← Ask NT Wright Anything
Ask NT Wright Anything
#232 Making sense of Adam, Eve and the Genesis creation story (Classic)
00:29:23
Loading summary
Transcript36 lines
- [00:02]
Rico Tice
Before we dive into today's discussion, we have a special resource just for you. A free ebook called Does It Make Sense to Believe in God? In today's world, where faith is often labeled as outdated or irrational, this ebook takes a fresh look at the evidence for God. It features reflections from years of engaging with some of the world's leading atheists, like Richard Dawkins, and reveals why, after hearing every conceivable argument, our confidence in God's existence is stronger than ever. Download Does It Make Sense to Believe in God Today? For free@premierinsight.org resources that's premierinsight.org resources now let's get started with today's show.
- [00:54]
Justin Brierley
Welcome to today's replay of Ask NT Wright Anything. The Ask NT Wright Anything podcast. Hello and welcome back to the show where we bring you the thought and Theology of N.T. wright, aka Tom Wright. The show brought to you in partnership as ever with SPCK and NT Wright online. I'm Justin Brierley, head of Premier Unbelievable and today listener questions on how to interpret the early chapters of Genesis, what Tom believes about the nature of Adam and Eve, whether suffering and death existed before the Fall, and much more. Plus, Tom will be pulling out the guitar once more for a Genesis themed song if you listen right to the end of today's show. This was first broadcast in 2019, but but we're bringing you some fresh answers to your questions very soon. Thanks to a dragon who got in touch to say the only bad thing about this podcast is that I can't yet listen to more episodes. Tom and Justin have had such a large impact on my own theological shifts in recent years. Wonderful to have a place where hard theological questions can be discussed and presented in such an accessible, thoughtful way. Can't wait to hear more. Thank you both. Glad we've been helpful for you. Do leave us a rating and a review wherever you listen to your podcast. It helps others to discover the show as well. And for more from the show, do register for our newsletter at our website. Among the many perks of registering is that you get all kinds of bonus material. In fact, we'll send you God's Not Dead. It's an ebook by Christian thinker William Lane Craig, laying out the evidence for God's existence. So if you'd like to register, get that free ebook premier unbelievable.com the link is with today's show. Now onto your questions. Genesis, Evolution Admon Eve, the Fall. These are the questions that I've brought together for today's podcast. Tom of course in a previous podcast you played for us that song you, you composed with, with Francis Collins, which I, I thought has tremendous words. There's a lot of depth to it. But obviously a song can only say so much and so can a podcast. At the end of the day, these are big issues, aren't they?
- [03:10]
N.T. Wright
Sure, sure.
- [03:11]
Justin Brierley
We'll do our best though. Let's start with George in Mexico. Thank you for listening from Mexico, George. And he says it's simply the age old question, variously put, is it indispensable, in the interest of a strong Christian faith, to be able to reconcile the findings of science with the literal interpretation of the Bible?
- [03:31]
N.T. Wright
Oh my goodness, two big questions there. I sometimes say to people, the trouble is you think the jigsaw has pieces of this shape and you're trying to fit them together like that, but actually over time, that piece of the jigsaw has got out of shape and so has this piece. So the phrase the findings of science is always in fact fluid. Yes, every scientific finding is a hypothesis in need of verification. And again and again it may take a generation or two, but then along comes Einstein who says, actually we're doing it wrong now, we need to do it like this. And that goes on. And likewise, what do we mean by the literal interpretation? And obviously, over the last two centuries, the question of the Bible being, quote, literally true, unquote, has been massive, particularly in North America, where a particular strain of rationalism came in with the enlightenment, broadly the 18th century. And much of American Christianity seized onto that in a false war, a phony war between people saying, it's all rubbish, it's all myth, it's all just made up, and other people saying, no, it's all literally true. And pinning that onto the idea of the authority of Scripture, which comes through in Protestantism ever since the Reformation, that if you're challenging the authority of the Pope or the Church, well, what you got instead? Well, it's the Bible, so the Bible must be literally true, otherwise we don't know what to believe. And then, so the Protestant emphasis on the Bible comes together with the Enlightenment emphasis on rationalism, and you got a big problem. Especially when then Epicurean scientists like Erasmus Darwin, Charles's grandfather, are saying, we've got to look at the way the world makes itself, which is ancient Epicureanism with a modern twist. And then Charles Darwin eventually gets on a boat and discovers some turtles and finches and so on, says, bingo, got it. This is how it all works, sort of. But then the new thing there is the survival of the fittest and people forget that. What that means is like the idea of monkeys typing Shakespeare. And you got to imagine really rather a lot of near misses. So for evolution to work, you have to stretch it out over massive millennia. And the ancient Epicureans saw this as well as the modern ones. This is not a modern idea, but this is where the idea of evolutionary development, which I think most modern Christians would happily accept in some way or form, gets hooked up with a modern idea of progress. That actually this is where everything is progressing. And therefore we the scientists are telling you the way the world is, we're telling you the way history is going. That's where the problem comes. Because actually science doesn't do that. And actually nor does a so called literal interpretation of Genesis either.
- [06:29]
Justin Brierley
And very often when we're talking about the quote unquote, literal interpretation of Genesis, we're talking about the very early chapters and we're talking about the creation narrative.
- [06:37]
N.T. Wright
Absolutely.
- [06:37]
Justin Brierley
And in that sense, you know, this is a question from me rather than a listener, though I think a lot of listeners will be asking this question is simply if in a nutshell you were asked to say to someone who's confused, how am I supposed to read Genesis if it's not a scientific description of how the world came to be, what is it?
- [06:55]
N.T. Wright
I am reading there are several layers and we loosely refer to it as poetry. And of course it isn't poetry in the sense that it isn't composed in the same way as say the Psalms are. It doesn't have that kind of verse structure, but it's poetic in the sense that, as only poetry can, it's saying three or four or five things at the same time. And my friend and colleague John Walton from Wheaton College has written very helpfully on this. In terms of the ancient Near Eastern world that forms the context within which Genesis would have meant what it meant.
- [07:28]
Justin Brierley
The lost world of Genesis, I think, is.
- [07:29]
N.T. Wright
That's right. He's written several books and a commentary on Genesis, I think two commentaries on Genesis, if I remember rightly. And part of the point there is that this description of something being created in six stages, ending with an image being put into it, is the creation of a temple. The image being humankind in Genesis 1. Yes. If you create something, this structure which is a heaven and earth structure, which it is, and if the last thing to go in is an image, and then the God who's made it takes his rest, that's coming in to take possession. This is now God's home. This is where he wants to be with his human creatures. And so it's a way of saying, look at the whole creation the way we look at a temple. And then it also means turning it round. Look at the temple in Jerusalem as a microcosm of the whole creation. And certainly the decoration of the temple indicates that, as in the tabernacle, in the wilderness as well. So that suddenly a whole world of cosmology is opened up, which has got nothing whatever to do with were these six periods of 24 hours. Now, actually, most British Christians, and I think most Christians around the world don't get hung up on the six periods of 24 hours in the way that some Americans still feel they have to. And it's a shame. It's because that major event happened in American culture, the Scopes trial in. Was it 1929, something like that? It was somewhere around there, which, you know, nobody else could have had that. That was a post civil war Northern liberals versus Southern conservatives flexing their theological muscles. And everyone wanted to know what was going to happen about this because it was sort of, are we going to be in the modern world or the ancient world with all sorts of overtones. That was a very America specific thing. And I never tire of saying this because these questions regular come from America and people often don't realize how peculiar that context is that needs demystifying.
- [09:31]
Justin Brierley
The cultural context often determines the kinds of questions people are asking. But here's some actually from Surrey, Derby and Romania who are asking related questions and particularly to do with, well, how did. What are the results of the fall if there is a long evolutionary process involving death and decay and so on. So I'll just read all three of these. They're asking similar questions. Malcolm in Surrey says, it's said that creation and evolution are not in conflict, simply different ways of describing the same thing. But whereas creation teaches that death came into the world through sin, evolution teaches that death was in existence from the beginning. Can that circle be squared? If not, is the gospel message invalidated? Ada in Romania says, I don't know how to view creation in terms of the understanding we now have of science. Evolution again implies death, suffering, fear, survival of the fittest, etc. How does this match with Paul's teachings that through sin death has entered the world? And again, death came into the world through a man, but also with God's declaration of the goodness of the initial creation. And finally, Jamie Indabi, who says, you believe that heaven is a restoration of the heavens and earth. It was originally in the beginning. You also believe in Millions of years of evolution, what we see in the fossil record is millions of years of bloodshed, cancer, disease, suffering, and death. So, according to your worldview, all that horror existed before sin. What exactly will a restored Earth be like? And what exactly was the physical punishment for sin if all of that existed before sin? Sorry to be blunt, but your worldview doesn't seem to add up, says Jamie.
- [11:00]
N.T. Wright
So, yeah, clearly there are. Again, if I spoke before about two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, there's about 10 there, and they're all in need of cleaning up. And I'm not necessarily the right person or the best person to do all of that cleaning up. However, it does seem to me that I take the point completely. If there is a long period before that primal pair of hominids find that some strange force or power or presence that they were only dimly aware of seems to be saying to them, you are special. I've got a job for you to do. That rather does imply, and many theologians have said this precisely, that the call of call the Madam and Eve, for the sake of argument, is itself the Creator's act of saying, now there's been a lot of mess and muddle and decay and so on, but now we're going to have a garden, and this is going to work out thus. And so, and they are called to be God's agents and instruments to bring his wise order into this creation, which has hitherto been without form and void. Tohu abohu, when they then rebel. This is at a different level, as it were, so that there is, yes, decay and death in the fossil record, in trees and plants and dinosaurs, whatever, but when they are told on the day that you eat of it, you will die, there is something else going on there, a different level, which I think may correspond in some ways, though I've not really worked this out to what you get in the Book of Revelation when it talks about the first death and the second death, that there may be different, different levels, different meanings of death, and that Paul is definitely looking at the second one. But the other thing we have to realize there is that as with Genesis 1 and the Temple, so with Genesis 3. If we assume, as most people do, that the Pentateuch is being edited, at least during the Babylonian exile, and it's seen as a whole, so that there's a narrative arc from the beginning of Genesis to the end of Deuteronomy. Clearly, the end of Deuteronomy is saying, if here is the law given to Israel. If you obey, you will Live. If you disobey, you will die. And what will die mean? It will mean exile. The curse of exile. Deuteronomy 27, 8, 9, picked up at the end of Leviticus 18 as well. And then there is the prospect of restoration. But that's how the narrative works. And so anyone in Babylon, in the Jewish community, in sort of the middle of the first millennium BC writing or reading or editing Genesis 3, would say, we know exactly what the story is about. Here's a family who are given a task, given a lovely land to live in, told to be responsible, who blew it, disobeyed, and they get kicked out. And that is the ultimate death. Because how can you sing the Lord's song in a strange land? In other words, this is already an allegory of Israel, or vice versa. Israel is to be seen as acting out what's happened to all the human race. So you've got these different bits of the great Jewish story jangling against one another. And until you've put all that back together again, it's hard, as it were, to put the different elements into a rationalistic scheme and say, well, Paul says, death entered, so how are you going to do that? So I'm not saying that solves the problem in a sense, it complexifies it further, but I think it's a healthy complexity which then enables us to say that there are levels of death, that God's choice of the humans was in order precisely to bring new life and coherence to the chaos, the tohu abohu, that when they messed up, this was the beginning of a new level of death, which then had to have a new sort of injection of life. That the work of the ultimate human Jesus, has to do what Adam and Eve were supposed to do, but also to rescue them in the process. And that, I think, is why Romans 5:12, 21 is such an incredibly difficult and dense passage. Paul is saying all of that at the same time.
- [15:19]
Justin Brierley
Right, well, let's talk about that again from a different perspective. Robin Down Derry asks, what is Genesis 3? By which I assume he means the sort of passage about the fall of Adam and Eve, the rebellion, trying to tell us about a fundamental fracture between God and man. Why does Western theology in particular appear to traditionally focus on the Fall and the curse? Why would God curse and banish a mankind that was created in love and blessing?
- [15:48]
N.T. Wright
About 20 years ago, or maybe even more, maybe 30 years ago, there was a. An American called Matthew Fox, who was actually a Dominican, except the order then didn't like him anymore. And they. I think he became an Episcopalian, actually, as many do. And he wrote a book called Original Blessing, which was a kind of an answer to original sin. And he was basically a New Age proponent who used to go and stay up at the community at Findhorn up in northern Scotland and so on. And it was an odd mixture. I once did a television program with him, one to other people. And it was an odd mixture of bits of genuine Christianity with bits of extraordinary New Agey stuff from. It must have been the 80s, actually. And there the emphasis was. The Western church, ever since Augustine has been fixated on sin and curse and death and oh, dear, and how do we get out of that? But in fact, creation was always wonderful and good. The danger with rejecting the dualism is that you buy into a monism where, as with other forms of monism, like Stoicism, it's very hard to have any critique of evil at all. If there's anything you don't like in the world, in other people, in yourself, then as Epictetus says, the door stands open, you're free to leave. In other words, Stoics commit suicide if they don't like the way things are. It's fine to be an original Blessing person when the sun is shining in your family, being nice to you, and you know you've got money in the bank for most of humans for some of the time. And some humans, most of the time, it's not actually like that. And so most humans most of the time are faced with the question, well, yes, there are great good impulses, but things have gone horribly wrong. It's like, you know, people say, well, I can't believe because of the problem of evil. But if you're an atheist, you have the problem of good. Why. Why would anything seem other than random if you're a complete atheist? And Dawkins, I suppose, would say it's atavistic impulses of remembering hunting rituals from when we were in the trees and so on, that things which seem good to us are really related to those prim instincts or something like that. I'm caricaturing. So I want to say, yes, God created the world, and he created it good. But the goodness was never static. It was always, Genesis 1 is the beginning of a project. It's not a tableau. This is really, really important. So that in the New Testament, it isn't a matter of saying, let's go back to the garden. Like a famous song by Joni Mitchell has, that you've got to get back to the garden. No, where the garden was the beginning. The garden was God's project which turned into a city. Was it meant to turn into a city when Cain built a city? Isn't that interesting? The Tower of Babel says no. Book of Revelation says, well, yes actually, but not like that. So it isn't the Tower of Babel. Humans reaching up to God. The new Jerusalem comes down from heaven to earth. So the garden is meant to be the beginning of a community which turns into the garden city. The danger is that it turns into a city which is purely human arrogance, etc. And those are the images we ought to be looking at because those are the things which say yes to the goodness of creation, no to all that's infected and corrupted it. And now where is this going to go? What is the new world towards which we're aiming?
- [19:22]
Justin Brierley
Henry asks, did sin come into the world through Adam? Satan was already present and along with him, sin. If God is going to finally deal with Satan and annihilate him, why didn't he do this before he created Adam? I suppose I want to go to another facet of that, which is. But what is what. What do you conceive is what happened when that. That fall when.
- [19:44]
Rico Tice
We're excited to announce the launch of a brand new podcast from Premier Insight called the Bible Explored with Rico Tice. Featuring Rico Tice, a renowned British preacher and apologist, the Bible Explored With Rico Tice podcast offers practical guidance for living out the eternal truth of God's word in everyday life. It will inspire and equip you to boldly share the gospel even in life's toughest situations. To continue creating content and resources like this, we rely on the generosity of listeners like you. Your support is vital to keep Premier Insight strong and ensure programs like the Bible Explored With Rico Tai's podcast can reach more people. To equip a generation of Christians to live out their faith with clarity, conviction and confidence, Simply go to PremierInsight.org NTRight that's PremierInsight.org NTRIGHT thank you for your support.
- [20:48]
Justin Brierley
Whatever form it took, that rebellion happened, what did that sow into creation? And is that something that is responsible for the physical attributes, you know, this creation that is subject to decay, as he puts it?
- [21:03]
N.T. Wright
Yes, in a sense, I want to say the creation was before the call of these two hominids was already decaying and going through a cycle.
- [21:12]
Justin Brierley
It had that nature.
- [21:13]
N.T. Wright
But the human project was to take it from there and move it into the new way that God intended it to be. It's very difficult to cash out Genesis 3 into any other sorts of propositions. Whichever things one does, there will be elements missing. And this is, of course, notorious. And. But I do want to say that the early pair, if they were a pair, and I don't much mind if there were exactly two of them, but you know what I mean. The early hominids who are given this vocation are thereby given a call to worship the Creator and reflect his wise stewardship into the world. And somehow there is something. There is this tree in inverted commas and this snake in inverted commas which say, there are other possibilities here. Do you have to do this? And I wouldn't go all the way into the traditional, quote, free will defense, unquote, as though we had to have freedom in order for it to work. But something like that needs to be said along with all the other things that are going on. And part of the rationale of why there's a snake seems to be that in the lavish, extraordinary creation that God made, once you get away from sort of thinking of God simply with these six periods saying, now, I'm going to do this, now I'm going to do that now. End of conversation. Once you move with somebody like John Polkinghorne into a much more open idea of God, there we say experimenting God, saying, let's do giraffes. Why not? Let's do pineapples. You just have to think around creation a bit, and you have to say, God was having fun with this stuff. But out of all of that, God is a much more unpredictable God. The danger is that I think ever since, particularly the deism of the 17th and 18th century, we tend to see God as the clockmaker, as the one who's made a machine that ought to work. And if it isn't working, it's his fault for making it wrong. And I think that's a fundamentally wrong view of God.
- [23:29]
Justin Brierley
I mean, coming back to Henry's question where he asked sort of about the role of Satan in all this. And I have heard others speak of the idea of a sort of fall before the fall, the cosmic fall, which at some level proceeds and is kind of. I've heard theologians speak of that as being that the thing that creates that the nature of the universe into which Adam and Eve are this project of restoration.
- [23:51]
N.T. Wright
I'm not sure about the word nature, but.
- [23:53]
Justin Brierley
But there's some sense in which the. A cosmic fall, you know, and I forget the exact reference in Scripture, but where we only have a very brief mention of it. But the idea that there Was a. An angelic rebellion.
- [24:05]
N.T. Wright
Yeah, yeah. It's the beginning of Genesis 6, when the Watchers, you know, and this is where some of Milton comes from and so on, the rebellious angels who get crossed. Because it seems that God is going to make these human beings who are going to be his primary agents. And these angels think, hey, that's not fair. We ought to be that. There is enough in scripture about that in some of the Psalms as well, actually, for one to say something like that seems to be there. What we have to have again and again with Scripture is appropriate hermeneutical humility. This doesn't mean that we can't know things. It means that we just may not have very good language for this. And I think they were as aware of that as we are. Just like we today, we talk about there seem to be some forces unleashed. You look back at the history of the 20th century and you say in the 1930s, there just seemed to be demonic forces unleashed. I have no idea what that phrase actually means. But what we're saying is more was going on here than simply the sum total of a few wicked human beings. Something else was at work. Rather like Scott Peck says in his book People of the Lie, that there's a certain amount that humans just do by messing up. But then there is another dimension beyond that. And it seems to me that to project that back onto early cosmology cautiously is quite a wise thing to do, because Scripture does seem to be doing that. And that doesn't exactly explain why there's a snake in the garden. But I think you have to say something about the freedom of God and God's lavish letting be God saying let there be this, let there be that. And the things that God says let there be too, are not puppets. And there's a sense in which God does and doesn't control them like the author of a novel does and doesn't control the characters. If the author of a novel tries to control the characters too much, be a very bad novel.
- [26:00]
Justin Brierley
Yes, let's get a last question in from S. Drummond in Texas. And I think this does fall into the sort of whole free will sort of question. But Estromond says one question I've never found an answer, nor have seen discussed among theologians. And I did study theology and philosophy regards Adam and Eve's fall. And he says he understands the Bible passage may be allegorical, but how could their disobedience be a punishable sin if they were created pure and couldn't tell the difference between good and evil before committing the sin. If they committed the sin willingly, it means they chose evil over good and could already tell the difference. If they did it ignorantly and couldn't differentiate good from evil, then God would have been unfair in his judgment. The only logical answer, in my view, according to the story of Genesis, is that they already knew good and evil.
- [26:47]
N.T. Wright
Yeah, this is, this is a cleverly argued little bit of sort of philosophical speculation. And, and as an exegete, as a historian, I'm always wary when theologians or philosophers say this must have meant or would have been or whatever, because I want to say, hang on, what is being smuggled in here? And I would want to take that whole paragraph and just gently unpick it and say, are we sure about these moves here? Because when somebody addresses you and says, I love you, you are my people, I want to reflect myself through you into my world. Then this isn't, oh, now we have a sort of a moral index of what good and evil means. It means, oh wow, you are amazing. We are your people. We bask in that. How delightful. And the giving of a command or a prohibition implies something about this is what you ought to do, obviously. And you could stand back from that and say, well, hang on, I'm going to be a philosopher for a minute and this means you're teaching me a bit about good and evil, doesn't it? But if they haven't got any such idea yet, it says, okay, that's what he wants to do, but then guess what? There's some other way which is impinging upon us. And I think the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis is just one of those very, very profound things. I don't think it's, oh yes, I know that there is a difference between good and evil. I think it's actually a knowing by experience. We have now found out what the difference is that good is life and evil means darkness and exile and curse. So I think the knowledge of good and evil is not just a head knowledge. Oh yeah, we've got this index and we understand that there is something called good. And I think it's now you'll know what it's really all about.
- [28:44]
Justin Brierley
It's the sort of experiential sort of.
- [28:46]
N.T. Wright
Sort of like CS Lewis says somewhere about somebody who climbs up to a high diving board, says, you know, you want to know what a 50 meter thing, dive is all about. Wait until you're standing there, then you'll know what it's really all about.
- [29:01]
Justin Brierley
Well, thank you very much again, a lot of ground covered there in various different ways. Just before we finish up, you mentioned John Walton as possibly a good place to start exploring these issues. Any other recommendations for people who want to get, get their head around the whole way to put Genesis together and the Fall and everything else?
- [29:19]
N.T. Wright
I mean, I have been very struck in the last five or six years, well, the last 10 years really, by this whole business of temple theology. In Genesis, Gregory Beale's book the Temple and the Church's mission starts off with some of that and develops it in terms of a forward looking way. Said again, back to creation. No, the church's mission is to be the temple of God in the world for the world against the day of the new creation, etc. That's been very helpful. John Levinson, the Jewish studies professor at Harvard who's a remarkable Jewish scholar, he has a book whose title is just slipping my mind, but you can say I recall.
- [29:58]
Justin Brierley
I will let people know.
- [29:59]
N.T. Wright
I'm sorry, this is, this is just sheer old age kicking in. Plus the fact that I got up very early this morning. I think, I think it's Creation and the Persistence of Evil. But that is a very sensitive and interesting Jewish reading of not only Genesis, but what follows from it.
- [30:18]
Justin Brierley
Well, I will make sure listeners have the correct title and where to get hold of it by the end of today's program. For the moment, Tom, thank you very much.
- [30:26]
N.T. Wright
Thank you. Thank you very much.
- [30:32]
Justin Brierley
Hope you found today's show helpful, but don't hang up on us yet. Something special coming up in just a moment that you won't want to miss. Just a reminder, there's a link with today's show where you can register for our newsletter. If you do that, we'll send you God's Not Dead. It's an ebook by William Lane Craig laying out the evidence for God's existence. Plus you'll get loads more bonus content on top of that when you register or simply head to premier unbelievable.com to do that. There's a link with today's show too for now. Thanks for being with us. You've been listening to the Ask nt Write Anything podcast. Let other people know about this show by rating and reviewing it in your podcast provider.