Genesis not being literal

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CurtisHouse

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I know that there is no formal position on if Creation in Genesis is to be taken literally or not. For those that don’t think Genesis is literal, how would this affect the doctrine of original sin? If Adam and Eve weren’t literal, it seems the ramifications would tear at the doctrine of original sin and make it not literal as well. Where do you stand on the interpretation of Genesis? It seems like people in the Catholic Church, and protestant churches as well, have went with the times and are trying to fit evolution into the Creation account. Did any of the early church fathers explain Genesis as anything other than literal? Just random thoughts in my head and trying to get it all sorted out. Thanks in advance.

Curtis
 
Adam and Eve (the first humans) are a dogma. So is original sin. What’s not to be taken literally is how they were created. 😉
 
It’s not hard to still believe that the two first humans could have acted in such a way as to bring original sin down on themselves, even if you don’t believe that God literally created the world in 7 days, that Adam ate a literal apple from a literal tree of knowledge etc.

The Catechism explains all this:
[390] The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man . Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents.

…

III. ORIGINAL SIN

Freedom put to the test

[396] 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.” The “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” 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.

Man’s first sin

[397] 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. All subsequent sin would be disobedience toward God and lack of trust in his goodness.

[398] 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”.

399 Scripture portrays the tragic consequences of this first disobedience. Adam and Eve immediately lose the grace of original holiness.280 They become afraid of the God of whom they have conceived a distorted image - that of a God jealous of his prerogatives.

[400] 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. Harmony with creation is broken: visible creation has become alien and hostile to man. Because of man, creation is now subject “to its bondage to decay”. Finally, the consequence explicitly foretold for this disobedience will come true: man will “return to the ground”, for out of it he was taken. Death makes its entrance into human history .

[401] After that first sin, the world is virtually inundated by sin…
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The point is not whether Adam ate a literal apple. The point is that he wanted to put himself on the same level of God rather than just trusting in God.
 
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CurtisHouse said:
Did any of the early church fathers explain Genesis as anything other than literal?
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Saint Augustine In his work The Literal Meaning of Genesis , he said that the first 2 chapters of Genesis were written in a simple allegorical style for all people to be able to grasp certain truths about how everything began; and long before Darwin, Augustine also believed that God created man from lower firms of life in a world that had the capacity to develop, and criticized those who interpreted a Genesis in a strictly literal way:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth , the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics ; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions , and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven , when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion [quoting 1 Tim 1:7].
 
CurtisHouse said:
Did any of the early church fathers explain Genesis as anything other than literal?
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Origen is not strictly a ‘Church Father’, but he also took Genesis as non-literal:
“What intelligent person will suppose that there was a first, a second and a third day, that there was evening and morning without the existence of the sun and moon and stars? Or that there was a first day without a sky?”
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CurtisHouse said:
If Adam and Eve weren’t literal, it seems the ramifications would tear at the doctrine of original sin and make it not literal as well.
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There isn’t much concretness to that stuff, Adam and Eve or Original Sin. They’re both equally nebulous in how their revelation is interpreted into a teaching. I personally don’t think that there is a whole lot to either one of them other than them simply being part of a larger story.
 
CurtisHouse said:
If Adam and Eve weren’t literal, it seems the ramifications would tear at the doctrine of original sin and make it not literal as well.
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There is no contradiction between evolution and there having been a first man and a first woman. If you accept evolution, the man wasn’t created from earth and the woman wasn’t created from the man’s rib; instead, they were both the offspring of beings of an intermediate nature, neither fully ape nor fully human.
 
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CurtisHouse said:
It seems like people in the Catholic Church, and protestant churches as well, have went with the times and are trying to fit evolution into the Creation account.
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As others here indicate, the point you make above is somewhat historically backwards. As David Bentley Hart masterfully points out, the oracularist literalism approach to the Bible, which is produced by Modernism (and creationism follows from it) has no connection with the ancient church or even with the church of the Middle Ages. Trying to interpret the biblical texts (any of them but especially Genesis) in some hyper-literal way, as if it’s just a modern book of history is only what a simpleton would do, according to the Fathers. The early church fathers were influenced by the Greeks who had no problem with believing in a vastly old world (some Greeks even held that the world had no beginning).

So a person could only think that modern Catholics and Protestants are in some way capitulating to evolution if that person believes that Christian history began 500 years ago.
CurtisHouse said:
Did any of the early church fathers explain Genesis as anything other than literal?
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Pretty much all of them. Allegorically finding Christ in the narrative, illumined by the Holy Spirit, was the way in which the church fathers interpreted the sacred scriptures, to include Genesis. Oracular literalism, creationism, these are products of the Modern Era in the western church.
 
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Speaking from a Jewish perspective, outside of Orthodox circles, even when Genesis is viewed as “not being literal,” what is meant is that Genesis is offering truth, not facts.

There is a difference between what is fact, like a news report or a page out of an encyclopedia or the results of a science experiment, and what is truth, such as what is taught from a religious sage. They are not the same.

Take for instance Jesus of Nazareth. Christians view Jesus as the Messiah. Even myself, as a Jew, view Jesus as a great Jewish sage. He taught great truths from God. And yet Scripture says of Jesus:
With many such parables he spoke the word to them as they were able to understand it. Without parables he did not speak to them.–Mark 4.33-34, NAB
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Now parables are not literal narratives. They are not fact. But they are stories filled with truths. They are Jewish ways of getting truths across. That is why it is said of Jesus that “without parables he did not speak.” It is the way Jews teach truth.

Genesis, and in fact much of Scripture, is not filled with dry fact. Instead it is filled with life-giving truth. In order to do this effectively, the Jewish writers often fell back on the narrative device of using parable-like narrative storytelling. This is where Jesus himself got this manner of teaching truth.

This doesn’t mean that Adam and Eve were not historical, any more than it means that Abraham was not historical. You can place historical figures in a narrative or setting that is not literal. A great example of this is the parable of the Good Samaritan. The figures in the parable are historical–they truly existed, but the story or the setting is not.

Truth is found not in the details of a story but in its interpretation. Eating fruit doesn’t cause sin, but a disobedient heart and stealing do. Is the story in Genesis really about a fruit tree or about disobedience and rebellion? Is Original Sin tied to a literal tree in a literal garden or is it something far greater? If the simple story in Genesis is true, then why did it take the complex sufferings of the Sacrifice of the Cross to undo it?
 
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Experts in human genetics are still debating whether we are all descended from a common ancestor.
 
And there we have it… everyone should pay attention to CCC#390 in your quote. Here at very conservative American CAF, where there is a bizarrely inflated contingent of “the earth is only 6000 years old” folks, we keep hearing, as the OP states, that there is no “formal teaching” on this matter. Yet the Catechism explicitly teaches that the Genesis creation narrative uses “figurative language”.
 
Dan_Defender said:
Experts in human genetics are still debating whether we are all descended from a common ancestor.
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Incorrect I’m afraid; we have a large number of common ancestors and there is no disagreement. We are all descended from Mitochondrial Eve and from Y-chromosome Adam. Hence we are all descended from M-Eve’s parents, her grandparents, her great-grandparents etc. Similarly for Y-Adam parents, grandparents etc.

There is a very wide choice of couples from whom all living humans are descended. Which of those many couples first had souls is not a question science can answer; souls do not fossilise and do not show up in DNA the way mitochondria and Y-chromosomes do.
 
That makes sense. Coming from the Earth could be a rather simplistic way of describing it so all people could understand. Genesis should never be treated as a science textbook. It was never intended to be as such.
 
Thank you for showing this passage from the CCC. Another point in the disobedience was that God gave both Adam and Eve a chance to confess and, most likely, have their sins absolved. Instead they just placed the blame on others.
 
It had to be some sort of fruit depicted so why not an apple. When one thinks of a fruit readily available to consume on a tree, the apple seems to be the first thing that would come to your mind.
 
As Carl Sagan said many times, we’re made of star stuff, that includes the Earth and all of us. Even a greater indicator that we all come from the same Creator. Even before the water and the first single-cell organisms, there was the Earth cooling so, in essence, humans did come from the Earth imo.
 
Even when I was protestant, I found the 6,000 year number to be pretty ludicrous. That number just came from somebody who followed the sola scriptura false thinking and couldn’t fathom that there were other siblings, generations, etc. not mentioned in the Bible. Just another reason why I love the Catholic Church. You can believe in God and not have to leave your brain at the door so to speak. Instead we are supposed to love God with all our heart, MIND, body and soul.
 
Thank you for that. I will definitely read that in a little while. All of these answers have definitely been a blessing. Thank God for CAF. Deo gratias!
 
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