The importance of the past

In his introduction to Athanasius’s On Incarnation, C. S. Lewis suggested that one should read at least one old book for every new one. By old, he had in mind books from the previous century and beyond. He mentions in a single breath St. Luke, St. Paul, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Richard Hooker and Joseph Butler. The most recent in that set is Butler, who survived into the middle of the 18^th century. Later in the same piece, he allows for George MacDonald, who just barely stepped into the 20^th century. Lewis’s argument is that reading old books helps one to see the present era in sharper contrast. Reading old books helps us to see what we are missing.

I’ve lately adopted a somewhat similar practice, though not so focused on theologians. I’ve been picking up books that I should have read but for one reason or another didn’t. Moby Dick, to take one example, or, to take another, The Tale of Two Cities. Most recently, it was George Orwell’s 1984. And it was Orwell’s novel that got me thinking about the importance of the past in resisting tyranny.

In 1984, the Party—a shadowy cabal that runs Oceania, a megastate encompassing the UK and all of the Americas)—is attempting to eliminate time altogether. Things are now, the Party claims, just as they have always been and as they always will be. If Oceania is at war with Eurasia, it has always been at war with Eurasia, and it will be always at war with Eurasia. And if, for reasons only the Party knows, the war shifts from Eurasia to Eastasia (two more megastates), then Eurasia has always been at war with Eastasia and will always be at war with Eastasia. There is in 1984 no past. And if no past, then no future. There is only what the Party declares to be now: an endless dystopian present.

We haven’t reached that point in our politics, but we seem headed in that general direction. Governments—the national and some state governments—are attempting to impose their idea of the past on the culture—their idea of how the past ought to have been. One of the latest moves in this campaign is a presidential directive aimed at the information signs in national parks. Here are a few examples, in a report for the New York Times by Maxine Joselow and Lisa Friedman :

At Cape Hatteras National Seashore in North Carolina, the Trump administration is set to review, and possibly remove or alter, signs about how climate change is causing sea levels to rise.

At Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia, the administration will soon decide whether to take down exhibits on the brutality of slavery.

And at Castillo de San Marcos National Monument in Florida, Trump officials are scrutinizing language about the imprisonment of Native Americans inside the Spanish stone fortress.

According to internal documents reviewed by The New York Times, employees of the National Park Service have flagged descriptions and displays at scores of parks and historic sites for review in connection with President Trump’s directive to remove or cover up materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans.”

To “inappropriately disparage” means to tell the uncomfortable truth about what happened in the past or is happening in the present. “Americans” means some Americans and not others. The directive is aimed at whitewashing the past in the most literal meaning of the word. And this is only one example. In Florida, it is now against the law to cause “an individual [to] feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin.” The prohibition on causing “discomfort” is not aimed at racism, as one might conclude on a superficial reading, but on teaching that racism has been an important and systemic component of American society from the beginning. 

For would-be authoritarians, history—interrogating and recovering the past—is always deeply subversive. If your goal is to control the present and the future, you need to control the past. This has been true for as long as there have been authoritarians. Authoritarians almost always fudge the past. If you are the first emperor of the first empire in recorded human history, Sargon of Akkad in the 3^rd millennium BCE, you call yourself Sargon (šarru-kin), “legitimate king,” precisely because your kingship is not legitimate. Or if you are Darius of Persia, and you came to the throne by murdering the legitimate heir to the throne, you tell a story that it was not the heir you murdered but an imposter, and you put a billboard high on a Persian cliff at Behistun to tell the story your way. Or if you have come to power in 21^st century America, you claim that your crowds were larger than crowds even before, even when the pictures tell otherwise. You lie to legitimate your rule. And you keep on lying until the truth about the past is lost in the avalanche of words.

But it’s not politics that I have in mind for this post. Politics is not my primary area of interest except as I—along with you—shake my head every morning as I scan the latest headlines. What I want to consider is something I know more about, the teaching of the church, and the way that, just as in politics, the church often finds it convenient to deny the history in order to support what they claim as truth. Or, to put it more concretely, I want to talk about the historical Adam.

The historical Adam

The year was 1981. I had been to graduate school, taught a bit at Calvin College (now Calvin University) and Calvin Theological Seminary, and begun working at River Terrace Church in East Lansing, Michigan as an associate pastor. I liked the work, felt called to it and affirmed in it. It was time to seek ordination. I applied to my denomination, the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) to become a candidate for ministry.

It didn’t go well. In the odd polity then still in place in the CRC, the first step toward ordination for someone like me who had been out of seminary for a while was to gain the approval of the Calvin Seminary faculty. An interview arranged, and I met with the faculty on what I recall as a pleasant spring evening. The atmosphere in the room seemed collegial. They knew me, and I knew them.

All went well until one faculty member recalled a paper I had given a few years before for the theological and science faculties of Calvin College. In the paper I had observed that several significant works in Old Testament studies were approaching their centenary, among them Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, 1878, 2^nd edition 1883). In Prolegomena, Wellhausen presented what became known as the “documentary hypothesis,” the notion that in the first five books of the Bible, Genesis through Deuteronomy, several strands of tradition can be detected and teased out, the strands or sources known as J (Yahwist), E (Elohist), P (Priestly), and D (Deuteronomist).

I cited Wellhausen’s book, along with a couple of others of the same vantage merely as a bit of color, a way of getting into my topic, which was the first three chapters of Genesis. But the seminary faculty member who remembered the paper wanted clarification: did I “believe in” the documentary hypothesis? “No,” I responded, saying that such a historical hypothesis was not something one “believed in,” but if he was asking whether I thought it possible that these early books of the Bible were assembled from earlier strands of tradition, I did indeed think it possible. Whether the documentary hypothesis was true or not was, I thought, a question of historical judgment, not of dogma.

For the faculty member asking me the question, it was the wrong answer. The seminary faculty approved me for ordination, but the member of the faculty who raised the question voted no and registered his negative vote in the minutes of the meeting. I was flagged for the steps which came next, first, the Calvin Board of Trustees (then one board for seminary and college) and ultimately the 1981 CRC synod. At each subsequent level, I was interrogated about my views on the Bible.

By the time my case came to the synod, the issue had shifted somewhat. It was no longer Wellhausen and the documentary hypothesis; it was the historical Adam. Was the story in Genesis 2-3 historical? A real Adam and a real Eve? As a synod delegate put it to me from the floor of the synod, was it “a real garden and a real snake”? My answer to his question in retrospect was not politic. I said to the delegate that we could probably debate what “real” means in this case, but in the sense he had in mind, the answer was no. The story was not history. There was no garden, no snake, no Adam, and no Eve. It’s a story, an important, deeply theological, story, but still a story.

It was the wrong answer. Synod 1981 turned down my application for ordination. (I was approved five years later.) My answer could not be allowed but not for historical or biblical reasons. No one engaged me on those levels. My answer could not be allowed for reasons of dogma. The teaching of the CRC (and other similar denominations) required a “historical Adam.” The biblical story may have elements of folklore, it was sometimes allowed, but it is necessary that there be a “historical Adam” who at a given point in the past ate the forbidden fruit and thereby disobeyed God.

The necessary Adam

Why must there be a historical Adam? The answer in that era in the CRC and other Reformed denominations was caught up with a 17^th century theological innovation: federal or covenant theology. Federal theology was a clever way to deal with original sin—a way made possible by 17^th century political thinking. How are we implicated in the sin of the human race? By dint of Adam being our covenant representative. Adam in effect voted for us, and because he is our representative, his vote plunged us into sin and the fires of hell.

For this theology to work, Adam has to have existed. You may note that in the biblical story Eve has the primary role. It’s she that engages in discussion with the serpent, and she who first eats the fruit. Adam stands in the background, silent. He eats what Eve gives him. You might think that this would make Eve our covenant representative, but not so. In the assumptions of the 17^th century, the covenant representative has to be a man, a first man at the beginning of human history who makes the fatal decision to choose the knowledge of good and evil over eternal life. Adam is that man. No Adam, and there is by these lights no fall. No fall, and there is no salvation. So went the argument. However one might choose to read the Garden of Eden story, I was told, you must have an actual Adam. A “historical Adam.”

Pay attention to the terminology: “historical” in “historical Adam” has nothing to do with history in the ordinary sense. It means something like “actual” or “physically real.” Note the irony: the existence of this “historical Adam” was not established by means of historical investigation or close study of the text, but by dogma. The theology of the church required a historical Adam regardless of whatever history or biblical studies might say. It was not a “historical Adam” that the CRC required of me but a “necessary Adam,” necessary for dogmatic reasons. It was frequently claimed at the time that if we lose the historical Adam, we will lose the whole gospel.

Adam in history

This sort of argument never works for long. In the case of the historical Adam, two distinct histories must be given short shrift. One is the history of the human race; the other is the history of the biblical story in Genesis 2-3. Both of these histories challenge the notion of a “historical Adam.” 

Take first the history of the human race. What can we know of the history of humans? Quite a lot, as it turns out, and more all the time. Since my encounter with Synod 1981, an avenue of inquiry has opened up for the history of the development of the species of which we are a part, the study of DNA, which is the study of species variation reaching back to where humans diverged from our brothers and sisters and cousins in the animal world. 

As it turns out, this history is complicated, far more complicated than we knew only a few years ago. The evidence indicates that at one point several human species existed simultaneously. Neanderthals, and Denisovans, and our own Homo Sapiens, perhaps along with other species, coexisted and interbred. We carry the evidence in our own bodies. Some of our genes are Neanderthal in origin. 

Or take our genetic ancestors. Our earliest known common ancestor on our mother’s side, Mitochondrial Eve, and the earliest common ancestor for human males, Y-chromosomal Adam, may have existed at the same time, but not necessarily so, and in any case, they were not the only humans at the time. Thousands of other humans coexisted with them.

This greatly complicates any notion of a single pair in a garden somewhere near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers who ate the forbidden fruit and thereby doomed their descendants to death. Increasingly, against the accumulated evidence on human origins, the “historical Adam” seems not historical at all.

Along with the history of human development, another history bears on the question of the “historical Adam: the history of the text. It’s that history—how the Garden story came to occupy the place in Genesis it now occupies and what the story is trying to tell us—that I have found engaging in the years since. But for the synod, the text ultimately did not matter. It was not the scriptural story that determined whether or not there had to be a “historical Adam”; it was the theological system. 

This is always a danger in the study of any text, including the Bible. In reading a text, you develop an interpretation that you believe makes sense of the book. Once you have this interpretation, you begin to impose it on the text, forcing it to say what your system requires it to say. You are no longer reading the text; you are reading your system. Federal theology in just this way determines how scripture must be read. The interpretative system determines what the scriptures must say; not the scriptures what must be taught by the church.

But Genesis 2-3 (and all the rest of Genesis), like, to take another example, biblical teaching on human sexuality, will not go easily into the theological box into which the church has tried to force it. The Genesis story, embedded in a conversation with other ancient stories, is far more interesting and relevant than federal theology will allow it to be. In the end, it’s not a story about a human fall from grace but a story about what it means to be human. At the beginning of the story, the human couple are not yet fully human. There are two perils, both of which would destroy the particular qualities of human life: to be only animal without human consciousness or to be divine without the limits that makes human life human. Adam and Eve are poised between the animal world and the divine world. In the end, they are discovered to be both and neither. Like their fellow animals, they are mortal; like the denizens of the divine world, they know good and evil. To be just this, mortal and yet gifted with a kind of divine knowledge, is the particular quality of human life. Whatever else we are, we are this. As the preacher in Ecclesiastes has it, “I see the kind of life that God has given to humanity. Their everyday business is pleasant enough, but God has also put eternity in their minds (Ecclesiastes 3:10-11 in my paraphrase). 

But all that is lost in the standard dogmatic reading of the text, a reading that reduces the intricacies of the story to an ill-conceived divine test to see if these creatures will obey or not—a reading that denigrates both God and humans. 

Owning the past

I’ll leave it there. Another time and in another post, I’ll raise again the way the story works. It’s really quite a wonderful and relevant meditation on the meaning of human life. My point is not the story but the way the church has come to believe that the past is whatever it says it is. In this respect, it resembles the Party in 1984. If it declares that there was a real snake in a real garden, it must be so. Anyone who claims otherwise must be wrong, not for historical reasons—in this way of thinking there is no history—but for dogmatic reasons. 

As it turns out, the “historical Adam” is a dogmatic fiction.

Because the church has far too often resorted to declaring the past to be whatever it wants it to be in order to fit its teaching, the church has come to resist the very thing it claims for itself: respect for history. The study of history, whether of human origins or the origins of the Bible, comes in this way to threaten the church. The early 20^th century Fundamentals, the publications that created and defined modern Christian fundamentalism, were opposed to two things in modern thought: Darwinian science and higher criticism—the two things that CRC opposed in claiming a “historical Adam.”

My sense is that the CRC, probably in common with other churches, has backed off its once adamant insistence that without the “historical Adam” gospel teaching would fall apart. By now the evidence to the contrary has grown too strong. Perhaps it’s time for the church to acknowledge that it was wrong and to search out new ways to read the Bible and its own traditions.

Or so I think.

Clay