Genesis: The Origin of All Heresies?
Genesis 1: Creation, Not Creationism
Genesis 2: Salvation, Not Creation
Genesis 2 & 3: The "Wood" of God
The Bible's first book, Genesis, was intended to describe the origin of the ancient world, yet it has become the battleground for many modern theological conflicts. From its initial chapter comes the protracted debate between creation and evolution. The second chapter gives rise to even more longstanding arguments concerning human nature, sin, and salvation. Because of alleged discrepancies between these chapters, large numbers of theologians and academicians over the past two centuries have abandoned the idea that the Scriptures are a reliable source of data on most subjects.
Christianity's true purpose is also overthrown in more "conservative" denominations by their assignment of the title protoevangelium, "first Gospel," to a statement in Genesis 3:15: "I will put animosity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he will strike at your head, and you will strike at his heel." Taken seriously, such a designation of the latter verse would mean that there is no "good news for modern man" in the first two chapters of Scripture. Indeed, many contemporary theologians assure us that the formerly good earth is now hopelessly spattered with sin, that man has lost his original office as ruler of the earth, that his entrance into the primordial paradise was not a gift of grace but rather an assignment of duties (in the words of one major tradition, a "covenant of works" which Adam needed to perform to earn his ultimate status), and that his relationship to woman should now take the form of a female dominated monogamy, the very behavior which led man into the first sin ("you listened to the voice of your wife," 3:17). Genesis 3:15 is widely alleged to have been fulfilled exclusively by the death of Jesus Christ, when in fact every true "seed of the woman" beginning with Abel has defeated some diabolical scheme, while suffering temporary loss to his person.
If Genesis 3:15 remained unfulfilled for millennia, the status of the Old Testament saints inevitably becomes uncertain; indeed, some traditions overtly refuse to call them "saints," and deny that they will ever enter "heaven." An even larger number of denominations, however unwittingly, end up with a system in which no human being will ever experience the estate originally promised to their ancestors. They instead assert that in "this life" humans will continue to lack the perfection of Genesis 2, in the immediately following afterlife called "heaven" they will lack the bodies of Genesis 2, and following the future advent of Christ they will lack the sexuality of Genesis 2. Few seem to have noticed that if such a scheme truly reflects God's will, the original version of his creation was never really intended for mankind at all.
In order to recover the genuine "first Gospel," the following analysis of the initial chapters of Genesis begins with the assumption that the Bible is factually correct in all its parts, but that "Bible believing" interpretations of the same may be deeply flawed. As a result, a number of radical proposals will be encountered herein, which of course are hardly more "inspired" or "inerrant" than their more familiar rivals. Yet it is hoped that, if even a few are valid, a solution may be found to Christianity's, as well as mankind's, most pressing challenges.
The last two centuries have proven that Genesis' initial chapters cannot be dismissed as legendary without losing the authority of the Scriptures in their entirety. Neither can one retain an authoritative "historical" Jesus while asserting a mythical Genesis, since the biblical Jesus appealed to the authority of Genesis' early chapters in his preaching (Mark 10:6-8). The proposal known as "theistic evolution," which grants authority to Genesis 1:1 (thus conceding to God credit for the "big bang") while consigning much of the remainder of its first two chapters to the category of fairy tale, is little more than an attempt to claim some form of orthodoxy while laying the foundation for its overthrow.
It hardly follows, however, that the counter-proposal known as creationism is the correct approach to Genesis. In addition to some very doubtful handling of biological and geological evidence, creationism suffers from such presuppositional errors as the fallacy of false dichotomy (evolutionary theory and creationism as the only possible explanations of the universe) and an uncritical stance toward English Bibles, denominational commentaries, and medieval scholastic theology. The following are offered as corrections to five basic principles associated with creationism.
Man's-Eye versus God's-Eye Viewpoint That view of Scriptural origins known as dictation theory has generated a major misreading of the creation account's perspective, namely, that Genesis 1 was written from the vantage point of God, apparently looking down upon the nascent earth from somewhere near the universe's edge. Dictation theory holds that all of Scripture is "God's word" to the exclusion of any genuinely human component. This is similar to Monophysite christology, in which Jesus lacks certain human attributes due to an overstress on his divinity, and that view of the Lord's Supper known as transubstantiation, in which Jesus' body and blood are no longer really bread and wine. It makes little difference whether one believes that God actually wrote the first copies of Scripture himself, or whether he mesmerized the biblical authors, or whether he spoke to them as secretaries; in all cases, the human authors are not permitted to have come up with any idea of their own. According to this view, if David first wrote a psalm himself, even if the Holy Spirit were subsequently to have approved every single word in it, that psalm could not be considered "inspired Scripture" or "God's word." It thus does not occur to "traditional" commentators that Genesis 1 could have been written from the perspective of a human author, whose purpose was to describe how creation would have looked to a man standing on the surface of the earth.
Adopting a "man's-eye viewpoint" results in Genesis 1 being a story of the origins, not of the entire universe, but simply of our planet. Already existing at the beginning of this account are an unformed earth, outer space (the "dark abyss") and "waters," the densely clouded atmosphere which surrounded the ancient earth in the manner of the planet Venus today. The creation of "light" on the first day is thus not the "big bang," but the ignition of the sun as an operational star. The "firmament" is the separation of the "waters above" (clouds) from the "waters below" (oceans) as the earth and its atmosphere cooled. The appearance of sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day (a major problem for creationism, since plants come into being on the previous day) is not their creation, but their becoming visible from the vantage point of the earth's surface when the previously unbroken cloud cover dissipated.
Nonadjacent versus Adjacent Day Postulate Creationism rightly maintains against theistic evolution that the "days" of Genesis 1 must be regarded as twenty-four hour periods, not indefinite eras of millions of years. Whereas "day" can indeed sometimes refer to an indefinite period (as in John 8:56), indefinite periods never have evenings and mornings; the latter phrase has no other use in Scripture than in connection with twenty-four hour periods (as in Ex. 16:8). On the other hand, neither Genesis 1 nor any other biblical text suggests that these days were immediately adjacent to one another. Scripture nowhere speaks of a "creation week," nor of one hundred forty-four hours of creation. "In six days the Lord made the heaven, the earth, the sea, and all the things which are in them, and he rested on the seventh day" (Ex. 20:11) can just as easily refer to seven widely separated days as to seven adjacent ones.
Secular science is unwittingly converging with this view of Genesis. The weakest element in traditional Darwinian theory is its proposal of extremely slow development by random chance mutation and natural selection, in contrast to the massive and rapid alterations indicated by the fossil record. The late Stephen Jay Gould's proposed solution, known as "punctuated equilibrium," is quite compatible with the "nonadjacent day" reading of Genesis 1. Secular science may even have discovered the sixth day of creation, which Genesis presents as the transition from aquatic and avian life to terrestrial animals. An asteroid is believed to have once hit the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico, resulting in so much climatic change due to atmospheric dust as to cause the extinction of the dinosaurs (fifth day creatures, according to the modern theory of the dinosaurs' avian ancestry) and the rise of mammals.
Creatio ex Alio versus ex Nihilo Virtually everything in Genesis was created out of some previous part of creation: man and animals from the earth, birds and fish from the sea, etc. The attempt to overwrite Genesis 1 with the opposite assumption is apparently based on the false deduction that, since it is easier to create ex alio ("out of something") than ex nihilo ("out of nothing"), God should only do the latter, lest his glory be minimized or his actions seem too similar to those which man is capable of. Behind such a deduction is the notion that God and man are now very different, their similarity according to Gen. 1:26 having allegedly been irretrievably lost when man fell into sin.
Once an insistance on a thoroughgoing creatio ex nihilo is set aside, most collisions between creation and evolution evaporate. Creation explains the jumps in the fossil record which random chance mutation and natural selection cannot, yet does not preclude the obvious occurrences of the latter in the development of various species (the gradual increase in the average size of horses is a familiar example).
Fluidity versus Fixity of Species Genesis 1 speaks of plants and animals reproducing "according to kind," but that hardly suggests what anyone today would call a species. Neither does the term genos, which the Septuagint employs at this point, convey what its Latin cognate genus signifies in modern scientific literature. Genesis simply asserts that fish begat other fish, birds begat other birds, mammals begat other mammals, etc.
The notion of unalterable species was apparently based on a false deduction similar to that undergirding creatio ex nihilo, namely, that changes in creatures would somehow minimize God's glory, as though the previous version of a species could not be regarded as "perfect" if any of its major attributes were subsequently altered. Behind this lies a Platonic view of perfection which perverts many presentations of "traditional" theology; in Scripture, weaknesses of various kinds in no way lessen how good something is in God's sight (2 Cor. 12:9).
Deprived Humanity versus Depraved Biology By insisting that physical death is incompatible with the original creation's goodness, and thus that there was no physical death prior to Adam's fall into sin, creationism struggles to explain how the fossil record came about. Typically, the implausible theory that all fossil-bearing geological strata are the result of a worldwide flood in the time of Noah is combined with the unsupported conjecture that all geological dating systems are false. The conclusion of Genesis 1 suggests instead that physical death has always been part of the creation; the provision that animals would eat all types of plants (1:30) obviously results in the death of those plants. In denying the existence of physical death prior to Genesis 3, creationism requires the postulate that, after the fall into sin, God radically changed the genetics and instincts of a significant fraction of the earth's creatures. However, the Lord's words to Adam at this juncture (3:18-19) describe an alteration, not of the earth and its creatures, but of man's relationship to them.
The death penalty for eating the forbidden fruit (Gen. 2:17) was the threat of a physical execution, not merely a spiritual excommunication, since it is later contrasted with Jesus' equally physical resurrection (1 Cor. 15:21-22), but this does not require the notion that humans, much less animals and plants, were biologically altered in the process. That Adam and Eve did not physically die on the day they sinned has led some to reinterpret the "day" of this text as an indefinite era, so that their physical demise centuries later could be viewed as the carrying out of their sentence. But in fact, the death penalty was never imposed in this case, since divine executions in Scripture require the presence of a valid minister and congregation (Noah and his family, Gen. 7:1-4; Moses and the sons of Levi, Ex. 32:25-28; Peter and the Jerusalem church, Acts 5:1-11). It is the threat of such executions which will be eliminated in the future as "the last enemy" (1 Cor. 15:26; Rev. 20:14). Whether physical expiration as such, in addition to bodily corruption and the experience of remaining deceased indefinitely, will also be eliminated is less clear. Jesus asserted that in the resurrection believers will no longer die (Luke 20:36), but elsewhere held that mere physical expiration is not dying but "falling asleep" (Mark 5:39). At the same time, even the latter may well be headed for abolition as a result of the "change" which will occur during the last trumpet (1 Cor. 15:51-52). In any case, the wondrous future enhancement of humanity does not imply any defect in creation's remote past.
It is virtually universal and unquestioned to assert that Gen. 2:4ff. is a "rewind" or "flashback" to the sixth day of creation in Gen. 1:24-31. In fact, nowhere else in Scripture is such a narrative structure alleged, namely, an historical sequence in which paragraph 1 presents event A, paragraph 2 presents event B, but paragraph 3, in presenting an apparent event C, is in fact rewinding the story or flashing back to event A, in order to discuss the material depicted in paragraph 1 from a different perspective. Were the latter true of Gen. 2:4ff., the re-telling of the sixth day would have to conclude at some point, yet there is no obvious place after Gen. 2:4 to interpolate the occasion on which God rested. This and other differences between Genesis 1 and 2 have led all but the most "conservative" scholars to adopt the theory that two unrelated authors or communities produced two different creation accounts, which an editor somewhat clumsily wove together after the Babylonian exile.
A major justification for the latter theory is the fact that the divine person in charge of Gen. 1:1-2:3 is termed "God" (Heb. elohim, Gk. theos), whereas the lead character in Gen. 2:4ff. is called "Lord" (Heb. yahveh, Gk. kurios). Following the unitarian assumptions of Judaism, both of these have traditionally been regarded as references to God the Father; modern scholarship then claims that the use of different divine names is due to two separate parent documents. A New Testament oriented analysis of this material would by contrast begin with the proposal, based on "Jesus is the Lord" (1 Cor. 12:3), that the "Lord God" of Genesis 2 is to be the identified with God the Son, thus raising the possibility that this chapter is a story of salvation rather than creation.
Adam's "Conversion Experience" The first major indication that chapter 2 is concerned with spiritual rather than physical generation is the similarity of 2:7 ("God formed the man with soil from the earth, breathed the breath of life into his face, and the man became a living soul," where "God" refers to the "Lord God" of 2:4) to John 20:22 ("He breathed on them and said, `Receive the Holy Spirit,´" where "he" and "them" refer respectively to the risen Christ and his apostles), both of which employ the rare verb emphusaó for "breathed." The "soil" (chous) out of which Adam was formed refers to man's physical nature, since elsewhere this term is employed for what is left behind after physical death (as in Ps. 29:9 [30:9 MT]; the major Septuagintal manuscripts carefully distinguish chous from chnous, "dust," which can serve as a metaphor for spiritually dead humans, as in Ps. 1:4). Adam's identity as a "living soul" must then include his spiritual nature; otherwise, the life God intended for man does not significantly differ from that of any other "living soul" (1:24, where the assertion that all animals are living hardly means that they all have the same kind of life).
Another important similarity occurs between 2:8 ("The Lord God planted a paradise in Eden") and Luke 23:43 ("He said to him, `I tell you the truth: today you will be with me in paradise,´" where "he" and "him" refer respectively to Jesus and the penitent thief at Calvary), both of which employ the rare noun paradeisos. Many readers miss the latter connection because English Bibles generally call Eden a "garden," with no footnotes in either Genesis or Luke to indicate the relationship between Eden and Jesus' promise.
It should be obvious that "salvation" in this context must mean something other than the remission of sins or redemption from hell, since there is no evidence Adam needed either of these. Whereas both Roman Catholic and Protestant theology postpone many positive aspects of salvation to a later stage of life or an afterlife, Scripture repeatedly affirms that sanctification, purity, and the full experience of the Holy Spirit are already present in believers from the beginning of their walk with God. "God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because on it he rested from all his works which God had begun to make" (2:3) thus refers, not to God somehow becoming inactive for a twenty-four period, but to the Father authorizing the Lord to bestow full salvation upon Adam, by which he was blessed, sanctified, and given rest. In the beginning, the real purpose of "this life" was neither to acquire the sanctified estate by one's own efforts with God's help, nor to await its reception in an afterlife, but to believe that one had already acquired this estate by the mercy of the Lord God, in order to "inherit blessing" (1 Pet. 3:9). "Inheritance," after all, is not the acquisition de novo of something not currently possessed, but a more complete personal enjoyment of something to which one is already legally entitled and which one's family already possesses.
Eden's History and Geography When Genesis 2 is no longer viewed as a creation story, the timetable for its events would no longer be sought in the geological origins of the earth or the biological origins of homo sapiens, but in that period of history when various peoples developed extensive agriculture (2:15) and began to domesticate animals (2:20). According to secular science, this occurred in the so-called Neolithic Age, which extended roughly from 8000 to 4000 BC. This is exactly where the chronology of Genesis places Adam: approximately 5400 BC according to the Septuagintal Greek chronology, or 4200 BC according to that of the Hebrew.
The geography of Genesis 2 not surprisingly locates Adam in the Fertile Crescent, amidst the first great civilizations stretching from Egypt through Persia. However, the fact that Eden was "in the East" does not necessarily mean in the eastern part of the Fertile Crescent; in Scripture, the only land ever said to be "in the East" is Transjordan, the area later occupied by Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh (Num. 34:3; Deut. 4:41).
Of the four rivers mentioned by name in 2:10-14, the identification of the Tigris and Euphrates, the rivers of Assyria and Babylonia, is certain. What data exists for the other rivers associates both with the Nile. The Pishon appears elsewhere only in Sirach 24:25-27, followed by references to the Tigris, Euphrates, Jordan, and Gihon (some English versions follow a Syriac text in adding a reference to the Nile before the Gihon; by contrast, Neilos occurs in no Septuagintal manuscript of this or any other text). The Pishon "circles all the land of Havilah" (Heb. chawilah, apparently derived from chowl, "sand"), which together with Shur in the Sinai peninsula (Gen. 20:1) is described as facing Egypt (Gen. 25:18; 1 Kgdms. 15:7). In the genealogy of Ham (Gen. 10:7; 1 Chr. 1:9), there was also a man named Havilah, the son of Cush (Ethiopia) and the nephew of Mizraim (Egypt), Put (Libya), and Canaan. Havilah is thus most likely the arid region between the Nile and the Red Sea, including especially ancient Nubia. The latter, a region of modern northern Sudan around which the Nile flows in a semicircular meander, had exactly the reputation for gold deposits as Genesis posits of Havilah. The Pishon may then specifically name the easternmost tributary of the Nile, the Atbara river, which geologists believe was the Nile's original source in prehistoric times. This branch continues south into modern Eritrea, thus extending the western border of the Red Sea's coastal desert.
Identifying the Gihon is complicated by variant spellings of this name and inconsistencies between the Greek and Hebrew texts. In addition to Genesis 2 and the aforementioned Sirach 24:27, Géón also appears in Jer. 2:17 [2:18 MT], which speaks of "the way of Egypt to drink the water of Gihon." The MT here reads Shiychowr, which some English versions render as the Nile, but whose other occurrences the Septuagint either lacks entirely (Is. 23:3), or regards as an area of land rather than a body of water ("uninhabitable region facing Egypt," Josh. 13:3; "borders of Egypt," 1 Chr. 13:5). The Heb. Giychown elsewhere names a spring in Jerusalem, but the Septuagint transliterates these occurrences as Gión (3 Kgdms. 1:33, 38, 45; 2 Chr. 32:30; 2 Chr. 33:14).
Since the Gihon in Genesis 2 "circles all the land of Ethiopia," it would plausibly be associated with the remainder of the Nile's tributaries. The longest of these, the White Nile, does indeed "circle" Ethiopia to the west, while the Blue Nile flows directly into its heart, coming the closest of all the Nile's branches to the modern capital, Addis Ababa.
In view of Sirach 24:25-27, where the Jordan appears with the four named rivers of Genesis 2, it may be asked whether a reference to the main river of Palestine is also implicit in the account of Adam. There is of course no one river which is the source of both the Nile and the Euphrates systems. If Eden was in fact located in Transjordan, the Jordan would be that river which "flowed out of Eden to water the paradise." The subsequent phrase "from there" is unspecific, but would appear to indicate that the four "sources" (archai, literally "beginnings") came from the entire Fertile Crescent, not merely Eden or its river.
Eve's Origins The most revolutionary aspect of the analysis of Genesis 2 as a salvation story would be the re-thinking of its final paragraph (2:21-25). What has heretofore been understood as the creation of the first female homo sapiens would instead be viewed as the origin of Eve's vocation as Adam's spouse, and thus as a metaphor for the future believing community, which is regularly presented in female terms ("the daughter of Zion," Ps. 9:14; "the bride, the wife of the little lamb," Rev. 21:9). The Septuagint makes this idea more unambiguous by its addition of a pronominal adjective to Gen. 2:23b: "She will be called Woman, because she was taken out of her man," that is, her husband (neither Hebrew nor Greek have distinct words for "wife" or "husband"). The derivation of Eve from Adam's side thus results in female subordination to males only in the sexual relationship (thus Eph. 5:22 and 1 Pet. 3:1) and in the ecclesiastical sphere (thus 1 Tim. 2:12-13), not in general subordination to males in every aspect of life.
The resultant portrait of a male centered sexuality contrasts markedly with the matriarchal societies and earth goddess religions which dominated the Neolithic period according to secular anthropology. The absence of anything remotely resembling "marriage" in the modern sense (including even what few customs the Bible elsewhere recognizes, as in Gen. 29:22) also contradicts the highly restrictive approach to sexuality which most modern denominations attempt to derive from this text. The conclusion of Genesis 2 would appear to be intended as divine permission to overthrow what according to the Creator is an upside down relationship between men and women, a permission as desperately needed now as in the beginning.
It is a felicitous coincidence that "wood" and "word" are so similar in English, since the two types of "wood" (xulon, usually translated "tree") described in Genesis 2 and 3 do indeed symbolize the words or ideas by which human life is organized. The correct relationship between the two "woods" produces nothing short of "paradise"; their wrong use, by contrast, results in no less than a repetition of the fall into sin.
The Tree of Life That the tree of life (xulon tés zóés) symbolizes the Gospel of salvation should be controversial only among those with an extremely truncated understanding of the Gospel. This tree also appears in Proverbs 3:18, where it is equated with wisdom. The latter is presented as the overarching principle for success in every facet of life, the divinely approved ideology and worldview: "For length of career and years of life are in her (wisdom's) right hand, and in her left hand are wealth and glory; righteousness goes out of her mouth, and she conveys law and mercy with her tongue." (3:16). A quotation of Proverbs 3:18 also appears in 4 Maccabees 18:16, near the end of a summary of the Old Testament's "suffering and entering into glory" theme, which the risen Jesus taught as crucial for understanding the Scriptures (Luke 24:26-27, the same idea summarized by Gen. 3:15).
Other references to the tree of life are just as unambiguous in employing this phrase as symbolic of a nation. Especially noteworthy is Ezekiel 31:2-9, where Assyria is not only called a tree of life, but is compared to other trees (presumably other Fertile Crescent nations) in "paradise" (31:8-9). "Assyria" may well refer here to more ancient empires such as those of Sumer and Akkad, which occupied the same territory and gave rise to much of the same culture as the Assyrians. The early Mesopotamians are well known for their quasi-biblical moral and legal principles, such as those in the Code of Hammurabi. Not surprisingly, the nation of Israel is also compared to the tree of life ("the days of my people will be like the days of the tree of life," Is. 65:22, where "my people" refers to a reformed Israel in the future, not Isaiah's contemporaries). In this phrase's New Testament occurrences (all in the book of Revelation), the tree of life is similarly identified with "the holy city" (22:14, 19). Yet it does not remain restricted to any one people, since "the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations" (22:2).
The latter passages make clear that there is in fact no discrepancy between the two biblical entailments of "tree of life"; the wisdom described in Proverbs is that ideology which grants success to a nation. There can be little debate that every nation and culture in history which radically rebelled against such principles as the Ten Commandments came to a devastating end. By contrast, even nations which did little more than tolerate the biblical religion and its key principles reaped large rewards. The fact that ancient Mesopotamia could have been called a tree of life, even though no formal "Judeo-Christian" religion existed there, proves that the wisdom which this tree betokens is no occult or mystical knowledge of a privileged few. As in ancient Israel, the tree of life is cut down among a people not by trivial violations of complex ritual codes or the failure to achieve some austere standard of "purity," but rather by coarse unbelief, idolatry, and injustice.
The Tree of Beauty and Ugliness It is almost universal to misdefine the tree of knowing beauty and ugliness (kalos kai ponéros) as communicating the knowledge of moral good and evil. The latter interpretation is precluded by the fact that, prior to eating from this tree, Adam had already known moral good by naming the animals under the Lord's direction (2:20), and Eve had already known moral evil by misquoting the Lord's command (3:3). Elsewhere in Genesis, kalos describes "beautiful" women (who may well have not been morally good, 6:2), whereas agathos describes the "morally good" vocation which Joseph received from God (50:20).
In view of the tree of life's identification as the source of divine wisdom, it appears certain that the tree of knowing beauty and ugliness is the other major source of human knowledge, namely that of the five senses, often called "empirical" knowledge, and the emotional experiences produced thereby. The full use of sensory data for purely aesthetic purposes in addition to practical ones is unique to human beings; a dog, by contrast, never smells anything solely in order to enjoy its scent, and simply ignores sounds (such as music) which it does not associate with its personal interests. The problem with man's sensory knowledge, aesthetic judgments, and emotional experiences is that they cannot serve as valid norms for human life. Every erroneous religious, philosophical, and political development in human history can be traced to people turning inward and making their own feelings, logic, or alleged mystical experiences the basis for their behavior.
It cannot be overemphasized that the knowledge of beauty and ugliness was not itself prohibited to man, but rather the use of that knowledge as the norm of life. The Lord did not prohibit the tree as such to man, but only the eating of its fruit. Some theologians who insist otherwise actually defend Eve's statement, "neither shall you touch it" (3:3), as a legitimate deduction from rather than a false addition to the Lord's command. Elsewhere in Scripture, "fruit" describes an ultimate result (such as evil behavior as the consequence of false prophecy, Matt. 7:20), and "eating" something with spiritual significance (such as Jesus' flesh and blood, John 6:53-58) makes it the dominant aspect of one's existence. The sin of Adam and Eve was not that they violated an arbitrary command, nor that they desired to be like God, but that they gave to their interior senses and emotions the role which should have been reserved for the external wisdom of the Lord.
Behind the misunderstanding of this tree is the false view of biblical imperatives as virtually impossible standards of behavior, which man must obey in order to acquire or maintain salvation. However, just as no one who is unwittingly about to move into the path of a speeding vehicle hears the admonition "Watch out!" as a duty or threat, so also the Lord's admonition to Adam not to eat the fruit of aesthetics is a blessing rather than a curse. The Lord is permitting us to have flesh (the seat of the five senses and their derivative emotions), yet not to be dominated and thus misled by it (thus Paul's denigration of a fleshly existence, Rom. 7:18). We are thus saved from ascetic religion (which attempts to eliminate the flesh by arbitrary restrictions in "this life"), afterlife religion (which despairs of overturning the flesh's dominating role until physical death), and irreligion (which walks by the sight of the flesh rather than by the faith of the Spirit).
The Sword of the Spirits The concluding image of Genesis 3 is possibly even more puzzling than anything which precedes it: the stationing of "cherubim and a flaming sword which turned back and forth to preserve the way of the tree of life" (3:24). The mission of these beings was not, as is widely supposed, to prevent man from gaining access to the tree of life, but to preserve the right kind of access to it. The whole problem with Adam and Eve was that they inverted the divine order, in which the wisdom represented by the tree of life was humanity's ultimate government. "Perhaps now he will extend his hand, take from the tree of life and eat, and live forever" refers to the possibility that Adam might repent and return to the Lord's original gracious provision. The mission of the cherubim would then have been to insure that divine wisdom would be acquired by employing divinely approved methods.
What little is known elsewhere of the cherubim associates them with Israel's formal public worship. Embroideries of cherubim adorned curtains in the tabernacle (Ex. 26:1), statues of the same were on the lid of the Ark of the Testament (connected to the mercy seat over which the Lord spoke, Num. 7:89), and even larger such statues stood in the later temple's Holy of Holies (3 Kgdms. 6:23-28). A sword is elsewhere associated with God's word (romphaia, Rev. 1:16; machaira, also translated "sword," has the same significance in Eph. 6:17 and Heb. 4:12), and flame is a familiar motif of the Holy Spirit (Luke 3:16; Acts 2:3). As a result, the image of the cherubim in Genesis 3 is a vivid portrait of what is commonly called "public ministry," the preaching and ritual which officially promotes divine wisdom over human experience, grace over merit, faith over sight, mercy over judgment, and thus life over death.
Postscript: The Seed and the Leather Tunics Elsewhere on this website (The Gospel: Atonement or Apartment? and Secundum Christum: The Death of Jesus according to Jesus), that explanation of Jesus' death known variously as "substitutionary satisfaction," "vicarious atonement," and "penal substitution" has been exposed as lacking any genuinely biblical basis; the number of "prooftexts" cited to support it, even in Bibles translated by committees dominated by adherents to this theory, are shockingly few for an idea purported to be central to Christianity. As a result, penal substitutionists must attempt to interpolate this notion wherever possible. This is especially necessary in Genesis, since a statement in 15:6 ("Abram believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness") is cited both by Paul and his alleged theological adversary James as the foundation of the Christian Gospel (Rom. 4:3; Jas. 2:23). If what Abraham believed doesn't include "penal substitution," the entire theological system of this theory's defenders is called into question. Two such interpolations have been proposed in Genesis 3, involving the promise of the woman's seed against the serpent (3:15) and the bestowal of leather tunics to replace the fig leaves sown by Adam and Eve (3:21).
The "penal substitution" interpretation of the seed begins with the assumption that it refers exclusively to Jesus of Nazareth. This is justified by a doctrine known as solus Christus, "Christ alone," which denies the title "Christ" to any divinely anointed office holder other than Jesus (contrary to Ps. 104:15 [105:15 MT]) and disconnects Christ from the body of believers (contrary to 1 Cor. 12:27). In fact, the text of Genesis between the initial prophecy and the statement of Abraham's faith in same consistently uses "seed" as a term for a collective, which includes Adam and Eve's third son Seth (4:25), Noah's descendants as those who would be exempted from subsequent great floods (9:9), and Abraham's descendants as those who would one day occupy Palestine (12:7, 13:15). As noted above, the original promise was simply that God's people would successfully overcome the evil forces which they might encounter, but not without damage to themselves. Nevertheless, defenders of "penal substitution" insist that "he (the seed) will bruise your (the serpent's) head," though not directed at God the Father, implies the payment of a penalty of sin to Him, and "you will bruise his heel," hardly a fatal injury, is the same thing as experiencing eternal damnation as a replacement for billions of human beings.
An even more unjustified set of interpolations has been advanced to transform the Lord's bestowal of leather tunics into a prefigurement of Jesus' supposed substitutionary propitiation of divine wrath. First, Adam and Eve's shame over their nakedness (3:7) is construed as a consciousness of sin, and the fig leaves which they employed to conceal their nakedness are asserted to be works-righteous attempts to sanctify themselves. The animal skins are then assumed to have resulted from the death of an animal, the possibility of a creatio ex nihilo being ignored. This death is further assumed to have been the result of a sacrifice, the absence of any priest or altar being ignored. Such an unevidenced proposal would not merit mention, were it not for the number of theologians who have subscribed to it. For example, the widely published commentary of Matthew Henry (1708-1710) asserts, "The beasts, from whose skins they were clothed, it is supposed were slain, not for man's food, but for sacrifice, to typify Christ, the great Sacrifice. Adam and Eve made for themselves aprons of fig-leaves, a covering too narrow for them to wrap themselves in, Isa 28:20. Such are all the rags of our own righteousness. But God made them coats of skin, large, strong, durable, and fit for them: such is the righteousness of Christ; therefore put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ." Adam Clarke, a protégé of Methodism's founder John Wesley, in his commentary (1817) introduced the various aspects of this theory with such phrases as "we may fairly presume," "we may safely infer," "it is most likely," and "it seems reasonable." It remains an astonishment that something merely "supposed" or "inferred" could be thought to constitute the foundation for the Christian faith.
