Because
evolution is a topic that will increasingly challenge evangelicals, Peter Enns
has chosen to chart one possible course through the data, both biblical and
scientific. I gave an abbreviated
response to his presentation in a forum at Gordon College on 4 May 2012. What follows here is an expanded
version of that, preceded by a synopsis of the book.
Brief
Summary of The Evolution of Adam
Enns deals
with Genesis in Part One of the book.
The first chapter is a sweeping survey of the challenges from science,
biblical criticism, and the Ancient Near East (ANE) archaeological finds that
confronted the evangelical church in the 19th century. He indicates that the purpose of
Genesis is not to speak to physical origins, a position espoused by John Walton
as well (The Lost World of Genesis One). Likewise, Enns stresses the importance of archaeology
to give context and, in the course of doing so, articulates the similarities
between the biblical narratives and ANE myths. He introduces additional issues, including the questions that
are raised in regard to Genesis and the claims for Mosaic authorship. I will have more to say about
these matters later.
In Chapter
Two, Enns focuses on the higher critical reasons to affirm late post-exilic
period authorship of the Pentateuch.
As part of this survey, he also presents a stunningly sweeping overview
of his suggested dates for the Old Testament books, all of which are
significantly late. Once the post-exilic
date for the Pentateuch is established, then Enns can say two things. First, the purpose of the early Genesis
narratives has nothing to do with a description of God's physical
creation. Instead, its purpose was
self-definition in the face of the trauma of the exile. Second, if the text is that late, then
we have every reason to question its value as a repository of historical
information. Later
compilations of early records were not thought to be sacred Scripture. Just as the Old Testament is a theological re-engagement of
Israel's past, so the Church is equally in the process of re-engaging that
theologically, this time in light of the resurrection.
Enns surveys other origins stories in
the third chapter, deploying the expression "genre calibration" to
claim that Genesis is not intended to accomplish anything beyond what other cultural
narratives/myths did. A proper
understanding of Genesis helps us understand its theology. The events of Genesis 1-11 involve
primordial time; these narratives are different from those in chapters 12-50
and they share a conceptual world with outside, clearly ahistorical sources.
Chapter Four closes the first part of
the book with an exploration of Israel's understanding of primordial time. Because Israel's creation stories were rooted
in Israel's present experiences, the Exodus, for example, did not necessarily
occur as recorded; instead, deliverance from Egypt was presented with cosmic
battle themes that echo the cosmic crisis at creation. Likewise, Adam's story is both
universal but also Israel's story of disobedience. Exile from the garden is the death sentence (Genesis 2:17
– "in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die...")
just as exile from the land was Israel's death sentence.
So also, Israel's Sabbath and
Sanctuary, known to us from exilic and post-exilic texts, reflect the cosmic
order of creation woven into a lately created narrative; everything was
borrowed from the wider ANE cultural context and transformed into vehicles that
expressed who God is. The garden
looked forward to renewed creation (cf. Rev 22). Jesus is the final
intersection of primordial time with history as we see the intertextual
linkages of John 1 with Genesis 1.
Part Two
turns to Paul's creative and Christ-centered engagement with Scripture. Foundational to the point that he will
develop, Enns first claims that the Old Testament nowhere develops the "adam
theme," specifically that universal sinfulness is caused by Adam's
transgression. Thus, the garden
curses do not include the prospect of inborn sinfulness and the whole story
does not have the purpose of explaining the sinful nature of humankind. Likewise, the Cain story is simply
illustrative of the choices that Cain (like Adam and like later Israel)
faced. In this regard, Enns
additionally raises the possibility of seeing the Adam narrative as a wisdom
story, representing loss of innocence as Adam and Eve acquire something good by
ill means. Making parallels
with Proverbs, Enns emphasizes the power of obedience and gaining wisdom by the
proper means. Access to tree of
life will be a source of wisdom.
In Enns'
model, Paul's Christology drove him to read the Adam story as a universal
introduction to sin even though that specific theological purpose was not
intended in the original narrative.
Instead, "Paul's reading of Genesis is driven by factors external
to Genesis" (p. 87). Because
Enns sees Romans as Paul's case that both Jews and Gentiles make up the people
of God, he claims that Paul used the Adam figure to demonstrate that Christ's
crucifixion and resurrection put Jews and Gentiles on an equal footing. In other words, we all need a
savior to deliver us, but that knowledge is not dependent on a historical Adam.
Chapter Six
is devoted to demonstrating that Paul was a product of his time and world view. Just as, for example, Paul reflected
the current thinking on levels of heaven (2 Cor 12:1-4), so also with regard to
the person of Adam. Enns engages
at this point in a survey of intertestamental period hermeneutical attempts to
engage the past in order to make sense of their present. These include examples from the
Pseudepigrapha, the Dead Sea texts, and the Targums, all of which engage the
written Word and many of which addressed the Adam story. He claims that Paul's handling of this
narrative is not hermeneutically different from any of the others, but
Paul got it "right" because he read the story Christologically.
Enns
bolsters his point about Paul's creative hermeneutics with other examples that serve
to demonstrate that this is characteristic of Pauline use of Old Testament
material. In other words, Paul's
Christological convictions drove his exegesis. Paul's claims do not rise naturally from the OT contexts;
instead, he re-worked the past traditions to speak to the present.
Chapter
Seven expands on just what was involved in this re-working. For Paul, Adam was both historically
and theologically significant. As
the first person created by God, Adam is representative of all of humanity (1
Cor 15:44-49). Although Enns does
not address 1 Corinthians 15 at length, I will return to it later. Paul's understanding of Adam is shaped
by Jesus, but the reality of who Jesus is does not "depend on Paul's
understanding of Adam as a historical person" (p. 122, author's italics). Enns intentionally distinguishes
between the historical event of the resurrection (which occurred in Pauls'
time) and a primordial Adam about whom Paul makes a cultural assumption in order
to draw his theological conclusion.
"Adam as disobedient primordial first man and Christ as obedient
and raised-from-the-dead historical last man are not of the same historical
category" (p. 126).
Enns claims
that the primary focus of Romans addresses the radical effect of the
resurrection in bringing together Jew and Gentile, even though this seemed to
go against all of the Old Testament.
Furthermore, the resurrection of the Son of God was so overwhelming a "solution"
that it made the "problem" of human sin much clearer than it was
before. It was this truth of the
resurrection that made Paul put Adam in the place of responsibility for the
universal problem. If God's
solution was Christ's dying and rising, the problem was death and Adam was the
responsible person. The reality of
the empty tomb made Paul see sin and death in universal terms.
In
conclusion, Enns proposes nine theses as summaries of the preceding chapters:
1)
literalism is not an option;
2) the scientific
and biblical models of human origins are incompatible and there is no place for
Adam in evolutionary schemes;
3) the Adam
story reflects the ANE setting and must be read that way; there is no secret
science hidden in the story;
4) of the two
creation stories, Genesis 2 is earlier but it was put after Genesis 1 in the
post-exilic period to give definition to Israel's identity;
5) the Adam
story is similar to Proverbs; its main point addresses the failure to fear God
and attain to wise maturity;
6) God's
solution through the resurrection revealed the plight of humans and Paul's
point in using this narrative was to show that being in the human family
transcends the Jew / Gentile distinction;
7) there is
a parallel between Scripture and Christ – both becoming thoroughly human,
with all of the accompanying limitations, in order to exalt God's power (the
point of his earlier book, Inspiration and Incarnation; Evangelicals and the
Problem of the Old Testament);
8) the root of conflict is not solely scientific
or theological but also a matter of group identity, in this case Protestant evangelical
in which context conformity to certain views is expected;
9) synthesis is required between evolution
and Christianity – at stake is the necessity to re-think the biblical
material on the origins of humanity, sin and death.
Some
Equally Brief Reponses
First of
all, I am appreciative of the pastoral concern evident in this book, especially
for the target audience of evangelicals who struggle to find common ground
between good science and the truths of Scripture and do not want to jettison
either. I also am grateful for the
strong emphasis on the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the
powerful, absolutely transforming nature of that historical event. And finally, it is evident that Enns
wants to maintain an understanding of Scripture as the Word of God. This last point serves to launch us
into the issues on which I will be (hopefully) cordially critical.
Enns is very
gifted in making complex issues accessible, but this gift has worked against
him in this brief book. There is a pervasive tendency toward reductionism,
choosing one singular explanation, over-simplifying, and avoiding other viable
possibilities, when the reality might well be much more complex and rich
– as it usually is. This
impacts a number of the arguments; I will simply note several representative
examples here before getting to what I think is at the heart of the discussion.
Enns presumes
that the Genesis text is cut from entirely the same cloth as parallel ANE
texts. He puts the question this
way: how can the Bible be
culturally conditioned and yet be unique?
I agree that there are similarities between Mesopotamian myths (which
span a long time range) and Genesis but we must not over-state the similarities
or lose the profound impact of the distinct differences. These differences serve to emphasize
the unique nature of God's relationship with his people as articulated in
Genesis. In God's astonishing
grace, He has indeed revealed His word in media that made sense to the people
of the periods in which God spoke.
But God also infused those narrative forms with life-transforming
meaning.
One more
example: For Enns, the "image
of God" has nothing to do with our nature reflecting God's nature.
He asserts that the purpose of Genesis is not to speak to physical origins of
the universe at large and particularly the creation of an Adam. Thus, he understands the concept of "image"
solely in terms of its use in the wider cultural context. Just as images served to represent the
king in his absence, so this image (Adam) would serve as God's representative
or regent. In other words, the "likeness
and image" are representational and functional in the narrative purpose
(more on that later); they do not deal with the creation of a human being. But why not both – or more? Limiting the purpose of the image
of God seems to be imposing a reductionist read on a remarkable text and
excludes the equally powerful implications regarding who we are as human beings. By way of a possible analogy: This diminished view of the image of
God (i.e., only as a functional regent) might be the same as saying that logos
in the New Testament can only mean what we see it meaning in the first century
Hellenistic Jewish writings of Philo – "reason" as a
significant aspect of the divine Being. Yet, John's reference to Jesus as logos
gives that word a whole new level of meaning. The logos becoming flesh and tenting among
humans (John 1:14) would have shocked Philo.
With that,
let me turn to the major issue as I see it. If there is no historical veracity in the Adam and Eve
narrative, we are left with no explanation as to how humankind emerged with
such remarkable capabilities, on the one hand, and horrifying impulses, on the
other. And yet, of all texts, we
would expect the Word from God, with its array of God-revealing and
life-transforming purposes, to address that fundamental issue. It is only the biblical narrative as
historical narrative that makes sense of both our extraordinary nature and
gifts as well as the wretched state within which we find ourselves. The question for us is: How do we best treat the biblical
narrative as well as the scientific data with integrity? Enns
does acknowledge that his approach is incapable of addressing this nagging
question as to what makes us "deeply flawed humans marching inexorably
toward death." Nevertheless, "...seeking an answer for 'why' in the
Adam story may be off the mark to begin with" (p. 126).
Genesis 2
first depicts God's shaping Adam and breathing into him God's breath. Francis Collins (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for
Belief) acknowledges that humans are unique in ways that defy evolutionary
explanation and point to our spiritual nature, including the Moral Law and
search for God that characterize all cultures. Something happened in that remarkable moment when
intellectual, emotional and spiritual capacities that characterize the Person
of God were given into the trusteeship of the finite human being called
Adam.
Subsequently,
the disobedience of Adam and Eve as they chose to reject the word of God did indeed
result in the death of which God warned in Genesis 2 – "in the yom
that you eat of it, you will surely die..." implying that yom can
mean a very long time, a conclusion we already reach after reading Genesis
1:1-2:4. The curses pronounced in
Genesis 3 make that death sentence eminently clear – "to dust you
shall return" (Gen 3:19). At
the end of Genesis 3, they were prevented from eating of the tree of life lest
they live forever. The vignettes
in the succeeding chapters make it unmistakably evident that the murderous and
corrupting sinful human impulses find their point of origin in the preceding
narrative. It is reductionist to
claim that because the Garden curses in Genesis 3 do not explicitly include the
matter of inborn sinfulness, the story did not have the purpose of
explaining the sinful nature of humankind. Enns claims that the Genesis narrative and, for that matter
the OT, is missing "any indication that Adam's
disobedience is the cause of universal sin, death, and condemnation, as Paul
seems to argue" (p. 82). Nevertheless, if that narrative cannot bear that
theological weight, what basis do we have for constructing it at any point
further down the line? It
seems to me that this scheme leaves Enns without the foundational understanding
for the rest of the Old Testament, significant parts of which he does indeed
weave back into this text, including Israel's story of disobedience and Israel's
construction of its identity in the face of the horror of the exile and the
apparent failure of God's promises.
Of course,
how we interpret Paul's references to Adam is vital. Paul affirms Adam as a physical being, echoing the Genesis
narrative in 1 Corinthians 15:45-47 as he addresses the nature of Jesus Christ
– "So it is written, The first man Adam became a living being; the
last Adam a life-giving spirit...The first man was of the dust of the earth,
the second man from heaven."
Enns avoids more than a passing reference to 1 Corinthians 15, perhaps
because it specifically does address the physical nature of Adam. Instead, he focuses on Paul's
theological declaration in Romans 5 that Adam was the one responsible for the
introduction of sin and death into the realm of human existence. As noted above, Enns acknowledges that
Paul treats Adam as a historical figure but claims that this was the result of
the hermeneutical climate of his own time, not because it was really so.
In other
words, while Paul's Christology drove him to read the Adam story as an
introduction to universal sin, that was not intended in the original
narrative. Paul was powerfully
convinced that the resurrection of Christ was (and is) the solution for the
problem of humankind and in order to make theological sense out of that event,
Paul articulates the "problem" (disobedience of Adam and Eve) for which
Christ is the solution. The true condition of humanity was only revealed by the
act of God in Christ.
Given,
however, the pervasive and horrifying nature of sin, I confess that I have
trouble thinking that the profound nature of the problem was not "realized"
until Paul's time. The Christ
event and its purpose themselves are in danger of becoming ambiguous if we
presume that there was not until that point a recognizable cause that could be
articulated. If Paul addresses
Adam as the cause, is it not presumptuous of us to say we know better than Paul
and will no longer try to speak in terms of cause? The overlay of the "new perspective on Paul" to
which Enns resorts does not resolve this issue.
What is
interesting to me is that Enns has cast his lot with the presumably failsafe
evidence from science and archaeology and those disciplinary conclusions have
trumped the biblical text.
Basically, science becomes the infallible last word on the issue. It might be worth noting that scientific
method can also, according to some, call into question the historicity of the
resurrection. Enns affirms
that he believes the latter on faith. So likewise, I would just as readily affirm, along with Jesus
and Paul, that there was a historical Adam at some point. The Adam narrative is not necessarily
as recently composed and unhistorical as Enns suggests.
In this regard, I appreciate his caution
at the beginning of chapter two to the effect that theories are provisional. It would be prudent to exercise this
same caution regarding the suggested implications of human evolution as well as
to the documentary hypothesis that has shaped his presentation of the biblical
books.
And to that
we now turn, albeit briefly. All
of this analysis, as Enns rightly states, is profoundly affected by when we
date the relevant Old Testament texts and how we assess their purpose, two
related matters. He asserts that consensus
scholarship regarding the late composition of the Pentateuch has effectively
ruled out the option of considering these narratives historical. It is another discussion altogether to
work through this matter because it is much more complicated than it sounds in his
book, especially in light of the sphere in which consensus scholarship
reigns. While it is true that the current
consensus of the academy regards post-exilic composition of the Pentateuch as a
given, there is a significant corpus of data that support a second millennium
milieu for the first five books of Moses.
Likewise, there are credible and well-reasoned responses to the standard
arguments for non-Mosaic authorship. These data should at least be
acknowledged. The equally
one-sided presentation regarding the dates of the rest of the Old Testament
books is astonishing for its brevity and lack of nuance.
Enns does
acknowledge, along with others, that there are older materials embedded in the
text but these early records were not thought to be Scripture. That seems to be a bit presumptuous. And one might inquire as to how we are
then to read Joshua 1 and Psalm 1, both of which enjoin meditation on
Torah. Additionally, if the exile
was traumatic because God's promises were perceived to have failed, we might
legitimately ask on what basis these "promises" were to mean anything.
For now, it
is important to note that Enns' treatment of these issues in biblical criticism
does not give attention to alternative credible models. In fact, we need not presume that
Genesis 1-3 are post-exilic and reflective of Israel's need for self-definition
in that traumatic Babylonian context (6th century BC). If these narratives were composed
earlier, perhaps the purpose was not self-definition in the face of exile in
which God's promises have apparently failed, but self-definition for the
covenant community about to enter the culture of Canaan with its own array of
competing gods. This covenant,
revealed at Sinai in the second millennium BC, finds its best parallels in
Hittite treaties, also from the second millennium BC. In addition, this
would be a most powerful means of self-definition, as covenant has everything
to do with restoring a fractured relationship, a matter that goes all the way
back to Genesis!
Enns has
drawn together a rich array of theological and intertextual connections as he
explores the defining events in Israel's tradition. As he notes, Israel's stories (creation and redemption) are
indeed interwoven. Nevertheless,
that does not rule out the possibility of their historical basis. The Exodus event was unquestionably of
cosmic proportions at the same time that it was geographically and temporally
located. In fact, Exodus 12:12
indicates that a major purpose of this event was to bring judgment on all the
gods of Egypt. Thus, it is no
surprise that subsequent poetic renditions of this would incorporate a cosmic
world view, weaving in forces that appear in wider cosmic presentations of
creation.
But let me
close on a positive note. It is
possible to reconcile Genesis 1-3 with our current understanding of the natural
sciences. The verbs used in the poetic narrative suggest God's intimate
involvement with the process ("made", "set", "created",
"formed", "planted") in conjunction with the land
and the water "bringing forth "- in other words, both intervention
and natural processes. Furthermore,
"living creature" (nefesh h͎ayah - 1:20, 24; 2:7) and "breath"
(neshamah – Gen 2:7 and 7:22) refer to both animals as well as
humans even within the biblical text.
Thus, it is not terribly surprising to find significant shared
aspects of physical composition. As
the culmination of the entire process, however, we have a first human pair who
is neither imposed on nor foreign to the biblical account. At the same time, we ought not expect this
human couple to be completely divorced from the array of creatures who
apparently lived those hundreds of thousands of years ago. That is the beauty of the brief and
compelling narrative; it does leave space.
Jesus also
affirmed a reality that lay behind the Genesis creation account. In response to the query about divorce
from some Pharisees, he said: "...at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and
said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to
his wife, and the two will become one flesh' So they are no longer
two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate"
(Matt 19:4-6). I would like to
suggest that this is more than Jesus simply accommodating His language to the
contemporary cultural beliefs.
As Enns
affirms in his earlier book, Inspiration and Incarnation, there is a compelling
parallel between Scripture and Christ – both becoming human in order to
exalt God's power. But his attempt
to limit Scripture (both Genesis and Paul) to the "human" realm of
solely ancient literatures breaks down because following the
Incarnation, we do have the resurrection and post-resurrection appearances,
both of which were unique and pressed the people of that day to readjust their
view of the "Son of Man."
The same is true of the inspired Word. It is significantly more than a culturally shaped
artifact. The Word of God audaciously
claims that it is living and active, doing major transformative works in
our lives (Hebrews 4:12) no matter in which cultural framework we live.