No Adam, no Fall? Wrestling with sin and science.

(This post is one of a sporadic series on the Church of England’s Thirty-nine Articles)

Last week I posted a first look at the Church of England’s ninth article on original sin. In passing, I noted that there are other ways of reading the story told in Genesis 3. The Pauline retelling of Adam’s fall is not even the only way in which Christians have explained human sinfulness, nor is Augustine’s the only possible interpretation of Paul. This may help us when facing the challenge of reframing traditional understandings.

I begin by noting that an account of a single specific Fall of humanity seems to be generated by Paul’s comparison of Adam and Christ. Jewish readers do not take these texts in the same way, and there is good reason in the text to see it their way.

The eating of the fruit mars the way in which humans were to live in the world. Among other things they hide from God; the stewardship of the garden is replaced by the painful labour of farming; childbearing likewise results in an equivalent painful labour. The man and woman are distanced from each other and seek refuge in the cultural artefacts of clothing, and the way to the tree of life is barred.

As the story progresses, so too does a growing alienation between humans, as first Cain murders Abel, and Lamech develops a macho cult of power backed up by vengeance. Rivalries that set up a train of persistent bloody history and tribal warfare develop in the story of Noah’s sons. This alienation will find its completion in the mangling of human language at the tower of Babel, and the dispersal of people and language groups. Throughout this time the growth of self-aggrandizing human culture continues apace.

The order of creation is itself threatened, first (and this is the nearest some Jewish traditions have come to an actual “Fall” ) by the disordering of the proper relations of heaven and earth, as “the sons of God” mingle with “the daughters of men.” This prompts God to come close to undoing creation by releasing the penned up waters, and disordering the world with the chaotic flood, yet in the end God sustains creation despite the fact that imperfections continue, and moreover renews his blessing. It is worth noting that Genesis 6 is probably a more pervasive, though less obvious, account of “fall” even within the pages of the New Testament.

Throughout this story, the threat that eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would bring death is being worked out. As human knowledge of good and evil continues to grow experientially through this primaeval history, so people’s lifespans come increasingly closer to the norm. Adam may have been 930 years old when he dies, but by the end of Genesis 11 Terah dies at 205. We are someway nearer the normal human experience of a life bounded by all sorts of limits, but especially the limit of death.

This brief summary reads the texts as an aetiology of human experience of the world. It is one of bane and blessing, disobedience and covenant, death and life. It is remarkably hard to single out one moment only of this progression and say, “that was the Fall, that was”. So what could have led Paul to his innovative understanding of a moment when everything changed with the transgression of Adam, rather than through a series of events?

The answer, I think, must be that this is indeed one of the places where Paul moves, in Sanders’ phrase, “from solution to plight.” Seeing a decisive moment of new creation in the resurrection of Christ drives Paul back to seeing a decisive moment of creation’s fall through Adam. Thus there is only either fallen humanity, or recreated humanity. Just as resurrection is not a process, so fall could not have been a process rather. Both are read as decisive events.

One of the unforeseen and unintended side-efects of this narrative parallelism comes nowadays from reading it in reverse, and arguing from the (generally) undisputed historicity of Jesus back to a necessary but highly disputable historicity of Adam. This gives rise to what I would say is the major problem for traditional Christian ways of talking about “the Fall” in the contemporary world. All the evidence we have, as interpreted by our best explanations, from the cosmos and the natural history of this planet points not only to the gradual emergence of sentient and self-conscious life, but also more importantly to this life emerging through a process of competitive and violent selfishness and the struggle for both survival and superiority.

Christian responses to this are mixed. I note and lay aside the fundamentalist one. (“God was there and therefore I trust his word more the scientists.”) It ignores so much evidence both of the book of nature and the nature of the Book alike that it is probably invincible in its ignorance. There are a great many other Christians, however, who I would not on other indices necessarily call fundamentalist, who are driven by a mix of conviction, instinct, and the reversal of Paul’s logical narrative to feel that because Christ was a historical person, then Adam must have been. In some sense they can at least claim in their support that there was a first time homo sapiens emerged.

I have some sympathy with that instinct to relinquish traditional understandings of Scripture only with reluctance, but it seems to me in this case that any such tenuous clinging on to a moment of “special creation” not only sits oddly with the idea that in every other respect God has chosen evolution as the mechanism by which he creates life, but that it ignores just how problematic the idea of a “selfish gene” is.

“Sin” (if I may be every bit as anthropomorphic and anachronistic as Richard Dawkins is) is not only in the world long before “Adam”, but is the mechanism whereby Adam’s species can emerge and flourish as the one who is able to name the animals (in increasingly sophisticated taxonomies) and tend to the garden of the earth’s ecosystem (or destroy it). That is why the traditional “liberal” view is also inadequate. We cannot simply quarantine science as a “how” question in an area where the “how” has such a profound impact on the “what” and the “why”.

To some extent, I am only noting the problems in this post. I feel I lack the understanding or the qualifications to really tease out a satisfactory answer. I will therefore finish with some of the things that I find help me wrestle with the question of where we go from here.

First, I note that there are indeed those other traditions of the origins of evil in the world which go alongside and beyond the account of Adam, Eve and the serpent. Some of those locate the origins of evil in heavenly beings (which we might “demythologise” as the disordering of the cosmos). Some of them seem to lay the blame more clearly on God, who makes both darkness and light. I think we need to go back to a fuller exploration of those traditions, and see if they can help enrich our understanding.

Second, I note Paul’s method. he re-reads the earlier story in the light of Christ. He does this with most things. I wonder what ways are open to us if we take that method seriously and look at ways of re-reading the whole narrative in the light of Christ, an even more thorough-going move from solution to plight, in the knowledge of creation and evolution that we have subsequently acquired.

One way I have begun to think about this is a proleptic reading of the opening chapter of Genesis, not a s a story of beginnings, but a story of intentions, taking its place as the prologue not simply to the primeval history or the Pentateuch, but as the foreword to the canon. This is what will have happened by the time the story ends.

The prologue to Genesis is, of course, subverted in various ways by what follows. When God takes a close-up look at his creation in chapter 2, he sees that it looks rather different from the far off view he had before. From a distance, it all looked “very good” (Gen 1:31). Getting down and dirty in the garden, however, “God said, ‘It is not good’”. (Gen 2:18). What follows suggests that the lack of perfection is considerably far more reaching than that.

When God looks down on his creation after six days work, he sees the finished article and rests. The perspective of John’s account of the life of Jesus suggests that the work is not finished. It needs completing. (John 4:34). Indeed, Jesus works on the sabbath, precisely because it is not yet time to rest and the work of creation goes on:

Therefore the Jews started persecuting Jesus, because he was doing such things on the sabbath. But Jesus answered them, “My Father is still working, and I also am working.” (John 5:16-17)

The sixth day of the week, when the one through whom all things are made, the Word which speaks creation into being, is glorified on the cross, is yet to come, and only at the end of that sixth day does Jesus proclaim that “It is finished.” (John 19:30) before he rests in the tomb on the seventh day.

I suggest this invites us into a way of re-reading the creation narratives differently. Creation is what God is about, creating order from chaos, drawing conscious forms of life able to love and praise out of the primordial soup, developing those who will come to find their true selves in the image of the one in whom God encounters his creation. The image of God, revealed in Jesus, is God’s intention for men and women, transcending the selfish gene to live in a self-giving love that mirrors and responds to the love of God.

I’m not sure how good this suggestion is. I do think we need to take the conversation seriously. I also remain convinced that we need to re-read the Genesis myth both in light of other biblical texts and the best accounts we have of the world in our search for a coherent reframing of our traditional understanding. It seems to me that further development along the lines I’m suggesting here offer us a one helpful way of conceiving Fall, and original sin in the light of what we know about the world.

These traditional concepts now become ways of speaking about human existence on its way to being ordered out of chaos, and created in the image of God. They are eschatological rather than protological in their orientation. Though they describe our environment and our being negatively (though in all sorts of ways fairly accurately) their primary intent is not negative, but an invitation to a better vision, and a hope for a creation where God can finally, and without qualification or fear of contradiction, pronounce that it is indeed very good.

Tagged as: 39 articles, anglican, creation, fall