This post is NOT your typical discourse on how science and faith are really not enemies but good friends after all. Instead, I am writing about how modern science may lead us to find new ways to think about our faith. There are many examples of this, from how we understand creation for one, and life-after-death for another. I will not discuss either of those in this post, at least not directly. Rather, I will look at something Saint Paul says in his letter to the Romans. Here it is:
...sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned. (Romans 5:12)Paul here assumes the Roman Christians know that before Adam sinned there was no physical death in the world. Living things (people, animals, plants) didn't start dying until Adam sinned. Paul then uses this common knowledge to set the Romans up for the Good News that Jesus has conquered the very death that Adam initiated by sinning.
This passage is difficult for those of us living in the twenty-first century to accept, however. Most of us know (or think we do) that death reigned on earth for billions of years before Adam. So death could not have entered the world due to Adam's sin as Paul and his contemporaries thought it did -- death was already here when Adam appeared and had been killing off living things for millennia.
From our point of view, therefore, Paul's statement that death came through Adam's sin reflects a pre-scientific belief we now know to be false. Things seem to get worse. Because here is what Paul says just a couple of sentences later:
If, because of the one man’s [Adam's] trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. (Romans 5:17)There are two ways to understand what Paul is saying. First, he could mean that Jesus' defeat of death on the cross depends on physical death having come into the world through Adam's sin. Some Christians understand Paul to mean exactly that. Accordingly, these Christians feel compelled to reject modern evolutionary science in order to defend Paul and, they believe, their Biblical faith.
The second way to understand Paul is like this: he is trying to explain how it is possible for the death and resurrection of one man, Jesus Christ, to bring life to all. He knows the Romans already understand that sin and death came into the world through one man. So he says in effect, "You know that death came into the world through one man's sinful disobedience, so you get the basic principle that what one man did can affect all of us. So it should not really surprise you that death has been undone by another man's perfect obedience; that other man, of course, is Jesus Christ!"
In this second reading of Paul, he is not telling us we should think Adam's sin did bring death into the world. He is just using the Roman's belief that this is what happened to help them understand how Jesus' death and resurrection could affect everyone. This view assumes that if Paul and his first readers (actually, hearers -- because his letters were meant to be read aloud in public) had known that death had existed in the world for billions of years before Adam, he would have developed some other way to explain how Jesus' death and resurrection worked.
Not everyone will find this second explanation acceptable. Some will see Paul making a strong statement that what Adam did through his sinful disobedience, Jesus undid through his perfect obedience. Paul could just as well have said that Jesus is the "anti-Adam". Thus, they argue that even if we can excuse his saying physical death came into the world through Adam's sin as pre-scientific ignorance, we can't easily get away from the direct connection Paul makes between Adam and Jesus, and the strong implication that Adam was a real, historical figure.
Who Was Adam? What Did He Do?
In one sense, there is no problem in thinking of Adam as a historical figure. There must have been a first human male and female. We know that "Eve" means "Mother of the Living", and modern science tells us that all human beings are indeed descended from a single female. "Eve" is a pretty good name for her! While science has not yet been able to show that we are all descended from a single male, it is quite reasonable to believe that we are because, in typical primate behavior, the alpha male does not share his mate! And because the name "Adam" is just the Hebrew equivalent for "human" (and is derived from "adama", meaning "earth"), it is a pretty good name for the first man too.
The real question is whether there is any more we can know about Adam, the person Paul has in mind? Who was he? What did he do?
As to who Adam was, there are at least three possibilities: (1) he really was the first human male, or at least the human male from whom all of us are descended; (2) he was a man who somehow got things started off on the wrong foot, perhaps the founder of human civilization; (3) he is a composite character who represents all of us. In a moment, I will consider each of these in turn. But first we must ask what it is that Adam did.
What was Adam's sin? A straightforward reading of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden tells us that Adam ate of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Most theologians and biblical scholars today regard this story in Genesis as poetry drenched in rich symbolism. In the story, for example, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil could just as well be called the "Tree of Death" in juxtaposition with the "Tree of Life", that other tree in the Garden. These two trees then seem to represent the choice we must all make between the ways of life and death, a dominant theme running throughout the entire Bible from Genesis to Revelation (for example: Deutoronomy 11:26-21, Sirach 15:16, Matthew 7:13-14).
If we accept that the tree is symbolic, then it follows that eating the forbidden fruit is likewise symbolic and therefore not to be taken literally. This means of course that we don't know what exactly Adam did. And yet we do know something. For recall the serpent's temptation: "You shall be like gods!" (Genesis 3:5). And this corresponds very nicely to something Paul himself tells us in the wonderful Philippians hymn:
Of course, Paul is telling us about Jesus in this passage rather than Adam, but he is also telling us something about Adam's sin when he says "[Jesus] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited."Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross. (Philippians 2:5-11)
Remember that Paul understands Jesus to be the anti-Adam: what Adam did, Jesus undid. So the way we should understand Paul here is this: in contrast to Adam, who was not God, and who tried to make himself equal with God, consider that Jesus, who was God, freely chose to empty himself of his divinity and take the form of a slave. In short, the nature of Adam's sin was simply this: he tried to make himself like God.
With this insight in hand, let us now consider the three alternatives as to who Adam was (or is).
Literally the First Man. Whether created directly from the dust of the ground, or gradually through billions of years of evolution, at some point there came into existence that first human male from whom we are all descended. According to the first alternative, that first man is Adam. And that is all we really know about him, except that he made some kind of choice -- we don't know precisely what -- in which he tried to make himself like God and forever set the course of human history down the wrong path.
God-King, Political Genius, and Founder of Human Civilization. According to this alternative, Adam was a real historical figure but not necessarily the first human male. Consider that all of the key characters in the Biblical story were people who initiated some critical turning point in human history. Besides Adam, these include: Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Samuel, David, John the Baptist, Jesus, Peter, and Paul. The first few of these were tribal chieftains, great judges, kings, prophets, or other sorts of leaders. Thus Adam too could have been some sort of ruler who did something so significant that it set the direction of human history and determined what kind of people we would be. Perhaps he founded the first civilization. Perhaps he was the first king who set himself up as a god and demanded to be worshiped, and thereby set the pattern for kings, emperors, fuhrers, and "dear leaders" to come.
Literary Symbol for You and Me. The third alternative is that Adam is a literary symbol rather than a historical person. If so, then we are faced with the uncomfortable reality that Adam's sin is ours. For we too choose everyday to make ourselves our own masters, lords of our own lives, the very centers of our own universes. And by insisting that everyone else make our desires and our needs their priorities, we make ourselves their lords rather than their servants. In a word, we make ourselves God and demand their worship.
Some Christians will not see Adam, the Literary Symbol, as a viable alternative. If Adam is just a symbol for you and me, they will say, it is hard to take Paul's strong view of Jesus as the anti-Adam seriously; that too becomes just another literary way of expressing things.
But I am not so sure. Perhaps Jesus undid what each of us does every day: put ourselves at the center of the Universe, making ourselves our own little gods.
Conclusion
So who was Adam? Perhaps he was all three: the first man, who set himself up to be worshiped by everyone else, and thereby became a symbol for all of us. I'm not really sure that it matters too much which of the three alternatives is the right one, or if the truth is something else altogether. What does matters is that whoever Adam was and whatever he did by whatever choice of arrogance and self-aggrandizement, this was undone by Jesus' choice of obedience and humility. Death came through Adam, but life came through Jesus Christ. Alleluia!
