Adam and Eve and the Nature of Truth

You might find it helpful to look at this link to a recent NPR story about Evangelical scholars questioning the historicity of Adam and Eve before reading my comments below.

I vividly remember being frustrated when I went to seminary 30 years ago when none of my professors would give me a straight answer on the existence of Adam and Eve. After reading the NPR story, I figure if I’d gone to Calvin Seminary, instead of Western Seminary, I might have gotten a straighter answer, but I’m not sure I would have gotten an answer that satisfied me. Besides wondering who was there to write everything down before Adam was created, I just couldn’t get my mind around a few of the facts presented in the first pages of the Bible – like how the world could have days before the creation of the sun, how people could live to be 600 or 700 years old, or how after Adam and Eve had two sons, Cain and Abel, and Cain killed Abel, Cain fled to the land of Nod where he and his wife had a son named Enoch. Where the heck did Cain’s wife come from? (“No doubt Can’s wife was a daughter of Adam,” a fundamentalist commentary I own says, and besides creeping me out, that explanation also makes me wonder what sort of God creates a world where incest is necessary and how many generations it would take to get the mutations that sort of coupling must have caused out of the human bloodstream. But I digress….)

I doubt any of my professors believed in a literal, historical Adam and Eve. You can draw your own conclusions about why they might be reticent to acknowledge that publicly, but I tend to think they were watching how this issue kept coming up a few miles down the road at Calvin and decided discretion served them better than disclosure. Who wants to upset their conservative wealthy donor base?

Having no donor base to alienate, I can freely say I don’t think we are supposed to understand the first chapters of Genesis literally. I quoted Father Richard Rohr in this blog a while ago saying, “Literalism is usually the lowest and least level of meaning.” In the NPR story, Fuzale Rana, the vice president of an organization called Reasons to Believe, is quoted as saying, "I think this is going to be a pivotal point in Church history because what rests at the very heart of this debate is whether or not key ideas within Christianity are ultimately true or not."

I disagree with this statement. The presupposition behind it is that literalism is the sole gage of “ultimate truth.” I remember learning the story of the tortoise and the hare in elementary school and knowing the story was true even though there wasn’t a “real” race between a tortoise and a hare that ever happened. As a child I didn’t struggle with needing to know if something was literally true to believe it.

What my professors did teach me in seminary was what to have faith in. I was taught to reject the idea of putting my faith in the Bible and instead to believe in the God the Bible witnessed to, a God too big to ever be completely captured in the words on a page. That’s nuanced thinking, because I was also taught to have a very high view of scripture. I believe everything we need to know about creation, human nature and sin is found in the first chapters of Genesis. And I believe ultimately it doesn’t matter whether or not someone believes if Adam and Eve were historical characters. Except if you believe they were, you wind up saying creepy things like Cain married his sister. Yuck!