Collins Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?

Who They Were and Why You Should Care
1. Auflage 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4335-2428-8
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

'We need a real Adam and Eve if we are to make sense of the Bible and of life,' argues C. John Collins. Examining the biblical storyline as the worldview story of the people of God, Collins shows how that story presupposes a real Adam and Eve and how the modern experience of life points to the same conclusion.    Applying well-informed critical thinking to common theological and scientific questions, Collins asserts the importance of a real man at the beginning in God's plan for creation, a plan that includes 'redemption' for all people since sin entered the world.     Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? addresses both biblical and Jewish texts and contains extensive appendices to examine how the material in Genesis relates to similar material from Mesopotamian myths. Collins's detailed analysis of the relevant texts will instill confidence in readers that the traditional Christian story equips them better than any alternatives to engage the life that they actually encounter in the modern world. 

C. John Collins (PhD, University of Liverpool) is professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. He has been a research engineer, church-planter, and teacher. He was the Old Testament Chairman for the English Standard Version Bible and is author of The God of Miracles, Science and Faith: Friends or Foes?, and Genesis 1-4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary. He and his wife have two grown children.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Collins, C. John

Leseproben

2

THE SHAPE OF THE BIBLICAL STORY

2.a Story and Worldview

A number of developments in Biblical studies over the last several decades have deeply enriched our ability to read the Bible well. In the nineteenth century, and through most of the twentieth, Bible scholars emphasized studying an ancient text to discover how it came into being. This kind of study focused on the sources that were supposedly brought together, and the editorial process by which the sources were reshaped into something new. Because these sources no longer exist (if they ever did), each scholar had his own opinion on what they looked like. Often enough, one discerned the boundaries between the sources by looking for differences in style and inconsistencies in outlook. In the late twentieth century, however, many Bible scholars came to a fresh appreciation of the literary qualities of the Biblical books; thus we have come to favor literary readings oriented toward the text as we have it, as opposed to reconstructing the presumed process by which the text came to its current form; this has focused attention on the means by which the Biblical authors communicate their point of view. In fact, it has now become respectable to explain what once appeared to be stylistic differences and ideological inconsistencies as literary devices of a coherent literary work.1

And what are some of the literary characteristics that the Biblical authors used? Now, since each one has his own style and preferences, generalizations are hazardous; but we can find some that are common to them all. The features that we will have to notice include:2

• The narrator is and : that is, he serves as the voice and perspective of God.
• The narration is : that is, the emphasis is on direct action and interaction of the characters rather than on descriptive detail of the environs.
• The narratives are : that is, they focus on what is essential for the narrative.
• The author signals speech using poetic diction: that is, elevated diction of a speech is evidence of its significance; often oracular, it may even be divine speech.

The result of these features is that, generally speaking, the author communicates his point of view by indirect and laconic means. The emphasis will be on showing (displaying the heart by action and speech) versus telling (the narrator telling us explicitly what kind of person the character is).

Hence if we want to be good readers of Old Testament narratives, we will pay attention to, for example, the way people speak: we will look for the relation between what they say and what they do, or between what the narrator has reported and what the character reports (if the character adds or deletes things, how does this reflect “spin”?), or between what someone says (or is told) he will say and what he does say. The Biblical narrators are fully aware that humans are sinful, and that even the best of us have mixed motives and imperfect morality.

Not everyone who is aware of these literary features will agree on just what they mean in a particular passage, and thus we cannot avoid the kind of discussion that evaluates proposed ways of reading. We must offer reasons for our preferences. Some help in navigating differences comes from developments in linguistics. For example, we now have a rigorous description of how Hebrew authors use verb tenses and word order to focus the readers’ attention, in the discipline called “discourse grammar.” One of the chief pioneers in this discipline is Robert Longacre, a linguist and Bible translation consultant who has drawn on experience with numerous non-Western languages (and Hebrew is a non-Western language). Since about the middle of the twentieth century, the discipline of lexical semantics—discerning the meanings of words in their contexts— has also become well developed.

Another area of linguistics that has made progress is called “sociolinguistics,” which is the study of the way people use language in various social situations. The part of sociolinguistics called “speech act theory” focuses on how people do things with what they say. Some of the things they do include conveying information, but there is more: a speaker might be trying to shape an attitude, or he might be reminding his audience of what they already believe so that they will act upon it. Sometimes the speaker wants his audience to infer the right response. For example, by saying the sentence “there is a car coming down the street” you might be telling your son not to try crossing the street, or you might be telling your friend across the street to hold on to the Frisbee until the car passes. Usually if someone at a dinner table says, “Is there is any salt on the table?” he is not asking for information: he is making a polite request that someone bring the saltshaker to the table.

All of these factors will help us when we ask what a Biblical author is “saying” in his text: we are not limited to the actual words he uses. For example, we will note that Genesis 3 never uses any words for sin or disobedience; but it would be foolish indeed to conclude that what Eve and Adam did was not “sin.” The author wants us to see that it was indeed, and to be horrified.

Another development in theological studies is that we pay more attention to the place of one’s worldview, and we want to find a fully Biblical worldview.3 I am using the term “worldview” in the way students of ideology use the term, to denote the basic stance toward God, others, and the world that persons and communities hold.4 It has further become clear that a worldview is instilled by means of the grand story, which tells a community where we came from, what went wrong, what has been done about it (whether by gods or by man, or some combination), where we now are in the whole process, and where the whole world is headed. One student of world missions has suggested that tribal peoples learn their worldviews through the sacred stories their culture tells; my only correction is that this is true of all peoples, not just of tribal ones.5

A number of theologians have applied this perspective to the Bible: they have argued that the Bible presents us with an overarching worldview-shaping story, and not simply with a bunch of edifying stories.6 We will take up the specific contours of this story shortly. Albert Wolters and Michael Goheen have shown why this is a crucial insight:7

To miss the grand narrative of Scripture is a serious matter; it is not simply a matter of misinterpreting parts of Scripture. It is a matter of being oblivious to which story is shaping our lives. Some story will shape our lives. When the Bible is broken up into little bits and chunks—theological, devotional, spiritual, moral, or world-view bits and chunks—then these bits can be nicely fitted into the reigning story of our own culture with all its idols! One can be theologically orthodox, devotionally pious, morally upright, or maybe even have one’s worldview categories straight, and yet be shaped by the idolatrous Western story. The Bible loses its forceful and formative power by being absorbed into a more encompassing secular story.

People who write about the relationship between worldview and overarching story do not always use the same verbs for the relation between the story and the worldview: does the story carry the world-view, to it, it, or something else? However one might wish to articulate this, there is one common affirmation: the worldview is not an abstraction derived from the story; that is, one cannot treat the story simply as the husk, which we can then discard once we have discovered the (perhaps timeless) concepts. This is not to deny that there may well be such things as transcendent truths (such as moral norms); but they gain their power from their place in the story—that is, they equip the members of a community to play their parts in the story meaningfully.8 It is the worldview story that, if well told, captures the imaginations of those who own it, thereby driving them on and holding their loyalty.

2.b History, Myth, and Worldview Story

This notion of a worldview story ties in with the sense of “myth” in C. S. Lewis’s essay, “The Funeral of a Great Myth.”9 Here Lewis is describing the story of “developmentalism,” a purely naturalistic evolutionary tale of how we got here and where we are going. He distinguishes this story from the theories of the particular sciences: the story uses the theories to the extent that these theories support the story.10 What makes this “myth” attractive is its imaginative appeal; as Lewis said, “I grew up believing in this myth and I have felt—I still feel—its almost perfect grandeur.” Could it be that “myth” is the right category for the kind of stories we find in the ancient world, whether from the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, or even the Hebrews?

The difficulty is that in popular usage the term “myth” implies a judgment that the story is not true.11 The word can have a range of other meanings, but untrue (or at least unhistorical) usually attaches to it, whatever we may...