Adam and Evolution

Forty percent of Americans believe that God created human beings in their present form at one point in time in the past 10,000 years. A majority of these believe God created the entire universe in six 24-hour days.  Another almost 40 percent believe that God created human beings by using evolution over a vast length of time -- that the biblical six days of creation are symbolic rather than scientific.  Among those who attend church weekly, the difference widens considerably. Almost 70 percent hold the “creationist” view, while just over 30 percent believe in God-guided evolution. 

When I was a young believer, one of my mentors in the faith often warned of “majoring in the minors.” In an important sense, the debate about “creationism” vs. “theistic evolution” is a distraction from the core of Christian faith.  The prominent Evangelist Billy Graham expresses this view when he writes:

“I don't think that there's any conflict at all between science today and the Scriptures. I think that we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many times and we've tried to make the Scriptures say things they weren't meant to say. I think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a book of Redemption, and of course I accept the Creation story. I believe that God did create the universe. I believe that God created man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or not, does not change the fact that God did create man.  Whichever way God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man's relationship to God."

The physical evidence for evolution is overwhelming, and denying it undermines Christians’ credibility and our evangelistic outreach, especially to young people. Nor does Christian faithfulness require such a denial, even for biblical conservatives who regard the Genesis account of creation as essentially historical.

The simplest way to combine evolution with a historical reading of Genesis 1 & 2 is to hold that God worked by means of evolution to create the first male and female human beings, whom he then placed in Eden.  But this view requires acknowledging that massive violence and suffering occur in the animal world prior to humanity’s “fall” into sin.   Could a good God use a method of creation that involved such savagery?

Notice, however, that in Genesis 2, the “fall” of nature into corruption has occurred prior to Adam and Eve’s sin. Satan’s existence means that the fall of the rebellious angels had already occurred. And the deceitful serpent is readily available as Satan’s tool to tempt the first humans. That nature became corrupt with the angelic fall is consistent with the mediating role in creation of the rebellious “powers and principalities” expressed in the New Testament.

We should also note that Genesis 2 doesn’t say that the entire earth was a paradise. Rather, God “took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden.” The impression is that Eden was a site especially formed by God untouched by the earth’s corruption. Consistent with this possibility is that Adam is commanded to populate and subdue the earth. The implication is that Adam was called to bring order to a disordered earth. Remember, too, that according to Genesis human beings were not created immortal, but could receive immortality as a gift of the tree of life.

If we read Genesis in this more careful way there’s no reason to object to evolution. Though nature had fallen into corruption, God worked through evolution in nature’s fallen, violent state to bring forth the good of flourishing plant, animal and human life.  By remaining faithful, Adam and Eve would have received the gift of immortality and the power to extend paradise to the rest of the earth. By rebelling against God, they forfeited their power to tame the fallen earth and allowed sin and corruption to enter the human race. This understanding requires that we view Eve’s formation from Adam’s rib as symbolic rather than literal. But theologically conservative Christians can acknowledge that the Genesis 2 account contains several symbolic elements while affirming its essential historicity.

Yet there is a further complication. Based on genetic analysis, most scientists now believe that the original human beings arose not from one pair in one place, but as a group of perhaps 10,000 who emerged in various places around the same time somewhere between 150,000 to 100,000 years ago. If this as accurate, God could have chosen a particular male and female pair from among this aboriginal group as representatives of humanity and placed them in Eden (just as the high priest represented all Israelites, and Jesus represented all humankind in the Apostle Paul’s theology).

In this version, had Adam and Eve remained faithful, they could have brought order, peace and immortality to the rest of existing and future humanity as well as healing to the earth. This variation has the added benefit of explaining Cain’s fear expressed in Genesis 4 that as a “restless wanderer on the earth,” he will be killed, as well as how Cain found a wife and built a city. These biblical allusions make much more sense if we assume a larger human presence on earth beyond Adam, Eve and their children.

But does a belief in the basic historicity of Genesis 1-3 require a single original or representative couple?  Here’s another possibility: At least some of the earliest human population were given the experience of an intimate and empowered relationship with God.  For them the veil separating earth and heaven was thin and porous. These humans experienced living in the Edenic intersection of heaven and earth – an overlap of God’s realm and that of humanity. 

Both the Bible and human history record other such periods of varying degrees of intensity: Moses on Mt. Sinai, Jesus’ ministry on earth, the day of Pentecost and the early churches’ experience with the miraculous, and the various times of renewal since then, e.g. the First and Second Great Awakenings.  For me and many others, the miracle-drenched Christian renewal movement occurring in the U.S. and other parts of the world during the 1970s was such a time.

Had those first humans chosen faithfulness to God, they would have received the power to bring paradise to the world. But our aboriginal forebears rejected obedient intimacy with God and forfeited the power to heal creation. This brought the “fall” to humankind, and God shut off the overlap of heaven and earth (“So the Lord God banished them from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken, and . . . placed cherubim and a flaming sword to guard the way to the tree of life,” Gen. 3:23-24).

This understanding preserves the Apostle Paul’s explanation of sin’s origin and of how Jesus reversed this aboriginal human rejection of God. It does mean, however, that we understand the Genesis stories and Paul’s reference to Adam as the “one man” through whom sin entered, as representative accounts speaking of the first humans as a collective man – the first human population treated as one. But referring to a group of people as if they were one individual is not an uncommon biblical convention (see e.g. Isaiah 53 and Daniel 7, where the “servant of the Lord” and “the son of man” are envisioned as individuals but refer to the faithful remnant of Israel, and later of course to Jesus as the faithful representative of Israel and of humanity.).

In this understanding the six days of creation in Genesis 1 are symbolic. Genesis 1 is giving us the view “from 30,000” feet, as the saying goes. The details are not intended as scientific fact. The point is that God is the Creator and that creation is intrinsically good. The sin, death and destruction we now see are the corruption of something essentially good – not anything God made or wills.

To be sure, another option exists for Christians whose understanding of Scripture allows them view the Genesis creation accounts as completely symbolic rather than historical. For them, Genesis 1-3 express the profound truths that (1) God is the Creator of all, (2) human beings bear God’s image and the responsibility for the well-being of the world at large, (3) but by turning away from faithfulness to God, we have forfeited abundant life, immortality and the divine power to exercise a paradise-bringing dominion to the earth, and yet (4) God still loves us and will provide a way of redemption and restoration.  For many Christians, this is what the Holy Spirit is communicating in these stories, not historical reconstruction or scientific facts.

If we accept some version of reconciling Scripture and evolution, some tensions remain. Christians believe that in one way or another, God guided the evolutionary process. But in strict evolutionary thinking the process was purely random.   There is as no serious empirical evidence to show a guided evolution. Maybe one day there will be. Or maybe what appears random to us is a guided process from God’s vantage point.

Where does this leave us? It is important for Christians to accept evolution as an amply demonstrated empirical realty. Not to do so shatters our credibility when we speak to unbelievers about the core truths about God and Jesus.  We proclaim God as the Creator of all and humanity created in God’s image, though in need of redemption. These affirmations are at the heart of biblical faith, and must not be compromised. But it is neither difficult nor faithless to hold these crucial convictions together with acknowledging God’s use of evolution. How exactly they fit together, though unresolved, is one of the “minors.” The “major” is that God’s creative and redemptive Word, Jesus Christ, crucified and resurrected, is Lord and Savior of all.

Martin Shupack, Dec. 12, 2012