Augustine (354-430) condemned in his own time. Some Christians took Genesis 1: 5-8 to teach that the earth is a flat disk resting on pylons in the “waters below,” covered by a solid sky dome protecting it from “waters above.” They scoffed at “secular” Greek science, which taught that the earth was a sphere suspended in “ether.” Augustine urged church leaders to prevent such “embarrassing ignorance” from being put forth as the literal sense of the Bible, lest educated people “laugh it to scorn” (Genesis Taken Literally, Book One, chapter 19).
The recent spread of “simple literalism” also recalls advice from another church father, Origen (185-254). He warned that simple reading rendered Genesis a repository of absurdities—a literal Eden, magical trees, a talking snake, and so forth. Most absurd of all was crude depiction of God—making Adam manually, walking in the Garden, and being “absent” from the Garden when Adam and Eve fell. Origen urged Christians, for the sake of the Gospel, to understand and explain to others that such things “did not literally happen” (First Principles, IV, I, 16).
Modern biblical scholarship supports the critique of “simple literalism.”
Discovery of creation stories from ancient Egypt, Canaan, and Babylon, among others, has made it possible to read Genesis alongside the myths of its neighbors and to make comparisons. The results are eye opening.
We now see clearly that Genesis is anything but a simple record of events. On the contrary, it is a remarkably complex composition, crafted carefully in the cultural idiom of its ancient time.
One example is the infamous sequence of God creating days, the earth, and all plant life before making the sun, or moon, or stars—in effect, before making the gravitational, temporal-spatial physical universe! In its context, however, the sequence is not embarrassingly mistaken. It is profound.
The Babylonians believed the sun, moon and stars were the creators of light, so they worshiped them as gods. The writer of Genesis leads off by depicting God as the one who created light—by divine command. In a single stroke the writer demotes the celestial “lights” to the status of important yet mere creatures under God. The account has no value as a historical record of cosmic events, or as a source for physical science. But it has immense value is as a source of religious vision, beginning with the existence of a God who transcends the cosmos.
In Genesis 2-3, the writer employed typical Semitic devices. The creation of the first man from dust, the Tree of Life, and the anti-creation Serpent were symbolic commonplaces. And to the main point, the name “Adam” often means “Everyman,” while “Eve” means “Mother of the Living” (the official title of the Babylonian dragon goddess). It makes sense to take them as symbolizing the first humans rather than as literal descriptions of persons.
So there’s significant agreement among Christian scholars—both those who affirm a “historical” Adam and Eve, and those who don’t—that we should not understand Genesis in a simply literal way.
But why take Adam and Eve as literal, or “historical,” at all? Why the passionate persistence?
Some say that Paul treated Adam as “one man,” in Romans 5, and that a “historical” Adam is essential to Paul’s explanation of Christ. Albert Mohler, the President of the Southern Baptist Seminary, argues this way (http://www.albertmohler.com/2011/08/22/false-start-the-controversy-over-adam-and-eve-heats-up/). But in Acts, Paul explained the Gospel far and wide, for years, without ever even mentioning Adam, and apart from two instances (Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15: 22), that’s also true of his letters. Without Adam, proclamation of the Gospel by the first Christians barely changes, if at all. It’s clearly not necessary to that proclamation.
What could change is the explanation of how sin and death entered the world. Paul attributes these negative conditions of existence to the disobedience of Adam. So isn’t a “historical” first man necessary after all?
That depends. First we are used to reading Romans 5 in the way Augustine did. Augustine’s interpretation prevailed so completely in Catholicism and Protestantism that we hardly think of it as an interpretation anymore. Augustine’s interpretation has almost canonical standing in some churches (including ours).
Augustine worried about critics of Christianity who pointed out evils in the world and scoffed at the Christian notion that it was the creation of a perfect God. Augustine believed that the story of Adam and Eve contained an answer—a “theodicy,” or defense of God’s perfection. He proposed that Adam must have been endowed at first with supernatural knowledge and love of God, that Adam enjoyed the Beatific Vision of God in Paradise. Western Christian tradition calls this doctrine, Original Righteousness, the complement to Original Sin.
The argument is that if Adam was in this Beatific Condition in Paradise, then he, not God (or Satan), is the one to blame for evils. Despite the advantages in Eden, Adam became proud, turned against God, and ruined Paradise.
So it is not just a “historical” Adam and Eve that we’ve deemed necessary, but a factual “Augustinian” first pair who ruined a natural and moral Utopia. Without them, it seems there’s no significant human guilt for evils, and that by default (barring Satan) the author of evils must be God. John Collins voices the views of numerous others in defending a “historical Adam and Eve in exactly this way (Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?) This also explains why the historic Reformed fathers cemented the “Augustinian” characters and plot into our confessions (Belgic Confession, Article 14; Heidelberg Catechism, Lord’s Day 3). So why would scholars propose reconsidering such nearly canonical tradition?
They (we) worry about critical questions being raised both inside and outside churches.
Some questions arise from modern science. Science has revealed a prehistoric world of violent climatic events, hosts of parasites and vicious diseases, mass extinctions—“nature red in tooth and claw,” in the famous words of Tennyson. This hardly looks like “Eden.” Science also supports seeing the very first humans emerging in this world as inevitably primitive, at the very dawn of self-consciousness and moral awareness. Trying to fit “Augustinian” supermen and superwomen into this scene as some do—C.S. Lewis, for instance (The Problem of Pain)—seems extremely implausible to many of us. Further, geneticists calculate with considerable confidence that the current population could not have come from a single pair of humans. Genetic diversity requires between 1,000 and 20,000 pairs, around 150,000 years ago. If true, then it’s doubly hard to imagine “Augustinian” characters acting out Paradise Lost on the stage of history.
But apart from science, the “Augustinian” characters and plot seem unbelievable in their own right. On the one hand, we must believe that the first human beings were infused by God’s grace, and in such a state of unbroken communion with God that all blame falls on them, none on God. On the other hand, we have to imagine that they were fragile in some way—fragile enough to be fooled into defying God, fragile enough to become selfishly proud, diabolically dark, and to do the very wickedest thing humanly possible.
On the face of it, it seems absurd to think these emotions could ever take hold in the heart of persons in the grip of God’s unfiltered love and grace. Beginning with Paul, we have records of people blessed by comparable experiences (in lesser degrees, we suppose). Christian mystics like John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, among others, testify that the immediate experience of God’s glory and love altered them forever. It became impossible for them not to bend the knee in love. Defiant, self-directed pride in the presence of God just isn’t possible. The Reformed Christians refer to such grace as “irresistible,” and rightly so.
It seems, then, that the first human beings could not have been in that Beatific condition, as claimed. To explain the Fall, Alvin Plantinga speculates that maybe a “high objective probability” exists that any creature in “God’s image” will want to be God, and fall (Warranted Christian Belief, 211). But if so, that seems to defeat the main purpose of the “Augustinian” explanation. It admits that evils are due—at least in part—to fragility in the divine design. So “Augustinian” explanations do not unequivocally protect God’s innocence, after all. So what are we to do?
I have proposed that we should consider an alternative reading of Genesis that prevailed in Eastern Orthodoxy. It goes back to Irenaeus of Lyon (d. 200 C.E.), who was arguably the most authoritative of all church fathers.
In his most famous writing, Against Heresies, Irenaeus reasoned that Adam and Eve could not have been mature figures, as Augustine later imagined them. He reasoned that maturity requires a process of maturation, comparable to that of Jesus, who was not righteous de novo, at birth, but “was made perfect through suffering” (Hebrews 2: 10). Irenaeus proposed that Adam and Eve were innocent, more like children than mature adults—this fits with their wide-eyed response to the forbidden fruit, and how easily the Serpent fooled them. Irenaeus reasoned further that God—being omniscient—knew all along that his “children” would fail, but let them fail, anyway. Why? Irenaeus proposed that their falling must have been part of God’s plan from eternity. Using Romans 5, he proposed that God’s plan always was to bring humanity to maturity—through the incarnation, atonement, and resurrection of Christ.
On this view, God is not conducting an experiment in Eden, hoping that it will go well, and then reacting with a Plan B (Christ) when it fails. This is a tendency in “Augustinian” accounts. Instead, God is comparable to an artist creating a masterpiece. We can only see its greatness and the artist’s glory in its completion. God is not the “author” of evils in the sense of having done anything wrong. God has rather “authorized” the Fall and evils in something like the way of Joseph’s brothers—they meant it as evil, and they are not excused for what they’d done, but God meant it for good, making their forgiveness by Joseph morally possible (Genesis 50:20). We may think of the Atonement in both these human and divine terms. Milton referred to the Fall as a felix culpa—a “fortunate fault,” because of the incomparably great good that came from it.
So it seems to some that the “historical” Adam and Eve of “Augustinian” tradition are not necessary to historical Christianity. In fact, this interpretation—Paradise Lost—seems to create more problems than it solves. In contrast, an “Irenaean” view of an originally undeveloped creation is easily adapted to the world-narrative of science. Biblical Adam and Eve can simply symbolize those first humans, whoever and wherever they were. It offers a more persuasive theological account of our human condition as part of God’s unfailing plan. And it leads to an integrated theology of creation centered on the incarnation, atonement, and future of the world as transformed by God in Christ.
Meanwhile, it’s been half a century since the CRC Synod wrote and approved Report 44. Maybe it’s time to revisit the subject of biblical authority and confessions as it pertains to Genesis, science, and Christian doctrine.
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John Schneider is Professor of Theology Emeritus at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI. He holds an M.A. in Historical and Systematic Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in Divinity from the University of Cambridge. He has recently finished a manuscript for a book, Animal Suffering and the Goodness of God: the Darwinian Problem of Natural Evils and Christian Faith. The book is currently under review by academic presses. He has also published on theological perspectives on capitalism.
Professor Schneider explored these issues at an American Scientific Affiliation symposium in 2010. His colleague Dan Harlow presented a related paper at that conference.
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