CTR n.s.

l 0/2 (Spring 2013) 75-82

A LITERAL AND HISTORICAL
ADAM AND EVE?
REFLECTIONS ON THE WORK
OF PETER ENNS
Walter C. Kaiser, Jr.
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, MA
I. INTRODUCTION
T h e traditional form of biblical teaching on the origins of humanity can
be succinctly summarized by the Wheaton College mandatory creed
which states:
God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the
entire human race.1
Now while this confession is straightforward and fundamental to
historic Christianity, it has been much easier to affirm until atheist-
tumed-Evangelical Christian Francis S. Collins wrote his 2006 bestseller
The Language o f God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief2 Prior to
completing this book, Collins had successfully led one of the most
phenomenal research endeavors since the Manhattan project at the
University of Chicago towards the middle of the twentieth century. In
2003, he and his team finished mapping out several billions of DNA
bases of all genes that determine human heredity. Hence, as one of the
1See the full statement at http://www.wheaton.edu/About-Wheaton/Statement-of-Faith
and-Educational-Purpose, accessed February 1, 2013.
2Francis S. Collins, The Language o f God: A Scientist Presents Evidence f or Belief
(New York: Free Press, 2006).
Criswell Theological Review 76
most eminent scientists of our day who also holds to both a creationist
and a Darwinian evolutionary point of view, Collins insisted on having
God as a Creator who oversaw the process of natural selection. He later
became the founder of BioLogos Foundation in San Diego in 2007, as
well as the BioLogos blog, to promote the view known as theistic
evolution. Collins, for his part, argues that the scientific results of the
genome project indicate that todays humans emerged anatomically from
our primate ancestors somewhere around 100,000 years ago, instead of
originating from a basic population of two individuals named Adam and
Eve. Therefore, there were approximately 10,000 individuals who gave
rise to the human race, not just two! Eventually Collins then resigned
from his role as head of BioLogos in order to accept the appointment in
2009 as the new director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in
Washington D.C.
Needless to say, these proposals presented a huge paradigm shift for
theologians and biblical exegetes to address, especially in light of the
confessional creeds of the Christian Church. Creeds such as the
Apostles Creed, which affirmed: I believe in God the Father, Maker of
heaven and earth... would need to be, at the very least, nuanced quite a
bit, if the interpretations of the findings of the genome project as
advocated by these scientists were verified and applied.
All of a sudden there emerged a number of new challenges to the
biblical record as a result of the genome project and the implications
some were deriving from it were many. Was a creation of humanity
unique? What did it mean that these humans bore the image of God?
What were we to think now of the doctrine of original sin if there was a
multi-genesis of persons? Had some of that large group managed to
escape sinning while others had not? Did death and evil come on all
creation as a result of the sins of this group, or was it limited just to
certain members of the human race as a result of those who sinned like
Adam had? Was there a real fall into sin in Eden or had theologians
merely concocted that story? Did Jesus genealogy recorded in Luke
really go back to a real Adam, or was that part of the theological myth as
well? And what shall we say about St. Pauls teaching that linked the
one man Adam with the one man Christ in Romans 5:12-19 and 1
Corinthians 15:20-23, 42-49? Was his analogy contrived out of whole
cloth or had we missed what he meant to teach all these years?
These concerns can come more rapidly than we are able to consider
them, but at the heart of the debate is the controlling issue which a South
Carolina pastor named Richard Phillips identified when he said: The
hermeneutics behind theistic evolution, he warned, are a Trojan horse
that, once inside our gates, must cause the entire fortress of Christian
belief to fall. So what is it about the biblical hermeneutics of this group
that is so damaging? Indeed this is a timely question and it would be best
to take each hermeneutical issue one at a time. So here we will address
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Walter C. Kaiser: A Literal and Historical Adam and Eve?
certain charges that are leveled against the belief in an historical or actual
Adam and Eve.
II. FIRST CHARGE: LITERALISM IS NOT AN OPTION FOR
INTERPRETING GENESIS 1AND 2 OR AN ADAM OR EVE
The first part of this charge is the first of Nine Theses that Peter
Enns takes up in the conclusion to his recent book The Evolution o f
Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesnt Say about Human Origins?
Enns boldly affirms that
One cannot read Genesis literally - meaning as a literally accurate
description of physical, historical reality - in view of the state of
scientific knowledge today and our knowledge of ancient Near
Eastern stories of origins.4
Enns goes on to warn that those who choose to read Genesis literally will
either have to ignore the evidence completely or present alternative
theories in order to keep spiritual stability. As he pictures the issue, it is
just such literalism that ends up exposing the Bible to ridicule, even
though its defenders fully intend instead to protect the Scriptures by
adhering to a literal narrative. Perhaps, Enns muses, this is why so many
thoughtful and informed persons end up rejecting the Bible because they
eventually perceive those who adopt a literalistic stance to be advocating
nonsense when it comes to cosmological topics.
What smacks of triumphalism in this is Enns statement about how
the text cannot be read from a literal point of view. In laying this
principle down as a presupposition, he expects the text of Scripture itself
to be adjusted to other outside sources or norms. But even as he makes
this move, he also tells us just what were the commonly agreed-upon
similarities that Genesis shared with the Babylonian creation story found
in the Enuma Elishx which is one of the two qualifiers, he claims, that has
arisen in recent times to caution us against reading the text as presenting a
real happening or event.5
Surprisingly, in this Babylonian Near Eastern myth, he finds six
common themes with Genesis: (1) matter exists independently of the
divine spirit with order coming in Genesis out of chaos, (2) darkness
preceded creation, (3) Genesis uses the word tehom, the deep, which
originated with the name of the goddess Tiamat, (4) light exists before the
creation of the sun, moon and stars, (5) in the Enuma Elish, Marduk
3Peter Enns. The Evolution o f Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesnt Say about
Human Origins (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2012). My copy is an e-book, so the page
numbers are not available, but this chapter is called Conclusion.
4Ibid.
5See Enns, chp. 3.
Criswell Theological Review 78
fillets slain Tiamats body to keep the waters from escaping just as the
Genesis firmament did with its so-called solid dome as it performed the
same duty in Scripture, and (6) the sequence of the days of creation were
similar with the creation of the firmament, dry land, luminaries and
humanity coming in that order.6
Now while some may think these parallels are formidable, Enns list
is actually quite startling in light of the work done as far back in time as
1942 by the Lutheran scholar at the Oriental Institute of the University of
Chicago, Alexander Heidel. He offered several observations, which have
come, by now, to be widely accepted by a large number of Old Testament
writers in the field. For example, there is an enormous difficulty in
explaining how we can bring a feminine Babylonian word over into
Hebrew un-augmented by any sufformative elements or decipher how the
gutturral h got into the middle of Hebrew tehom. These contingencies
have never been explained philologically, nor can they be.7 Also Kenneth
Kitchen called the identification and derivation of tehom from Tiamat as a
complete fallacy, noting that this word in Hebrew for the deep , tehom,
was a common Semitic word as could be shown by its presence in
Ugaritic from the early second millennium B.C.8Yet this was supposed to
be the alleged clue that showed how the Genesis narrative derived its
content from another Near Eastern story. And when this building stone
collapsed, there was a quiet disaffection for this thesis among most
scholars.
Likewise, the caricature argument for the Hebrew word raqia'
rendered firmament also fell away, because it actually meant something
like an extended platform, while the ideas of a solid or hard dome came
from the pictures derived from the Latin Vulgate firmamentum or the
Greek Septuagint stereoma rather than any meanings of the Hebrew
term.9 This is why scholars like Laird Harris had shown years ago that the
so-called triple-decker universe was an invention out of whole cloth and
did not exist in the Bible.
Consequently, these apparent parallels are not as common to both
fields as Enns assumes. So if these alleged similarities are among the
reasons prompting him to read Genesis in a way that departs from the
authors own use of his own terms in his own day, then it is time to
rethink that whole thesis. The entire basis for finding similarities must be
reinvestigated, for Enns current projections do not provide the grounds
most had alleged it would.
6Ibid.
7Alexander H. Heidel, Babylonian Genesis! 2nd edition (Chicago: Phoenix Books,
1963), 119.
8Kenneth A. Kitchen, Ancient Orient and the Old Testament (London: Tyndale Press,
1966), 89-90.
9See R. Laird Harris, Bible and Cosmology, Bulletin o f the Evangelical Theological
Society,_5 (1962), 11-17. Also see W. C. Kaiser, Jr., The Literary Form of Genesis 1-11,
in New Perspectives on the Old Testament, ed. J. Barton Payne (Waco, TX., Word Books,
1970), 57.
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Walter C. Kaiser: A Literal and Historical Adam and Eve?
That being said then with regard to Enns, the question that remains
for the Bible reader and scholar face is: How does the author who wrote
this material want to be understood? After all, if we expect others to
show us the courtesy of hearing us out first before making a judgment
about what we had to say, then we should offer the same kindness to the
writers of Scripture. This assumes as well that unless indicated by a clue
in our speech or writing that we intend a multiple meaning in our words
in this case, we should assume that we have a single meaning intended.
Early on, this principle of interpretation was called originalism.
Multiple meanings (or as one Bible teacher, who went even further off the
track, put it, every Biblical passage has an infinite number of
meanings), could not be given for any one given passage if language was
still going to communicate an understandable message. But that is what
Enns insists on doing. He wants to say that the words in the Genesis
passages have several meanings. Yet that raises the question: which one
is true? Which one did the author who stood in the council of God intend
to say was Gods authoritative communication to humanity? To say all
meanings are true is to make the Holy Spirit stutter and to leave us having
to make a choice as to which meaning we prefer.
III. SECOND CHARGE: THE APOSTLE PAUL
GOT IT WRONG AS WELL
Adam plays a major part not only in the creation story, but also in
St. Pauls letters, particularly in Romans 5:12-21 and 1 Corinthians
15:20-58. Even Enns acknowledges that Paul seems to regard Adam as
the first human being and ancestor of everyone who ever lived. 10 This,
Enns continues, is a particularly vital point in Romans, where Paul
regards Adams disobedience as the cause of universal sin and death from
which humanity is redeemed through the obedience of Christ.11 That,
Enns agrees, settles the issue of an historical Adam for a good number of
Christians. And so it should, for Enns has so far read the Scriptures
correctly just as the writer who wrote them meant them to be understood.
Apparently though, it does not settle the matter for all believers
because Enns warns that Pauls account is not as straightforward as it
seems on the face of it. In fact, confides Enns, Pauls Adam is not a
result of a straight reading of Genesis or the Old Testament. 12 Paul, as
a first century Jew and along with many of his contemporaries, assumed a
unique view of the world on cosmic and human origins. It is against this
background, then, that Pauls view of Adam must be read, for the way
New Testament writers and others read the Old Testament involved both
10Enns, Understanding Pauls Adam, in Evolution o f Adam, especially chapter 7.
11Ibid.
,2See Enns full defense of this idea in chapters 5-6.
Criswell Theological Review 80
creativity and an argument for a plurality of senses or meanings to any
one given text apart from any signals in the text advocated.
For example, St. Paul handled the Old Testament in a creative way,
which was influenced by the new practices of Second Temple Judaism.13
Thus Paul was not doing straight exegesis of the Adam story. Rather,
he was subordinating Adams ancient story to the present day with the
higher reality of the risen Christ taking precedence. But then all of a
sudden it turns out that Enns sees Paul as assigning a role to Adam that
was largely unique to Paul in the ancient world, thereby in this instance
not according to second temple Judaisms practices after all! Instead,
Paul in the book of Romans, was forced by the reality of the risen Christ
to ...mine Scripture for ways of explicating this in-breaking of the
resurrection of Christ as the New Testaments remedy for humanitys
predicament of the sin of all humanity.
In a sense, it is as if Enns is presenting Pauls reflections about Adam
along these lines; if only Adam could be read as the first human, then
this would support my argument about the universal plight and remedy
for humanity. What this means for Enns is that while Adam as a subject
helped Paul make his point, he was not an essential part of his argument
and thus his historicity is inconsequential. This explains, as Enns
continues, why Adam is so important for Christian theology, yet he is
surprisingly and relatively absent [from] explicit reference[s] in the
Old Testament.
This claim is somewhat intriguing because Enns does acknowledge
that Adam is represented in Genesis as the first human and the ancestor of
all who come after him. Still it becomes even more perplexing when
Enns places that reading alongside a number of other meanings. For
example, Proverbs 3:18 with its reference to the tree of life is another
Adam story, for in it Adam is the one who failed to fear God because he
partook of the fruit and thereby failed to attain maturity. As such, this
Adam becomes a wisdom story for every Israelite, who likewise need
to choose between the path of wisdom or the path of foolishness.14Taking
it a step further, this wisdom story and the Pauline story may inform each
other as seen in 1 Corinthians 1:30, where the wisdom that Adam and Eve
originally lacked is amply supplied by an act of God who says, All the
treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden in Christ.
The problem remaining for Enns though, is that he reads Scripture in
a novel way by using second temple practices from the first Christian
century, and then supplements this approach with current statements of
modern science. Combined, these sources act as his grid which
ultimately guides him to cut loose from the ancient meanings of the
human authors of Scripture. And the final result is that he sees biblical
13Ibid., chapter 6.
14Ibid.
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Walter C. Kaiser: A Literal and Historical Adam and Eve?
texts as being capable of conveying multiple senses that often depart from
the original meaning of the initial writers.
IV. THIRD CHARGE: SCIENTIFIC AND BIBLICAL MODELS
OF HUMAN ORIGINS ARE INCOMPATIBLE BECAUSE
THEY SPEAK DIFFERENT LANGUAGES
With regard to this last accusation, it must be conceded that the level
of discourse and terminology used in the two models or disciplines of
theology and science is quite different to be sure. But this is a separate
issue from asking whether these fields can accurately describe happenings
or events in the real world or not. No one wants to attribute to the writer
of Genesis a type of sophistication that somehow transposes his words
into a scientific code. Nor is it a fact that when ordinary people use the
word historical to describe the events and persons in the Garden of
Eden are they intending the same science of historiography used by
professional historians today. Rather, this use of historical simply
means that actual and real happenings are intended without placing any
more nuanced associations with the word. In that sense then, both the
writer of Genesis and the modem day scientist may both understand that
they are addressing an event that really happened, but one describes it in
terms of a usus loquendi (i.e., in an ordinary spoken usage), and another
uses words that are part of the academic discipline represented.
Peter Enns, however, attempts to merge evolution with Adam in an
attempt to preserve what he feels is at the heart of Pauls teaching on
Adam from the Bible. So what is dropped is the literality of the creation
accounts in favor of the alleged scientific data. It is thought that this
process, as Enns sees it, would end up saying something like this: Adam
and Eve were two hominids or [more preferably] symbolic of a group of
hominids with whom, at some point in evolutionary development, God
entered into a relationship. At this point God endowed them with his
image, thus making them conscious of God...
But Enns correctly sees problems even with this formulation. The
Bible, instead, has a sudden and recent creation of humanity, not a
gradual evolution over millions of years. Moreover, that formulation is
an ad hoc account of creation; it is not the biblical way of recounting the
narrative. Enns also feels it presses the image of God into service that
is not indicated in the text of Genesis because it does not say that at some
point God endowed the hominids with an awareness of himself or his
image.
Enns point is that all attempts to reconcile the two different sources
for the story of creation are impossible since they each speak a different
language. The two creation stories of Genesis and science cannot be
merged. Consequently, Enns argues that just because the Bible considers
Adam to be the progenitor of humanity does not mean we need to find
Criswell Theological Review
82
some way to maintain this view within the evolutionary scheme.15 Yet it
must be highlighted that at this point, Enns is assuming that the genome
project has conclusively proven that similarity between the genes of
humanity and those of chimpanzees, for example, prove descent from
primates to humans. And a large part of this argument rested on the
presence of junk genes that showed no current purpose in humans.
However, the ENCORE study has now concluded that this deduction was
incorrect as well, for now the junk genes are 100% effective in their role.
So what we discover is that Enns, along with too many other
evangelicals, has prematurely concluded that evolution is now a
demonstrated fact, and that evangelical interpreters of the Bible need to
recognize this before we look as foolish as some are depicted to be at the
famous Scopes Monkey trial.
V. CONCLUSION
The overall point to keep in mind amidst this discussion is that
nothing science can produce will ever intimidate those who hold to the
position that when Scripture is judged from the viewpoint of the original
authors and is interpreted in accordance with their own words and
narration of events, it will not conflict with a correct understanding of the
scientific data. This does not mean that various theories of scientists and
proposed interpretations of biblical exegetes may not clash, but the facts
all belong to God as do the Scripture. Thus there is no room for conflict
when all the facts are known and properly understood. So as a final
admonition, it is imperative that both the record of Scripture and
scientific research be carefully received because the true difficulty does
reside in the interpretations given to each of the records. That is where we
must proceed with more caution and patience.
15This idea is what drives Enns to the nine theses that he constructs at the end of his
book.
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