#157 Making sense of Adam, Eve and the Genesis creation story

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#157 Making sense of Adam, Eve and the Genesis creation story

February 16, 2023

Tom Wright joins Justin to answer listener questions on how to interpret the early chapters of Genesis, what he believes about the nature of Adam and Eve, whether suffering and death existed before the fall and much more… He also pulls out the guitar once more for a Genesis-themed song. First broadcast in 2019.

Tom's recommended resources mentioned in this show:

John Walton: 'The Lost World of Genesis One'

Gregory K Beale: 'The Temple and the Church's Mission'

Jon D Levenson: 'Creation and the Persistence of Evil'

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Transcript

Hi there, before we begin today's podcast I want to share an incredibly special resource with you today. If you're like me, life can get pretty hectic pretty quickly, but one thing that helps me slow down is connecting with God in new ways. And I'd like to share a resource that has really helped me do that.

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That's premierinsight.org/resources. The Ask NT Wright Anything podcast. Hello and welcome back to the show where we bring you the thought and theology of NT Wright aka Tom Wright. The show brought to you in partnership as ever with SBCK and NT Wright online.

I'm Justin Briley, head of Premier Unbelievable. And today listen to questions on how to interpret the early chapters of Genesis, what Tom believes about the nature of Adam and Eve, whether suffering and death existed before the fall and much more. Plus Tom will be pulling out the guitar once more for a Genesis themed song if you listen right to the end of today's show.

This was first broadcast in 2019, but we're bringing you some fresh answers to your questions very soon. Thanks to A Dragon, who got in touch to say the only bad thing about this podcast is that I can't yet listen to more episodes. Tom and Justin have had such a large impact on my own theological shifts in recent years.

Wonderful to have a place where hard theological questions can be discussed and presented in such an accessible, thoughtful way. Can't wait to hear more, thank you both. Glad we've been helpful for you.

Do leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast, it helps others to discover the show as well. And for more from the show, do register for our newsletter at our website. Among the many perks of registering is that you get all kinds of bonus material.

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Genesis, Evolution, Admoniv, The Fall, these are the questions that I've brought together for today's podcast, Tom. Of course, in a previous podcast you played for us, that song you composed with. Francis Collins, which I thought has tremendous words, there's a lot of depth to it, but obviously a song can only say so much and so can a podcast at the end of the day.

These are big issues, aren't they? Sure. We'll do our best though. Let's start with George in Mexico.

Thank you for listening from Mexico, George. And he says it's simply the age of question, very sleep put. Is it indispensable in the interest of a strong Christian faith to be able to reconcile the findings of science with the literal interpretation of the Bible? Oh my goodness, two big questions there.

Sometimes say to people, the trouble is you think the jigsaw has pieces of this shape and you're trying to fit them together like that, but actually over time that piece of the jigsaw has got out of shape and so has this piece. So the phrase, the findings of science is always in fact fluid. Every scientific finding is a hypothesis in need of verification and again and again it may take a generation or two, but then along comes Einstein who says actually we're doing it wrong.

Now we'd need to do it like this. And that goes on. And likewise, what do we mean by the literal interpretation? And obviously over the last two centuries, the question of the Bible being quote literally true unquote has been massive, particularly in North America, where a particular strain of rationalism came in with the Enlightenment broadly in the 18th century.

And much of American Christianity seized onto that in a false war, a phony war between people saying it's all rubbish, it's all myth, it's all just made up and other people saying no, it's all literally true. And pinning that onto the idea of the authority of scripture, which comes through in Protestantism ever since the Reformation that if you're challenging the authority of the Pope or the church, well what you've got instead, well it's the Bible. So the Bible must be literally true, otherwise we don't know what to believe.

And then so the Protestant emphasis on the Bible comes together with the Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism and you got a big problem, especially when then Epicurean scientists like Erasmus Darwin, Charles' grandfather, are saying we've got to look at the way the world makes itself, which is ancient Epicureanism with a modern twist. And then Charles Darwin eventually gets on a boat and discovers some turtles and finches and so on, bingo, got it, this is how it all works, sort of. But then the new thing there is the survival of the fittest, and people forget that what that means is like the idea of monkeys typing Shakespeare, and you've got to imagine really rather a lot of near misses.

So for evolution to work you have to stretch it out of a massive millennia, and the ancient Epicureans saw this as well as the modern ones, it's not a modern idea. But this is where the idea of evolutionary development, which I think most modern Christians would happily accept in some way or form, gets hooked up with a modern idea of progress that actually this is where everything is progressing. And therefore we the scientists are telling you the way the world is, we're telling you the way history is going.

That's where the problem comes, because actually science doesn't do that, and actually in order is a so-called literal interpretation of Genesis either. And very often when we're talking about the quote-unquote literal interpretation of Genesis, we're talking about the very early chapters, and we're talking about the creation narrative. And in that sense, this is a question from me rather than a listener, though I think a lot of listeners will be asking this question, is simply if in a nutshell you were asked to say to someone who's confused, how am I supposed to read Genesis if it's not a scientific description of how the world came to be? What is it I am reading? There are several layers, and we loosely refer to it as poetry, and of course it isn't poetry in the sense that it isn't composed in the same way as say the Psalms are.

It doesn't have that kind of verse structure. But it's poetic in the sense that as only poetry can, it's saying three or four or five things at the same time. And my friend and colleague John Walton from Wheaton College has written very helpful on this in terms of the ancient Near Eastern world that forms the context within which the world is not.

The context within which Genesis would have meant what it meant. The lost world of Genesis, I think is right. That's right.

He's written several books and a commentary on Genesis, I think two commentaries on Genesis, if I remember rightly. And part of the point there is that this description of something being created in six stages ending with an image being put into it is the creation of a temple. The image being humankind.

In Genesis one, yes, if you create something, this structure which is a heaven and earth structure, which it is, and if the last thing to go in is an image, and then the God who's made it takes his rest, that's coming in to take possession. This is now God's home. This is where he wants to be with his human creatures.

And so it's a way of saying, look at the whole creation, the way we look at a temple. And then it also means turning it round, look at the temple in Jerusalem as a microcosm of the whole creation. And certainly the decoration of the temple indicates that as in the tabernacle and the wilderness as well.

So that suddenly a whole world of cosmology has opened up, which has got nothing whatever to do with were these six periods of 24 hours. Now actually most British Christians, and I think most Christians around the world, don't get hung up on the six periods of 24 hours in the way that some Americans still feel they have to. And it's a shame.

It's because that major event happened in American culture, the scopes trial. Was it 1929? Something like that. It was somewhere around there.

Which nobody else could have had that. Flexing their theological muscles. And everyone wanted to know what was going to happen about this because it was sort of, are we going to be in the modern world or the ancient world with all sorts of overtones? That was a very America specific thing.

And I never tire of saying this because these questions regularly come from American people often don't realize how peculiar that context is. That needs demystify. Yes, the cultural context often determines the kinds of questions people are asking.

But here's some actually from Surrey, Derby and Romania, other places, who were asking related questions. And particularly to do with how did, what are the results of the fall if there is a long evolutionary process involving death and decay and so on. So I'll just read all three of these.

They're asking similar questions. Malcolm in Surrey says, it's said that creation and evolution are not in conflict, simply different ways of describing the same thing. But whereas creation teaches that death came into the world through sin, evolution teaches that death was in existence from the beginning, can that circle be squared? If not, is the gospel message invalidated? Ada in Romania says, I don't know how to view creation in terms of the understanding we now have of science.

Evolution again implies death, suffering, fear, survival of the fittest, etc. How does this match with Paul's teachings that, through sin, death has entered the world. And again, death came into the world through a man.

But also with God's declaration of the goodness of the initial creation. And finally, Jamie in Derby, who says, you believe that heaven is a restoration of the heavens and earth. It was originally in the beginning.

You also believe in millions of years of evolution. What we see in the fossil record is millions of years of bloodshed, cancer, disease, suffering and death. So according to your worldview, all that horror existed before sin.

What exactly will a restored earth be like? And what exactly was the physical punishment for sin if all of that existed before sin? Sorry to be blunt, but your worldview doesn't seem to add up. So it's Jamie. Yeah, clearly there are again, if I spoke before about two pieces of visual puzzles, about ten there.

And they're all in need of cleaning up. And I'm not necessarily the right person or the best person to do all of that cleaning up. However, it does seem to me that I take the point completely.

If there is a long period before that primal pair of hominids find that some strange force or power or presence that they were only dimly aware of seems to be saying to them, you are special, I've got a job for you to do. That rather does imply, and many theologians have said this, precisely that the call of, call them out of any of the sake of argument, is itself the creators act of saying, now there's been a lot of mess and muddle and decay and so on, but now we're going to have a garden and this is going to work out thus and so. And they are called to be God's agents and instruments, to bring his wise order into this creation, which has hitherto been without form and void, Tohua Beum.

When they then rebel, this is at a different level as it were, so that there is, yes, decay and death in the fossil record in trees and plants and dinosaurs, whatever. But when they are told on the day that you eat of it, you will die. There is something else going on there, a different level which I think may correspond in some ways, though I've not really worked this out, to what you get in the book of Revelation when it talks about the first death and the second death, that there may be different levels, different meanings of death, and that Paul is definitely looking at the second one.

But the other thing we have to realise there is that as with Genesis 1 and the temple, so with Genesis 3, if we assume as most people do that, the Pentateuch is being edited, at least during the Babylonian exile, and it's seen as a whole so that there's a narrative arc from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy, clearly the end of Deuteronomy is saying, if, here is the law given to Israel, if you obey, you will live, if you disobey, you will die, and what will die mean, it will mean exile, the curse of exile, Deuteronomy 27, 8 and 9, picked up at the end of Leviticus 18 as well, and then there is the prospect of restoration, but that's how the narrative works. And so anyone in Babylon, in the Jewish community, in sort of the middle of the first millennium BC, writing or reading or editing Genesis 3 would say, we know exactly what the story is about. Here's of how you were given a task, given a lovely land to live in, told to be responsible, who blew it, disobeyed, and they get kicked out, and that is the ultimate death, because how can you sing the Lord's song in a strange land? In other words, this is already an allegory of Israel, or vice versa, Israel is to be seen as acting out what's happened to all the human race.

So you've got these different bits of the great Jewish story jangling against one another, and until you've put all that back together again, it's hard, as it were, to put the different elements into a rationalistic scheme and say, well, Paul says death entered, so how are you going to do that? So I'm not saying that solves the problem, in a sense it complexifies it further, but I think it's a healthy complexity, which then enables us to say that there are levels of death, that God's choice of the humans was in order precisely to bring new life and coherence to the chaos that we were born, that when they messed up, this was the beginning of a new level of death, which then had to have a new sort of injection of life, that the work of the ultimate human Jesus has to do what Adam and Eve were supposed to do, but also to rescue them in the process. And that I think is why Romans 5, 12 to 21, is such an incredibly difficult and dense passage. Paul is saying all of that at the same time.

Right, well, let's talk about that again from a different perspective. Robin Downderry asks, what is Genesis 3, by which I assume he means the sort of passage about the fall of Adam and Eve, the rebellion, trying to tell us about a fundamental fracture between God and man. Why does Western theology in particular appear to traditionally focus on the fall and the curse? Why would God curse and banish a mankind that was created in love and blessing? About 20 years ago, maybe even more, maybe 30 years ago, there was an American called Matthew Fox, who was actually a Dominican, except the Order then didn't like him anymore, and I think he became an Episcopalian, actually, as many do.

And he wrote a book called Original Blessing, which was kind of an answer to original sin. And he was basically a new age proponent who used to go and stay up with the community at Fintoorn, up in Northern Scotland, and so on. And it was an odd mixture.

I once did a television program with him, one to other people. And it was an odd mixture of bits of genuine Christianity, with bits of extraordinary new age stuff from, it must have been the 80s, actually. And there the emphasis was, the Western church, ever since Augustine, has been fixated on sin and curse and death and odour and how do we get out of that.

But in fact, creation was always wonderful and good. The danger with rejecting the dualism is that you buy into a monism, where, as with other forms of monism like stoicism, it's very hard to have any critique of evil at all. If there's anything you don't like in the world, in other people, in yourself, then as Epictetus says, the door stands open, you're free to leave.

In other words, stoics commit suicide, if they don't like the way things are. It's fine to be an original blessing person when the sun is shining in your family being nice to you and you've got money in the bank. For most of humans, for some of the time and some humans most of the time, is not actually like that.

And so most humans, most of the time, are faced with the question, well, yes, there are great good impulses, but things have gone horribly wrong. It's like, people say, well, I can't believe because of the problem of evil, but if you're an atheist, you have the problem of good. Why would anything seem other than random if you're a complete atheist? And Dawkins, I suppose, would say it's atavistic impulses of remembering hunting rituals from when we were in the trees and so on.

The things which seem good to us are really related to those primal instincts or something like that, I'm carrying a tiring. So I want to say, yes, God created the world and he created it good, but the goodness was never static. It was always, Genesis 1 is the beginning of a project.

It's not a tableau. This is really, really important. So that in the New Testament, it isn't a matter of saying, let's go back to the garden.

I can say a famous song by Joni Mitchell, I've got to get back to the garden. No, where the garden was the beginning, the garden was God's project, which turned into a city. Was it meant to turn into a city when Cain built a city? Isn't that interesting? The Tower of Babel says, no, Book of Revelation says, well, yes, actually, but not like that.

So it isn't the Tower of Babel humans reaching up to God. The New Jerusalem comes down from heaven to earth. So the garden is meant to be the beginning of a community which turns into the garden city.

The danger is that it turns into a city which is purely human arrogance, etc. And those are the images we ought to be looking at because those are the things which say, yes, to the goodness of creation, no to all that's infected and corrupted it. And now, where is this going to go? What is the New World towards the terrain? Hi there.

Before we go any further, I want you to know about a very special ebook we're releasing this month called Critical Race Theory and Christianity. This ebook draws from two unbelievable podcasts with Neil Shenvie, Rassselberry, Owen Strann and Jermaine Marshall addressing questions like, has so-called woke ideology taken over parts of the church? Or is white privilege a problem in the church? And is critical race theory compatible with the gospel? I'd love for you to have a copy of this powerful ebook as my special thanks to you for your gift to Premier Insight today. The ministry that brings you this podcast each week.

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That's premier insight.org/give. And don't forget to download our newest ebook, Critical Race Theory and Christianity as my special thank you. Henry asks, did sin come into the world through Adam? Satan was already present and along with him sin, if God is going to finally deal with Satan and annihilate him, why didn't he do this before he created Adam? I suppose I want to go to another facet of that, which is, but what do you conceive is what happened when that fall, whatever form it took, that rebellion happened. What did that sow into creation and how, is that something that is responsible for the physical attributes, this creation that is subject to decay as well as it puts it? Yes, in a sense, I want to say the creation was before the call of these two hominids was already decaying and going through a cycle.

I had that nature. But the human project was to take it from there and move it into the new way that God intended to be. It's very difficult to cash out Genesis 3 into any other sorts of propositions.

Whichever things one does, there will be elements missing, and this is a course notorious. But I do want to say that the early pair, if they were a pair, and I don't much mind if there were exactly two of them, but you know what I mean? The early hominids who were given this vocation are thereby given a call to worship the Creator and reflect His wise stewardship into the world. And somehow there is something, there is this tree in inverted commas and this snake in inverted commas, which say there are other possibilities here.

Do you have to do this? And I wouldn't go all the way into the traditional "free will" defense, unquote, as though we had to have freedom in order for it to work. But something like that needs to be said along with all the other things that are going on. And part of the rationale of why there's a snake seems to be that in the lavish, extraordinary creation that God made, you know, once you get away from sort of thinking of God, simply with these six periods saying, "I'm going to do this, now I'm going to do that, now I'm going to do that," end of conversation, once you move with something like John Polkingorn into a much more open idea of God, there we say, experimenting, God's saying, "Let's do giraffes, why not?" Let's do pineapples.

You just have to think around creation a bit and you have to say God was having fun with this stuff, but out of all of that God is a much more unpredictable God. The danger is that I think ever since particularly the dayism of the 17th and 18th century, we tend to see God as the clockmaker, as the one who's made a machine that ought to work, and if it isn't working, it's his fault for making it wrong. And I think that's a fundamentally wrong view of God.

I mean, coming back to Henry's question where he asked sort of about the role of Satan in all this, and I have heard others speak of the idea of a sort of fall before the fall, which at some level proceeds and I've heard the illusions speak of that as being the thing that creates the nature of the universe into which Adam and Eve are this project of restoration. I'm not sure about the word nature, but there's some sense in which a cosmic fall, you know, I forget the exact reference in Scripture, but where we only have a very brief mention of it, but the idea that there was an angelic rebellion. Yeah, it's a beginning of Genesis 6, when the Watchers, you know, and this is where some of Milton comes from and so on, the rebellious angels who get crossed because it seems that God is going to make these human beings who are going to be his primary agents, and these angels think, "Hey, that's not fair.

We ought to be that." There is enough in Scripture about that, in some of the Psalms as well actually, for one to say something like that seems to be there, what we have to have again and again with Scripture is appropriate hermeneutical humility. This doesn't mean that we can't know things. It means that we just may not have very good language for this, and I think they were as aware of that as we are.

Just like we today, we talk about there seem to be some forces on leisure. You look back at the history of the 20th century and you say, "In the 1930s, there just seemed to be demonic forces unleashed." I have no idea what that phrase actually means, but what we are saying is, more was going on here than simply the sum total of a few wicked human beings, something else was at work, rather like Scott Peck says in his book, People of the Lie, that there is a certain amount that humans just do by messing up, but then there is another dimension beyond that. It seems to me that to project that back onto early cosmology, cautiously is quite a wise thing to do because Scripture does seem to be doing that.

And that doesn't exactly explain why there is a snake in the garden, but I think you have to say something about the freedom of God and God's lavish letting be. God's saying, "Let there be this, let there be that." And the things that God says, "Let there be to are not puppets." There is a sense in which God doesn't control them, like the author of a novel. Does and doesn't control the characters? If the author of a novel tries to control the characters too much, be a very bad novel.

Yes. Let's get a last question in from Estrummond in Texas, and I think this does fall into the sort of whole freewill sort of question, but Estrummond says, "One question I have never found an answer, nor have seen disgust among theologians," and I did study theology and philosophy, in regards Adam and Eve's fall. And he says he understands the Bible passage may be allegorical, but how could their disobedience be a punishable sin if they were created pure and couldn't tell the difference between a good and evil before committing the sin? If they committed the sin willingly, it means they chose evil over good and could already tell the difference.

If they did it ignorally and couldn't differentiate good from evil, then God would have been unfair in his judgment. The only logical answer, in my view, according to the story of Genesis is that they already knew good and evil. Yeah.

This is a cleverly argued little bit of sort of philosophical speculation, and as an exegete, as a historian, I'm always wary when theologians or philosophers say, "This must have meant or would have been," or whatever, because I want to say, hang on, what is being smuggled in here? And I would want to take that whole paragraph and just gently unpick it and say, "We sure about these moves here." Because when somebody addresses you and says, "I love you, you are my people, I want to reflect myself through you into my world," then this isn't, "Oh, now we have a sort of a moral index of what good and evil means." It means, "Oh, wow, you are amazing. We are your people. We bask in that.

How delightful." And the giving of a command, or a prohibition, implies something about, "This is what you ought to do, obviously." And you could stand back from that and say, "Well, hang on, I'm going to be a philosopher for a minute, and this means you're teaching me a bit about good and evil, doesn't it?" But if they haven't got any such idea yet, it says, "Okay, that's what you want us to do." But then guess what? There's some other way which is impinging upon us. And I think the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis is just one of those very, very profound things. I don't think it's, "Oh, yes, I know that there is a difference between good and evil." I think it's actually a knowing by experience.

We have now found out what the difference is. That good is life. And evil means darkness and exile and curse.

So I think the knowledge of good and evil is not just a head knowledge. "Oh, yeah, we've got this index and we understand that there is something called good." I think it's, now you'll know what it's really all about. It's the sort of experiential sort of... Like C.S. Lewis says somewhere about somebody who climbs up to a high diving board, says, "You want to know what a 50 meter thing, a dive is all about.

Wait until you're standing there, then you'll know what it's really all about." Well, thank you very much. Again, a lot of ground covered there in various different ways. Just before we finish up, you mentioned John Walton, as possibly a good place to start exploring these issues.

Any other recommendations for people who want to get the head around the whole way to put Genesis together and the full and everything else with it? I mean, I have been very struck in the last five or six years, well, the last ten years, really, by this whole business of temple theology in Genesis. Gregory Beal's book, The Temple and the Church's Mission, starts off with some of that and develops it in terms of forward-looking way, sitting back to creation. The Church's mission is to be the temple of God in the world, for the world against the day of the new creation, et cetera.

That's been very helpful. John Levinson, the Jewish Studies Professor at Harvard, who's a remarkable Jewish scholar. He has a book whose title is just "Slipping My Mind" but you can say it's a record- I will let people know what it is.

I'm sorry, this is just sheer old age kicking in, plus the fact that I got up very early this morning. I think it's creation and the persistence of evil. But that is a very sensitive and interesting Jewish reading of not any Genesis but what follows from it.

Well, I will make sure that listeners have the correct title. And where to get hold of it. By the end of today's program for the moment.

Tom, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much.

[Music] I hope you found today's show helpful. But don't hang up on us yet, something special coming up in just a moment that you won't want to miss. Just a reminder, there's a link with today's show where you can register for our newsletter.

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[Music] Tom, we've got another song from you. Always enjoy this part of the show where we get to hear something from the playbook of Tom Wright. This is something you've come up with again with a friend of yours, Francis Collins, who was the well-known Christian scientist, and another co-author on the show.

My friend Brian Walsh. I wrote the first three verses of this. I had had the beginning of this song in my head for a year or two.

It goes to the tune of Bob Dylan's song "Shelter from the Storm," which ought to be played in E major, but my voice won't do that anymore, so I'm going to play it in C, just out of it. Because Brian Walsh is, as well as the theologian, is a great Dylan fan, I sent Brian the first three or four verses and said, "What do you think about this?" And blow me by email back came another verse, which I then fiddle around with. And then I sent them all to Francis.

Francis wrote a special last verse for the Biologos conference, which was coming up. That doesn't really fit with how I'm doing it now, but so it was like a lot of things in life, a rich collaboration. Sounds like the next Crosby, Stills and Nash.

It's Wright Collins. And Walsh, yes, yes. But it tells the story of salvation from one or two unusual angles and kind of gets them scrunched up together a bit.

And had its first airing, did you say at the Missio Alliance conference? I think it had its first airing at a Biologos conference in Houston a couple of years ago, and then I doctored it a bit and then did it at the Missio Alliance. Anyway, let's hear it. Okay, and the harmony of Shelter from the Storm is actually quite basic, so there's not much guitaring, it's just... Okay.

"When Cain had married a local girl, as they always knew he would, and Seth was running the family farm and Abel was gone for good, then Eve shook ahead and to Adam she said as they planted out the corn, with a family to feed, but what we need is a new world to be born. When Cain had built him a city, as they always knew he might, and they planned a tower right up to the sky so the top would be out of sight, then Adam sighed and to Eve replied as they faced the neighbours scorn. A city means greed, but what we need is a new world to be born.

When Noah decided to build him a boat and collect a floating zoo, and it rained so hard that they called out the guard, but it was nothing they could do, then Adam thought back to the snake and the grass on that innocent sunny morn, and he muttered to Eve, "We've got to believe there's a new world to be born." Now Abraham had no family and he'd left his city behind, and against all the odds he trusted in God not knowing what he would find. Then Sarah heard the voice of Eve, a whispering in her ear, "It may sound funny, but never mine honey, the new world starts right here." The new world's born in blood and pain and the birth pangs are severe. When Jesus calmed the angry storm we knew that it was near.

As Eve stood weeping by the city wall and the temple veil was torn, they watched him die with one last cry so the new world could be born. So then the grave burst open and Adam sang in praise. All creatures heard the good news and their victory song they raised.

On that Sunday morning early they blew the jubilee horn with the death of death and the spirit's breath the new world has been born. One day the holy city will come down from heaven to earth, a vast unnumbered family to proclaim the world's rebirth. The lambs drew bright with gates flung wide to welcome the bright new dawn.

The slaves set free and fresh leaves on the tree, the new world has been born.

[Music]