The story of Adam and Eve is a profound theological parable about divine creativity and God’s love for the world. It is no more literally true than the Popol Vuh of the Earth Diver myth.
Charlie Zeaiter, of course you are Catholic – this is mainstream Catholic theology (I speak as a trained theologian). My only caveat is that you shouldn’t say “just myths,” for that devalues the genre of myth: myths are crucially important foundational stories, told and retold down the generations in a pre-scientific culture, transmitted by oral tradition, and later written down. The big mistake is when untrained literalists today interpret a version that was committed to writing at some stage of Hebrew culture as absolute literal truth.Anyway, these are my reasons for believing that stories like Adam and Eve are just myths - but with lessons for Christians. (I have no idea if that still makes me Catholic or not.)
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God created man in his image and established him in his friendship. A spiritual creature, man can live this friendship only in free submission to God. The prohibition against eating “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” spells this out: "for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die."276 The "tree of the knowledge of good and evil"277 symbolically evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust. Man is dependent on his Creator, and subject to the laws of creation and to the moral norms that govern the use of freedom.penWindow(‘cr/397.htm’) Man, tempted by the devil, let his trust in his Creator die in his heart and, abusing his freedom, disobeyed God’s command. This is what man’s first sin consisted of.278 All subsequent sin would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in his goodness.penWindow(‘cr/398.htm’) In that sin man *preferred *himself to God and by that very act scorned him. He chose himself over and against God, against the requirements of his creaturely status and therefore against his own good. Constituted in a state of holiness, man was destined to be fully “divinized” by God in glory. Seduced by the devil, he wanted to “be like God”, but “without God, before God, and not in accordance with God”.279penWindow(‘cr/400.htm’) The harmony in which they had found themselves, thanks to original justice, is now destroyed: the control of the soul’s spiritual faculties over the body is shattered; the union of man and woman becomes subject to tensions, their relations henceforth marked by lust and domination.282 Harmony with creation is broken: visible creation has become alien and hostile to man.283 Because of man, creation is now subject “to its bondage to decay”.284 Finally, the consequence explicitly foretold for this disobedience will come true: man will “return to the ground”,285 for out of it he was taken. Death makes its entrance into human history.286penWindow(‘cr/401.htm’) After that first sin, the world is virtually inundated by sin There is Cain’s murder of his brother Abel and the universal corruption which follows in the wake of sin. Likewise, sin frequently manifests itself in the history of Israel, especially as infidelity to the God of the Covenant and as transgression of the Law of Moses. And even after Christ’s atonement, sin raises its head in countless ways among Christians.287 Scripture and the Church’s Tradition continually recall the presence and universality of sin in man’s history:Jesus believed that the sun and all the stars revolve around the earth every twenty four hours. So modern astronomy is wrong, and NASA is wasting our money by pretending there is an international space station, which is actually on a sound stage in Hollywood. After all, Jesus can’t be wrong.
God cannot deceive or be deceived, nor can Jesus who is His son and the truth.
I didn’t say Jesus deceived. I only said that heliocentrism must be wrong because Jesus believed geocentrism to be true. If we follow Jesus we must reject not only Freud and Darwin, but Newton, Galileo, and Copernicus.
Jesus doesn’t know - He just believed?
Jesus was a man of his times, and a finite human being during his lifetime – he wasn’t omniscient. If you think he was, we are in real trouble. If you think the worldview presupposed by Jesus is the same as that we now presuppose, you have a lot of explaining to do as to why Jesus’ chemistry and physics and meteorology and astronomy were so different from ours.
Thanks for the confidence. But I’m still intrigued about what was written by 1ke earlier…
I guess it bothers me that the children of Adam and Eve married each other. (That sounds like the original sin to me
only kidding)No Divinity to be found in Jesus? That is not Catholic Teaching!
Yes. We all share the same DNA and the whole human race are brothers.
Buffalo, where did you read that?
Charlie Zeiter, these are great questions, about which theologians still write. We know from paleontology and biology that humans diverged from their common ancestor with the other great apes 5-7 million years ago. We also know from genetics that Homo sapiens cannot have sprung from a single pair, as that would have constituted an insurmountable genetic bottleneck leading to genetic degradation. See jvi.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/78/19/10582. To avoid this genetic bottleneck the minimum population of hominids that evolved into rational, moral, and spiritually responsive humans was about 10,000 individuals.Thanks for the confidence. But I’m still intrigued about what was written by 1ke earlier…I guess it bothers me that the children of Adam and Eve married each other. (That sounds like the original sin to me
So, I’m a little confused as to the church teaching; Are we all direct descendants of Adam and Eve?
Your post:
I mean that Jesus the man was not omniscient, and Jesus as the Word of God incarnate did not in his human life overturn the scientific understanding of his time. Jesus did not overturn the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic conception of the universe by anticipating the developments of Copernicus-Galileo-Newton; he did not overturn Galenic physiology by anticipating Vesalio-Harveian pulmonary circulation of the blood; he did not overturn antique conceptions of geography and geology, etc.
So He was divine but not all knowing? Unlikely. Now whether or not He chose to teach science is another thing. And we don’t really know that, since the Gospels did not record everything He said and did) However, where He makes statements about one thing or another we must conclude He was not deceiving us.
If Jesus knew about modern science, he chose to hide it from his contemporaries. He could have developed a space program, set up advanced laboratories for the treatment of cancer, established a military technology to rival the Pentagon and kick out the Romans, etc. Evidently he chose to hide all these things from his disciples.