I have found myself coming back to those early pages of Genesis over and over and over again for the past….10 or so years now. When I became a Christian in that Southern Baptist pew I remember the only verse coming to my mind being Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
This was all I needed. Well, this along with a reflection on how my dad’s life had been transformed from addict to loving father. But as a kid who was being introduced to evolution and the Big Bang in middle school science class; suddenly Genesis 1 seemed to put all my doubts to rest.
For the time being.
As the years went on I would continually find myself coming back to Genesis 1-3 with new insight. A new way to approach the text and each time it left me feeling like maybe little Austin in 7th grade actually could find some rest in knowing there’s a way to merge what science says to be true and the worldview Jesus calls us to embrace.
Maybe the war that I was pushed into between science and religion was not a war necessary to even begin.
What’s the Problem?
Adam is the first human we come across in the pages of Scripture. And because of how many of us have come to read our Bibles we have bought into rather automatically that because Adam is the first named human recorded in the Bible after God has created everything that this must mean that Adam was the first human to have ever lived. And because Adam is the first human to have ever lived because the Bible says so then if we can just trace back the amount of years that people lived according to our Bibles then with that we can get a good sense as to how old the earth is.
What comes with this is an immediate enlisting into the culture war specifically in regards to science and what the Government is teaching our children.
The problem that then raises for me is I am not positive that this culture war is necessary. At least on the grounds of whether the earth is 6,000 years old or 4.5 billion years old. And so what comes with this argument is this debate on whether Adam was a historical figure in our lineage or not.
But to help paint a picture let me start off by sharing a little bit of the context I come from.
I grew up in a Southern Baptist/Evangelical, Jerry Falwell influenced, anti-science environment where the popular theory that the earth is billions of years old and that Adam was not the first human to have ever lived, and that humans are descendants of another creature that evolved over time was credited as complete nonsense.
That theory would be laughed out the room by people who had not read a book other that their John Macarthur study Bible. This theory was treated as completely incompatible with what Christianity had to offer. And may I say it was not even what Christianity had to offer, but rather it was what these people believed Christianity was asking people to buy into.
This environment that I’m describing is not all bad. The same people who would refuse to hear out their atheist friend’s explanation of evolution would also love the alcoholic and send him to rehab on their dime(thanks for helping my dad).
They would also host a food bank for the underprivileged in the community so that people could be sure to feed their families.
I think it’s important to share both sides of this enviroment. Because it not all bad but it is also not all good.
And it is within this environment that many people were given an option on how to view the world that maybe was not the best option. And with it came subtle signs of prejudice against people who may not hold the same views.
So what is the problem? The problem is with Adam. Does our Bibles require us to believe Adam was a literal human being who existed as the first human being ever created?
My goal is to dive into first Paul’s Adam. I believe Paul can be a great entry point for us because by analyzing Paul we can then begin to make our way back into the world that shaped Paul’s mind.
And then we can back up to the very beginning and look at those early chapters in Genesis and see if they are communicating a message that was ever meant to be taken literally or not.
And to close everything off we will then zoom out and see the big picture the Bible is trying to tell us about what it means to be human and how Jesus(the literal God-man) gives life to all of humanity.
Paul’s Adam
“Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, in this way death spread to all people, because all sinned. In fact, sin was in the world before the law, but sin is not charged to a person’s account when there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who did not sin in the likeness of Adam’s transgression. He is a type of the Coming One. ”1
This is a rather bleak description of Adam from St. Paul’s perspective. According to Paul, Adam is responsible for sin entering into the world. Which means according to Paul Adam is humanities greatest enemy?
Well, at least until this man is not. Because in 1 Timothy 2:12-14 Adam pins the ultimate blame on someone else:
I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.(ESV)2
When Paul is addressing this issue in the church of Ephesus of this group of women who have been influenced by the culture and are disrupting the services of the church and speaking ignorantly; Paul uses the first woman recorded in the Bible as the reason these women should be silent.
He appeals to the narrative of Scripture in the early pages of our Bibles that describe Adam being formed first, and then Eve who came from Adam. Because Adam was formed first, Paul uses this major plot point as a means to communicate to these unruly women why they should humble themselves and keep quiet. Understanding this passage though will tell us a lot about Paul that I believe is necessary for how we understand Paul in other passages of Scripture.
The context Paul is writing to in 1 Timothy is in the context of Ephesus where his mentee Timothy is the pastor of a church. 1 Timothy is a letter from mentor to mentee addressing concerns that are boiling up within this congregation of believers.
Within this context we have a group of women who have been influenced by the surrounding culture of this church. That influence being of the cult of Artemis. The cult of Artemis was this prevailing belief that woman should be on top. The women who bought into this culture of feminism became domineering. They were usurping authority based on cultural beliefs. It was infecting the culture and that culture was being brought into this church. Paul in dealing with this situation, pulls his people out of the narrative of the world and into the narrative of Scripture. And by that means he uses the Adam and Eve story as a way to represent the audience he is speaking to and confront them in their unruliness.
With every issue we address within the pages of Scripture we have to remember these are real people dealing with real scenarios. There is a context we have to immerse ourselves into to understand the writing on the wall. The reason I took us to 1 Timothy is because it highlights for us a major tactic that Paul uses in just about every letter I can think of.
Paul addresses his people in the context that they are living in. The quicker we can pin point that context, the better readers of Scripture we will be and the better we will be able to actually take away from the letter what Paul was trying to communicate and guard against imposing on the text our modern ideas and philosophies.
So to give a few examples let me run through a general overview of how Paul does this contextual work in a few of his letters.
Paul in his letter to the Thessalonians is speaking to a church that has the problem of sitting on their hands, being apathetic and waiting around for the second coming. So Paul speaks to that issue using language that the city of Thessalonica would know all too well. Language of being visited by a government official who has submitted a payment for the restoration of that city and is coming back in order to see how well the townspeople used the inheritance they received. The city of Thessalonnica had suffered under earthquakes that ruined their city, and so in an effort to rebuild and make the Emperor’s name great, the city received a deposit from the Emperor. And after the time of rebuilding, the Emperor would return again to see how they made good on the deposit they inherited.
Paul in his letter known as Ephesians, speaks into the household codes that were common within his day. When we can understand that household codes were a common and well known part of the culture Paul was living in, then when we read Paul’s words about wives submitting to husbands and husbands loving their wives, suddenly we can see more of what Paul was actually doing. He’s not giving mere marriage advice, he’s playing off of popular insights from his day and in his city. He’s letting the gospel message infuse into the reality of the day in order to transform it and when Paul does this with the household codes he helps conjure up an inverted Kingdom way of living within the confines of the culture of the day. Where the household codes gave power to domineering husbands who lord their power over their wives, Paul uses household codes to push men to love their wives as Christ loved the church.
Likewise, in Romans context matters. The letter of Romans is written to a multiethnic church. It’s not a dissertation. It’s not a systematic theology handbook. It’s a letter speaking into the context of this local church that has two groups of people who have a long history of not wanting to be in the room with each other. They are people from opposite sides of the track who have suddenly come together because of a good news that they are still wrestling with.
Paul is speaking into that tension that exists between two groups of people who think they are better than the other. Paul like he did in 1 Timothy, pulls his people away from the narratives of the culture and into the narrative of Scripture by using the story of Adam.
Adam, a type.
Cambridge dictionary gives us this definition: “a person who seems to represent a particular group of people, having all the qualities that you usually connect with that group.”
A type is a literary tool in a story. And here Paul uses not only Jesus but Adam as a type. Adam represents for Paul the character we all play of a person who makes the choice to disobey God and fulfill our own desires. We are people, represented by Adam who are in sin. Paul uses Adam as a means to bring these two groups together who are struggling to see their own faults. As they point their fingers at each other and shift the blame, Paul refers to them as being an Adam and needing a Jesus.
There is no difference between Jew and Gentile, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God3
What we can learn from this is that Adam is a type. Paul’s goal in this letter is not to prove the historicity of Adam but is to address an issue with the tool of Adam. The representative of all mankind.
But here’s the problem… Paul did believe Adam was a real person. If we are trying to understand the Bible as a book written by God through man and by the means of men then we need to understand how God used these men and their perspectives to write His inspired Word.
Pete Enns explains Paul this way:
Paul was an ancient interpreter, schooled in the ways of Second Temple Judaism(Phil. 3:4-6; Acts 22:3), and his handling of Scripture reflects the interpretive conventions of his day. We will never understand Paul’s use of the Old Testament until we come to terms with this fact.4
Though Paul’s use of Adam here does not prove Adam was a real person; it is important to note that Paul probably believed if asked that Adam was a real historical person. And a great pushback to the people claiming Adam was not a historical person but that Paul believed Jesus was, is the pushback: If Paul got Adam wrong, how do we know he did not get Jesus wrong?
I do not believe that Christianity as a whole stands or falls on whether Adam was real or not. I’ve held to an archetypal view for years now and I believe in Jesus more now than I did before. But I think this is fair critique.
How can we decipher out where we believe Paul was wrong and where he was right? Is it okay for us to say Paul got some things wrong?
There’s two points I want to make before we go further:
- Paul was a human. I firmly believe that the Bible is God’s inspired Word. I believe the Bible is perfect. But I do not believe the authors he used are perfect. What’s beautiful to me about the Bible and how it came together is how God used very broken people to communicate a perfect message that fills the void of the soul. I think back to Jonah, a prophet, a mouth piece for God who communicated God’s truth but did not always believe it. He was a deeply flawed man filled with hate and arrogance. Or what about the Psalmists? The Psalmists say some wild things that we know doctrinally are not true. Sometimes it seems that they want to use God for revenge on their enemies. Yet it’s through their mess that God communicates the gospel to us. Or what about the authors of the Gospel accounts. There are moments where the wording about the same account is not matching up verbatim. What do we do? Lie to ourselves that there are no inconsistencies or do we step into the fray and aim to understand the message God is trying to communicate through these seemingly conflicting accounts from different people? The point is God is using humanity(in its fullest sense) to communicate an overarching story that is perfect in its own way to deliver us from the pains of this world. It’s okay to hold two truths together: God and His Word are perfect, man is broken. God uses man in his brokenness to write the greatest book to have ever been written.
- Paul was a theologian in his day. He was wrestling through the texts of Scripture much like we do. And so in understanding how God is using Paul to write Scripture, we need to pin point where Paul is doing some theological interpretation and where we need to pause and step back into the Scriptures Paul is interpreting to better understand what those texts mean in their respected context not in Pauls.
Genesis 1
So if Paul believed that Adam was a historical real person then what does that mean for our Bibles? What does that mean for us? What do we do with that knowledge?
We acknowledge this truth and then we keep digging. Paul was thousands of years removed from when the story of Adam and Eve was first told. So our next goal is to go back to the beginning where the story is first introduced and aim to understand what it is this story meant for the people who it was originally for. That is a goal when reading your Bible. The goal is to not read it and find out what this specific passage means for me in my twenty first century world; but what did it mean for the people in the ancient world? And through that lens, we will rightly find out what lessons we can take and what the message we need from the story actually is.
Our first passage we need to look at is in Genesis 1:26-28
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
Here we have our first record of mankind coming onto the scene and this beautiful imagery of God having finished the majority of his creation but finalizing it before his day of rest(the seventh day) by placing His image and likeness inside this new world he has created. This is our first image of mankind in the narrative of Scripture. And a couple things are happening that’s important to note.
- God creates mankind in His image. This is important because it speaks to our value. Genesis 1 is being written during a time where there were other religions and cults. There was already a narrative of “people made in the image of God”. The only problem was that in the culture of the day the only people that label applied to were the people like the Pharaohs of Egypt and the Kings of Babylon. These were people who were the image of God and everyone else who was not were told by the narratives in the culture of the day that they must serve those who are. Genesis 1 is already in combat made with these other creation stories of the day. Genesis is a narrative reset for people on the margins of society. Genesis 1 speaks into the pain of slaves and communicates “you may have been told you are not as valuable as the King you are serving but the God who created everything begs to differ. He calls you a King and a Queen. You have value built in you.” What I hope you see through this is that Genesis 1 is speaking into the context of people’s lives and it’s giving them not just mere encouragement but identity. It’s saying “you are not a mere slave, you are the image of God, a title reserved only for powerful elites”.
- God creates mankind on the sixth day. Now you may feel like we are just counting stars at this point. Why does it matter what day mankind was created? Well, there is actually two reasons why.
- It’s important we highlight mankind was created on the sixth day because on the seventh day they are told to rest. They are created and immediately enter into a day of rest. Meaning they rest before they contribute to the world and begin trying to fulfill God’s call on their lives. We live in a world where you work a full week and if time allows you then you may rest. Rest is a reward. But the biblical structure of the week, mankind’s first day was rest and then they go work. Rest was not a reward for time put in, but a necessary starting place to do our best by coming from the best.
- Genesis 2 does not have the same layout. This should cause you to stop and ask a question or two. For example: does this mean my Bible is full of inconsistencies and contradictions even within the first two pages? Is there a different way I should be reading this?
Genesis 2
So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.
These are the generations
of the heavens and the earth when they were created,
in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. 5
The first three verses of Genesis 2 wrap up the story for Genesis 1. Verse 4 seems to hit a reset. It’s an odd reading when you do not know what is going on with the text because as you continue to read you receive a new account of creation and notice that there will be a different ordering of events as to how creation takes place.
As a teenager I remembering noticing this and being so thrown off but also so convinced that I had to make the text work in a flawless way. So my solution was to explain this away by saying Genesis 1 is from God’s perspective but Genesis 2 is a more grounded human perspective.
That is a nice try but that’s not exactly what is going on. This is a problem we will often run into when we impose our rules of understanding onto God’s revelation.
The first creation account compared to the second have a few areas of discontinuity.
For example the first creation account, we have God creating the world in six days. In the second creation account everything seems to happen all in one day(2:4).
For another example the way the universe is described pre-creation is different as well. In the first creation account our pre-created world was described as being “without form and void and darkness over the face of the deep”(1:2). In our second account we are told that there was “no bush of the field” “yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up”(2:5 ESV). Our first description is of a formless, dark void while our second sounds more like a desert.
Or to complete a set of three examples what about how God creates? In our first creation account it says that God speaks creation into existence. We read this over and over again as the text describes God saying phrases like “Let there be light”(1:3) or “let us make man in our image”(1:26). In our second creation account however we see God create in a different way. Here he does not speak mankind into existence, rather God breathes and forms creation into existence. We see this in Genesis 2:7 which says: “the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”(ESV) Or how about when He “planted a garden in Eden”(v.8). Planting is very different than speaking something into existence. I’ve tried both with tomato plants and it does not produce the same results.
There are more examples we could point out but I believe the point is made. In our first two chapters of Genesis we are told about the creation of the world in two very different ways. There are two different seemingly opposing accounts of creation with the only real similarity being that the Creator is Yahweh.
So what does this mean? Does this mean we cannot trust the Bible? Which creation account is the true telling of how this all began?
Both questions I just mentioned miss the point of the text. These two creation accounts are written in a certain time and place. They are speaking to a different culture. And they have different goals. So now let’s taker aim at how we read these two differing accounts. What should our approach be?
Concordism Vs. Cosmology
Concordism is the belief and way of doing hermeneutics that anticipates that the Bible when interpreted correctly will affirm our scientific conclusions of the day. An example of how this specifically plays out is the belief that you can read Genesis 1 and do all of your tracking back in time to see how old the earth is and one day science will catch up(because they are too resistant to the truth now) and will affirm the Bible was right about the age of the earth all along.
The problem with this way of reading the Bible is that is puts a weight on the Bible to be something it never claimed to be. As Protestants we believe in what is called “sola scriptura” which is the belief that for Christians we hold the Bible as our supreme authority on life and doctrine. The Bible sadly though does not always grasp for the kind of authority that I believe as Protestants we always want to it to have.
In Youth Group culture you will very quickly hear messages talking about how God has a plan for your life. A ton of stress is placed on teenagers to find out what God’s will for which school they will go to, who they will marry and what kind of life they will live; yet the Bible does not seem at all interested in that. The Bible is not the authority on which college you go to. The Bible is not gonna give you a blueprint for who to marry: Susan or Louise. Likewise, the Bible is not a scientific authority. It has a different mission altogether.
Another way to think about this is the idea that there different types of Pastors. Some pastors view their role as being a team leader, they will lead this church like a CEO leads a business. Other Pastors see their role more like a shepherd. They’re leading you to a field with grass to eat, they want to make sure your healthy but building a brand is not in their reputare.
All authority in life is not the same. All authority in life does not lead the same way. For another example there are fathers who lead their homes in authority by saying “do as I say, not as I do.” They rule with an iron fist not by example. They expect pure submission to their will and anything lacking will be disciplined. But then there’s another kind of father who is leading his home. When the kids asks “why does our family do things in this way?” The father does not respond with annoyance and a quick shut down in the terms of “just do what I say and stop asking questions.” Instead this father gives purpose. He makes sure the family understands the motivation behind why they do the things the way they do them. He believes that real submission will come by way of appealing to the hearts and minds of his children. Not in a way that is begging for their allegiance, but in a way that meets them where they are in their immaturity and builds them up to maturity. Both fathers exercise a form of authority. But their authority looks different.
This is why it’s important to understand that these creation accounts in Genesis are ancient cosmology not modern science.
Modern science is hyper focused on a literal “how did things become what they are?” We look at the universe and ask: “what on an atomic level happened to cause our galaxy to come into being?” We want to know the process of creation down to the finest detail.
Ancient cosmology was not looking at the stars and asking “how did that burning space rock become the burning space rock?” Instead they asked: “why is that light up there?”
In simple terms, we want to know how things become what they are. And that’s beautiful. This sparks innovation, it pushes society forward technologically. But for the ancients, science was a quest to determine the why behind what exists.
John Walton in his book ‘The Lost World of Genesis One’ explains this difference by giving the example of a person seeing a play.
One person sees the play and says: “oh that play was great!” And what that person is focused on is the technical aspect of the play. The lightning, the set design, the timing. They are focused on all crucial pieces that make a play great.
But for many of us when we see a play and we say “oh that was a great play” what we mean is that the story resonated with me in a deep and personal way. All those technical aspects of the play are givens. What many of us focus on is why the play was written to begin with. That’s what resonates with us. What resonates is not how that curtain opened at that exact moment or how that carpenter built that piece of the set. What resonates was the purpose behind the play that fuels the play from beginning to end. The purpose gives meaning to why that carpenter built the set the way he did. The purpose gave direction for that actor to use that dialect for that scene. The purpose is what the audience felt as they watched the play and walked away from it saying “that play just changed my life.” “That play just made me rethink this situation I’m currently going through.”
Ancient cosmology was focused on purpose, on the why. And so when it comes to authority, Genesis is using its authority to speak into the why question not necessarily the how. And when we force Genesis and the rest of the canon of Scripture to be something that it is not then we give critics more of a ground to stand on when they starting poking holes in what we say to be true and it’s not because they hate the truth, its because we shaped the truth into our own image and our own likeness.
What’s the Purpose of Your Bible?
The Bible exercises authority over our lives. But it does much the same way as that second father I mentioned earlier does. It appeals to where we are as humans.
The Genesis account of the fall is not meant to be taking literal(though you can read it that way if you’d like). Instead the Genesis account of the fall is setting the stage and establishing the blueprint for humanity throughout the rest of the stories you will read after. It establishes the fact that as humans we are all “prone to wander…prone to leave the God I love” as the great hymn says.
We all recognize that something is wrong with the world. We all feel that what’s wrong with the world is also what’s wrong with us. And though we may not always be able to put our finger on it right away, the Bible acknowledges this pain, this voidy feeling we feel.
It does not seek to explain why Adam and Eve first felt a sense to take a bite. It just explains that they do. They choose to break God’s commands to not eat that fruit off that tree.
That’s it.
The reason why is because that’s it for us.
We can sit back and justify our sin all day long. I came from a bad home life. I was traumatized as a child. This is all learned behavior. And all of that may be true for you. But the reality is, even good people choose to sin. Even church kids rebel. Even priests lie and steal.
The Bible sets us up from the beginning with two truths that need to be taken literally even if the stories they are set in are not meant to be taken literally.
Those two truths are:
- You are made in the image of God(Gen. 1:26). You have worth and beauty not because you have done anything good or bad but simply because of who created you.
- You will feel the pull to disobey God and disrupt his creation. You will feel a need to be ashamed of the body he has blessed you with(Gen. 3:7) You will believe the lies of the evil one. And you will perpetuate this evil onto the next generation(Gen. 4-11).
From this point forward you move from story to story, seeing all of the bad humanity has to offer but knowing they were meant for something more.
You cannot toss the characters away despite how frustrating they can be, because you will start to see yourself in these characters. You’d like to see yourself when they win, but more so you will see yourself when they lose.
Story after story will come and go and you will relate for all the wrong reasons, but there will be one character who stays the same throughout it all. One character who remains faithful to an unfaithful people.
This one character will show up in stories without ever even being mentioned. He’s like a shadow at times, reminding people of who brought them this far. And at the perfect climax of an overarching story taking shape, this character descends into the story in the way that transcends all other stories.
God, the creator of the heavens and earth and the one who makes mankind worth it, becomes mankind. He bears all their shame, their guilt, their brokenness. And in love, he reverses the curse.
Where one man brought sin and death into the world, another man(the God-man) brings life. And from then on, a new humanity, a new Adam enters into the story. A humanity that is able to live in light of the worth they were created with. A humanity that’s able to rule and reign the way God intended. A humanity that’s able to exist in relationship with God in the cool of the day.
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