Well, I have enjoyed reading the responses to my posting on the nature of Genesis 1-11 and the questions raised about the "young earth" idea. I knew it would bring forth a defense of a literal reading, because I've engaged in that debate on other threads. I have no desire to prolong the argument just for the sake of argument, but would ask us all to consider a few points:
[1] The sciences of geology, archaeology, paleontology, and the like, all point to a time frame of immense length for the universe, the earth, living things, and homo sapies, though of course homo sapiens appears much later than these other formative events. Why would we try to force these data to fit our reading of the Bible?
[2] So if the data and the reading of the Bible do not fit, and the data, while certainly not incontrovertible, do overwhelmingly point to an ancient universe, formed over a vast period of time, doesn't that suggest that there may be another way to read the Bible than the one we have become accustomed to? The study of ancient literature and, indeed, the very nature of the text, suggests a mythological framework -- and, again, I am not using "myth" to mean "untrue" or "fiction". Myth is a type of spiritual story designed to make sense of the world from the perspective of prescientific people AND -- this is most important -- to interpret our relationship with the divine. As another post has suggested, there are many parallels between the stories in Genesis 1-11 and other ancient mythologies. But there are also vast differences, in that our Biblical accounts do not dabble in multiple deities cavorting across the landscape! They point to a single Creator God, working with purpose, and to a broken, fallen humanity, in need of restoration to fellowship with God. So these stories, far from being "untrue", are PROFOUNDLY true. They are true for all of us. I am Adam, you are Eve, we all sin.
[3] That the names of Adam and Eve appear in the New Testament should not surprise us, nor does that bother us when we read the Genesis accounts mythologically. First, they are there because the writers of the New Testament had no other framework than a historical reading of Genesis. They had no science that would have led them to read those accounts in any different way. To put it another way, if Paul thought of Adam as a literal single human being, it only means that Paul was a man of his time, just as limited in his knowledge of facts as anyone else would have been then (and, of course, we are still very limited in our knowledge of these things). His first Adam-second Adam concept in I Corinthians may indeed, at one level, depend on seeing Adam as an individual who broke fellowship with God; but at another level, one can read this lyrical passage as a picture of our very personal relationship with the Gospel story -- I sinned and Christ came for me. It's not Adam's fault, it's mine. I chose to sin and cannot get away with blaming it on a distant ancestor.
I do not have a need to win this debate. But I am always trying to frame the Christian faith and a Biblical understanding in a way that is credible for the modern mind. I spent 23 years in campus ministry, working with students who came to the university and encountered science and history with only a naive theology to support them, and some ended up ridiculing Christianity. Subsequent to that, I spent 18 years as the pastor of a church with plenty of people in the medical and other scientific fields, and they found this perspective helpful in their conversations with their secular colleagues. Right now I am interim pastor of a church where it seems nearly everybody is a scientist connected with NIST or NIH or some such, and they are eager to grasp this sort of concept, because they know that a woodenly literal reading of Genesis will not make sense in their world.
My job has been, therefore, and still is, not only to help them reconcile the apparent conflicts, but also, and more importantly, to own the universality of human sin and our personal responsibility for our wrong choices. It's not just, "Ho hum, so I'm human." No, it is that being human means we "want to be as gods". Adam's story is my story, and I need a savior for that reason.
