The Lost World of Adam and Eve (23 page)

This is at the heart of the fresh way into the Paul-and-Adam discussion that I would propose (it requires, of course, much fuller treatment). First, Paul’s exposition of Adam in these passages is explicitly in the service not of a traditional soteriology but of the kingdom of God. Second, there is a close parallel between the biblical vocation of Adam in Genesis and the biblical vocation of Israel, and when we explore this we may find fresh ways through to the heart of some contemporary puzzles.

Adam and the kingdom of God.
First, then, Adam and the kingdom of God. Despite many generations in which Romans has been read simply as a book about “how we get saved,” that is not the ultimate point, even of Romans 1–8 or Romans 5–8. The great climax of Romans 1–8 is the renewal of all creation, in Romans 8:17-26, where Jesus as Messiah, with a reference to Psalm 2, is given as his inheritance the uttermost parts of the world. For Paul it’s clear:
the whole world is now God’s holy land.
That’s what Scripture prophesied, and that’s what has been achieved in Jesus the Messiah. But this inheritance is shared with all Jesus’ people; and the way this happens is ultimately through their resurrection. “Creation itself,” declares Paul, “will be freed from its slavery to decay, to enjoy the freedom that comes when God’s children are glorified” (Rom 8:21, author’s translation). That doesn’t mean that creation will
share
the glory, as some translations misleadingly suggest. Paul is working with Psalm 8 as well as Psalm 2, and in Psalm 8, exactly as in Genesis 1, humans are given glory and dominion over the world. Here is the problem to which Romans is the answer: not simply that we are sinful and need saving but that our sinfulness has meant that God’s project for the whole creation (that it should be run by obedient humans) was aborted, put on hold. And when we are saved, as Paul spells out, that is in order that the whole-creation project can at last get back on track. When humans are redeemed, creation gives a sigh of relief and says, “Thank goodness! About time you humans got sorted out! Now we can be put to rights at last.”

This is what Paul is really talking about in Romans 5:12-21. Out of many possible points, I here draw attention to Romans 5:17, 21. In Romans 5:17, Paul surprises us. “If, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man,” he says, and we expect him to go on, “how much more will life reign through the one.” But he doesn’t. He says, “how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!” Adam’s sin meant not only that he died but that he lost the “reign” over the world. God’s creation was supposed to function through human stewardship, and instead it now produces thorns and thistles. Now humans are redeemed, in order to get God’s creation-project back on track; and the word for all that is “reigning,” “ruling,”
basileuein
in Greek, in other words, “kingdom.” Paul’s Adam-theology is also his kingdom-theology, and the author of Genesis would have smiled in recognition. Romans 5:21 points, densely of course, in the same direction. Grace reigns “through righteousness” to the life of the age to come. God sets people right in order that through them he will set the world right. Justification by faith is God putting people right in advance, in order that through them God will put the world right.

We see the same from a different angle in 1 Corinthians 15:20-28. Again Paul is working with the Psalms, in this case Psalm 110 and again Psalm 8. His point is that Jesus is already enthroned, already king, already reigning. In other words,
he is at last where Adam was supposed to be.
There is at last an obedient human at the helm of the universe. Of course, this is part of Paul’s now-and-not-yet theology; Jesus is already reigning, but one day the last enemies will be finally overcome, namely death itself. Paul is working very closely with Genesis 1–3 right across 1 Corinthians 15. And basic to his exposition of Genesis is this point: that God put his wonderful world into human hands; that the human hands messed up the project; and that the human hands of Jesus the Messiah have now picked it up, sorted it out and got it back on track. It won’t do, therefore, simply to go to Paul and say, There you are, Paul believes in Adam; that proves a literalistic reading of Genesis. What this reading of the text exposes to view is the
failure
of the tradition to read either Paul or Genesis, because Paul’s whole point is to pick up from Genesis the notion of
the vocation of Adam
and to show that it is fulfilled in the Messiah. Unless we put that in the middle, we are not being obedient to the authority of these central scriptural texts.

This sends me back to Genesis, then, encouraged by John Walton on the one hand and writers such as Richard Middleton and Greg Beale on the other, to look at the calling of Adam.
2
The notion of the “image” doesn’t refer to a particular spiritual endowment, a secret “property” that humans possess somewhere in their genetic makeup, something that might be found by a scientific observation of humans as opposed to chimps. The image is a
vocation,
a calling. It is the call to be
an angled mirror,
reflecting God’s wise order into the world and reflecting the praises of all creation back to the Creator. That is what it means to be the royal priesthood: looking after God’s world is the royal bit, summing up creation’s praise is the priestly bit. And the image is, of course, the final thing that is put into the temple (here I draw on John Walton’s careful exposition of Genesis 1 and 2 as the creation of sacred space, and the seven days of Genesis 1 as the seven stages of temple building), so that the god can be present to his people through the image and that his people can worship him in that image. One of the great gains of biblical scholarship this last generation, not least because of our new understanding of first-century Judaism, is our realization that the temple was central to the Jewish worldview. This comes through in various places in Paul’s letters. The temple was where heaven and earth met; when Paul says in Ephesians 1:10 that God’s purpose was to sum up everything in heaven and on earth in the Messiah, we shouldn’t be surprised that much of the rest of the letter is then about Jesus and the church as the true temple. But here is the problem: that we have seen the goal of it all as “humans being rescued so that they could have fellowship with God,” but the Bible sees the goal of it all as “humans being rescued so that they could sum up the praises of all creation and look after that creation as God’s wise stewards.” Genesis, the Gospels, Romans and Revelation all insist that the problem goes like this: human sin has blocked God’s purposes for the whole creation; but God hasn’t gone back on his creational purpose, which was and is to work in his creation through human beings, his image-bearers. In his true image-bearer, Jesus the Messiah, he has rescued humans from their sin and death in order to reinscribe his original purposes, which include the extension of sacred space into all creation, until the earth is indeed full of God’s knowledge and glory as the waters cover the sea. God will be present in and with his whole creation; the whole creation will be like a glorious extension of the tabernacle in the wilderness or the temple in Jerusalem. (This, by the way, is the foundation for what I see as a proper theology of the sacraments, though this is a topic for another occasion.)

Vocations of Adam and Israel.
This is where I sense a strong parallel with the calling and vocation of the ancient people of Israel, and this is where we might glimpse some fresh light on Adam and the question of origins. Genesis itself makes a clear parallel between Adam and Abraham: “be fruitful and increase in number” (Gen 1:28) becomes “I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you” (Gen 17:6). Instead of the original paradise, with God present with his people, Israel is promised the land, and eventually given the temple as the place of God’s presence. But the point is this: Israel, a small, strange nomadic people in an obscure part of the world, is chosen to be the promise-bearer: “through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed” (Gen 22:18). Israel is to be a royal priesthood (Ex 19). Israel is to be the light of the nations (Is 42; 49).
Israel is chosen out of the rest of the world in order to be God’s strange means of rescuing the human race and so getting the creational project back on track.
And God chooses Israel while knowing full well, in Paul’s language, that Israel too is in Adam; the people who bear the solution are themselves part of the problem. That, in fact, is the clue to the hardest bits of Paul’s theology, for instance the problem of the law. That’s for another time. But watch closely. Israel is chosen to fulfill this divine purpose; Israel is placed in the holy land, the garden of God’s delight; and Israel is warned that if they don’t keep Torah they will be expelled, sent off into exile. It will look as though the whole project has been aborted. That is the horrible problem faced not only in the exile but in the so-called postexilic period. And it is that complex problem that the New Testament sees being dealt with, gloriously resolved, in Israel’s Messiah, Jesus the Lord, and his death and resurrection. He has dealt with exile, and now the whole world is God’s holy land, with Jesus and his people as the light of the world.

What might that tell us about the vocation of Adam, then? I do not know when Genesis reached its final form. Some still want to associate it with Moses; others insist it was at least edited during the exile. But whatever view you take about that, certainly the Jews of the Second Temple period would have no difficulty in decoding the story of Adam as an earlier version of their own story: placed in the garden; given a commission to look after it; being the place where God wanted to be at rest, to exercise his sovereign rule; warned about keeping the commandment; warned in particular that breaking it would mean death; breaking it and being exiled. It all sounds very, very familiar. And it leads me to my proposal: that just as God chose Israel from the rest of humankind for a special, strange, demanding vocation, so perhaps what Genesis is telling us is that
God chose one pair from the rest of early hominids for a special, strange, demanding vocation.
This pair (call them Adam and Eve if you like) were to be the representatives of the whole human race, the ones in whom God’s purposes to make the whole world a place of delight and joy and order, eventually colonizing the whole creation, were to be taken forward. God the Creator put into their hands the fragile task of being his image-bearers. If they failed, they would bring the whole purpose for the wider creation, including all those other nonchosen hominids, down with them. They were supposed to be the life-bringers, and if they failed in their task, the death that was already endemic in the world as it was would engulf them as well. This, perhaps, is a way of reading the warning of Genesis 2: in the day you eat of it
you, too, will die.
Not that death, the decay and dissolution of plants, animals and hominids, wasn’t a reality already; but you, Adam and Eve, are chosen to be the people through whom God’s life-giving reflection will be imaged into the world, and if you choose to worship and serve the creation rather than the Creator, you will merely reflect death back to death, and will share that death yourself. I do not know whether this is exactly what Genesis meant, or what Paul meant. But the close and (to a Jewish reader) rather obvious parallel between the vocation of Israel and the vocation of Adam leads me in that direction. And already we should be able to see that the traditional Western picture of an Adam-and-Christ soteriological scheme represents a shrinkage of the original Pauline vision.

One might perhaps sum up the problem like this: It isn’t just that Adam sinned, and that Israel sinned as well. The problem is that Israel was called to be God’s means of rescuing the world, but Israel was part of the Adamic problem to which it was supposed to be providing the solution. In a similar way—not exactly parallel, but similar—Adam and Eve were chosen to take the Creator’s purposes forward to a new dimension of life. But if they failed—if they abdicated their own image-bearing vocation, and followed the siren call of the elements of chaos still within creation—they would come to share the entropy that had so far been creation’s lot. They did, and that’s what happened.

Christology and the project of new creation
. All this, of course, projects us forward toward a full and rich Christology. This will not be simply about Jesus as both divine and human; that’s a given, but it’s only a shorthand, a signpost. Look at Paul’s language: Jesus is the beginning, the firstfruits, the true Image, the Temple in whom all God’s fullness was pleased to dwell. He is Israel’s Messiah, who fulfills Israel’s obedience on the cross and thereby rescues both Israel and the whole human race. He does for Israel what Israel couldn’t do for itself, and thereby does for humans what Israel was supposed to do for them,
and thereby launches God’s project of new creation, the new world over which he already reigns as king.
This is the great narrative, the true Pauline Adam-and-Christ story, and we need to learn how to tell it and live it.

Here we stumble upon an interesting possibility. The biologists and philosophers have pointed toward the complex notion of altruism as something that might just be a signpost away from the closed continuum of selfish genes. So, too, in the Christian message we have the cross, not just as an act of altruism—
altruism
is after all a thin, bloodless word, a parody of the reality—but the supreme act of love. “The Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me,” wrote Paul (Gal 2:20). “Having loved his own who were in the world,” wrote John, “he loved them to the end” (Jn 13:1). The cross is, and Jesus always said it was, the subversion of all human power-systems. The cross is the central thing that demonstrates the impossibility of the metaphysically inflated Evolution-with-a-capital-E. The weakness of God is stronger than human strength. And it leads, and Jesus said it would lead, to a life of following him that would itself be about taking up the cross and so finding life, about the meek inheriting the earth. That is how the Adamic vocation is to be fulfilled. If we can study Genesis and human origins without hearing
the call to be an image-bearing human being renewed in Jesus,
we are massively missing the point, perhaps pursuing our own dream of an otherworldly salvation that merely colludes with the forces of evil. That’s what gnosticism always does.