CRUDE SAID:
If I were to interpret the fall of Adam as a real historical fall - but viewed the fall as having happened to a group of humans rather than just one - am I making Adam into a myth?
What if I interpret the fall as the fall of a man and a woman, but who weren’t the singular parents of humanity - say, there was some breeding with those they were interfertile with (or perhaps their offspring did)? Myth?
Mind you, I imagine someone could argue that both of these interpretations are wrong. But would they be full-blown myth if they affirm that what Genesis describes is a real fall?
Let’s begin by defining our terms. Here’s a sympathetic definition by a renown theologian and literary critic:
A traditional narration which relates to events that happened at the beginning of time and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of men of today and, in a general manner, establishing all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in his world. For us, moderns, a myth is only a myth because we can no longer connect that time with the time of history as we write it, employing the critical method, nor can we connect mythical places with our geographical space. This is why the myth can no longer be an explanation; to exclude its etiological intention is the theme of all necessary demythologization.
This new level of expression embarrasses the modern man. In one sense, he alone can recognize the myth as myth, because he along has reached the point where history and myth become separate.
P. Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Beacon Press 1967), 5,161.
Thanks for the reply, I appreciate it.
ReplyDeleteFor if the narrator understood Adam and Eve to be the first human couple, and you gloss that as something else, then you have dehistoricized the account.
That seems a bit tricky. So whether or not the hypothetical interpretations I supply count as myth hinges on the intention of the original author? Do I have that right?
Second, in one of the examples I gave, Adam and Eve really were the 'first human couple'. The other humanoids they could procreate with were not 'human' in a full sense - perhaps lacking an intellectual soul. Perhaps not human by some other standard.
Just to add one thing...
ReplyDeleteWhile I know that's a common tack among some people who want to interpret Genesis this or that way, but I'm not sure my interpretation "retrofits the account with modern science". The Fall is still real. Adam and Eve are still the first humans. There's a very real, even 'supernatural', difference between those first humans and all other creatures up until that point. I certainly did not give some thoroughly "scientific" account of the origin of man with either of those possible interpretations.
Maybe you could insist I'm at least trying to 'partially retrofit' the account. I'd still deny that, but the partial would be more apt I think.
Thanks for a thought-provoking piece. I think I'm fairly close to you theologically as I am an evangelical in the Reformed tradition, and hold a graduate degree from a conservative Reformed seminary.
ReplyDeleteThat said, let me pose a question - is a perspective of Genesis 1-11 as divinely inspired, divinely revealed myth, hermeneutically permissible?
Here I'm going to argue in favor of the proposition, though by way of disclaimer I should say my mind's not fully made up. What I'm doing here is engaging in an exercise of thinking something through by writing it down and soliciting feedback. Now back to the proposition.
The Triune God is a missionary God. If God had no redemptive mission in mind, then there would be no need for his self-revelation, nor for the existence of Scripture, nor indeed for the incarnation of Christ.
Contemporary missionary praxis mandates a contextualization of the redemptive message in order to accommodate the revelation of God and the Gospel to the understanding of the target people group.
Could it not be said that Genesis 1-11 uses accommodative anthropomorphism to present the fact of divine creation and human sin and need of redemption in a way that could be understood by ancient near-eastern people groups? Can the divinely revealed Creation Story be true in a redemptive sense while not necessarily being factual in a historical sense? The parables of Jesus, by way of parallel example, present timeless spiritual truths even though they probably don't depict actual events which took place: they are true and without error even though they may not be factual.
I'm inclined toward such a view of Genesis 1-11, although I freely acknowledge that such a view still poses real theological challenges to my evangelical hermeneutic and my Reformed Theology.
But the proposition offers one way of dealing with what appears to be overwhelmingly convincing scientific evidence supporting propositions which are difficult to reconcile with a literal-chronological reading of Genesis 1-11.
Among those propositions:
-Genomic evidence for common ancestry of humans and other primates. I need not make an exhaustive list, but let me list but one example which is particularly compelling: The GULO pseudogene which we share with apes, which prevents us from synthesizing ascorbic acid and therefore mandates that we get it from our diets or suffer scurvy.
-No support for a genetic bottleneck to either the family of Noah ~4000-odd years ago or a literal Adam and Eve ~6000 years ago
-In fact genomics indicates the opposite of Genesis 1-2 or 9-11 that at no time does there appear to have been a breeding population of human beings in our present form of less than ten thousand or tens of thousands of individuals.
This does not even begin to scratch the surface of scientific data which are difficult to square - not with Scripture itself, but with a literal-chronological hermeneutical construct. In fact, I think it could easily be argued that such a hermeneutic construct is a modernistic imposition on Scripture, but that will have to be another discussion.
For now this comment is already too long, but I thank the blogmasters here for their very generous guidelines on commenting, and pray that I have not transgressed the same.
CRUDE SAID:
ReplyDelete“So whether or not the hypothetical interpretations I supply count as myth hinges on the intention of the original author? Do I have that right?”
Correct.
“Second, in one of the examples I gave, Adam and Eve really were the 'first human couple'. The other humanoids they could procreate with were not 'human' in a full sense - perhaps lacking an intellectual soul.”
But you’re redefining the “first human couple.” That’s not what the narrator meant.
“While I know that's a common tack among some people who want to interpret Genesis this or that way, but I'm not sure my interpretation ‘retrofits the account with modern science’. The Fall is still real. Adam and Eve are still the first humans. There's a very real, even 'supernatural', difference between those first humans and all other creatures up until that point. I certainly did not give some thoroughly ‘scientific’ account of the origin of man with either of those possible interpretations.”
Transplanting the account into a theistic evolutionary framework retrofits the account with a view to modern science.
KLOMPENMAKER SAID:
ReplyDelete“That said, let me pose a question - is a perspective of Genesis 1-11 as divinely inspired, divinely revealed myth, hermeneutically permissible?”
Hypothetically speaking, yes–although that depends, in part, on how you define “myth.” Lower down you seem to define “myth” in parabolic terms.
All things being equal, it’s hypothetically possible that Gen 1-11 is parabolic. However, abstractions like that don’t have much mileage.
In context, we can’t justifiably compartmentalize Gen 1-11 from Gen 12-50, or the remainder of the Pentateuch. It’s a continuous narrative.
“Could it not be said that Genesis 1-11 uses accommodative anthropomorphism to present the fact of divine creation and human sin and need of redemption in a way that could be understood by ancient near-eastern people groups?”
If Gen 2 can describe the creation of the woman from the man, then the narrator could describe the creation of human beings from lower animals. The narrator could use the same basic imagery/process. God creates animals, then God uses that raw material to make the first man and woman (or the first men and women). If Gen 2 can depict God making a woman from the body of a man, then the narrator could also depict God making a man from the body of an animal. That would be theistic evolution, cast in terms understandable to ANE readers.
So you’re setting up a false dichotomy. It doesn’t require myth or accommodation to do that. Or if it does, that requires no more than special creation.
KLOMPENMAKER SAID:
ReplyDelete“The GULO pseudogene which we share with apes, which prevents us from synthesizing ascorbic acid and therefore mandates that we get it from our diets or suffer scurvy.”
In their book on The Design of Life (also the CD-ROM), I think Dembski and Wells address that argument. I also think Uncommon Descent addresses that type of issue from time to time.
“No support for a genetic bottleneck to either the family of Noah ~4000-odd years ago or a literal Adam and Eve ~6000 years ago.”
i) You seem to be erecting a false dichotomy between young-earth creationism and revealed myth. But, of course, those are not the only logical alternatives. There is also old-earth creationism.
ii) Keep in mind that Genesis doesn’t date the flood, or even the creation of Adam and Eve. The attempt to date those events involves a combination of Biblical and extrabiblical information. You have to start with a continuous universal calendar, then decide where to fit Bible events or intervals into that larger construct.
iii) I’m not clear on why you think we could simply begin with the present, and then extrapolate backward to a point of origin. That takes a number of untestable assumptions for granted–or so it seems to me.
“In fact genomics indicates the opposite of Genesis 1-2 or 9-11 that at no time does there appear to have been a breeding population of human beings in our present form of less than ten thousand or tens of thousands of individuals.”
I don’t know what all you’ve read on the subject. I’ve posted some things on this issue.