Enns, "The Evolution of Adam": A Preliminary Thought

I received Peter Enns’ book “The Evolution of Adam:  What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins” today, and read through the Introduction and the last few chapters. I admire Pete.  His work has helped me a great deal, and though I don’t know him well, I consider him one of my “theological friends.”

There is a great deal of wisdom in Pete’s book on this important and difficult subject.  His Biblical scholarship is clear and sensible.  It seems to me obvious, as Pete describes, that Paul’s use of “Adam” in the New Testament is quite different than what the “original author(s)” of the Genesis 1-4 narratives had in mind.  It also seems to me plain, as Pete describes, that Paul thought of “Adam” as a “literal” first man, and that Paul had no notion at all of a group of early hominids or something along those lines.  A proper hermeneutical appropriation of these texts for our understanding today — a “good reading” — requires us to recognize this and not to read our science into the texts.  At the same time, we cannot in good conscience ignore or rewrite well established empirical findings of the natural sciences.

But I’m going to differ with Pete on the conclusion he draws from this:  he thinks any effort to think of “Adam” as a literal person is ad hoc and doomed, and that the better approach is to think of Paul’s use of Adam merely as an instance of accommodation.  I think that this presents, probably inadvertently, an overly static understanding of “revelation” and an overly mechanical understanding of the relationship between scripture and doctrine.

It seems to me that, although Pete begins to move beyond Reformation polemics by incorporating the New Perspective on Paul, he’s still stuck in a “flat” Reformed conception of the correspondence between scripture and doctrine and the role of “tradition” in forming scriptural interpretation and doctrine.  He employs the category of “accommodation,” but he still seems to assume that “interpretation” is a matter of understanding “what Paul thought” — with necessary adjustments for “accommodation” — and that “doctrine” is just what falls immediately out of one-to-one correspondence with “interpretation.”

But that is not really “spiritual” or “theological” interpretation.  It isn’t just about “what Paul thought,” but how the Church has employed Paul’s texts as the Church lived out its experience in the world.  And it seems to me that we should hear the Church’s strong witness to the belief, as it has reflected on Paul’s texts, that “sin” and “death” are at first rooted in our commonality in the first man, “Adam.”  (This is true of both the Eastern and Western Churches, but of course with differing perspectives on what this means, and of course there are Catholic and Eastern Orthodox scholars today who don’t consider a “literal” Adam important.)  This isn’t “ad hoc”; it’s a recognition that “theology” is much more than just a “plain reading” of the Bible.

It is manifestly true that the Church’s ongoing hermeneutical task — it’s hearing of the texts “ever and again” (to sound like Barth) in light of new knowledge and new experience — requires us to describe the Church’s doctrine in a way that accounts for all such truth.  Doctrine develops in that we continually seek to better understand the fullness of that which has been revealed. And so Pete is right that we today cannot merely say “there was a first man, Adam,” as Paul probably would have said if asked a question about human origins (Paul does not, we should note, ever address such questions directly).

But our job in constructing doctrine and theology is never just to restate “what Paul (or John or Mark or Luke or Peter or Moses or Q or P….) said.”  Our job is to offer the best synthetic descriptions of the mysteries of creation, sin, and redemption that we can muster, without eliding anything we believe is true.

So, I am much more comfortable with synthetic descriptions that take “Adam” as all at once “real person” and “symbol.”  If the modern natural sciences suggest that this “Adam” must have been somehow connected with a larger population of evolving hominids (as it seems strongly to do), that is curious but on reflection not terribly troubling.  The claim is not that “Genesis teaches” or “Paul teaches” or the “Bible teaches” anything about evolving hominids, but neither does Genesis or Paul or the Bible exclude anything about them, because it suggests nothing about them at all. “Hominids” were not on the ancient writers’ and redactors’ radar screens.

What the Church has heard consistently as it has listened to scripture is that the history of “humanity” is marred at its very root, in “Adam.”  What the Church has developed as it has listened to scripture is a metaphysically thick conception of “humanity” that goes beyond yet is rooted in the text of scripture. The idea that we should think of “Adam” as the first “true human,” the first to participate in the Divine life and to enjoy all the faculties of the human “soul,” seems to me most fruitful.  True, this is not exactly what the authors and editors of Genesis 1-4, or Paul, probably had in mind, but it builds through centuries reason and experience with the voice of the Holy Spirit on what Genesis and Paul said.

That is how “theology,” as opposed to “Biblicism,” works.  Pete applies this deftly to inter-testamental hermeneutics and in particular to Paul’s creative appropriation of Genesis 1-4.  Pete is reaching for the same thing with respect to the Church’s theological hermeneutics, but it seems to me that he is always falling back into the box of older Reformed assumptions about scripture’s sufficiency and perspicuity, compounded perhaps by the divide between “Theology” and “Biblical Studies” about the shape and role of Biblical interpretation.  I suggest we need to get beyond those divides to practice “theological” interpretation.