I have a new article in Fuller’s Theology News & Notes. The title speaks for itself: “Does Paul’s Christ Require a Historical Adam?”
The levels of freedom (or lack thereof) that many of us experience with regard to the question of Adam as a historical person is inseparable from the theology that we see bound up with him. (keep reading)
Blosphere confessional: I rant here sometimes. More than that, some might say that I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about a couple issues that come around regularly.
To the point: I can be downright confrontational about the fact that the Bible is not inerrant or that the world as we know it is the result of an evolutionary process.
Why poke the hornet’s nest? (And, it is a hornet’s nest!)
Here’s the reason: one of the most important messages we communicate when we talk about our faith is what the borders are, outside of which one cannot be part of “us.” The ways people speak about inerrancy and creationism in some quarters communicates this: that if there is an error in the Bible or if we are here as a result of an evolutionary process then Christianity is not true.
When we communicate the either/or of Christianity or a Bible that has mistakes or of Christianity or a world that is 4.5 billion years old, we are setting up Christianity for an increasing number of people heading toward the door.
Here’s the script: if you tell a high school kid that it’s either inerrancy or bust, and this kid goes and takes an introduction to OT or introduction to NT course in seminary, this young adult is going to have to go for bust unless she can reconfigure her Christianity to make room for a Bible that is not, in fact inerrant.
Sometimes it doesn’t even take a class.
What if your student is particularly “diligent” (*ahem*) and decides while working at summer camp that during the time when the kids are off sailing during sailing class he will sit down and outline the last week of Jesus’ life according to the four Gospels? (I have a “friend” who did this once…)
That’s right: if your students actually read the Bible rather than just talking about what the Bible “is,” they will discover that the Bible that you have bundled up with Christianity does not exist. And then they will have to choose to either deny the actual content of the Bible, cling to the system they’ve been given, and stay Christian, OR to leave Christianity because the options before them are clear, OR to reconfigure their faith in light of the Bible we actually have.
This is an unbearable burden to place on Christ followers. It is a false choice to create a choice between inerrancy or atheism. In short, marrying inerrancy to Christianity is pastorally disastrous.
Why do I rant about “what the Bible is”? Mostly, because I want as many of us as possible to be creating more space within the world of faithful, Jesus-following Christianity for people to continue following Jesus whether or not they’ve found a mistake in the Bible.
Or, to put it another way: there is no reason that someone should feel as though their whole faith is called into question by Bart Ehrman’s NT Intro course.
I have a parallel agenda with evolution: I have read some about evolution. I’m no expert.
But what I do know is that by treating evolution as a scandal to the Christian faith we are creating choices for our college students that not only lead them to being unduly scandalized by their education, but also to fleeing from fields where they might be most useful to the world.
On the latter point: while we get our knickers in a wad about why evolution is demonic, I have an agnostic/atheistic friend who spends all day as an evolutionary biologist studying the evolution of cancer cells so as to help lay the groundwork for future more effective treatments.
He is making the world a better place (something I think God actually cares about) by helping push back the hold that a nefarious disease can take on our bodies (overcoming sickness–I think God cares about) by working in a field that we close off to our young people by raising all sorts of doubts about whether such activity is an active denial of the existence of God.
Seriously.
Here’s the deal: even if the most nuanced articulations of creationism over against evolution, or of what sorts of “creativity” we might find in the Bible could cohere with inerrancy, allow for the very things I’m talking about, most people will not hear the breadth of what is allowed in the nuance, and will hear, instead, the black and white either/or.
Part of my job as a biblical scholar who cares about the church is not simply to engaged in the finely nuanced positions of my colleagues, but the effects of what we say “on the ground.” And part of my calling as a seminary professor is to clear out the ground that people stand on from all the clutter that accumulates on any horizontal surface. In this case, it’s the clutter of what “chrisitanity” demands that Christianity does not, in fact, require.
So I rant about evolution. And I rave about inerrancy. In doing this, what I want to communicate is that you don’t have to make a choice between science and Christian faith or between history and Christian faith.
There are a lot of difficult choices you will have to make. I am not trying to make Christianity easy or conform it to the way of the world.
Instead, I am trying to clear out all this meaningless clutter so that we can hear, instead, that the real decision we have to make is this: “Will you lose your life for the sake of Jesus and the gospel? Will you take up your cross and follow?”
… or, what’s right with it, depending on who you are.
This week, James K. A. Smith posted a review of Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam at The Colossian Forum. Although Enns is a friend, I am not an apologist for this particular book, which is amenable to, perhaps significant, critique from a number of angles.
However, I am an apologist for people wrestling with the critical issues about what the Bible is, what it actually communicates, and what the impact of this might be for Christian theology.
And this is precisely the sort of challenge that Smith’s critique of the book seeks to circumvent. Smith’s critique of Enns’ methodology (it’s not a book review in the typical sense) is an almost stereotypical move by a theologian to keep the church from having to wrestle with what the Bible actually is, what it actually says, and how this might challenge what we think we know about ourselves and God.
You’ll notice I said “actually.” And here, no doubt, I can hear Smith jumping up and down and screaming, “‘Actually’ is precisely the point! Enns tries to define ‘actually’ as what the human authors meant, but that’s never been the full extent of what the church has believed.”
I know this. And so does Enns–more so than Smith gives him credit for.
Smith wrongly critiques Enns on two points.
First, he says that Enns’ paradigm is one in which the true meaning lies “behind” the text. This is a mischaracterization. For Enns, as for most scholars who turn to historical context to understand the text, the world “behind” the text does not determine what the text means, but helps us understand with greater plausibility the particular connotations this text would have had to a first audience.
This is not getting behind the text, it’s better understanding the text we actually have.
Second, for some reason Smith thinks that Richard B. Hays
This is where Smith’s critique was peculiar, to say the least. After chastising Enns for claiming an ultimate meaning in Genesis and not allowing a reframing of it in canonical context, he quotes Enns as saying:
what Genesis says about Adam and the consequences of his actions does not seem to line up with the universal picture that Paul paints in Romans and 1 Corinthians […]. I do not think the gospel stands on whether we can read Paul’s Adam in the pages of Genesis.
That sounds a lot like Enns is arguing for a revisionist reading of Genesis in light of the Christ event–a canonical reassessment that says, “How Paul reads Adam is not determined by the Ancient Near Eastern context.”
If Smith were in the mood to give Enns’ book a charitable reading, he might even say that Enns has demonstrated that these later meanings unfolded “in front of the text.”
But the real crux is that Smith wants to iron out all the wrinkles through an appeal to divine authorship. The problem, of course, is that this convenient appeal is so powerful that it can substantiate every claim while proving none.
Such appeals to divine intention have too long disallowed careful investigation into the plausibility of evolution and what the impact might be for how Christians read the Bible and understand human origins.
While I disagree with Enns on numerous points, his book is more valuable than Smith’s critique for two reasons: (1) It owns up to the Bible we actually have rather than the Bible Smith seems to wish God had given us. (No, appeals to God cannot make the critical issues of the Bible go away.) But perhaps more importantly, (2) It moves Christianity in the right direction by freeing evangelicals to wrestle with the questions of evolution and theology with integrity rather than calling us back again to the comfort of divine approbation for our closed-eyed denial of the problems facing our theological tradition.
Peter Enns
Smith closes his critique by suggest we return to ask the unasked foundational questions. This is a red herring. We can keep retreating to our theological reading rooms and having comfortable conversations about how important it is that God wrote the Bible. Or, we can continue the conversation that Enns has helped move along by (a) wrestling with the meaning of the Bible we actually have as both a historical and a theological document–God, if God be author, actually authored this and not some other book!–and (b) figuring out what we’re going to say about human origins now that we know humanity came to be in a much different way than we’d think from a literal reading of Genesis 1 or even the almost opposite way we’d think from a literal reading of Genesis 2.
Theological interpretation is at its best when it is drawing on what we know historically about the contexts of scripture to enrich and challenge the theology of the church. It is at its worst when it strives to use the power of God to keep us from recognizing either the Bible we actually have or the world we actually live in. Smith’s review is guilty of both of the latter.
Slowing the blogging pace and stepping back for a week or two over the holidays, I started to think about what streams of conversation are flowing with particular force these days.
Over the past couple of years there have been emergent or missional conversations that always provided ready fodder for conversation. But those streams have largely dried up as ever-present conversation pieces.
Here are a couple of things that strike me as continuing points of interest as I scan the blogosphere. But I’d also love to hear from you: what are you thinking about and finding yourself in vigorous conversation about as you strive to work out what it looks like to faithfully follow Jesus in 2012?
Recent books by Scot McKnight, Tom Wright, and yours truly are all working to contribute to such a recalibration of the evangelical gospel, that has been too long denying what it should have been affirming (in many circles). The gospel is good news for the whole world.
But, this means that we are confronted with a monumental task. And here is where the conservatives are right: to affirm evolution entails a reconfiguring of the narrative of humanity in significant ways. What can Christians say about the significance of humanity’s place in the cosmos once the story of evolution displaces the story of one-off creation? What can be retained? What must be replaced? Pete Enns’ book, and the interest it is generating even prior to publication, is one piece of bookish evidence about the continuing significance of this issue.
What do you think? Are these issues the ones that are active points of conversation in your world? Are there others? I started to wonder if “what the Bible is” might not be another significant point where evangelicals are entering a new place (cf. Christian Smith’s, The Bible Made Impossible), and if folks find themselves increasingly in conversations about sex and sexuality?
Anyone?
On Sunday, I posted some thoughts about hope–Christian hope as resurrection hope, followed yesterday by some reflections on the significance of Jesus’ full humanity.
Taking hold of the far-reaching implications of Jesus’ restoration project is something I continually harp on because it can play an important role in transforming the posture with which we hold the gospel.
My experience within evangelical Christian circles has often been one in which followers of Jesus envision themselves as the small, minority truth-holders, struggling to cling to what it right, and ever cautious and even fearful about fully engaging in other “worlds” that might be tainted by godlessness, or liberalism, or the like (since those to are “alike,” right?! *ahem*).
Image: markuso / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Last night I had the opportunity to participate on a panel that was responding to questions posed by a group of college students. We fielded questions such as, “What are Christians supposed to do about evolution, especially science majors?” “What should Christians think about environmentalism?” “What about people who never hear the message of Jesus?”
The questions are important ones in many respects. But the overall sense I got from the questions was that Christian faith is a small fortress to be guarded carefully. And I wondered if we didn’t need to start reimagining a capacious vision of the reign of God as our gospel.
I think the problem of a small, carefully guarded fortress starts early. In youth group we learn that the gospel means: (1) Jesus died for your sins; (2) you shouldn’t sleep with your boyfriend or girlfriend; and (3) drinking is bad.
There’s not much good news in that, except in the hope that if you can control your hormones you get to be with Jesus drinking grape juice one day.
But what if we begin, instead, with, “God was, in Christ Jesus, reconciling all things to himself”?
Then the world of nature and science does not stand as a looming threat to our faith, but as a witness to the breadth of the saving care of God.
Then the preservation of the environment becomes not merely a fleeting liberal hobby-horse, but a crucial pillar in the eternal plan of God. You think you care about the environment? Well, you’ve got nothing on the creator.
Maybe even questions about sex and sexuality can be received, gratefully, as gifts, rather than fearful lands to be trod, if at all, with extreme caution.
Paul talks about the reception of the Spirit as a transforming moment that moves us from slavish fear to the freedom of the glory of the children of God. It moves us into the realm where we know ourselves to be members of God’s family and instruments in the turning of the ages.
Posture, it seems to me, is as important as details. If we cannot posture ourselves with arms wide open to the cosmos that God has reconciled to himself, then we are not so positioned as to come to faithful answers to the questions that plague us. And we might not even be in the position to be plagued by the right questions.
A day or two ago I talked a bit about how we might think through the human origins question.
To me, the most important issue confronting Christians is not what answers we give to questions but how we handle them. That’s one of the most significant factors behind my “Storied Theology” project: I want us to reconceptualize what Christianity is, so that we will not only interpret the bible differently, but act differently as well.
This is not because I don’t think that answers matter, or because I have some morbid, academic interest in the ways we carry out theological debate and want to write a book on argumentation.
I want us to think, interpret, and act differently because I have high levels of frustration at the pervasive failure of Christians to act Christianly toward one another or toward the world outside the church.
And I do mean that we have not acted like Christians. But of course, this means that I have to have some idea of what defines Christianity, which means that I probably have a different idea about that than the people who are defending their actions in the name of Christ.
And this is where the whole bounded-set, centered-set, river analogy comes in.
For the folks who are demanding that Adam is a do-or-die figure for Christianity, Christianity is a set of persons or beliefs bounded by a string of theological commitments. This means that anyone transgressing those theological borders must either be shot while trying to escape or else sealed off from the sheep whom those borders are erected to protect.
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We have to think of the place of Christian theology in more dynamic terms–not so that we can embrace every whim of passing theological fancy, but so that we can act as though (1) variation in theology does not threaten the integrity of Jesus Christ who is, himself, the Truth, and thus (2) conversation about new ideas will not bring the church to ruin.
The church is not doctrine.
The church is the body of the crucified Christ.
Therefore, we do not read scripture to preserve doctrines.
We read scripture to discover what it means that the crucified Christ is the resurrected Lord over all.
Therefore, we do not act as though preserving doctrine is our highest calling.
We act as though the truth of Christ is preserved through a people enacting upon the world the saving narrative of the crucified messiah.
Yesterday I put up two posts that, together, open up the question of how we should think about new ideas that challenge what Christians have “always thought.”
In the bounded-set thinking that comes most naturally to many of us, the arrival of a new idea, especially if it challenges an old one, automatically generates a response of rejection. It falls outside the boundary of received Christian orthodoxy.
It, and its proponents and adherents, is rejected.
This is what’s happening with the evolution and historicity of Adam question. And I understand it.
The Christian tradition has built a lot on Adam. The idea of a historical first parent who fell from a state of innocence is important for understanding humanity, creation, and even how salvation works. 
But here’s what we’ve seen over the past hundred and fifty years: after scientists started working with a theory of evolution, data from innumerable branches and sub-branches of various scientific disciplines started making other discoveries that supported that theory and did not support instant appearance of diversified species on earth.
The latest challenge to the traditionally conceived Christian story of origins is genomic data that points to pools of thousands rather than a single individual.
So what do Christians do with all this?
First, we recognize that we are standing at a different point, downstream from our theological forebears. They had scientific worldviews that were impacting their articulations of humanity and sin (sin transferred in sperm, anyone?). And, their scientific worldviews were closer to the biblical writers: we hadn’t yet discovered that the earth revolves around the sun, for example, or found fossils of animals that died millions of years before anything like a human being was on the earth.
Image Copyright Javier Martinez
That first step is huge. It is, I think, the greatest hurdle: to clear the bar of setting our minds in such a posture that we can listen to the issue, wrestle with the problem, without defensiveness.
Second, we revisit the biblical story to see where we might have been over-reading our preconception into the story. The particular creation story in which there is a person named Adam who breaks a command and thereby brings ruin on himself and, apparently, the world, is the same story that then proceeds to have Adam’s son Cain run off to marry foreigners.
This indicates that Genesis 2-4 is a story that does not intend to give an entirely comprehensive account of the origin of humanity. Yes, it intends to tell a story within which God’s people have a unique place, and where a ruptured relationship with God wreaks havoc in every aspect of life, but there’s also a window into the possibility that this fits within a larger narrative of an already-extant humanity.
Then, of course, we step further back and realize that we have two creation stories in Gen 1-2 alone, and that each tells a different narrative about humanity as it fits within the unfolding of creation. Then there are other biblical stories–creation from a slain Leviathan, anyone?
We start to get a perspective on creation that is polyvalent, to say the least. When the question is opened up, by our modern scientists, about how we did, in fact, come to be here, we have our eyes opened afresh to see that the biblical narratives are anything but dogmatic about the answer. They give evidence of different ancient Israelites at different times and places painting different pictures in order to communicate something significant about humanity’s and, more importantly Israel’s, place in the cosmos.
And Paul did the same thing, building on Adam traditions.
The next step, then, is beginning to return to our time. What must we say about the creation of the world, about humanity, about “The Man” and “The Woman” whom we meet in the early chapters of Genesis?
We will not be able to provide a viable answer to that question if we are unwilling to ask it with integrity for our own day and time.
Bounded-set Christianity has not place for the question at all. Ironically, those most committed to history are least willing to learn from it. Yes, the earth does circle the sun; and yes, Christianity survived this knowledge. But conservative Protestant Christianity, in particular, refuses to be chastened by the mistakes of the past, and continues to insist on the absolute necessity of data that science has repeatedly disproved.
The question, as I see it, is not whether this scientific information is correct, but rather how we will articulate faithful Christianity in light of it.
We are downstream and there is no swimming back.
Ed. note: the author got so caught up in the “Trajectories and challenges” part, he forgot about “ethics.” What does all this have to do with how we act as Christians? Come back tomorrow and find out!
In the Apocalypse of Abraham, the patriarch sees a vision of Adam and Eve in paradise. He sees them intertwined with each other, being fed grapes by a dragon-like creature.
The failure of Adam and Eve is a cause of great consternation to Abraham: why did God create these people, give them dominion, only to ruin humanity upon the earth (23:12)?
Here is the divine answer:
And he said to me, “Hear, Abraham! Those who desire evil, and all whom I have hated as they commit them–over them did I give him dominion, and he was to be beloved of them.”
Adam, it seems, was not the firstborn of all human creatures. He was created to be the ruler of the human creatures who committed all sorts of evil. He was given dominion over sinful humans, in order to be loved by them and thus, it seems, draw them to obedience to Israel’s God.
This underscores two things.
First, an most generally, it reinforces the idea that the story of Adam has to be read as part of the narrative that defines the specific people of Israel. It was written to introduce their story and is best read as such an introduction. If we read it as simply about humanity our reading is too thin.
Secondly, it is good for us to realize that long before “scientific” concerns started giving people reason to reread the Adam narrative, early Jews were reading it differently from what we see as the “normal” or “straight” reading. Adam and Eve did not have to be read as the first humans ever to come on the scene. Early Jewish readers “knew” that Cain had somewhere to go, a people to go to, after he killed Abel.
Whereto? To the people whom Adam and Eve had been created to rule and bring into conformity with the will of God.
Please note, I’m not saying that this is the correct reading of the text; rather, I’m suggesting that it shows us a couple of important things. One of these is that the story of Adam precedes stories of Davidic kings and messiahs a story about a representative human ruling the world on God’s behalf. The other is that such a recognition can lead to a reading of Gen 2-3 that sees Adam and Eve entering a story that is already well underway–and that this did, in fact, happen before there were scientific pressures pushing anyone in such a direction.
‘Adam and Eve are back in the saddle again. The cover story of this month’s Christianity Today details the ongoing debate about human origins.
This is an important conversation for us to have.
As I read this article and talk about these issues with my friends and colleagues, I am increasingly struck by two things. First, as I accept the conclusions of scientists I am increasingly consenting to things I know nothing about. I do not now, and probably will not ever, have firsthand knowledge of DNA sequencing, pre-genome project evolutionary evidence and theory, or archaeological evidence of hominoid development.
I anticipate that I will always be dependent, at some level, on some sort of scientific consensus to tell me what the origins of humanity are, even as I anticipate that my friends who are not in the theological studies academy will always be dependent on me to tell them about the ins and outs of making sense of the New Testament as a set of first century documents.
With such dependence on the professionals, why do I not exercise a bit more reserve in my affirmation of evolution theory, and old earth, and the like?
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This is my second point.
Evolution, as a theory, has created expectations that later scientific research, even brand new scientific fields, has confirmed, whereas literal creationism and attempts at biblically created depictions of the world are always having to adjust dramatically to account for the new evidence.
Darwin came along and said that species evolved from one another. This is a process that would take millions (at least) of years. Biologists begin postulating relationships among species. Heredity and change are explored.
Paleontologists and archaeologists dig and explore. They discover early signs of tool use that seems to go back tens of thousands of years–humanity in particular and certainly the earth in general seem older than 6,000 years.
Researchers build on evolutionary theory, and discover that cancer cells evolve–and develop cancer treatments.
A brand new field of genome mapping comes onto the scene, and the results confirm the expectations of evolutionary biology: not only do humans share functional DNA with other primates, we also share the sequences that don’t seem to do anything.
Translation: things that would be part of us if we have evolved from something other than precisely what we are right now were, in fact, discovered in the DNA sequences–and these “somethings” are shared with primates. And, there is no reason on theories of direct creation why God would put such unnecessary ingredients into his humans, or chimpanzees.
What this tells me is that scientific accounts of human origins are on the right track in way that a literal biblical rendering of human origins is not. The latter fails in the role of accurately predicting what the evidence will demonstrate–which is precisely the role of a good scientific theory.
No, the earth is not flat. No, the earth is not a land mass supported by pillars that stand in the midst of the sea. No, there is no firmament holding back the waters of the heavens. No, the sun does not race back around to its starting point every night so that it can make its course over the earth’s sky once again. No, the earth is not 6,000 years old.
So what about humans?
