Genesis 1: 26-31

Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the air and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Genesis 2: 18-25

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them, and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all cattle and to the birds of the air and to every animal of the field, but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken.”

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.

Sermon Text

Today we have three different questions before us, all from the story of Adam and Eve. I am going to do my best to tackle them all, bit by bit, but know in advance that each one could be books unto themselves, so today we are going to fully answer one and throw out some short explanations of the others. This is one of those Sundays where we might need to take some time outside of service to go over some more specific details of our topic – but that’s what I’m here for. Today we look at three questions, “Were Adam and Eve truly the first two people on Earth?” “How were they married?” and “How are they not related if one was born from the other?”

If those seem obvious to you, then let us break down each one a little bit at a time. Firstly, are Adam and Eve the first human beings? Biblically, that is the narrative we are given so it’s a good starting point. However, in the first two chapters of Genesis there is a complication. Adam and Eve are not named in Genesis 1 at all, instead humanity is created in a single moment by God. Just like the rest of Creation, God speaks and humanity forms as an offshoot of God’s divine image. The creation of humanity in Genesis 1 is ex nihilo, out of nothing, and consists of man and woman emerging from God’s word without any additional action on God’s part.

Genesis 2 tells the story differently. Rather than creation being spread across seven days, God has created the earth, has not yet placed plant life on it, and puts the divine fingers into the mud. The muddy soil that God collects is shaped into a new creature – Ha’Adam – the human being. The creature is not given a name yet, but is instead given the general name for people. This human being is then shown all of God’s creatures, and when no suitable partner is found God puts the creatures to sleep and splits it in two. Typically, we read the text as the NRSV puts it, womankind being made from a rib of the first human, but a closer translation is, “From the side.” This has led some to imagine that Adam and Eve were one creature joined at the hip until they were split into two – a little too fanciful for my taste, but better at getting to the basis of this story.

These two origins for humanity – one time being made in an instant and the other being made gradually alongside the rest of creation – are what scripture gives us as material for understanding human origins. The fact that there are two versions of this story tells me that there is room for flexibility in how we understand our genesis, and so as time has gone on the exact nature of Adam and Eve’s status as progenitors of humanity has changed. Today there are a variety of views held by a variety of Christians, all with their own merits and problems. Many take the second story as written – humanity is descended from two people, and they are those people named “Adam and Eve,” upon their expulsion from Eden.

Others believe that humanity existed separately from Eden and Adam and Eve were just two special people that God placed into the Garden. That option makes no sense to me, because then you have to account for a bunch of random people the story does not explain at all. However, it is an attempt to deal with a later development in Genesis. Once the first couple leave Eden their children are married off to other people. Usually this is explained as them marrying their siblings and going on to have children with them. That should have some clear and present issues that come from it, but the main point I would make is that Genesis never says that siblings married siblings in those days, and so we are just making an assumption that is not helpful to our question.

For my part, I take another perspective generally. I lean on my scientific background and say that humanity is a part of the natural world as much as anything else. We, like all life, developed through modifications by descent as an evolutionary process. Like all life on Earth, we trace our lineage through vast webs of species that we cannot even begin to name, but a few of which we have found. Our distant relatives the Homo Habilis and Erectus walked on two legs long before we did. Our cousins the Neanderthals died out, but their blood still runs in the veins of some people on Earth (myself included!) All of us are the product of time, environment, and genetic mutation.

Some might look at that and say that such a belief is antithetical to scripture, certainly Ken Ham and others have made that argument (and quite a bit of money.). I, however, disagree. The two stories told to us in scripture are not lessened by the narrative I just went through. We are human beings, made in the Image of God, and uniquely blessed with a relationship with God. Dogs and cats do not pray, but we do. Christ came to live with us as human beings, not as any other animal. We are God’s image in this world. Sin entered the world through our unwillingness to obey God, to do what we want rather than what is right, and that is the same story as Eden. My version sees the snake and the fruit as a means to tell this spiritual truth through more physical means, but either version holds these truths in common.

It has always been my policy to tell everyone to read anything before Abraham enters the story of Genesis as an attempt to reconstruct a history of humanity. The Garden, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, all contain several stories smooshed together to reveal a deeper truth, but that taken on their face cause some trouble to hold as completely literal. For example, just in the text itself, how many of each animal is to be on the ark? If you read Genesis 6 your answer would be two, but if you read Genesis 7 the answer becomes fourteen if they are ritually clean animal and two if they are unclean. Another interesting pair of stories is how languages came about. In Genesis 11 we’re told that language came from when God confused the tongues of the people at Babel so they could no longer work together on projects like the Tower of Babel. Genesis 10, however, implies that languages developed just by people spreading out away from one another.

Not until Abraham enters the picture do things become solidified in terms of how time progresses and people interact with each other. Abraham begins Biblical history, while the preceding narratives capture a Biblical pre-history. Again, this can sound controversial and to some this thinking definitely is not something they would go along with. However, for me in all my studying and all my devotions, it is something I can cling to as true and as conducive to my faith. If Genesis 1-11 provide a stumbling block when I try to twist what we know about our fourteen billion year old cosmos to fit their words, then I consider it better to relent of literalism in exchange for truth.

The other questions about Eden, I think follow from that. For Adam and Eve we cannot say how their relationship was considered a marriage, but by looking at Isaac’s wedding in Genesis 24, we can see all it took was saying you were married and consummating that union This was what was necessary for a “wedding,” at one point in the history of God’s people. So, Adam and Eve meet that criteria of a legal marriage. Finally, as for their blood relative status, I think that if God made Eve from Adam, if we take the text more literally, God could inject some genetic diversity in the process to make the matter less consanguineous.

Now, a lot in one sermon, as these question series often produce. However, I hope that what is clear here is something we know to be the case, though we seldom acknowledge. Faith is a house we all live in, and it is a big house that can fit some diverse opinions. Some people look at a message like I just gave, and they would say it is heresy of the highest order, that I should dare suggest a timescale and human origin that is foreign to the writ of scripture. However, I would argue that those who criticize my own views are imposing limits on God that are equally lacking. We all have to work off of gaps in the text, I just built my perspective from the evidence God left us in creation rather than the magisterium of the Church.

The miracle of faith, however, is that God is with both of perspectives. The body of Christ is united in its diversity, and opinions can differ on all manner of things. We are able to thrive in this diversity, among these differences, because we unite around one reality. Christ our Lord, lived, died, and was raised by the power of God’s Spirit for the revivification of all creation. That truth, that centrality of the Gospel, underpins all other theological difference. We are one in the Lord, and that oneness, it covers all difference with grace, with love, with mercy in abundance. If after hearing me expound on this question you disagree with my answer, God bless you for it, because we are still one in the body of Christ despite this. That, I think, is a miracle that speaks to what Eden is about. A place where people, and God, live at peace with one another. What a fellowship, what a joy divine, for we who gather with such a goal as this. – Amen.