The Overton Salon

NPR had a story last week about the fact that some Evangelicals (specially the folks over at BioLogos, and some others here and there) are now starting to question whether or not Adam and Eve actually existed. The biologist Dennis Venema argues that the human genome shows that humans as a species emerged as a large group from differing primate species. Therefore, to pin point two humans as the original would be completely impossible.

Now there are three objections that people NPR interviewed brought up. Fazale Rana has two. First, “ the Genesis account makes man unique, created in the image of God — not a descendant of lower primates.” But does not believing in an historical Adam and Eve hinder this? First, the Hebrew word adam’a means “human,” and Eve means of course “mother.” Now, if I was telling a story that started with, ‘one day, human walked into the store to buy some milk,’ everyone would believe that I’m telling a story that is describing something important about all humans, not merely one. And it seems to me that’s exactly what Genesis is doing. It’s not asking the question ‘how can we scientifically discuss the origins of human life,’ but ‘how is it that the world that we’re in (and this means the Hebrews to which it was address) looks like this?’ And a story that explains is probably much more powerful than scientific theory.

The second objection Rana raises is that “it tells a story of how evil came into the world, and it’s not a story in which God introduced evil through the process of evolution, but one in which Adam and Eve decided to disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit.” Or it doesn’t actually explain how evil came in at all, since the serpent was already there, presumably evil. It is an archetype of sin, as it were, one way sin works: through grasping at something that is not yours. But the story of Cain and Abel gives another view into the mechanism of sin, as does Babel, and other stories in that first 11 chapters of Genesis. To privilege Adam and Eve over those stories is not warranted – in fact, Jesus seems to have used the Cain and Abel story while never once mentioning Adam (who is only mentioned in Romans 5 and 1 Cor 15). In other words, evil is not explicable by blaming Adam.

And third, Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, says that “When Adam sinned, he sinned for us…And it’s that very sinfulness that sets up our understanding of our need for a savior.” Actually, no: it is Christ’s death and resurrection that sets up our understanding of sin and Adam. This is an important distinction. It is the difference between blaming someone for our sin, and realizing that we are all complicit in it. This is why it makes no difference whether Adam was an individual human or a group of 10,000 humans. We are all complicit in the situation we are in, and we only realize this once Jesus dies on a cross, and is raised from the grave.

It is interesting to ask why it is that Jews do not have a theory of original sin, and Adam is not seen as any worse or better than lots of other sinners, like Abraham, Jacob, or David. The answer is because, in their view, the resurrection did not happen in the  middle of history, as Christians understand it. And when Paul speaks about Adam in both Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 (the latter all about resurrection) his point is that the reality of “death” came into being with him. Death, for Paul, as for the Old Testament, did not mean biological cessation, but referred to an anthropological reality that was destructive of what humans are. And resurrection through Christ (as the ‘first fruits’) shows that death is unnecessary.

In other words, the entire point of the doctrine of original sin is not to blame someone, but to show that death is unnecessary. Does that require one person?