The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say About Human Origins by Peter Enns

Author:Peter Enns
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Christian
ISBN: 9781587433153
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Adam and Wisdom

In chapter 4 we looked at a way of reading the Adam story as an Israel-centered story: Adam is a proto-Israelite. Here I’d like to return to this idea from a different but wholly complementary angle, one that puts Paul’s reading in sharper relief.

Paul’s understanding of Adam’s role in the human drama has had a very influential interpreter, at least for Western Christianity—Augustine (354–430). Augustine is one of the most brilliant thinkers in the history of the church, and like most brilliant thinkers, his ideas can hardly be packaged quickly—and this includes his view of Adam. Still, in its bare outlines, Augustine understood that in Adam and Eve’s transgression, the state of humanity was transformed. From then on, the depraved and guilty nature of the first couple was transmitted through sexual union to their offspring and consequently to all humanity. Augustine even goes so far as to say that all of humanity was present in some sense in Adam’s transgression, and so all humanity shares in Adam’s guilt. My point here is not to engage Augustine’s position but to offer it as a baseline that most Protestant Christians at least presume as the biblical teaching.

Nevertheless another view, although not strictly contradictory, approaches the Adam story from another angle. This view was advanced by second-century apologists such as Theophilus of Antioch and Irenaeus of Lyons, and it continues to be advocated by the Orthodox Church. According to this view, the garden story is not about a descent from a pristine, untainted original state of humanity (which is how the Adam story is popularly understood). Rather, it tells the story of naïveté and immaturity on the part of Adam and Eve and the loss of childlike innocence in an illicit move to grasp at a good thing, wisdom, represented by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve are like children placed in a paradise, where they are to learn to serve God and grow in wisdom and maturity, to move toward spiritual perfection.[78]

According to this view, Adam’s first lesson in moving toward spiritual maturity is the command to keep away from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:15–17). The command not to eat of that tree is not a random test of faith to see if Adam is worthy—to see if this untainted creature might fall from his perch, so to speak. It is about how such knowledge is to be pursued. Knowing the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, is desirable; it is the wish of every parent for their children, the very goal of what it means to be a mature, faithful, covenant-keeping Israelite. This quest to know right from wrong is articulated in Israel’s Wisdom literature, namely Proverbs. Having such wisdom is not “bad” in either Genesis or Proverbs; it is the very picture of what God wants for his people. The issue at stake in the garden narrative is how humans are to obtain such knowledge: in God’s way or in some other way.

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