Jeremy D

I have a crazy non-denom friend. She was off in Atlanta at the Passion Conference this weekend, so I took the opportunity when she came back to ask her about it and engage her about her beliefs. We went through a couple of things about pain and struggle and she wasn't giving up any ground, but then she's someone who thinks "Anything is possible with God!"

That brings me to the subject of this thread: She cited Adam and Eve as a reason for us to deserve earthly suffering. I told her straight-up that Adam and Eve was meant as a metaphor. She believes in a literal Adam and Eve.

Oy vey.

I went here to grab a couple of points to use against her, but her Jesus helmet is very well installed. She isn't versed in the original Hebrew of Genesis, however (about the only thing I am good with). She said she would check up on the translation that clearly establishes Adam as representing humanity (presumably with her pastor). I asked her why she believes in a talking serpent. The response was "Anything is possible with God!"

I'm dealing with a crazy crazy person here. What other ways can I demonstrate that the creation story was never meant to be taken literally?

spin

What makes you think it was not meant to be taken literally? One of the major problems I face when dealing with Genesis is that others want to manipulate the text and say this or that is not meant to be taken literally. It doesn't really mean "day" when it says "day". You can't be literal when it says that Eve was created out of Adam's rib... but why? because it offends our modern sense of reality? That's no reflection on the perceived reality of that time.

Literal doesn't mean that the text must be correct, but it does mean you are more likely to understand the thought of the text and not re-create the text merely to say what's acceptable to you.

If you want to deal with someone who wants to treat it as reflective of a reality today, why not deal with its implications: man was created first and woman was an afterthought to please man. Woman doesn't exist without man. Etc. The full chauvinist package as expressed in the story. Would she really accept that?

(Just incidentally, 1 Enoch, a composite ancient non-canonical Jewish text, has a different explanation for how humankind went wrong, not from their choice to eat the wrong fruit, but because angels fell to earth and perverted them. This alternative would be highly unlikely had the Adam&Eve story been part of the common tradition.)


spin

judge

One could show her Galatians 4 . This is not part of the creation story but it is part of Genesis.

Here even Paul uses Genesis figuratively. This might be enough to at least have her consider another way of looking at Genesis than her present way.

DBT

I'm inclined to think that Genesis was meant to be a metaphor in regard to morality, provide a cultural foundation for a group of people -the Israelites... and to be also taken as a literal explanation for the creation of the world.

Joan of Bark

I'm afraid I'm with Spin on this one. I think it was meant to be taken literally, even though the whole story is patently absurd.

Jeremy, you could point out the contradictions between the first and second versions of creation, such as in the way the planet came to have dry land and water, and the order of the creation of humans and animals. Contradictions like these tend to drive the literalists into a lot of verbal gymnastics. Not that you'll convince her, but you could plant a seed of doubt in her mind that will grow into full-fledged tree of scepticism in the future ...

DBT

But we are talking about bronze age people, what better explanation did they have for the existence of the world?

Steven Carr

In the beginning , God created the heavens and the earth.

Persuade her that that was never meant to be taken literally, and you can contimue from there.

-Jay-

Jeremy -

I'm gonna go with Spin here. There are some subtle consequences of what he said, though, that are worth spelling out clearly.

The question of whether the original authors of the Genesis material meant it to be taken literally is almost a moot point - there's no good reason to assume they didn't. However (and this is the point that gets lost on people who are trying to read and interpret it today), the intent of the authors doesn't bear on the accuracy of the material.

What is important is understanding the context in which the Genesis material was written down, and how the material would have played to the intended audience at the time. The creation stories (and the flood stories, and the patriarch stories) are largely etiological myth - they sought to explain how the world got to be the way it was. All societies have them. That's unremarkable in and of itself. (The specific motivations behind the assembly of what we now know as the Pentateuch likely have a political element to them, but that's another discussion.)

It's also important to understand that the Genesis creation accounts are human works - no God dictated them, no God picked up a stylus and inscribed the stories on stone tablets. This is where your friend is going to get stuck. If she's the sort (and from what you've said, she is) that believes that the Bible is the verbally inspired inerrant word of God, it's going to be very challenging to convince her otherwise. You'll need to either be patient, or find a good place to pound your head against the wall. Maybe both.

regards,

NinJay

ChandraRama

sorry, I think she is right. It was meant to be taken literally. That is what was intended by the original writers of the story. figurative and metephor are all escape routes of the christian apologists.

In my opinion, the so called "moderate" or "Scientific" christians are more dangerous than the literalists. They just make your mouth shut in debate, while they never rile against the literalists.

Whenever I face a metephor christian, I used to ask him, why dont you write against the literalists than argue with me?

It is like American oil companies that use evolutionary theory to find the gas, but fund the fundies who oppose evolutionary theory.

John Kesler

I agree with the comments of others, that the story of Adam and Eve was intended to be a literal account of the first humans. Luke apparently thought that Adam was an actual person, because his genealogy (Luke 3) traces Jesus' ancestry back to Adam, a peculiar thing to do unless Adam were viewed as an actual person.