Peter Enns compares Adam’s banishment from Eden to Israel’s exile, in this mind-expanding talk which I greatly enjoyed. It will, of course, ruffle all sorts of conservative feathers. In bringing out a few highlights, I seek intellectual honesty.
Claim: “Genesis reads well as an Israel-centred story on a universal stage, and this makes timelines less tense”.
- Genesis 1: cosmos and humanity, (however many) years ago.
- Genesis 2: subset of humanity, 6000 years, etc.
Question: Were Adam and Eve:
- Naieve children, learning? (Irenaus)
- Perfect humans? (Augustine)
Detour: Why would God say “I withhold from you any knowledge of good and evil?” No parent would wish ignorance for their kids. Proverbs describes wisdom as a tree of life, and rightly desirable. But Eve’s choice is quintessential non-wisdom. Knowledge isn’t the problem, it’s how you get it.
Individual Choice:
- Cain kills his brother, but Adam’s original sin doesn’t get the blame. Cain could have chosen differently just like his father.
- The Flood is not God saying “I have to kill everyone because of what Adam did.” People make individual bad choices, and an individual righteous man (Noah) is a fresh start.
Pauline Assertions:
- For Paul, Adam is the first human.
- But the Old Testament Adam is not Paul’s Adam.
- The Old Testament giving of the law assumes the feasibility of obedience; Paul’s idea of being enslaved to sin is foreign to the OT.
- Does Adam ever do what Paul says he does?
- Not unlike us, Paul inherits a cosmology and a tradition about Adam.
- Paul engages with Genesis, asking (as we do) primarily “what does it mean now?”, not “what did it mean back then?”
- Paul re-reads the OT knowing “how the story ends”: Resurrection is his starting point.
- Paul teases things out of the OT in service of Christ, in a way no one else could have done.
- Romans is not a book about how to get saved, but about how Jews and Gentiles (and we) can co-exist as one people.
- Paul is wrong about the cause of the problem, but right about the problem and the solution: sin and death are real regardless of the cause we attribute it to
- Paul uses Adam creatively: I can forgive Paul for mis-reading Adam
Conclusion: You can’t just graft evolution together with traditional theology. You have to think hard, and be deliberate and careful. All of our theology is provisional.