Undeception

…and why the Church in the East never did.

Listening to most Evangelical first-string leaders, you’d get the impression that apart from an historical Fall of Man that marred the souls of all the descendants of the ones who fell, you’d have no need for Jesus, and Christianity sails right out the window. So much more than inerrancy hangs on the question: original sin and total depravity hang on some sort of historical Fall, don’t they?

Perhaps they do (though not necessarily) — but the massive blind spot we have is that a rather large, ancient, and revered segment of the Christian Church rejected both of those teachings long before science came along and refuted the possibility of an historical first pair of human progenitors. And yet these believers still maintain that the work of Christ in atonement is absolutely necessary for every individual regardless.

Archbishop Lazar Puhalo explains:

The Schism between the West and the East is great indeed, so much so that Protestants rarely ever hear that perspective. These sorts of surprises are why I have begun to love glancing at Christian theology through the lens of the Orthodox.

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: devout evangelicals will never be able to come to terms with evolution as long as they believe that it denies the existence of an historical Adam with an historical Fall. As goes creationism, so goes Christianity. Some will cling to their Christianity so tightly that they will never entertain any beliefs that contradict it; others cannot live with the cognitive dissonance and will eventually call it quits on Christianity once they recognize that universal common descent is, for all intents and purposes, indisputable.

The issue is why Jesus had to die if there were no original sin. Why do we need the second Adam if there was no first Adam? What did Jesus do if he didn’t undo the sin that came in because of Adam? At various times and places on this blog I have offered my answers to those thoughts, which include understanding the nature of the Bible and alternative views of the atonement, most especially. But I have often felt and occasionally expressed exasperation that there were no high profile Christians grappling with this problem, which is surely on the short of list of the most problematic issues in Christian theology.

The BioLogos Foundation has done a good job of turning that around, especially since bringing on Dr. Peter Enns as senior fellow. But he has really outdone himself this time. The next time I have someone ask me about the Adam problem for evolution, I will ask that person to carve out 50 minutes to watch the following presentation. In it, Pete Enns manages to lay out the finest explication of the narrative motivations behind Genesis and Paul’s use of the Adam story that I’ve heard in quite some time. Enjoy, and spread it around.

Hard link

H/T I Think I Believe

I have really enjoyed Pete Enns‘s contribution to BioLogos of late. His latest frames the Adam/Eve question in an interesting and honest way. Here’s an excerpt related to my last post:

What if we affirm that Paul’s view of human origins does not settle the matter for us today? Of course, this leaves us with a pressing question: how do we think about Adam today?

This is where the conversation begins for those wishing to maintain a biblical faith in a modern world. And whatever way forward is chosen, we must be clear on one thing: we have all left “Paul’s Adam.” We are all “creating Adam,” as it were, in an effort to reconcile Scripture and the modern understanding of human origins.
….
[O]nce you move to [the above affirmation], you have left Paul’s Adam and are now working with an Adam that is partially and even largely shaped by your own understanding and worldview. You are in an entirely different discussion.

It sounds bleak, but I have hope that efforts like the BioLogos Foundation, if they continue on their current trajectory, will begin to push through.

Christians coming to terms with evolution, including many ID advocates who acknowledge common descent, will often arrive at a midpoint of sorts between denial of evolution and all-out theistic evolution (or evolutionary creation) that acknowledges that we are by-products of evolution and seeks to hold the line on the most theologically problematic aspect of evolutionary theory: the historicity of Adam and Eve. For many, this is a comfortable resting place and they remain content acknowledging the deafening scientific consensus of common descent on one hand and believing in a literal first human pair on the other.

This is often done by positing a bottleneck of the population down to two individuals, often misunderstanding the unfortunately ambiguous terms Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam. The more sophisticated (but odd) way of doing this is to allow there to have been more than two at the time of Adam and Eve, but to posit that the Fall event occurred to them uniquely, and that the effects have passed down to later humanity through descent from them.

From Denis Venema and Darrel Falk at BioLogos comes a handy explanation of the relevant genomic evidence.

Attempting to square the Genesis account and common ancestry by positing a literal Adam and Eve who were the progenitors of the entire human race is, biologically speaking, looking for the most extreme population bottleneck a sexually reproducing species can experience: a reduction to one breeding pair.

Is there evidence that such a bottleneck has ever occurred?

The short answer is no, and that there is much evidence against it.

This leaves those seeking to maintain both common descent and theological concordism advocating one of the following positions (as best I can tell):

1. defining the pair as a literary representation of the entire human population at the time of an historical Fall (as C.S. Lewis did)
2. defining the Fall as something not passed down genetically, but as a metaphor for something that happened within a group of our race’s representatives (possibly even a literal pair)

Any other options I’m missing?

I prefer to just embrace the idea that the Jewish religious leaders who compiled Genesis from earlier stories used those stories to teach various theological concepts, including an etiology for sin, death, toil, the excruciating pain of childbirth, and the pitfalls of trying to live life doing “what seems right in [one's] own eyes” without due dependence on the system prescribed by those leaders. There’s more there of course, but I want to emphasize that our fundamental task in interpreting Scripture has to be to put ourselves in the minds of its human authors as best as we can given the tools of literary and historical research rather than read into Scripture all kinds of theological beliefs we already hold.

With evolution and with Scripture, we aren’t pushing God out of the picture to say that He in some sense authored both via natural processes. A committed affirmation of God’s creation by general Providence doesn’t selectively comb nature for divine signatures or other Easter eggs that will prove His authorship of it; we accept the whole creative process, warts (death, pain, etc.) and all as finding its source and being in God, with all the mysteries and difficulties this creates, resisting the urge to say, “God doesn’t do things that way, so science must be wrong here.” In the same way, we shouldn’t posit theological gems of special revelation throughout every passage of Scripture, somewhere between the lines, redeeming otherwise problematic passages. Rather, we simply do our best to uncover what it says, warts and all, and acknowledge that whatever it says, it was meant to be that way. Most of us already accept that David wasn’t speaking with the ideal level of faith, understanding, and resignation to the Golden Rule in the cursing Psalms; I’m merely saying that we should carry out that sort of evaluation consistently.

William Dembski, a father of the Intelligent Design movement, has recently become comfortable calling himself an old earth creationist who, as a good Baptist, accepts the historicity of Adam and Eve. This comes as no surprise really, but it’s interesting to see how his gears turn as he systematically lays all his cards on the table for why he’s personally invested in pursuing a critique of common descent.

Discussing his book The End of Christianity with the host of the UK radio show Unbelievable and an atheist guest, Dembski describes how he thinks that the chief difficulty for old earth as opposed to young earth creationism is the exceptionally long time for evil having existed prior to the event that was supposed to have caused it: the Fall of Man.

Dembski’s proposed solution is basically this: because God is not limited by time and knows the future, He allowed natural evil in anticipation of the evil that Adam and Eve introduced.

The host, Justin Brierley, imagines unbelievers thinking to themselves in reponse to this solution, “What a convoluted way of having to justify a God who allows evil, justifying it with Scripture.” Heck, I’m a believer and I thought the same thing. The atheist on the program gave a great analogy of a father telling his kids that if they’re quiet for the next ten minutes, they’ll go see a movie, and after the kids make a noise during that interval, explaining, “Well, I didn’t actually buy the tickets because I knew you’d make a noise.” As the guest points out, this certainly seems an under-handed way of parenting.

Only the supralapsarian viewpoint can seriously take that position: God had no interest in preventing evil at all since He instead actively foreordained its existence. This still doesn’t offer a theodicy for the problem of evil, because one can’t very well answer the objection that a good God and the existence of evil cannot be reconciled by outright denying that God is in fact good according to the terms presupposed in the objection.

Another bit of something Dembski described that I thought was interesting – although hopelessly wrongheaded – was that the creation stories of Genesis 1 and 2 were not two separate Ancient Near Eastern tales: rather, chapter 1 describes God’s conceptualization of creation and chapter 2 is the realization of the creation. I do not think this holds up for a number of reasons (not least of which because it would entail God changing His mind between planning and implementation), but since it is yet another example of Dembski’s concordism causing him to reject the scholarly consensus on the text, I thought I’d mention it here.

I didn’t disagree with Dembski throughout the whole show, though since he did score a couple hits against the belief in a young earth. He cites scientific data as being more-or-less conclusive on the issue of the age of the universe but finds Scriptural reasons for doubting young earth creationist arguments. For instance, he wonders why God needed to set up a segregated area, the Garden of Eden, in order to place His people if the world were so perfect and free from the effects of sin. Also, when someone asked him how could God have made it clearer that the days were literal 24-hour days, Dembski responded that He could have put the creation of the sun on Day 1 rather than on Day 4. Credit where credit’s due: touché, Bill.

Commonly in Christian theology, the agreement between Adam and God (the Adamic covenant) and the agreement between the Israelites and God (the Old Covenant of Moses) are contrasted (the Noahide and Abrahamic covenants are given varying significance depending on who’s talking). Many, such as those holding firmly to the Westminster Confession, argue that the Adamic covenant was a “covenant of works”, the Mosaic covenant was “of grace” at heart but administered through works, and that the New Covenant is thoroughly a covenant of grace. It’s almost as though God kept trying different ways to maintain a relationship with humanity, and finally managed to get it right with Christianity.

Reading the Eden story as an historical account gives us the impression that there was a covenant with humanity that got broken. Successive attempts at reconciling God and man were necessary, each in the form of a new epochal covenant that had to hold up at least temporarily until Jesus came and brokered the final version. But we get a slightly different picture if we understand the early Genesis accounts as etiology, an origins story, offered by later Israelite theologians to replace the errant myths they were familiar with, some lingering from their ancient past and others absorbed from surrounding cultures.

Did you see the Indiana Jones movies? Everyone knows him as the swashbuckling archaeologist who displayed his uncommon daring, epic bravado, and quick thinking to rescue relics and precious artifacts from those who sought to exploit them for nefarious purposes. We learned all that about him in the first movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and saw his awe-inspiring knowledge, skill, and good luck in action once again in The Temple of Doom. We intuited that these were not two isolated occasions. We could tell that he’d been at this for quite awhile, and was an “old hand” at it.

At the beginning of the third movie, the filmmakers included something commonly appreciated by fans of such recurring tales: an origin story. Now this is interesting: those who see him as a young man might have expected to see some decisive moment that transformed him from a typical kid into the legend as we know him. Whereas a young, carefree, and well-adjusted Bruce Wayne experienced something that sharply reversed his course and sent him hurtling toward the brooding, dark, and psychologically scarred Batman he became, Lucas and Spielberg took a tack that’s in many ways much more interesting — and ancient.

To our surprise (and satisfaction), when we first see him as a teenager, despite the absences of his only known phobia, the scar beneath his chin, and his iconic fedora, he’s already Indiana Jones. By my count, four separate etiologies are presented in this short story prefacing The Last Crusade, but what’s remarkable is what remains the same: here at our first glimpse, what do we see but the same idealistic adventurer that we’ve known all along, who believes that precious artifacts “belong in a museum”, knows his archeology, is bravely tenacious, and stands his ground even when cornered. We find that what makes Indiana Jones Indiana Jones is…well, he’s Indiana Jones.

I think that’s one of the primary things the Genesis story of the Fall was meant to convey: God initiates relationships with men, and their pride and self-interest routinely cause the severing of those relationships. Now, I’m not sure how “Moses” arrived at this conclusion; God certainly may have revealed it, but since He didn’t reveal how it happened (via the evolutionary processes that created us), I tend to think it was acquired by more proximate causes. For one thing, as seen in etiologies across the ancient world, uniformitarianism seems to have been generally taken for granted; they formed their etiologies based upon assumed continuity between what is observed in the present and what happened in the past.

No matter, one of the most profound revelations to us in the Genesis story, one we can take to the bank, was that humanity was human all along. The unfaithfulness the religious leaders of Israel were warning against the Israelites repeating is seen as part and parcel of the warp and woof of what people have always been. “You’re just like your muleheaded Grandpa Adam.”

An interesting result of this interpretation is that it redirects one view of the Fall popular among Christians who understandably want to make sure that accepting evolution and a non-historical view of Genesis doesn’t throw out any more than necessary. These take up an allegorical or parabolic interpretation in which Adam and Eve aren’t necessarily two historical people, but whose Fall as depicted actually did take place in history among a certain population of humans. This view has been championed by theologians from C. S. Lewis to Keith Ward. The idea is that there was a period of time, probably in the thousands of years, in which humans were doing just fine, walking in the Garden with God in the cool of the evening, until by the influence of some catalyst they rose up and rebelled. I think this misses the point of the story, which was that humans have been humans as long as they’ve been human. In fact, what the story seems to be saying is that humanity is in a sense defined in contradistinction to other creatures by our simultaneous knowledge of God and the moral law and our inability to acknowledge God and live up to that moral law.

I tend to see a bit more continuity throughout human history in what God expects from those with whom He is in covenant: He expects love and faithfulness. The fantastic aspect of the New Covenant is the demonstration in Jesus’ self-sacrifice that God’s love covers our unfaithfulness and inadequacy to love. And as we consciously submit to Him and subjugate ourselves to His order, an ability to live and love Him faithfully and adequately are given back to us by His grace.

One of today’s posts on Science and the Sacred is called An Artist or An Engineer? The author argues that we shouldn’t expect the precision of an engineer in creation any more than we expect it in an artist. The article brings this out by raising the issue of what has elsewhere been called “unintelligent design”:

The problem of imperfect design in nature raises serious concerns for the idea of God as the divine engineer, the metaphor put forward by those associated with the Intelligent Design movement. After all, if God designed each detail in the blueprint of life, why would he create mammalian eyes which have a blind spot?

One of my friends who is critical of evolution responded to this article with a one line explanation for design imperfections: “A little thing called the Fall.” She was referring to the belief that the Fall of Man marred the entire physical creation.

Doesn’t it seem just a tad convenient to claim that God designed everything in creation as well as an omniscient engineer could, but that any weaknesses in this argument are attributable to the Fall? (Thank heavens Paul saw it fit to insert Romans 8.19-21 as the sole prooftext!)

The weakest part of the Falldidit argument is that the aspects of design mangled and obscured by the Fall were not just random vandalism here and there. They’re actually quite systematic: specifically they give the distinct impression of nested hierarchies, which end up corroborating common ancestry as predicted by evolution. Doesn’t sound like the work of an Intelligent Strategist to me, unless He also happens to be an Intelligent Deceiver.

I’ll stick with the theological problems inherent in my view of the Fall, thank you very much.