Adam and Eve

[Shane Roach]

Because sin is a transgression against divine law. If I lie, I have sinned. In order for sin to have physical ramifications on the entire universe, like cause asteroids to collide with the Earth, or cause all life on earth to decay, sin has to be like a virus that spreads. That would make it a physical concept, rather than an abstract concept. How can a transgression against divine law be a physical concept?

To me, it becomes a physical concept when someone physically does something, though I may be skipping right past what you mean.

Well, as I said. There was a Jewish Revelation older than the one we have. It appears that the Church took the Jewish version and altered it to be more future apocalyptic, by using a lot of similarities from the Book of Daniel.

Revelation just seems to have a lot of connections to the time period - the persecution of the Christians by the Roman Empire. For example, the number of the beast, 666 in Hebrew numerology spells Nero Caesar.

Yeah, well that's nothing to do with what is written though. I have read it, studied it, and begun to piece it together, and there is really no way it is derived directly from something to do with Rome unless the version to do with Rome also has references to New Testament and new covenant concepts, and so forth.

Wherever it came from, what I was curious about was what problems you had with it on its own merits.

Yours is so far the most difficult to understand, which is surprising to me given how open and willing to discuss you were. But difficult to understand is not a bad thing.

 

[Shane Roach]

As to my theology, I'm still learning. My views have been changing to come in line with the early Patriarchs (where early is defined up to about 400 AD). At someone's recommendation, I read the Epistles of Ignatius of Antioch and I've found them very consistent with (possibly even providing a basis for) the other things I've been reading that came later.

For more recent works, I've just begun Calvin's Institutes. I'm still at the beginning of Book I, but already he's quite compelling. I don't know quite how to classify myself (or if it is wise for me to do so), theologically, but if I had to identify myself with a group, I'd say Barthian Neo-Orthodox.

I'm sorry but this is nigh meaningless to me! If you want to translate it into things to do with specific donctrines I would be interested though. The few times I have run up against people who talk about the Patriarch's motivated me to read Origen a little and so forth. I came to realize that what the Bible says about ongoing attempts of Satan to get a foothold in the church makes it flatly impossible for there to be some way to sort of magically regress back to some more pristine or pure portion of the history of the church. For better or worse, we re in the 21st century now, so... but you may surprise me. Ultimately though there's really not much to go on here.

 

[Shane Roach]

Perhaps the most conservative confession active in the modern Protestant Churches is the Westminster Confession of Faith, which except for the one line that Adam was the physical progenitor of all humanity i can subscribe to.

It's difficult to understand how Adam could be made in the image of God and then have the breath of life breathed into him if he were not the progenitor of all humanity. There are a number of verses in the New Testament that refer back to Adam as well.

I guess I have pretty much the same objection though with this post as I had with willtor's, which is that it is long on references and short on personal insights.

I was reading about the Westminster Confession of Faith and ran up against some interpretations of Genesis that are even more conservative than I can wrap my head around. How do you get a 24 hour day before you even have a sun?

Meh...

 

[Jase]

Wherever it came from, what I was curious about was what problems you had with it on its own merits.

Well I think it seems rather cruel. I can't quite see the similarity between the loving and caring Jesus found in the Gospels and the vindictive, war crazed, destructive one portrayed in Revelation. I don't see the purpose of going through all those "special effects" and the fancy show of darkness, asteroids hitting the earth, water turning to blood, 2 billion people getting killed, the antichrist slaughtering every believer, the 4 horseman, etc.

 

[Shane Roach]

Here's my view.

I think the Eden account is similar to Ezekiel 16. Is the woman named Jerusalem in that chapter a real person or is she imaginary? The answer is neither. She is a representation of the nation Israel. Her story within that prophetic message is Israel's story. It is told more completely than a historical record could, since it also reveals God's involvement in events that historically could seem merely natural.

I think Genesis 2-4 is revealing the history of humanity the way Ezekiel 16 reveals Israel's history. I read both accounts the same way. Adam and his wife Eve are not individuals any more than the lady Jerusalem and her sisters Samaria and Sodom. They are far more than individuals. God places them in a paradise and provides for all their needs, just as he adopted the child Jerusalem and raised her in luxury. Adam and Eve's actions allegorically correspond to the actions of humanity toward God.

The serpent is not just a literal serpent: it represents pride, the temptation of selfish ambition, and ultimately Satan. So, when the serpent is cursed in Genesis 3:14-15, the curse is actually referring to far more than literal snakes -- it foreshadows the second Adam's ultimate defeat of Satan (Romans 16:20). Similarly, the trees are not literal trees any more than the ring and crown in Ezekiel 16:12 are merely literal. The tree of life represents God's sustaining, life-giving power (Revelation 2:7, 22:1-2), while the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents godlike knowledge (Genesis 3:5).

Adam and Eve, representing fledgling humanity, disobey God by grasping for this knowledge that they are not ready for. As a result, they do gain some knowledge, but in the process lose their innocence. Their communion with God is broken. This is the advent of sin, and it is described more prosaically in Romans 1:18-32.

Relating this to prehistory, the most obvious trait distinguishing humans from other apes is the increase in brain size; the larger skull size naturally led to increased pain for women in childbirth (other factors, such as hip changes due to bipedalism and the level of cranial development at birth, also factor in). Early primates learned to use tools, making clubs, then spears, then arrows. We learned to use fire. As we gained knowledge, we became capable of violence exceeding any other beast.

God confronts Adam and Eve and reveals the consequences of their actions. They are banished from their paradise, no longer having access to the tree of life -- God's special sustaining power. Life will be hard as they move from gathering food in the garden to an agricultural lifestyle where for the first time weeds can be defined.

Their broken communion with God and each other is passed on in their children. The horticulturalist son kills his pastoralist brother. In short order the account goes on to describe the advent of cities (4:17), crafts (4:21) and metalworks (4:22), again compressing large-scale events into a story of a few individuals.

When the account is read this way, it is no less truthful than the account in Ezekiel 16. This approach is used even by most literalists when it comes to Genesis 3:14-15, but I don't think those verses are an aberration. When this approach is used for the entire account, it allows one to get at the themes and focus of the story instead of trying to manipulate science or history to accord with its surface details.

I toyed with this sort of theology early on, and most especially before I had actually read the Bible. People who are able to keep to this understanding AFTER reading the Bible confuse me. Specific references to Adam and Eve in the New Testament make this especially hard for me to wrap my noggin around.

No judgement here. Just tossing out there what is in my head.

 

[Jase]

How do you get a 24 hour day before you even have a sun?

Meh...

Most creationists say God's light served as the sun to create our days until he put the real sun there.

 

[Shane Roach]

Well I think it seems rather cruel. I can't quite see the similarity between the loving and caring Jesus found in the Gospels and the vindictive, war crazed, destructive one portrayed in Revelation. I don't see the purpose of going through all those "special effects" and the fancy show of darkness, asteroids hitting the earth, water turning to blood, 2 billion people getting killed, the antichrist slaughtering every believer, the 4 horseman, etc.

That's what sin looks like when it ceases to be an abstract concept.

This subtle shift of responsibility for sin from man to God is something that is always disconcerting for me to hear from a fellow Christian, but I am not in much of a position here it seems to advise you.

 

[Shane Roach]

Most creationists say God's light served as the sun to create our days until he put the real sun there.

Well, first off I've never heard that from a Creationist, though I tend not to argue with them, being a pseudo-Creationist myself I guess. Or at least a mostly-Biblical-literalist.

Secondly, it really hardly matters if His light served as a sun, since the turning of the earth makes the days and nights.

I have my own weird understanding of Genesis, so I guess it is always a learning experience for me to see how others view it.

 

[Shane Roach]

Revelation, I'm leaning Ammillenial because it is replete with doctrinal statements. This is consistent with the notion that, as Scripture, it is useful for teaching and preaching, and for the sake of all believers, not just those of the last generation.

Care to elaborate? As far as I know I am a post trib pre rapture millenialist. :o Though I find a lot of this tends to depend on what the "trib" is according to the individual. I try not to take too firm a view on Revelation matters as I have yet to do the sort of study that would truly render it completely comprehensible, though over the years more and more of it makes sense.

As with most of the TEs with whom I've spoken on these Forums, I don't deny even the first several chapters of Genesis. I accept them as they are.

That's hard to reconcile with the fact that the first several chapters specifically contradict evolution in the sense that they state that all sorts of creatures were created, and not only that, but on different "days", making the concept of creating them through evolution from one original rather spotty to me. Still, again, I am not wanting to argue. If you want to discuss it that is fine. If not, fine too.

 

[Jase]

That's what sin looks like when it ceases to be an abstract concept.

This subtle shift of responsibility for sin from man to God is something that is always disconcerting for me to hear from a fellow Christian, but I am not in much of a position here it seems to advise you.

According to Revelation, sin doesn't cause all that, God does. Angels are the one's that release each of the catastrophes. Angels aren't sin.

 

[Jase]

Well, first off I've never heard that from a Creationist, though I tend not to argue with them, being a pseudo-Creationist myself I guess. Or at least a mostly-Biblical-literalist.

Secondly, it really hardly matters if His light served as a sun, since the turning of the earth makes the days and nights.

I have my own weird understanding of Genesis, so I guess it is always a learning experience for me to see how others view it.

Well, i used to be a young earth creationist, so I used to use that argument

 

[Marshall Janzen]

I toyed with this sort of theology early on, and most especially before I had actually read the Bible. People who are able to keep to this understanding AFTER reading the Bible confuse me. Specific references to Adam and Even in the New Testament make this especially hard for me to wrap my noggin around.

Well, let me try to help you wrap your noggin around it. I mentioned that I treat the man Adam the same way as the woman Jerusalem in Ezekiel 16. Now, what if someone thought that Jerusalem was a real, literal woman? What would they make of a verse like this:

• "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!" (Matthew 23:37, ESV)

Note how Jesus describes Jerusalem as a person. He speaks of her "children". For someone coming to this verse with a presupposition of Jerusalem being a woman, they'd likely see this as an open-and-shut confirmation of their theory from Jesus himself. However, for those without that presupposition, the verse can easily be taken another way. Jesus could just be personifying Jerusalem using a simple figure of speech, not much different than the extended metaphor Ezekiel used in Ezekiel 16.

Of course, the same applies to Adam and Eve. Most references to Adam in the New Testament can easily fit either interpretation -- literal individual or representing humanity. However, if one expects Adam to always be a literal individual, it's easy to read that into each mention of him. The references to Adam and Eve are always in the context of the Eden narrative. Referring to the characters in a narrative does not indicate that the narrative is of a certain kind.

The Romans 5 reference is especially interesting. It describes sin coming into the world through one man, rather than through one man and one woman (and perhaps one snake). There's two common explanations. The first is federal headship, where Adam is seen as representing everyone and acting in behalf of everyone. However, I don't think that accords well with the Genesis 2-3 narrative itself where Eve's sin seems to have mattered too. The second explanation is that Paul is compressing Adam and Eve into one individual, just as Genesis 2-3 compressed early humanity into two individuals, and Ezekiel 16 compressed Israel into one individual. This is I think a better fit with Genesis, and is also consistent with how Genesis elsewhere refers to Adam. For instance, right before a genealogy that seems to take Adam quite literally, there's a verse where God names the first humans, male and female, Adam (Genesis 5:2). Adam is also the name for the humans (male and female) created in Genesis 1. So, there's definite biblical precedent for taking Adam as encompassing more than a literal individual.

 

[rmwilliamsll]

It's difficult to understand how Adam could be made in the image of God and then have the breath of life breathed into him if he were not the progenitor of all humanity.


look carefully at Gen 2:7, the creation of the Man-Adam.
it doesn't say anything about the image of God, that is imported from Gen 1:26,27. There are two different uses of the term adam in Gen 1-2. The first is in Gen 1 and it refers to generic mankind. The second is Gen 2 the creation of a specific Adam with whom God walks in the garden. The second creation story Gen 2-3 is not the same one as happens on the 6th day in Gen 1.

Gen 1 describes the creation of the earth in terms of the Sabbath week. Gen 2-5 has nothing in it about the sabbath, there aren't any time markers at all from Adam's creation to the expulsion from the garden of eden. (Gen 2,3)

The specific Adam of Gen 2,3 is the progenitor of the people in the ancient near east. not the indians in n. and s. america, nor the australian aboriginals, nor chinese, nor japanese. just those in "the land". Which makes sense, it is not a universal story, it is a specific story of the Israelite people, Adam is who they traced their ancestry to.

There are lots of other people around at the time of Adam, they are simply unimportant to the developing ideals. Adam was the first man with whom God dealt directly.

so now there is no reason to explain how the chinese got there in time to have a civilization, nor explain where Cain got his wife, nor how he was able to build a city. etc. Gen is the story of Israel, not of humanity. This is why the universalization of the Gospel from the Jews to the Greeks was such a big thing, salvation belonged exclusively to an ethnic (ethnos) group up until then, that is why it was so difficult for the Jewish Christians to see that the Gentiles had been grafted in.


all humanity is in the image of God, from Gen 1:27, but only Adam and his offspring talked to God, until Pentecost.

 

[Shane Roach]

According to Revelation, sin doesn't cause all that, God does. Angels are the one's that release each of the catastrophes. Angels aren't sin.

I guess my point was that there is nothing in the Revelation to indicate to me they are doing it just for fun.

Rev 9:20-21
20 And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:
21 Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.
KJV

Whose fault is it? God's? Or the wicked?

 

[Jase]

I guess my point was that there is nothing in the Revelation to indicate to me they are doing it just for fun.

Rev 9:20-21
20 And the rest of the men which were not killed by these plagues yet repented not of the works of their hands, that they should not worship devils, and idols of gold, and silver, and brass, and stone, and of wood: which neither can see, nor hear, nor walk:
21 Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts.
KJV

Whose fault is it? God's? Or the wicked?

There are other ways to deal with the wicked then dropping asteroids on them and starving them to death.

 

[Shane Roach]

Well, i used to be a young earth creationist, so I used to use that argument

LOL!!!

Yeah, I have a sort of literal but not young earth interpretation. I have problems with evolution because of the assertion that all things came from one creature, and I do tend to believe that Adam and Eve were created whole, as they were created direcly in the image of God. As for why the rocks and the fossils look the way they do, I honestly could not give a rip. If evolution works, fine. If not, fine too. But don't tell me after a century of refining this theory constantly that we now KNOW that everything evolved from one life form.

In any event, worst case scenario, God made it all look like this on purpose to "confound the wise with the foolish things" as it were. It's always odd to me the conflict between on the one hand believing in an all powerful God, and on the other hand thinking that He can't have made the world in 6 days because, darn, it just doesn't LOOK like I think it ought to if He did.



Personally, the fact that the world still seems largely inexplicable would be my first clue that maybe there's more going on here than meets the eye when you go sifting through rocks and dead carcasses.

 

[Shane Roach]

There are other ways to deal with the wicked then dropping asteroids on them and starving them to death.

Yes, my Lord.

When you've created your own universe that works better, get back to me on that wouldja?

Seriously... I am sorry, I know that was a little sarcastic, but statements like that just leave me flat. All that comes from that view is a world built on any given person's opinion rather than the one we have. If you want to sit down and write quite literally from the ground up how you would deal with each and every sort of crime from theft to attempted genocide, then go for it. Do you imagine when you got through that everyone would agree about them all?

 

[Marshall Janzen]

It's always odd to me the conflict between on the one hand believing in an all powerful God, and on the other hand thinking that He can't have made the world in 6 days because, darn, it just doesn't LOOK like I think it ought to if He did.

Few seem to hold to that view, though. Most think that God could have made the world in six days, but the evidence shows that he didn't. This is quite different from thinking the evidence shows that he couldn't.

 

[Shane Roach]

Well, let me try to help you wrap your noggin around it. I mentioned that I treat the man Adam the same way as the woman Jerusalem in Ezekiel 16. Now, what if someone thought that Jerusalem was a real, literal woman? What would they make of a verse like this:

• "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!" (Matthew 23:37, ESV)

Note how Jesus describes Jerusalem as a person. He speaks of her "children". For someone coming to this verse with a presupposition of Jerusalem being a woman, they'd likely see this as an open-and-shut confirmation of their theory from Jesus himself. However, for those without that presupposition, the verse can easily be taken another way. Jesus could just be personifying Jerusalem using a simple figure of speech, not much different than the extended metaphor Ezekiel used in Ezekiel 16.

Of course, the same applies to Adam and Eve. Most references to Adam in the New Testament can easily fit either interpretation -- literal individual or representing humanity. However, if one expects Adam to always be a literal individual, it's easy to read that into each mention of him. The references to Adam and Eve are always in the context of the Eden narrative. Referring to the characters in a narrative does not indicate that the narrative is of a certain kind.

The Romans 5 reference is especially interesting. It describes sin coming into the world through one man, rather than through one man and one woman (and perhaps one snake). There's two common explanations. The first is federal headship, where Adam is seen as representing everyone and acting in behalf of everyone. However, I don't think that accords well with the Genesis 2-3 narrative itself where Eve's sin seems to have mattered too. The second explanation is that Paul is compressing Adam and Eve into one individual, just as Genesis 2-3 compressed early humanity into two individuals, and Ezekiel 16 compressed Israel into one individual. This is I think a better fit with Genesis, and is also consistent with how Genesis elsewhere refers to Adam. For instance, right before a genealogy that seems to take Adam quite literally, there's a verse where God names the first humans, male and female, Adam (Genesis 5:2). Adam is also the name for the humans (male and female) created in Genesis 1. So, there's definite biblical precedent for taking Adam as encompassing more than a literal individual.

About the time someone says, "But Adam was formed first, and then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but Eve was,".......

That's where my noggin splits. (Two g's in noggin as it turns out according to spell check....)

 

[Shane Roach]

Few seem to hold to that view, though. Most think that God could have made the world in six days, but the evidence shows that he didn't. This is quite different from thinking the evidence shows that he couldn't.

There's no possible evidence to show what God did or didn't do. I even thought I made mention that the Bible says God makes the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.