The Wrong Adam: Why Stories Are The Deepest Part Of The Text

 

Perhaps the biggest stumbling block for young earth creationists is the fact that St. Paul refers to Adam by name - so their reasoning goes something like this:

P1: Paul refers to Adam, so Adam must be a real historical figure.

P2: If Adam is a real historical figure, then he must be the first person.

P3: If Adam is the first person, then Genesis 1-3 must be taken as literal history.

P4: If Genesis 1-3 is taken as literal history, then the world must be about 6,000 years old.

C: Given premises 1-4, evolution over millions of years must be false.

Naturally, there are a lot of further things wrong with their reasoning, but we can preclude them by cutting to the chase and focusing on the base error, which is failing to understand that Paul referring to Adam is not merely a refence to a historical figure, it is a more powerful archetypical reference to Adam at a much deeper level (this may be why Jesus never referred to the name Adam at all, only to the Genesis account for its symbolic content on the template for marriage).

What you have to remember is that the story (or narrative) of almost any account is frequently the most powerful part of the text (where text here means anything that can be interpreted or analysed). When you think of the most profound teachings or events in history - whether that's one of Christ's parables, a Dostoevsky novel, the Battle of Waterloo, the death of Martin Luther King, the Cold War, the building of St. Paul's Cathedral, the painting of The Last Supper, and so on - the most powerful parts are the parts that are conveyed and analysed in narrative or symbolic form. What affects us most deeply is; what happened, the context and background, the cultural analysis, the characters (real or fiction) in the account, the message(s) being conveyed, the moral lessons, the impact it had thereafter, the symbols and imagery that carry deeper meanings within the account, and any other subtext that can be brought to bear on a deeper historical, ethical, psychological, philosophical and theological narrative, and applied to a present consideration.

When we apply this wisdom to Genesis 1-3, we ought to see it as folly to try to smuggle in a wholly literal, historical interpretation, at the expense of all other deeper elements I outlined above. In fact, it's actually impossible to read a text like Genesis 1-3 (or any Bible text for that matter) and not engage with it through the above mechanisms, even if one tries to deny them. The majority of the power is found in the story, because stories are the most powerful mode of communication we have. Some texts, like great works of literature, would contain almost no deeper power by being literal, historical events. Some texts, like the great works of poetry, would even be impoverished with an imposed literal interpretation. Some texts, like historical records, are accounts of real events, but their descriptive nature is expressed in narrative form to document what happened during the period, and some of the wider elements outlined above, that can be distilled from the studies.

All this should start to have more of a bearing on interpretations of texts like Genesis 1-3, and on the name Adam, under consideration. Once we engage with any text like this by giving it its due depth of consideration, we then uncover the pathways to its more powerful and profound meanings, like understanding how Adam refers to humanity in a general sense - and how, by tuning in to the allegorical or metaphorical representation of humanity, we can decipher the full suite of edification from the texts.

Footnote: I wrote this blog in part as a response to a friend who critiqued my last blog post with the following: "I still think you don't need to ditch the real person of Adam, as I pointed out before the recorded genealogy implies, whether you think the preceding stages were based on evolution or not, that at some point the person of Adam was real and selected by God as the 'first man". But if Adam is a symbolism for (hu)mankind, then he doesn't have to literally historically real, because the allegory is making a hyper-textual claim, a bit like how Paul's concept of Adam in Romans 5:12, as a representative figure whose sin had consequences for all humanity, is a hyper-textual claim. While the Biblical genealogies are incomplete, and are not structured like modern genealogies, it is still possible to decipher why Adam might appear in the historical lineage, especially if these genealogies were known by the Jewish scribes to represent a theological connection between original humanity and God's sovereignty and covenantal promises. In keeping with the rest of the allegory of early Genesis, the Adam archetype who is later referenced, can quite understandably be referenced through the same allegorical literary devices, that weave together a patterned Biblical structure that guides the reader through the coherent narrative of creation, fallenness, sin, redemption and salvation through Christ.