Kaiser, a Literal and Historical Adam and Eve

CTR n.s.l 0/2 (Spring 2013) 75-82

A LITERAL AND HISTORICAL ADAM AND EVE?

REFLECTIONS ON THE WORK OF PETER ENNS

Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, MA

I. INTRODUCTION

T h e traditional form of biblical teaching on the origins of humanity can be succinctly summarized by the Wheaton College mandatory creed which states:

God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the entire human race.1

Now while this confession is straightforward and fundamental to historic Christianity, it has been much easier to affirm until atheist- tumed-Evangelical Christian Francis S. Collins wrote his 2006 bestseller The Language o f God: A Scientist Presents Evidence fo r B elief2 Prior to completing this book, Collins had successfully led one of the most phenomenal research endeavors since the Manhattan project at the University of Chicago towards the middle of the twentieth century. In 2003, he and his team finished mapping out several billions of DNA bases of all genes that determine human heredity. Hence, as one of the

1See the full statement at http://www.wheaton.edu/About-Wheaton/Statement-of-Faith־ and-Educational-Purpose, accessed February 1, 2013.

2Francis S. Collins, The Language o f God: A Scientist Presents Evidence fo r Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006).

http://www.wheaton.edu/About-Wheaton/Statement-of-Faith%d6%be

Criswell Theological Review76

most eminent scientists of our day who also holds to both a creationist and a Darwinian evolutionary point of view, Collins insisted on having God as a Creator who oversaw the process of natural selection. He later became the founder of BioLogos Foundation in San Diego in 2007, as well as the BioLogos blog, to promote the view known as “theistic evolution.” Collins, for his part, argues that the scientific results of the genome project indicate that today’s humans emerged anatomically from our primate ancestors somewhere around 100,000 years ago, instead of originating from a basic population of two individuals named Adam and Eve. Therefore, there were approximately 10,000 individuals who gave rise to the human race, not just two! Eventually Collins then resigned from his role as head of BioLogos in order to accept the appointment in 2009 as the new director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Washington D.C.

Needless to say, these proposals presented a huge paradigm shift for theologians and biblical exegetes to address, especially in light of the confessional creeds of the Christian Church. Creeds such as the Apostles’ Creed, which affirmed: “I believe in God the Father, Maker of heaven and earth...” would need to be, at the very least, nuanced quite a bit, if the interpretations of the findings of the genome project as advocated by these scientists were verified and applied.

All of a sudden there emerged a number of new challenges to the biblical record as a result of the genome project and the implications some were deriving from it were many. Was a creation of humanity unique? What did it mean that these humans bore the “image of God?” What were we to think now of the doctrine of original sin if there was a multi-genesis of persons? Had some of that large group managed to escape sinning while others had not? Did death and evil come on all creation as a result of the sins of this group, or was it limited just to certain members of the human race as a result of those who sinned like Adam had? Was there a real “fall” into sin in Eden or had theologians merely concocted that story? Did Jesus’ genealogy recorded in Luke really go back to a real Adam, or was that part of the theological myth as well? And what shall we say about St. Paul’s teaching that linked the “one man” Adam with the “one man” Christ in Romans 5:12-19 and 1 Corinthians 15:20-23, 42-49? Was his analogy contrived out of whole cloth or had we missed what he meant to teach all these years?

These concerns can come more rapidly than we are able to consider them, but at the heart of the debate is the controlling issue which a South Carolina pastor named Richard Phillips identified when he said: “The hermeneutics behind theistic evolution,” he warned, “are a Trojan horse that, once inside our gates, must cause the entire fortress of Christian belief to fall.” So what is it about the biblical hermeneutics of this group that is so damaging? Indeed this is a timely question and it would be best to take each hermeneutical issue one at a time. So here we will address

77Walter C. Kaiser: A Literal and Historical Adam and Eve?

certain charges that are leveled against the belief in an historical or actual Adam and Eve.

II. FIRST CHARGE: LITERALISM IS NOT AN OPTION FOR INTERPRETING GENESIS 1 AND 2 OR AN ADAM OR EVE

The first part of this charge is the first of “Nine Theses” that Peter Enns takes up in the conclusion to his recent book The Evolution o f Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say about Human Origins? Enns boldly affirms that

One cannot read Genesis literally - meaning as a literally accurate description of physical, historical reality - in view of the state of scientific knowledge today and our knowledge of ancient Near Eastern stories of origins.4

Enns goes on to warn that those who choose to read Genesis literally will either have to ignore the evidence completely or present alternative theories in order to keep spiritual stability. As he pictures the issue, it is just such literalism that ends up exposing the Bible to ridicule, even though its defenders fully intend instead to protect the Scriptures by adhering to a literal narrative. Perhaps, Enns muses, this is why so many thoughtful and informed persons end up rejecting the Bible because they eventually perceive those who adopt a literalistic stance to be advocating nonsense when it comes to cosmological topics.

What smacks of triumphalism in this is Enn’s statement about how the text cannot be read from a literal point of view. In laying this principle down as a presupposition, he expects the text of Scripture itself to be adjusted to other outside sources or norms. But even as he makes this move, he also tells us just what were the “commonly agreed-upon similarities” that Genesis shared with the Babylonian creation story found in the Enuma Elishx which is one of the two qualifiers, he claims, that has arisen in recent times to caution us against reading the text as presenting a real happening or event.5

Surprisingly, in this Babylonian Near Eastern myth, he finds six common themes with Genesis: (1) matter exists independently of the divine spirit with order coming in Genesis out of ‘chaos,” (2) darkness preceded creation, (3) Genesis uses the word tehom, “the deep,” which originated with the name of the goddess Tiamat, (4) light exists before the creation of the sun, moon and stars, (5) in the Enuma Elish, Marduk

3Peter Enns. The Evolution o f Adam: What the Bible Does and D oesn ’t Say about Human Origins (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2012). My copy is an e-book, so the page numbers are not available, but this chapter is called “Conclusion.”

4Ibid.5See Enns, chp. 3.


fillets slain Tiamat’s body to keep the waters from escaping just as the Genesis “firmament” did with its so-called solid dome as it performed the same duty in Scripture, and (6) the sequence of the days of creation were similar with the creation of the firmament, dry land, luminaries and humanity coming in that order.6

Now while some may think these parallels are formidable, Enn’s list is actually quite startling in light of the work done as far back in time as 1942 by the Lutheran scholar at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, Alexander Heidel. He offered several observations, which have come, by now, to be widely accepted by a large number of Old Testament writers in the field. For example, there is an enormous difficulty in explaining how we can bring a feminine Babylonian word over into Hebrew un-augmented by any sufformative elements or decipher how the gutturral “h” got into the middle of Hebrew tehom. These contingencies have never been explained philologically, nor can they be.7 Also Kenneth Kitchen called the identification and derivation of tehom from Tiamat as a “complete fallacy,” noting that this word in Hebrew for “the deep ,״ tehom, was a common Semitic word as could be shown by its presence in Ugaritic from the early second millennium B.C.8 Yet this was supposed to be the alleged clue that showed how the Genesis narrative derived its content from another Near Eastern story. And when this building stone collapsed, there was a quiet disaffection for this thesis among most scholars.

Likewise, the caricature argument for the Hebrew word raqia' rendered “firmament” also fell away, because it actually meant something like an “extended” platform, while the ideas of a solid or hard dome came from the pictures derived from the Latin Vulgate firmamentum or the Greek Septuagint stereoma rather than any meanings of the Hebrew term.9 This is why scholars like Laird Harris had shown years ago that the so-called triple-decker universe was an invention out of whole cloth and did not exist in the Bible.

Consequently, these apparent parallels are not as common to both fields as Enns assumes. So if these alleged similarities are among the reasons prompting him to read Genesis in a way that departs from the author’s own use of his own terms in his own day, then it is time to rethink that whole thesis. The entire basis for finding similarities must be reinvestigated, for Enns’ current projections do not provide the grounds most had alleged it would.

6Ibid.7Alexander H. Heidel, Babylonian Genesis! 2nd edition (Chicago: Phoenix Books,

1963), 119.8Kenneth A. Kitchen, Ancient Orient and the O ld Testament (London: Tyndale Press,

1966), 89-90.9See R. Laird Harris, “Bible and Cosmology,” Bulletin o f the Evangelical Theological

Society,_5 (1962), 11-17. Also see W. C. Kaiser, Jr., “The Literary Form o f Genesis 1-11,” in New Perspectives on the O ld Testament, ed. J. Barton Payne (Waco, TX., Word Books, 1970), 57.


That being said then with regard to Enns, the question that remains for the Bible reader and scholar face is: “How does the author who wrote this material want to be understood? After all, if we expect others to show us the courtesy of hearing us out first before making a judgment about what we had to say, then we should offer the same kindness to the writers of Scripture. This assumes as well that unless indicated by a clue in our speech or writing that we intend a multiple meaning in our words in this case, we should assume that we have a single meaning intended. Early on, this principle of interpretation was called “originalism.” Multiple meanings (or as one Bible teacher, who went even further off the track, put it, “every Biblical passage has an infinite number of meanings”), could not be given for any one given passage if language was still going to communicate an understandable message. But that is what Enns insists on doing. He wants to say that the words in the Genesis passages have several meanings. Yet that raises the question: which one is true? Which one did the author who stood in the council of God intend to say was God’s authoritative communication to humanity? To say all meanings are true is to make the Holy Spirit stutter and to leave us having to make a choice as to which meaning we prefer.

III. SECOND CHARGE: THE APOSTLE PAUL GOT IT WRONG AS WELL

Adam plays a major part not only in the creation story, but also in St. Paul’s letters, particularly in Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians 15:20-58. Even Enns acknowledges that Paul “seems to regard Adam as the first human being and ancestor of everyone who ever lived.” 10 This, Enns continues, is “a particularly vital point in Romans, where Paul regards Adam’s disobedience as the cause of universal sin and death from which humanity is redeemed through the obedience of Christ.”11 That, Enns agrees, settles the issue of an historical Adam for a good number of Christians. And so it should, for Enns has so far read the Scriptures correctly just as the writer who wrote them meant them to be understood.

Apparently though, it does not settle the matter for all believers because Enns warns that Paul’s account is not as “straightforward” as it seems on the face of it. In fact, confides Enns, “Paul’s Adam is not a result of a ‘straight’ reading of Genesis or the Old Testament.” 12 Paul, as a first century Jew and along with many of his contemporaries, assumed a unique view of the world on cosmic and human origins. It is against this background, then, that Paul’s view of Adam must be read, for the way New Testament writers and others read the Old Testament involved both

10Enns, “Understanding Paul’s Adam,” in Evolution o f Adam, especially chapter 7.11Ibid.,2See Enns’ full defense o f this idea in chapters 5-6.


creativity and an argument for a plurality of senses or meanings to any one given text apart from any signals in the text advocated.

For example, St. Paul handled the Old Testament in a creative way, which was influenced by the new practices of Second Temple Judaism.13 Thus Paul was not doing “straight exegesis” of the Adam story. Rather, he was subordinating Adam’s ancient story to the present day with the higher reality of the risen Christ taking precedence. But then all of a sudden it turns out that Enns sees Paul as assigning a role to Adam that was “largely unique to Paul in the ancient world,” thereby in this instance not according to second temple Judaism’s practices after all! Instead, Paul in the book of Romans, was forced by the reality of the risen Christ to “ ...mine Scripture for ways of explicating” this in-breaking of the resurrection of Christ as the New Testament’s remedy for humanity’s predicament of the sin of all humanity.

In a sense, it is as if Enns is presenting Paul’s reflections about Adam along these lines; if only Adam could be read as “the first human,” then this would support my argument about the “universal plight and remedy for humanity.” What this means for Enns is that while Adam as a subject helped Paul make his point, he was not an essential part of his argument and thus his historicity is inconsequential. This explains, as Enns continues, why Adam is so important for Christian theology, yet he is “surprisingly” and “relatively absent [from] explicit reference[s] in the Old Testament.”

This claim is somewhat intriguing because Enns does acknowledge that Adam is represented in Genesis as the first human and the ancestor of all who come after him. Still it becomes even more perplexing when Enns places that reading alongside a number of other meanings. For example, Proverbs 3:18 with its reference to the “tree of life” is another Adam story, for in it Adam is the one who failed to fear God because he partook of the fruit and thereby failed to attain maturity. As such, this Adam becomes a wisdom story for “every Israelite,” who likewise need to choose between the path of wisdom or the path of foolishness.14 Taking it a step further, this wisdom story and the Pauline story may inform each other as seen in 1 Corinthians 1:30, where the wisdom that Adam and Eve originally lacked is amply supplied by an act of God who says, “All the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” are hidden in Christ.

The problem remaining for Enns though, is that he reads Scripture in a novel way by using second temple practices from the first Christian century, and then supplements this approach with current statements of modern science. Combined, these sources act as his grid which ultimately guides him to cut loose from the ancient meanings of the human authors of Scripture. And the final result is that he sees biblical

13Ibid., chapter 6.14Ibid.


texts as being capable of conveying multiple senses that often depart from the original meaning of the initial writers.

IV. THIRD CHARGE: SCIENTIFIC AND BIBLICAL MODELS OF HUMAN ORIGINS ARE INCOMPATIBLE BECAUSE

THEY SPEAK DIFFERENT ‘LANGUAGES’

With regard to this last accusation, it must be conceded that the level of discourse and terminology used in the two “models” or disciplines of theology and science is quite different to be sure. But this is a separate issue from asking whether these fields can accurately describe happenings or events in the real world or not. No one wants to attribute to the writer of Genesis a type of sophistication that somehow transposes his words into a scientific code. Nor is it a fact that when ordinary people use the word “historical” to describe the events and persons in the Garden of Eden are they intending the same science of historiography used by professional historians today. Rather, this use of “historical” simply means that actual and real happenings are intended without placing any more nuanced associations with the word. In that sense then, both the writer of Genesis and the modem day scientist may both understand that they are addressing an event that really happened, but one describes it in terms of a usus loquendi (i.e., in an ordinary spoken usage), and another uses words that are part of the academic discipline represented.

Peter Enns, however, attempts to merge evolution with Adam in an attempt to preserve what he feels is at the heart of Paul’s teaching on Adam from the Bible. So what is dropped is the literality of the creation accounts in favor of the alleged scientific data. It is thought that this process, as Enns sees it, would end up saying something like this: “Adam and Eve were two hominids or [more preferably] symbolic of a group of hominids with whom, at some point in evolutionary development, God entered into a relationship. At this point God endowed them with his image, thus making them conscious of God...”

But Enns correctly sees problems even with this formulation. The Bible, instead, has a sudden and recent creation of humanity, not a gradual evolution over millions of years. Moreover, that formulation is an ad hoc account of creation; it is not the biblical way of recounting the narrative. Enns also feels it presses the “image of God” into service that is not indicated in the text of Genesis because it does not say that at some point God endowed the hominids with an awareness of himself or his image.

Enns’ point is that all attempts to reconcile the two different sources for the story of creation are impossible since they each speak a different language. The two creation stories of Genesis and science cannot be merged. Consequently, Enns argues that just because the Bible considers Adam to be the progenitor of humanity does not mean we need to find


some way to maintain this view within the evolutionary scheme.15 Yet it must be highlighted that at this point, Enns is assuming that the genome project has conclusively proven that similarity between the genes of humanity and those of chimpanzees, for example, prove descent from primates to humans. And a large part of this argument rested on the presence of junk genes that showed no current purpose in humans. However, the ENCORE study has now concluded that this deduction was incorrect as well, for now the junk genes are 100% effective in their role. So what we discover is that Enns, along with too many other evangelicals, has prematurely concluded that evolution is now a demonstrated fact, and that evangelical interpreters of the Bible need to recognize this before we look as foolish as some are depicted to be at the famous Scopes Monkey trial.

V. CONCLUSION

The overall point to keep in mind amidst this discussion is that nothing science can produce will ever intimidate those who hold to the position that when Scripture is judged from the viewpoint of the original authors and is interpreted in accordance with their own words and narration of events, it will not conflict with a correct understanding of the scientific data. This does not mean that various theories of scientists and proposed interpretations of biblical exegetes may not clash, but the facts all belong to God as do the Scripture. Thus there is no room for conflict when all the facts are known and properly understood. So as a final admonition, it is imperative that both the record of Scripture and scientific research be carefully received because the true difficulty does reside in the interpretations given to each of the records. That is where we must proceed with more caution and patience.

15This idea is what drives Enns’ to the nine theses that he constructs at the end o f his book.

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Kaiser, a Literal and Historical Adam and Eve