Rethinking Adam and Eve

For anyone who believes that working toward a reconciliation of evolution and Christianity is a worthwhile goal (as I do), I highly recommend Peter Enns’s The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins (TEoA).

Enns is a biblical scholar and a committed Christian. He “believe[s] in the universal and humanly unalterable grip of both death and sin, and the work of the Savior, by the deep love and mercy of the Father, in delivering humanity from them.” At the same time, Enns is convinced “that evolution must be taken seriously.” With both of those considerations in mind, TEoA presents an alternative way to think about the story of Adam and Eve.

 

Notwithstanding the title of the book, Enns isn’t arguing that Adam (or Eve*) evolved. Rather, TEoA argues that our understanding of Adam should be adjusted — should evolve, if you will — because of scientific evidence supporting evolution and literary evidence from the world of the Bible that helps clarify the kind of literature the Bible is.

Many believers simply assume that Genesis — because it is the “word of God” — provides objective historical and scientific information about the creation of the world and the first humans.

Enns questions this assumption. For Enns, a “proper view of inspiration will embrace the fact that God speaks by means of the cultural idiom of the authors … [E]ven the expression of deep and ultimate truth does not escape the limitations of the cultures in which that truth is expressed.”

Some believers may see this perspective as disrespecting the scriptures, but Enns sees it as revealing an important characteristic of the divine:

God condescends to where people are, speaks their language, and employs their ways of thinking. … It is not beneath God to condescend to culturally conditioned human modes of communication. Having such a condescending God is crucial to the very heart of Christianity. … What sets [the Christian] God apart is his habit of coming down to our level.

Mormons shouldn’t have any difficulty with the basic point that Enns is making, because we have a similar idea in our scriptures. D&C 1:24 refers to commandments being given “given unto my servants in their weakness, after the manner of their language, that they might come to understanding.”

With this idea about inspiration in mind, Enns examines literary evidence from the ancient Near East. In particular, Enns discusses at length the similarities between:

• Genesis 1 and the Babylonian story of origins referred to as Enuma Elish;
• the flood narrative in Genesis 6–9 and the Mesopotamian stories known to us as the Atrahasis Epic and the Gilgamesh Epic; and
• the story of Adam and Eve and several other ancient Mesopotamian texts, including the Atrahasis Epic.

What does placing Genesis side by side with the — clearly mythical — primordial tales of other ancient cultures tell us? Enns calls it “genre calibration”:

Such comparisons have made it quite clear that Israel’s creation stories are not prepared to answer the kinds of questions that occupy modern scientific or even historical studies. … However one might label the genre of the opening chapters of Genesis (myth, legend, suprahistorical narrative, story, metaphor, symbolism, archetypal, etc.) is not the point here. The point is that Genesis and the modern scientific investigation of human origins do not overlap. To think that they do is an error in genre discernment. … [T]he early chapters of Genesis are not a literal or scientific description of historical events but a theological statement in an ancient idiom.

In other words, the author(s) of Genesis were not prepared to give us accurate historical or scientific information about cosmic and human origins. Genesis communicates what the ancient Israelites believed about God, but it does so within the scope of ancient ways of understanding cosmic and human origins.

If we were to make Enns’s point using the language of D&C 1:24, we could say that God revealed certain theological truths to the ancient Israelites “after the manner of their language,” meaning that these truths were communicated using ancient assumptions about origins that are not historically or scientifically accurate. God did not correct those assumptions; instead, God communicated to the ancient Israelites “in their weakness … that they might come to understanding.”

But what about Paul? In Romans 5:12–21 and 1 Corinthians 15:20–58, Paul writes about Adam as though he is the first human being and ancestor of everyone who has ever lived. (Paul doesn’t mention Eve.) Even more significantly, Paul writes as though Adam’s act of disobedience — which Paul seems to assume was an actual historical event — is the cause of universal sin and death from which humanity is redeemed through Jesus Christ. Because of this, many Christians have concluded that the Adam and Eve story must be read as a literally accurate description of historical reality.

However, Enns reminds us that Paul himself was an ancient man who, like the ancient Israelites, assumed various ways of thinking about cosmic and human origins:

By saying that Paul’s Adam is not the historical first man, we are leaving behind Paul’s understanding of the cause of the universal plight of sin and death. …

[But] [a]dmitting the historical and scientific problems with Paul’s Adam does not mean in the least that the gospel message is therefore undermined. A literal Adam may not be the first man and cause of sin and death, as Paul understood it, but what remains of Paul’s theology are three core elements of the gospel:

The universal and self-evident problem of death

The universal and self-evident problem of sin

The historical event of the death and resurrection of Christ

These three remain; what is lost is Paul’s culturally assumed explanation for what a primordial man had to do with causing the reign of death and sin in the world. …

Paul, as a first-century Jew, bore witness to God’s act in Christ in the only way that he could have been expected to do so, through ancient idioms and categories known to him and his religious tradition for century upon century. One can believe that Paul is correct theologically and historically about the problem of sin and death and the solution that God provides in Christ without also needing to believe that his assumptions about human origins are accurate. The need for a savior does not require a historical Adam.

It seems to me that similar arguments could be made about the references to Adam and Eve in uniquely Mormon scriptures (Enns is not a Mormon, and therefore does not address uniquely Mormon scriptures).

For believers like me who are not content with simply ignoring or dismissing the evidence supporting evolution, Enns provides a credible paradigm for interpreting the Adam and Eve story. Enns’s ideas merit serious consideration.

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*Eve isn’t discussed very much in TEoA. I assume this is because Enns sees Paul’s writings as “the ultimate source of concern for Christians who are seeking a synthesis between the Bible and evolution,” and Paul doesn’t discuss Eve.