An interesting read that touches a possible Orthodox response to modern historical understanding of the early chapters of Genesis...
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I have been frequently referring to a “before” and an “after” situation, using the language in a kind of narrative. There was for Man a “before,” when humankind was in a primordial state of bliss. Then there was an “after,” a point in our past after which things seem to have gone wrong, so that we lost our original happiness with God. This “after” shows humankind as sick and in need of healing; deification is that healing.
I have argued that the Bible has coherence as a whole, that it is an orderly account which explains things in terms of what previously happened and in terms of what are the real moving forces behind life. Thus the Bible is, in some sense, a “history.” It is a unique kind of history with God as the main character or agent, the subject of which is our salvation.
The present reader may find nagging at the back of his mind some questions which did not occur so urgently to the Fathers. In the last two centuries, there has been such a great upsurge in natural science and in critical history that it is hard to repress such questions as: “Did Adam and Eve really exist as historical individuals'?” and, “Don’t we all believe in evolution now, so that, although it might be possible to speak about the human race evolving from lower forms of life, we can’t believe that God made one individual man and one woman who were the ancestors of the whole human race, can we?”
What is surprising is that recent Orthodox writers do not give straight answers to these questions. Vladimir Lossky wrote a whole book about the theology of our being made in the image and likeness of God without touching upon these issues. The same is true about a variety of distinguished Orthodox writers: Staniloae has a discussion about the “Primordial State”—that is, Man before the Fall. He explains the theology of the human person and speaks in general about “Man” but does not say anything about whether we are to interpret the narrative of Genesis 1—3 as a true story about the individuals, Adam and Eve, who actually existed. Is the answer so obvious as not to need a discussion? Or are there no answers to these questions? Is it sinful and wrong even to ask these questions?
I argue that these questions cannot be repressed because they are part of what it means to be modern human beings, interested in historical questions about human origins. At the same time, it is important to be careful about the definition of “a human being.” Scientists have to use a definition appropriate to the analysis of human remains, such as brain-size or the nature of the posture indicated by the spinal cord. In medical science, the conflict between Orthodoxy and science is at its most acute with regard to the definition of a human being. Ideas of fetal development are used to define the point at which a child in the womb is not human for the purposes of legal definitions to enable abortions to be described in another way than as murder.
The text of Genesis 1—3 has been crucial in providing the basis for a theological definition of the human person. From these early texts in Genesis are derived important revealed ideas which define humanity in a particular way: that Man was made in the image and likeness of God; that humanity was good in both soul and body; that Man was created good; and that human wickedness and godlessness is not natural to humanity; that humanity has a capacity for good. These theological ideas have practical consequences. They therefore cannot be kept in a religious world completely separate from other kinds of knowledge that we now have.
However, the literary form of Genesis 1—3 is not history in the modern or even the ancient sense. Although not a history, there is a real question about whether or not Genesis 1—3 contains some historical facts. “History” is a tricky word, because it can mean two important and different things. It can mean a way of investigating and writing about the past—that is, what historians did or now do. Secondly, “history” and “historical” can mean “about something that actually happened.” I do not have to be a historian to say that my father actually existed and that I knew him: my father had an historical existence, but his story is not to be found in any history book, because he was not a famous person. It is in this second sense that Genesis 1—3 might be “historical” in possibly being about people who really did exist once in a state of blessedness. Does, then, Genesis 1—3 preserve an authentic memory about the lives of actual individual human beings, about the first human beings? If the answer is “Yes,” then the beginning of our salvation history still really is “history,” in the sense that it started with some real people and can form part of that history which the Bible narrates and which the Church’s liturgical cycle expresses, along with the tradition about Abraham, Moses, the Prophets, and the coming of the Word and Son of God in the flesh.
The Orthodox Church has made no dogmatic definitions about human origins. We have dogmas of the “Theology”—that is, what is strictly about God, about persons of the Trinity, and the two natures of Christ. We do not have a dogma about human anthropology, that is, about the process by which human beings originated. A situation has arisen in which “Adam” is used by Orthodox theologians as a rather general term to mean “Man in his fallen aspect,” and there has so far been an unwillingness on the part of theologians to give a defined teaching, precisely because their Church does not have an Ecumenical Council on the subject to which they can refer.
It follows that in my attempt to review this question, I am not giving the teaching of the Church with the same confidence as when I speak of the person of Christ, his divinity and human nature, and of the doctrine of the Trinity. With Christology and the Trinity, the teaching of Ecumenical Councils is supported by the thinking of the very Fathers who advocated these teachings against heresy. There is a long history of upholding these teachings, for over a millennium from the time when they were first made dogmas of the Church in the fourth century. By contrast, the anthropological, archaeological, and biological issues raised by science are just over a century old, and there is still a lively scientific debate about how to solve the issue of human origins. Various scientific theories crowd the stage. Evolution from lower forms of life is the dominant theory in the popular consciousnesses, although this theory takes a variety of forms.
The place to start is the Bible itself and to see what are the best possible interpretations of the text. I shall be working with the idea that the Bible is divinely inspired but that the truths revealed by the Bible are not always historical truths and that the Bible is not to be interpreted literally throughout.
We may still wonder if the whole narrative of Genesis 2:4—3:22 is a parable, containing no kernel of historical truth at all. In other words, the narrative expresses in a metaphorical way certain truths about our human condition. Although this solution has been fashionable in Liberal Protestant writings, Origen first suggested that, because of the many symbolic details, the whole Adam-Eve narrative is a sort of parable: The story never took place in the body; rather the story discloses certain mysteries. However, this is not a solution to the issue in Orthodox terms. This is because, in addition to interpreting the narrative symbolically, the Eastern Fathers also very often refer to the narrative as a history of true events. This is especially the case concerning the literal existence of a pair of human beings, one male, one female, created directly by God. This is hardly surprising, since it is probably the case that St. Paul did believe that Adam existed historically. There was no reason not to believe this, because neither St. Paul nor the Eastern Fathers had thought of the theory of evolution of humankind from earlier nonhuman humanoid species.
Today as in Origen’s time (3rd century A.D.), it is easier to say what kind of a narrative Genesis 1—3 is not than to say what kind of writing it is. The kind of writing, the genre of the narrative, is very important in determining meaning. Who today would want to confuse a fable with a statement of fact? I can tell you what I consider that Genesis 1—3 is not. It is not historiography—that is, history-writing, or the kind of writing that historians do. In the ancient Near East, people knew what history in this sense was.45 It also predates the kind of science which we now practice. It is not science, then. Genesis 1—3 does make some important claims about reality as a whole: for example, that God made the world in an orderly fashion, and that it was originally good. But the literary forms of the writing suggest some other purpose than the language of science, with its charts and mathematical formulae.
Is, then, Genesis 1—3 myth? The most recent analyses of Genesis, based upon the structure holding together the various literary devices, refer to the method of interpretation known as poetics46 or, sometimes, rhetorical criticism. Scholars of Genesis are dissatisfied with the category of “myth.” No one can agree on a definition of myth that applies to the Bible. This is not surprising, since myths were stories from the Greek rather than the Semitic world. The word “myth” is also useless now, when writing nontechnically, since it has come to mean “what is untrue,” as, for example in books entitled President X : the Man and the Myth.
One thing is becoming clearer in the most recent research on the Hebrew text: far from being a primitive text or a patchwork of sources, Genesis 1—3 is an advanced piece of writing! There is a sense in which it is such a subtle piece of work that it is still too advanced for us! Only very recently has work in the analysis of the literary structure of the Old Testament begun to show us what a complex web has been woven.
At the very heart of Genesis 1—3 and the recapitulation of 1:26—27 in 5:1—3 is the subtlety of the Hebrew writer’s use of adam. The word can mean, very generally, “Man” or humankind. In Genesis 2 the writer was able to make a pun upon man—earth, since adam means Man or the man and adamah means earth or soil. The name adam also appears in ancient Near Eastern texts as a personal name.48 In Hebrew, it is impossible to decide whether the general sense of “Man” was earlier than the personal name “Adam” or whether it was the other way around and “Adam” later came to have a general meaning, symbolizing Man. The first occurrence of adam in the Bible is in the general sense; it means “Man,” humanity:
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Adam Our Ancestor?
by Stephen Thomas
I have been frequently referring to a “before” and an “after” situation, using the language in a kind of narrative. There was for Man a “before,” when humankind was in a primordial state of bliss. Then there was an “after,” a point in our past after which things seem to have gone wrong, so that we lost our original happiness with God. This “after” shows humankind as sick and in need of healing; deification is that healing.
I have argued that the Bible has coherence as a whole, that it is an orderly account which explains things in terms of what previously happened and in terms of what are the real moving forces behind life. Thus the Bible is, in some sense, a “history.” It is a unique kind of history with God as the main character or agent, the subject of which is our salvation.
The present reader may find nagging at the back of his mind some questions which did not occur so urgently to the Fathers. In the last two centuries, there has been such a great upsurge in natural science and in critical history that it is hard to repress such questions as: “Did Adam and Eve really exist as historical individuals'?” and, “Don’t we all believe in evolution now, so that, although it might be possible to speak about the human race evolving from lower forms of life, we can’t believe that God made one individual man and one woman who were the ancestors of the whole human race, can we?”
What is surprising is that recent Orthodox writers do not give straight answers to these questions. Vladimir Lossky wrote a whole book about the theology of our being made in the image and likeness of God without touching upon these issues. The same is true about a variety of distinguished Orthodox writers: Staniloae has a discussion about the “Primordial State”—that is, Man before the Fall. He explains the theology of the human person and speaks in general about “Man” but does not say anything about whether we are to interpret the narrative of Genesis 1—3 as a true story about the individuals, Adam and Eve, who actually existed. Is the answer so obvious as not to need a discussion? Or are there no answers to these questions? Is it sinful and wrong even to ask these questions?
I argue that these questions cannot be repressed because they are part of what it means to be modern human beings, interested in historical questions about human origins. At the same time, it is important to be careful about the definition of “a human being.” Scientists have to use a definition appropriate to the analysis of human remains, such as brain-size or the nature of the posture indicated by the spinal cord. In medical science, the conflict between Orthodoxy and science is at its most acute with regard to the definition of a human being. Ideas of fetal development are used to define the point at which a child in the womb is not human for the purposes of legal definitions to enable abortions to be described in another way than as murder.
The text of Genesis 1—3 has been crucial in providing the basis for a theological definition of the human person. From these early texts in Genesis are derived important revealed ideas which define humanity in a particular way: that Man was made in the image and likeness of God; that humanity was good in both soul and body; that Man was created good; and that human wickedness and godlessness is not natural to humanity; that humanity has a capacity for good. These theological ideas have practical consequences. They therefore cannot be kept in a religious world completely separate from other kinds of knowledge that we now have.
However, the literary form of Genesis 1—3 is not history in the modern or even the ancient sense. Although not a history, there is a real question about whether or not Genesis 1—3 contains some historical facts. “History” is a tricky word, because it can mean two important and different things. It can mean a way of investigating and writing about the past—that is, what historians did or now do. Secondly, “history” and “historical” can mean “about something that actually happened.” I do not have to be a historian to say that my father actually existed and that I knew him: my father had an historical existence, but his story is not to be found in any history book, because he was not a famous person. It is in this second sense that Genesis 1—3 might be “historical” in possibly being about people who really did exist once in a state of blessedness. Does, then, Genesis 1—3 preserve an authentic memory about the lives of actual individual human beings, about the first human beings? If the answer is “Yes,” then the beginning of our salvation history still really is “history,” in the sense that it started with some real people and can form part of that history which the Bible narrates and which the Church’s liturgical cycle expresses, along with the tradition about Abraham, Moses, the Prophets, and the coming of the Word and Son of God in the flesh.
The Orthodox Church has made no dogmatic definitions about human origins. We have dogmas of the “Theology”—that is, what is strictly about God, about persons of the Trinity, and the two natures of Christ. We do not have a dogma about human anthropology, that is, about the process by which human beings originated. A situation has arisen in which “Adam” is used by Orthodox theologians as a rather general term to mean “Man in his fallen aspect,” and there has so far been an unwillingness on the part of theologians to give a defined teaching, precisely because their Church does not have an Ecumenical Council on the subject to which they can refer.
It follows that in my attempt to review this question, I am not giving the teaching of the Church with the same confidence as when I speak of the person of Christ, his divinity and human nature, and of the doctrine of the Trinity. With Christology and the Trinity, the teaching of Ecumenical Councils is supported by the thinking of the very Fathers who advocated these teachings against heresy. There is a long history of upholding these teachings, for over a millennium from the time when they were first made dogmas of the Church in the fourth century. By contrast, the anthropological, archaeological, and biological issues raised by science are just over a century old, and there is still a lively scientific debate about how to solve the issue of human origins. Various scientific theories crowd the stage. Evolution from lower forms of life is the dominant theory in the popular consciousnesses, although this theory takes a variety of forms.
The place to start is the Bible itself and to see what are the best possible interpretations of the text. I shall be working with the idea that the Bible is divinely inspired but that the truths revealed by the Bible are not always historical truths and that the Bible is not to be interpreted literally throughout.
We may still wonder if the whole narrative of Genesis 2:4—3:22 is a parable, containing no kernel of historical truth at all. In other words, the narrative expresses in a metaphorical way certain truths about our human condition. Although this solution has been fashionable in Liberal Protestant writings, Origen first suggested that, because of the many symbolic details, the whole Adam-Eve narrative is a sort of parable: The story never took place in the body; rather the story discloses certain mysteries. However, this is not a solution to the issue in Orthodox terms. This is because, in addition to interpreting the narrative symbolically, the Eastern Fathers also very often refer to the narrative as a history of true events. This is especially the case concerning the literal existence of a pair of human beings, one male, one female, created directly by God. This is hardly surprising, since it is probably the case that St. Paul did believe that Adam existed historically. There was no reason not to believe this, because neither St. Paul nor the Eastern Fathers had thought of the theory of evolution of humankind from earlier nonhuman humanoid species.
Today as in Origen’s time (3rd century A.D.), it is easier to say what kind of a narrative Genesis 1—3 is not than to say what kind of writing it is. The kind of writing, the genre of the narrative, is very important in determining meaning. Who today would want to confuse a fable with a statement of fact? I can tell you what I consider that Genesis 1—3 is not. It is not historiography—that is, history-writing, or the kind of writing that historians do. In the ancient Near East, people knew what history in this sense was.45 It also predates the kind of science which we now practice. It is not science, then. Genesis 1—3 does make some important claims about reality as a whole: for example, that God made the world in an orderly fashion, and that it was originally good. But the literary forms of the writing suggest some other purpose than the language of science, with its charts and mathematical formulae.
Is, then, Genesis 1—3 myth? The most recent analyses of Genesis, based upon the structure holding together the various literary devices, refer to the method of interpretation known as poetics46 or, sometimes, rhetorical criticism. Scholars of Genesis are dissatisfied with the category of “myth.” No one can agree on a definition of myth that applies to the Bible. This is not surprising, since myths were stories from the Greek rather than the Semitic world. The word “myth” is also useless now, when writing nontechnically, since it has come to mean “what is untrue,” as, for example in books entitled President X : the Man and the Myth.
One thing is becoming clearer in the most recent research on the Hebrew text: far from being a primitive text or a patchwork of sources, Genesis 1—3 is an advanced piece of writing! There is a sense in which it is such a subtle piece of work that it is still too advanced for us! Only very recently has work in the analysis of the literary structure of the Old Testament begun to show us what a complex web has been woven.
At the very heart of Genesis 1—3 and the recapitulation of 1:26—27 in 5:1—3 is the subtlety of the Hebrew writer’s use of adam. The word can mean, very generally, “Man” or humankind. In Genesis 2 the writer was able to make a pun upon man—earth, since adam means Man or the man and adamah means earth or soil. The name adam also appears in ancient Near Eastern texts as a personal name.48 In Hebrew, it is impossible to decide whether the general sense of “Man” was earlier than the personal name “Adam” or whether it was the other way around and “Adam” later came to have a general meaning, symbolizing Man. The first occurrence of adam in the Bible is in the general sense; it means “Man,” humanity:
Then God said, “Let us make adam in our image (tsellem), according to our likeness (demuth) . So God created the adam in his own image (tsellem). He created him in the image (tsellem) of God. He created them male and female. (Gen 1:26—27)
The Hebrew theology of this passage necessitates adam as a general concept of humankind, shared equally by men and women. What is clear in Hebrew is that adam is a concept about humanity in Genesis 1.
Equally clear from Genesis 2—5 is the fact that adam could also have the currency of a proper, personal name, “Adam,” just like “Cain,” “Abel,” “Seth,” “Enoch,” or “Kenan.” While these personal names may have originally had some religious meaning, as Near Eastern personal names usually did, they denote individuals who pass on their seed by generation to their sons and are recorded in the genealogical lines marked by the expression sepher todeloth, “the book of generations.” These lists form an important structural role in the Book of Genesis and occur at regular intervals throughout the book. The first genealogy is that of the line of adam, which implies propagation and so personal individuality, as in 5:1, for which 4:1 has prepared us:
And the adam knew his wife, Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain. (Gen 4:1)
It is still just possible to translate this as “the man,” but it can hardly be translated as “Humankind lay with his wife.” It is probably best translated “Adam knew his wife Eve,” but it could be translated “The man knew his wife Eve.” Consequently, we must take the first generation-list as having for its ancestor the individual, “Adam”: “This is the book of the generations of ‘Adam.’” Whether we translate “the man” or “Adam,” Genesis 2 uses the Hebrew word adam in a different sense from Genesis 1. However, unlike the translations, the Hebrew word remains the same though the concept changes. The result is that the Hebrew text conveys a sense that Man in general and human beings in particular are closely related. This is part of the subtlety of the text, which is untranslatable.
The Hebrew writer’s masterstroke occurs at the beginning of Genesis 5 with his identification of the story of the fall of adam, that is, of the human race, with an early genealogical list about individuals:
This is the book of the generations of adam. When God created adam, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them and he blessed them and named them adam when they were created. When adam had lived a hundred and thirty years, he became the father of a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth. The days of adam after he became the father of Seth were 80 years and he had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days that adam lived were 930 years; and he died. (Gen 5:1— 5)
The sacred writer interpolates into these verses a repetition of God’s creation of adam in his image and likeness from the very first chapter (Gen 1:28). The result is that adam has both a general and a particular meaning. The general and the particular are united in this passage. Adam is both “humanity” and the patriarch who heads the list of generations. In the latter sense, as patriarch, the proper name “Adam” occurs as the first father in other patriarchal lists in the Bible (e.g., 1 Chr 1:1).
There is a very subtle touch: the omission of the doublet “image and likeness” with regard to God and the substitution in Hebrew of “likeness” to God alone, cleverly balanced with the addition of Adam’s human begetting of Seth as “in the image and likeness” of Adam. It reminds the reader how tragic the human condition has become. By the time Seth is born, the murder of Abel and the banishment of Cain have already taken place. Man is specifically less like God than he was before, and more like the sons whom he begets. This perhaps suggests a shift in human consciousness—that is, a fading of the sense of being very precisely like God and an increase of the idea that as a human being one’s significance consists in begetting children and living on through one’s offspring.
The word adam is consequently difficult to translate, and translations show great variety. Contemporary Jewish commentaries allow only six occasions when the personal name would be justified. One authoritative Jewish translation does not translate adam as a personal name until God announces the “curses” or prophecies about life in the world the expulsion from Paradise. All the Christian translations into English vary, starting with “Man” and at some point breaking into “Adam” as the narrative proceeds. This lack of translation-consensus arises from something untranslatable in the Hebrew text, to which I have referred; the author is skillfully exploiting a double meaning of the word, producing an effect upon the reader of the Hebrew which hovers between the general and the specific.
The Jewish Septuagint translation of the third and second century B.C. translates adam as the name of a person, “Adam,” in twenty of a possible twenty-six instances.57 This translation interprets the Hebrew as being about an individual, someone called Adam by leaving the Hebrew word untranslated into Greek, so that it has the effect of a proper noun. The Septuagint is the official version of the Bible of the Greek Orthodox Church, because it was the version used by most of the New Testament writers and by all the early Greek Fathers. The Septuagint is part of the tradition by which the Church is guided in interpreting Scripture. What is remarkable in the case of Adam is that the Septuagint gives great weight to the interpretation that Genesis 1—3 is about an individual who actually existed, Adam, rather than a story about Man in general. The Septuagint supports the idea that, although we do not have to take all the details of Genesis 1—3 literally, the story does reflect the memory of what happened to an individual as the result of his choice.
The idea of Adam as our ancestor in sin, who passed on his sin to the whole of humankind, is a Christian interpretation of the Old Testament, started by St. Paul. In Romans 5, St. Paul explains that just as “through one,” all sinned, so also “through the one” Christ all are redeemed. St. Paul’s teaching is based upon the idea that an individual action has serious and far-reaching consequences. He gives Adam as an example of this: Adam is a “type.” His example illustrates the whole history of mankind until Christ. Adam did not sin alone. He sinned with his partner, the one whom God had provided for him as friend and equal, “because it is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen 2:18). He also sinned along with the serpent, which represents in Orthodox thought the angels who had rebelled from God and who were jealous of his creation of the man in Paradise. Thus sin is also communal; we sin with others and as a result of what others do.
Why, then, did not St. Paul say that we sinned “in Adam and Eve”? I suggest that this is because St. Paul has in mind the consequences of sin for humanity in general. Adam’s choice brought great disaster upon him—but also upon the whole of the human race, because his sin had as its consequence damage to our nature and the sickness of physical and spiritual death, the consequences of sin. Adam passed on the disease by generation through his seed. This inherited “disease” is not actual culpability from the moment of our birth, but rather a damaged nature with a tendency to fall away from God and to be unkind to people. The result was that, in practice, all human beings actually do sin. St. Paul chooses Adam because he is described as our ancestor. Since all the ancestral lists in the Old Testament begin with him, St. Paul can show how great the consequences of an individual’s actions can be. St. Paul is interested in the individual story of Adam to explain the wider power of individual choice.
St. Paul teaches that we can never be “individuals” whose choices do not affect the whole human race. There is a very hopeful idea at the end of St. Paul’s arguments. This idea is that Jesus Christ, although an individual person and “one man,” could by his actions repair the human nature as a whole.
If we follow St. Paul, then the beginning of human salvation history is the disobedience to God of one individual. This is not to say that Eve did not sin, but to say that Man fell as the result of individual sin. A situation that was first good was destroyed by a free act of individual people. St. Paul could equally well have said that the terrible consequences—death, murders, disease, alienation from God—were the result of Eve’s sin, as they are according to the narrative. Adam has a representative function. He becomes “typical” of us all, and so the term “Adam” means all of us. This is how, I suggest, the personal name came to have a general sense. This recognition of individual responsibility as having a very wide effect is important to the state of mind necessary to receive salvation also through the one man Christ. When we are united to Christ in faith and love—when, that is, we are “in Christ”—we too are part of the positive process by which the evil consequences to human nature are being reversed. Thus a holy life lived in Christ need not necessarily involve great ascetical feats or miraculous powers such as were given to some of the Saints by God. Life in Christ can take a humble and apparently insignificant form and yet still be part of the healing, not only of oneself as an individual, but also of the whole human race.
I consider the key to the modem issues connected with this narrative to be the idea that individual actions have very broad and lasting consequences. Most consistent with this is the view that God made humankind as individuals.
However, I accept that there are other ways of seeing the question. Genesis 1-3 may be seen more genetically as a narrative about human decadence, the degeneration of a group or race by the collection of all the bad decisions of a people put together. It is still, on this view, a story about human choice. One may still see individual human beings as being responsible for a collective decline by their choices, either through active wrongdoing or passive acceptance. It can still be a story truly reflecting the human desire for godlike power and for a morality independent of God, “knowing good and evil” in a purely human way. No decadent or corrupt society ever contains exclusively decadent people. However, even the innocent are affected by the lives of the corrupt people who live around them and by the corrupting atmosphere of a bad culture.
I have so far attempted to give the outline of an answer to the challenge which modern historical understanding presents to anything but a purely symbolic interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis. Now, however, I turn to a more difficult problem: how to face the difficulties posed by the popularly-held evolutionist picture of the universe, by which life-forms are thought to have developed through “survival of the fittest.” At the heart of this idea is cruelty through ruthless competition. Evolution cannot fit a totally benevolent scheme: God would have been “doing evil that good may come. (See Rom 3:8)
On the other hand, the evolution of life-forms according to the cruel law of the survival of the fittest fits the damaged world after the Fall. Adam and Eve’s choice had cosmic consequences even for the animals, who became enemies of one another after the Fall. It was after the Fall that Man and the animals were competitive with one another and preyed upon one another, not before.
In conclusion, it is hard to conceive how any account of the origin of Man in the creative will of God could be told in historical prose or in a factual manner which would satisfy a scientist. However, this need not be in opposition to the idea that there were actually individuals involved. The person of Adam is placed at the beginning of the human race as we know it, because the sacred writer understood that there was a link between the story of Adam and Eve and ancestral history. It is for this reason that he is our ancestor and can properly be placed at the beginning of Christian salvation history. This is the simplest, straightest view: God created the human person when he created the first human individuals, from matter brought to life by a share in his Spirit. We look to the “before” to find out how we should start to be now, “after” Paradise was first lost. The factual element in the story prevents us from blaming the way we are on “human nature.” We know that “human nature” does not predetermine the way we are now. It is a damaged nature that accounts for our condition and behavior—and the good news is that there is a way back to “human nature” as it should be and can be. Paradise can be regained.
SOURCE: Stephen Thomas, "Excursus to Chapter 5: Adam our Ancestor?" in "Deification in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition: A Biblical Perspective." (New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2007) 130-139.
