Handful of mud

I recently read a paper on human evolution entitled "Recent Genetic Science and Christian Theology on Human Origins: An 'Aesthetic Supralapsarianism'” by John Schneider.  Pardon the academic recycling, but I thought it a remarkably interesting paper, and so want to put my thoughts "out there" in hopes of being sharpened and refined.




The question of human origins has always been the most troubling aspect (if not the only troubling aspect) of evolutionary theory for me. After all, it is one thing to accept the natural world as a culmination of progress, but at some point the Christian (the Christian biologist, the Christian philosopher) must regardless step back and ask what he or she believes about the beginning of all things. A fault with modern biblical interpretation, I fear, is a somewhat “all-or-nothing” approach to evolutionary theory and/or theories of creationism—either one accepts all of evolutionary theory, or one doesn’t. Science has developed in a slow and yet punctuated method over the past several hundred years (periods of tedious work intermittently met with a discovery), and that has been unfortunately negligent of our hermeneutics. As Schneider notes, “…the closer the evidence comes to the level of confirmation, or demonstration [of ancestral human evolution], in the minds of scientists, the nearer conservative Protestantism comes to the brink of crisis” (Schneider 199).  The faithful Christian hasn’t really been allowed to match the pace of scientific progress to its counterparts in biblical revelation and understanding, leaving Protestantism as a system vulnerable to misunderstanding and confusion.

Schneider argues that we need to rethink Augustinian theology and the active and caring creator, as his understanding of humanity doesn’t always square with the character of God he proffers. Had God merely placed the historical Adam and Eve in the Garden without the evolved mental and rational capacities of reason and ethics, “it would seem that the Creator had deliberately stacked the moral deck against them” (Schneider 202). Humans as dumb and confused would not have had the mental capacity to reason through the dilemma given them in the Garden, and what we know of God’s grace doesn’t seem to admit of a trick. However, “we may think that the writer of Genesis deliberately used Adam and Eve as literary types that represented the first human beings symbolically in, which instance, we can simply stretch the symbolism to include the original colonies of our ancestors” (Schneider 200), and while this involves giving up biblical inerrancy (which is no small thing), it may prove to be a more viable and humble approach to God’s creative power and design. Is Man, then, a triumphant story of “mere progress,” or do we still hold the potential for encounters with God? (And then is God still able to be called “Creator?”) The human grasps at uniqueness have taken a sort of negative role; in our minds, we are unique in that we are rational, and we are unique in that our rationality allowed us to play out the fall and the entry of evil into the world. However, according to Schneider, this would seem to cast God in a maleficent role and humans in a disposable one—the exact opposite intended effect of Scriptural accounts. Referencing second century theologian Irenaeus, Schneider writes:
[it] seemed entirely implausible to Irenaeus that God could fail that way in the first place, or that in the fullness of his knowledge, power, and love, that God did not always plan to create the best world possible in and through the saving triumph of Jesus Christ…the Incarnation and the Cross together compose the purpose of Creation from the beginning (Schneider 203).


In this way, Adam and Eve are not arguably indispensable due to their roles in the Fall—the world was not created for the Fall. Rather, Adam and Eve are important in the symbolic roles they offer when we consider what has actually been the grand metaphor for the work of God on Earth—the Incarnation and Ascension. Thus, whether Adam and Eve are historical is not meant to be a divisive issue“…the beginning of God’s vision for the world, and for human beings, is to be consummated not in Adam, but in still superior form through re-creation in the image of Jesus Christ” (Schneider 203).

This is a reading of the Bible that gives Scripture its full due, and places God on his proper throne—and so I am prone to find comfort in it. I do think humans have been entrusted with vastly different roles from those of other “animals of the earth,” but I have often been frustrated at anthropocentric tendencies to idolize humanity—even idolizing our part to play in the Fall! What I appreciate about Schneider’s interpretation is that he is eager to make sure that God is not undermined as the sustainer and perfectly good Potter in favor of human uniqueness. Quoting Daryl Domning’s Original Selfishness, Schneider points out that in a reading of the book of Job, “God stands revealed, not as an arbitrary tyrant, but as a solicitous and empathetic parent who acknowledges, however regretfully, that children cannot be entirely spared the pains of life” (Schneider 205). Thus while we were not ultimately responsible for the degradation and banality of the world, we were permitted to experience it only along the road to ultimate redemption which is done only by Christ.

What Schneider ultimately concludes is that it was not some sort of eagerness for the entry of sin into the world and a show of power that God used to precipitate the creation of the world and humanity, (thus humbling our thoughts and aspirations of uniqueness and necessity to the world), but rather a move in which God symbolically preempted the Incarnation and ascension, which is his ultimate work—a work for us, but not one in which we are necessary participants. Thus human uniqueness is more evident in our roles as recipients of divine grace than in our culpability for the fall, which is a sort of negative grounds for uniqueness in the first place. So in the end, Schneider resolves to account for a view in which genetic science and a Christian existentialism are compatible on aesthetic rather than logical grounds, a “resolution by means of incorrigibly triumphant beauty as the medium of perfect goodness, cashing out in pure joy (rather than studied nods of heads at the successful logic of explanations” (Schneider 208). The roles of Adam and Eve as symbolic is, therefore, compatible with readings of Scripture that, contrary to much of Augustinian theology, find the events of the Incarnation and Ascension more meaningful and ultimately imperative to the Christian story than the Fall and evil played out through ignorant human uniqueness.