A Summary Overview of Peter Enns’ “The Evolution of Adam”

 

Written by Rachel Miller | Monday, February 13, 2012

 In looking at the various ways people have attempted to handle the differences between Christianity and evolution, Dr. Enns lays out four options:

1. Accept evolution and reject Christianity.
2. Accept Paul’s view of Adam as binding and reject evolution.
3. Reconcile evolution and Christianity by positing a first human pair (or group) at some point in the evolutionary process.
4. Rethink Genesis and Paul (18).

He then begins to explain why he believes that only the last option is a viable one. He believes that it is important to: “reevaluate what we have the right to expect from Genesis and Paul” (18) because “[u]nless one simply rejects scientific evidence (as some continue to do), adjustments to the biblical story are always necessary. The only question is what sorts of adjustments best account for the data” (15). Dr. Enns explains that “[d]eep Christian commitments lead one to read Paul and Genesis with utmost seriousness, but scientific sensibilities do not allow one to dismiss evolution” (17).

Most importantly, Dr. Enns maintains that:

[Paul’s] use of the Adam story, however, cannot and should not be the determining factor in whether biblically faithful Christians can accept evolution as the scientific account of human origins – and the gospel does not hang in the balance (20).

The Evolution of Adam is divided into two parts. Part one focuses on Genesis and part two on Paul. In part one, Dr. Enns makes three main points. First, the majority of the Old Testament was written after the Babylonian exile. Second, Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch were not written as history, but instead as a polemic against the surrounding cultures in an act of self-definition by the postexilic Israelites. Third, the story of Adam is therefore best understood as proto-Israel and was not meant in any way to be a story of universal origins.

According to Dr. Enns, most believers have a faulty understanding of Genesis and why it was written. As a result, they look to Genesis to answer questions that “it will not answer” (53). The first point that people need to understand is that Genesis was not written by Moses in the early days of the Israel’s national history. Instead:

[M]odern scholarship understands the Old Testament as a whole, and Genesis and the Pentateuch in particular, to be Israel’s statement of national self-definition in the wake of Babylonian captivity (586-539 BC) (19).

As a result:

The final form of the creation story in Genesis (along with the rest of the Pentateuch) reflects the concerns of the community that produced it: postexilic Israelites who had experienced God’s rejection in Babylon. … These stories were not written to speak of “origins” as we might think of them today (in a natural-science sense). They were written to say something of God and Israel’s place in the world as God’s chosen people. (24).

Because of this, “Christians today misread Genesis when they try to engage it, even minimally, in the scientific arena” (51). Dr. Enns believes that if we understand the correct genre of Genesis, then we will “hear Genesis in its ancient voice, not impose upon it questions it will not answer or burden it will not bear” (53). The proper category for Genesis is a polemic against the Mesopotamian stories of creation.

The discovery of creation and flood stories from the ancient Near East in the last couple of centuries have presented a challenge to biblical scholars in how to understand Genesis. Some have suggested that Genesis and the Mesopotamian stories have so much in common because of a shared cultural history, i.e., the events described in Genesis are actual history and the Mesopotamian stories are therefore non-inspired distortions of the actual history. According to Dr. Enns, the similarities between the creation and flood accounts in Genesis and other ANE literature are due to the biblical authors drawing on the Mesopotamian stories, such as Atrahasis and Enuma Elish, to define themselves and their God.

Dr. Enns is quick to point out that the Mesopotamian stories must be much older than Genesis because “[t]he polemical function of Gen. 1 requires that the Mesopotamian stories, whether written or oral, be older – otherwise there is nothing against which to polemicize” (172). He does not accept the idea that Genesis represents accurate history as opposed to the myths of their neighbors:

[A]ny thought of Genesis 1 providing a scientifically or historically accurate account of cosmic origins, and therefore being wholly distinct from the “fanciful” story in Enuma Elish, cannot be seriously entertained (58).