I understand about Paul doing theology, primarily, in this passage (Rms 5:12-17), as opposed to, say, Biological Sciences. However, doesn't his understanding of the original sin of Adam--by which we were all made sinners and thereby "dead"--seem to rely on a picture of Adam and Eve and the Garden and the Serpent, etc. just as we find it told in Genesis? I mean, a sentient, fully formed (not merely physically, but also spiritually, intellectually) human being making that existential choice (b/c he has, and knows he has, free will to choose for God or against Him) for all of us. I may not like Adam's choice, but I can recognize that, under the circumstances, I may not have done any better. (In fact, I often don't do any better, given much less momentous choices in my everyday life.) In any case, I can recognize in Adam a human being not too different from myself and can accept the justice of the condemnation and the wonder of the redeeming sacrifice of Jesus. (Thank you, Paul!)
But, what is bothering me is the whole garden story. I don't mind taking the story (account) just the way it is told, Sunday School Bible illustrations and all. I don't understand how it could have happened like that, but if God wanted it that way, I'm sure He could have done it. Creation of everything out of nothing, after all, is not really the most fantastic thing we are willing to believe, as Christians. In fact, as I said above, Paul seems to assume that the account in the Hebrew scriptures was pretty much how it all happened. Otherwise, how could "Adam" (if he was only a theoretical/mythical "marker" for the beginning of the human race) have been established as making such a momentous choice for all of us? But I know that some scholars are fond of seeing the Creation Story as just that: an attempt by an emerging society and an early religion to make sense of the world as they found it and of the God that they were coming to know. An actual garden and an actual serpent seem to be a little too simplistic for the sophisticated theological (not to mention cultural, societal, and even scientific) understanding we have now. But Paul is nothing if not sophisticated, theologically, and I don't see how we can get around Paul. In fact, the alternative: that there was no "garden" or "serpent" or actual moment of choosing by an actual human, seems much more unsettling to me. In that case the account we have is just trying to make sense of things that were playing out just as God knew (planned?) that they would. And that, to me, seems a more problematic view of God than the suggestion that He created a garden just like the Sunday School pictures and put Adam into it, etc.
So, as you can no doubt tell, I am no theologian and certainly no scholar or OT expert, and I am not trying to take on an argument with the modern scholarly community! I'm just asking...
2 comments:
Very interesting.
I don't think that Paul being dependent on this story tarnishes or embellishes his theological sophistication.
Whether there was a garden with four rivers or whether his name was Adam and her name was Eve is not significant beyond what all those elements signify theologically.
The fact that sociologists may class this as a story of origins doesn't change its inspired quality. By not taking a fundamentalist dictation view of the Scriptures we realize that in the biblical rendering of this story we are hearing God's Word as to our origins. While many story of origins contain aspects of the truth - theologically this one has value because it is God's Word.
This means that subsequent authors, particularly inspired one's will not be lead astray when they comment on the Scriptures utilizing the literal sense in teaching about salvation.
Therefore if Paul is utilizing Gen 1-3 to talk theologically about humanity, sin, God's grace and our universal need for salvation, etc. he stands on firm ground.
Were Paul to utilize such texts to make comments on the age of the earth, the nature of the sky, how rain is sent upon th earth he could be on shaky ground.
The same for us when we use good exegesis we can draw wonderful things form the text but when we ask the Scriptures to go beyond what they can inerrantly do we risk straying.
For example to insist that the name of the first parents was Adam and Eve as though it was there birth certificate does not really say anything about our salvation, but to comment that Adam is similar to the word for ground and that the word "Eve" is related to the word for life may lead to some important insights.
I don;t know if this really gets to the heart of what you are asking but it is a start. Let me know.
OK.
So, what you are saying is that Genesis 1-3 (for instance) is God's version of the story of our origins and of our willful separation from Him and the beginnings of our pilgrimage back to relationship with our Creator. And it is this "story"--God's inspired Word--that Paul quite rightly relies on in his disastrous-sin-of-Adam vs. redemptive-goodness-of-Jesus comparison. And, furthermore, Paul is also quite right to use an inspired text as a starting point for a theological discussion, in a way that he could not use it to discuss science, for instance.
This makes sense to me. It saves Paul from being a fundamentalist or a literalist about the Genesis account b/c he understands that what is really important about the story is theological anyway; it was not meant to teach history. So, perhaps it doesn't matter, even to Paul (especially to Paul?), whether or not there is an actual garden, etc. as I originally suspected.
However, I am still wondering about the original sin of Adam--what we understand to be his intentional choice against God that has marked all the rest of us as "dead": in desperate need of Christ's sacrifice. Does it matter that we don't seem to have an actual historic account of the event? I suppose that just b/c a story is symbolic of an event or an interpretation of an event, it doesn't mean that the characters in the story didn't actually exist and make their momentous choices. It seems very important to me that actual humans made the Genesis choice--whether or not it was in some Sunday School picture garden. Perhaps a time-traveling historian would not be able to visit the garden where the serpent was tempting Eve, but I don't see how any of it makes sense unless free humans are/were in a position to bear the responsibility for what we now call "original sin".
Or perhaps I am too worried about how "free" humans actually are?
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