One of things that puts people off talking about a close friendship with Jesus is that it sometimes sounds as though it is all about our feelings and our consolation. It will seem very self-centred if it is divorced from the reality of our need to seriously cooperate with him in the demanding work of salvation.

Today, while evil comes to meet us at every turn, there is an industrial-scale denial that we share responsibility for it. All sorts of excuses are offered to bolster the belief that we are the victims of evil forces within and without. It is as though we hardly have any free will, and therefore little responsibility. Christianity firmly holds that we are free beings; that all of us sin and must own our individual and shared responsibility for evil, and that we must freely participate in the work of restoring human holiness. We base this belief on the teaching at the beginning of the Bible.

But there we have a problem because many modern people rightly do not believe that the Bible’s accounts of creation and the beginning of the human race with Adam and Eve are strict history. We Christians, who base our understanding of God and mankind on them, have been slow to perceive how many people are put off by the way we talk about these stories. We have to help people to understand the origin and meaning of the beginning of the Bible.

In modern times, there have been huge developments in our knowledge of history. In the past century, it has revealed more and more of how people have acted and developed over the ages. History necessarily concentrates on the millennia for which we have written records. Archaeology adds to our understanding. It tells us a great deal as more and more traces of early peoples and civilisations are unearthed. Timescales of human developments have become more clear. Yet, despite the endless research, there is no evidence in science of how humanity started.

We Christians pose the question of how humanity started in these terms: when did the human soul begin? The soul is the source of our capacity to reflect on ourselves and to take conscious decisions to alter our behaviour rather than be driven by our basic instincts. We could put it another way: when did we begin to love using our free will? The answer we believe that God has given us is contained in the stories of Adam and Eve and all Christianity’s understanding stems from there.

It is not strict history; but instead the stories illustrate the answers to two elementary factors at play in our world. The first is the age-old questioning of why we are here and how we find happiness. The second is the process by which the Creator has communicated with us, and how he has unveiled himself to us.

The quest to discover why are we here and how we achieve happiness

         Modern interest in our family trees is evidence of how we feel the need to understand our origins in order to gain some understanding of who we are. Since we are not privy to the details of remote history we have to use our imaginations and intelligence to construct explanations of how the traditions and religions developed in different peoples as they sought to give answers to these basic questions.

The ancient peoples did not have books or computers, they had stories which they told round the campfires in the quiet of the night. The story tellers were remarkable for their retentive memories and what was passed down varied little over the generations. Where it did develop was where sages added details to introduce deeper meaning. The traditions of different people became established and were accepted into the communal understanding of the family, the tribe and eventually nations.

Many of these accounts from the different traditions have survived and they show great similarities. They usually agree on the creation of humanity by divine beings. These were very human-like, but with super powers. They were given characteristics like violence, selfishness, lust, devotion and vulnerability. Whenever we seek to explain something, we will do so in terms with which we are familiar. So the gods of myth were created in our own image. Since these primitive religions were mostly modelled on ourselves, they did little to shed light on why we are here and where happiness lies.

How the Creator reveals himself to us

All of this is a proper subject for scientific consideration. But the power of science to supply answers ends at the frontier of human intuition and belief. Here explanations of our origin and happiness can only be tested by the effects they have over time, and competing religions are judged by their fruits.

At a non-Christian funeral recently, the last song had these words: ‘I don’t believe in an interventionist God’, but the chorus was a plea to ‘Dear Lord’. It offered no answers, but it expressed the anguished human quest to know the answers to the age-old questions. We Christians definitely believe in an interventionist God. More than that, we believe that God has gradually revealed himself to humanity over the centuries until the fullness of his self-revelation came when his Son, his Word, his full expression of himself, became human as Christ. Christ then appointed messengers, or apostles whom he had taught and whom he commissioned to hand on the completed revelation that the God who reveals himself in Christ is family, love and goodness, and we are his children.

Where does Adam and Eve come into all this? In the midst of myths about competing gods, there appeared a tale of a good, holy God who made us well in his own image. The pervasive experience of evil was explained by an account of the first human beings choosing to know evil and bringing disaster into the world. The disaster was not to last for ever, but evil would be crushed by an ‘offspring’ of ‘the Woman’. We believe that, in his careful planning, God inspired the sages who elaborated this tradition. The next big step of his self-revelation was to form a close relationship with one of the ancients whom he gifted with enormous faith. His name was Abraham, and God ensured that Abraham’s family adhered to the story of Adam and Eve.

They did not have our strict method of verifying history and they even saw no contradiction in holding to the two differing accounts of creation in chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis. In the first chapter, God made man and woman on the sixth day after creating all the other plant and animal life on earth. In the second account in chapter 2, he made the man first then created plants and animals to provide him with companionship, but they did not satisfy him. God finally created woman and the man’s happiness was complete. Having two contradictory stories did not bother previous generations, but simply explained different aspects of what God was revealing.

As the family of Abraham developed into the nation of Israel, they learned to write, and gathered their stories into books. These were eventually compiled into the Old Testament as we know it. The process of compilation was completed only a few decades before Jesus was born. The Jews accepted the authority of the compilers. They and we believe that God inspired these compilers to select the writings which contained the truth about him, and to reject those which did not. Even then, there were two compilations of texts, one in Hebrew by the religious authorities in Jerusalem, the other in Greek by the renowned Jewish school of Alexandria in Egypt which accepted seven more books as inspired by God. This latter version was used by the vast majority of Jews who in fact were living all over the world outside Israel where Greek was the common language, like English is today.

Most people over the centuries took the simple road of accepting the stories at the beginning of the Bible as historical fact, because it was inspired by God, and they had as yet no sense of modern historical criticism. It is only recently, that modern methods have cast doubt on the early stories in the Bible. And that has led the Church in our day to understand that these tales were inspired by God to teach us the fundamentals about our creation and our fall into sin, and not about the exact history whose details are lost in the mist of time. It is through the meanings hidden within the scriptures that we are enlightened about God and humanity. There we discover not accurate history, but the truths on which we can and must base our certainties about creation, fall and redemption.

Original Innocence

Possibly the most problematic element in these stories for modern people is the teaching that humanity existed in a state of innocence until they sinned by eating the forbidden fruit of knowledge of good and evil. It is hard to imagine such a state when we think in terms of gradual evolution. But it is obvious that there was a point where God breathed into our forebears a soul making them human. What is fundamentally taught in scripture is that soon after this happened, the newly created human beings used their freedom to know evil as well as good, thereby seizing control of creation instead of submitting to God’s supremacy which was the true path to happiness. Again we believe that this is a fundamental fact revealed by God. We are not told the historical details of this Fall of mankind into sin, only the veiled account in the third chapter of Genesis. While our own immediate experience is of a world full of evil, it is undeniable that we all harbour a stubborn sense that perfect goodness can exist and that true innocence is possible. This recurring longing for perfection in mankind is not just idle imagination. Genesis 3 clearly teaches that it is our origin, and, in promising that the ‘Offspring’ of the ‘Woman’[3] would crush the head of the Serpent, it would once more be our destiny.

(If you wish to read of the book A Message For Its Own Time, click OUR BOOK at the top of this page)

  [1] ‘I don't believe in an interventionist God’ by Nick Cave

[2] Gen 3: 15

[3] Gen 3: 15st goes here. To edit this text, click on it and delete this default text and start typing your own or paste your own from a different source.