I had some thoughts regarding the discussion on Adam and Eve, and, since unfortunately I can’t make it to Bible study on time, was not able to put out the ideas at Steve’s (and now that I’ve finished writing it all here, realized that perhaps it was better to write it out anyway, so you can read it or not, as you please!). I realize that this thought runs counter to what most people at the study seemed to be thinking, but in the spirit of good discussion and critical thinking, I will put it out anyway, and you can feel free to agree or disagree, and post a kind-hearted reply if you can add more light to my thinking. :)
I want to discuss the idea that other people besides Adam and Eve existed at the time of the initial creation of human beings. I realize that from a scientific point of view, the development of many human beings at once would be most sensible; and at first glance, it seems not to create any serious theological problems. On deeper reflection, however, I am disturbed by the possible implications of this hypothesis. For if not all humankind descended from Adam, then not all were subject to the same fall into sin. And if not all fell with Adam (being as yet inside him), not all were given the promise of redemption (crushing the serpent’s head as he strikes the heel, Gen. 3:15). And as Jesus is the second Adam, the life-giving spirit (1 Cor. 15:45), then only those descended from Adam’s sinful line would be saved through Christ. But in Romans 5:12-19, Paul seems to be saying that sin came to all through the one man, Adam, and reconciliation to all through the second Adam, who is Christ.
So, if other human beings were around but not in the line of Adam, then are they not saved through Christ? For the story only works when Christ is the savior of the entirety of Adam’s line. If others were there, but not part of Adam, is their redemption then outside of Christ? As in, they may be saved through Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, or whatever is indigenous to their culture? Is Christ only the answer and completion to the Hebrew “myth,” if that is what we’re calling it, or is He the savior of all? “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God,” said Peter (Jn. 6:68). Is this true? If other words of life, means of salvation, are out there, how am I to know that I am descended from Adam and therefore under the salvation of Christ? And what reason would Paul have had to spread the gospel to the Gentiles, if they perhaps had not even descended from Adam? Could not their gods save them, completing whatever creation myths they believed?
This is where, it seems to me, this manner of thinking could go. Is this what we want?
If not, I perceive several ways around it. First, to interpret the passage as meaning that Adam and Eve are indeed the father and mother of all the living (Gen. 3:20: “The man called his wife Havah [life], because she was the mother of all living” [CJB]). As they lived a very long time, they could have had many children (as is mentioned in Gen. 5:4). Perhaps not all of these children were born after Seth, and perhaps these were the people Cain feared as he left the presence of God and from among whom he chose a wife. It may not be extremely plausible to the scientific mind, but to my simple mind, it seems a possibility.
Another possible solution is to consider the flood. As Noah and his family were descended from Adam (and, by the way, not from Cain, whose descendants all perished in the flood), then of course all people subsequent to the flood would have been children of Adam (provided that we are considering the flood to have been an actual worldwide event).
The third and most tenuous solution would be more philosophical than literal. That is the notion that Christ is the savior of all humankind (and indeed, all creation), but that he fulfills the mythology of each culture in a way unique and perfect to it. So to the Hebrew culture He is the Messiah prophesied in Isaiah, the sacrificial lamb of the Exodus, and the second Adam prefigured in Genesis. To another culture he may be the fulfillment in another way, of which I yet have no understanding, since my cross-cultural knowledge is limited. Yet for all cultures He would be the fulfillment, completion, Savior.
I am beginning to rather like the last option. However, I do have some trouble with it, as it seems dangerously close to what my atheist/Buddhist/Hindu/Jain friend said about Bodhisattvas. A Bodhisattva, as I understand it, is an enlightened human being who has escaped the wheel of suffering through good karma but chooses to postpone his or her entrance into nirvana in order to help the rest of the human race achieve the state of blessedness as well. In this view, Buddha, the Dali Lama, and other such revered teachers are considered Bodhisattvas. As my friend sees it, Christ is just another Bodhisattva, an incarnation of god among many others, and one can choose to follow whichever of these one likes—or to follow none at all, but simply trust one’s own inner enlightenment (inner god) through the practice of meditation. Books (and churches), my friend says, are a waste of time, and are just people trying to get you to believe whatever it is they believe so they can control you. So, is Jesus just another enlightened one, one among many that lead along the path of blessedness (which is, it seems, really a way to save oneself), or is He the true, literal, actual (and included in that is also metaphorical) Savior of all humanity?
6 comments:
As a side note, I did find this article online, which brought some light to the idea of Christ as fulfillment for the stories of each culture:
http://www.christianvisionproject.com/2007/04/christ_my_bodhisattva.html
In this article, Ram Gidoomal describes Christ as his Bodhisattva or guru, but not just any kind, one among many. He uses the term sanatan sat guru, which means “eternal true living way.” He says that there are many sat gurus (true living ways), but that no other guru could claim to be the sanatan sat guru (eternal living way) but Christ.
I also revisited the popularly referenced Mars Hill passage from Acts 17, in which Paul uses the poetry of the Greek culture to point the Athenians to Christ. In light of Paul’s example, the third solution considered above does seem quite valid; however, it was also interesting to note that in the very speech Paul delivered on Mars Hill, he states, “From one man [emphasis added] he [God] made every nation living on the entire surface of the earth…”. What bearing this might have on the salvation story is worthy of consideration.
I actually took a seminary class once on continuation theology (the idea that God reveals himself all over the place, but Christ is the ultimate fulfillment) It was taught by this super cool Indian man...I should tell you about it.
Cool, Katie! I look forward to hearing more about it.
It had been some time since I had deeply thought about Creation before this current biblestudy, and I have found that the discussion and your question in particular have been churning in my brain in the background. What does the Genesis narrative mean and in what sense did God create the man and the universe?
The basic message of Genesis is that God created the universe, and that by His will and intension a being with the mind of God (man) was brought out of the material (dust) of this creation. The man, in whom God breathed the spirit of life, rebelled and lost his perfect relationship with the Creator.
Perhaps a deeper question is in what way do we consider scripture to be an inspired work of God? We can consider as given that the account must at least be greatly simplified from the actual act of creation and using language accessible to simple people. Did God speak literal words using sound waves and human language into the void? Were there day and night before the sun, moon and stars? I believe the account of Genesis was intended in part for the ancient people on whom a detailed description of Creation would be lost. Given this constraint on my part, here are some other potential interpretations
1. Perhaps we can consider the account of Creation to be a parable. After all Jesus, the very embodiment of God, was an avid user of parables to describe complex concepts to simple people. There is a creation account that starts off the book of John, which identifies the word of creation with the personage of Christ himself (“in the beginning was the Word…”). Characters such as the Good Samaritan and the prodigal son may not have been literal people but are fully applicable for comparison to real situations. For instance, as the prodigal son turns back to his father so we also can turn back to God. As Adam, the initial man and embodiment of all mankind, broke the relationship with God for all humanity so does Jesus restore this relationship.
2. We can consider Adam to be the first of his kind who was capable of contemplating God… who had the “breath of life”. In this case, it was God’s intension from the beginning that this first true man should eventually come from the “dust of the earth”. This first man rebelled from his initially perfect relationship with God and as humanity spread to all corners of the earth we all became in some way his descendants genetically and spiritually.
3. The account of Genesis is literally true albeit simplified and God played a special role in the creation of the first man and woman of whom we are descended.
4. The account of Genesis is recorded from an oral legend of creation which God has shaped and used as a tool to teach us a deeper understanding of the nature of man and our broken relationship with God and each other. In this case, Jesus is the antithesis of the legendary Adam or the fall from grace that we are born with.
I don’t believe that a specific understanding of Genesis is necessary for a true and vibrant faith in Christ. The basic Christian creeds confess that "We believe in God the Father, Creator of Heaven and Earth…" but of what nature of Creation is not specified. The overarching claim of scripture that extends well beyond Genesis is that the God of the Hebrews is the sole creator of the universe and therefore has domain over all peoples. However, I am not well versed in Buddhist or Hindu beliefs and so cannot really comment on Jesus as one of many Bodhisattvas.
I find this conversation of Adam fascinating – it really is fun to play with these sorts of things. Building off of Elizabeth’s post, I’d like to throw a couple of other options out as to the nature of our descent (I just saw Ulrich’s post now after writing this, and I think that it plays off of his second option for interpretation :). I hadn’t previously tied together the passage from Romans to our physical relationship with Adam. Considering this descent in light of our justification through Christ quoted here, I wonder if we might be able to play with a few of the parameters. This is mostly just for fun, because I know that there are many intricacies to each of these that I am in no position to address.
Paul says that, as sin came into the world through the one man, Adam, so justification comes through the one man, Jesus Christ. I acknowledge that I am prone to take things to the allegorical extreme, but it’s also fun to see what we can play with in the text. So, if we all do trace our lineage for justification back to Christ without actually being his genetic offspring, could we also take onto ourselves the inherited sin of Adam without being his direct genetic offspring? Rather, could this Adam be some sort of personal archetype, falling in the same way that we all would fall if in his position? Taking the route of self over the relationship with God?
There are some implications of this train of thought that I’m not entirely comfortable with, a couple of which we chased our tails over this past week in Bible study. First, if this is just some sort of pathway that we will all fall into, did God create us with the intent that we fall (i.e. was it a necessary step in our process of growth or a natural consequence of our free will)? In another vein, what does this mean for the nature of sin itself? Does it make the circumstances surrounding the fall also allegorical? Where/who would the deceiver be in all this? Would it simply be a product of our own, selfish self?
(continued -- sorry for rambling!)
Another interpretation I have been kicking around for this account would trace our descent back to Adam genetically without having him necessarily be the only human out and about to begin with. While I don’t usually like reading too much scientifically into the creation account for fear of contaminating it with my own biases and collapsing it to a simple case of a testable hypothesis, this one was just too much fun – and I apologize for slaughtering the actual biology here … I normally think about rocks, not living things. I already have some strange notions about the creation account detailing with the intersection of human physical evolution and spiritual birth intersecting. What if our ability to interact with God were dependent on some mutation? Here my thought is that there could have also been humans around in form only, but who were incapable of moral thought and relationship with God. Let’s say that this moral mutation was a dominant trait in the population, and was somehow present in both Adam and Eve (a stretch, but we can think about that separately – or whether that is even necessary for this all to work out theologically). Any immediate progeny of Adam would then be able to inherit his moral/relational mutation. If his offspring containing this mutation were then to reproduce with other human populations lacking this moral source, they would also be able to pass this on to those around them.
I guess that it gets awkward if we talk about the laws of inheritance when we look at issues of morality, but there are also some interesting implications of this train of thought. If this were the case, and we have Adam with the genotype Mm (with M denoting the dominant Morality and m representing the recessive moral inability) then his offspring with any mm individual would be evenly distributed between Mm and mm. Crossing two Mm would give mm, MM, and Mm in a 1:1:2 ratio (assuming I’m remembering my eighth grade genetics properly :). To make this simpler, let’s say that this moral mutation provides his offspring with a huge selective advantage. In that case, we could expect it to become dominant in the population over time, making us all his progeny in one way or another. It would, though, allow there to be individual offspring of those with moral ability (Mm) to have potential offspring without this ability (mm). Strange, eh?
Now there are other ways for traits to enter into populations, particularly given our peculiar ability to learn culturally. Could this relational ability rather be some sort of morality meme that is in the collective human consciousness and, in effect, infects us all during the course of our growth and development? This would solve problems associated with a genetic source, but not let us stick as literally with being ‘steeped in sin from birth’ … that is, unless we think of our growing consciousness as some sort of cup of water with our tea bag of cultural memes giving us flavor and identity upon our birth into a suitable social environment. I would argue that we can’t be human without being exposed to social influences, so I’m not sure I’d have too many troubles with this. It is a funny thought, though, because it effectively makes our morality a ‘social construct,’ while still attaching a source from God – effectively ‘downloading’ this meme construct into the first man, Adam, when he sent his breath into him.
I’d like to suggest that we don’t put too much weight on these various ways of looking at the Biblical account of the fall. If something has implications that provide insight into the truth in our own lives, that is fantastic. If not, let’s kick something new around :).
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