The Faces of Adam, Eve, and Evil

The story of Adam and Eve with the snake is disarmingly simple. We may dismiss it outright as ridiculously unscientific and impossible to believe or to take seriously. However, it refuses to go away. In fact, it demands to be taken at face value. The human race most certainly had an origin, and even though one may hypothesize a more complex scenario of human beginnings, (which could be none other than an evolutionary model) it loses touch with the human soul in proportion to its remoteness and un-relatability. In other words, we cannot get beyond the faces of Adam and Eve, and for that matter, the snake as well. Behind these faces, if they are not to be taken at face value, is nothing but darkness and confusion, a cloud impenetrable. Anthropologists might revel in this hazy zone, but evolution has not the power to capture the human imagination at large. We are stuck with Adam and Eve whether we understand them in a symbolic way, or literal way, or something of both. They are our dad and mom.

Certainly there is a symbolic dimension to them! Most of us know that Adam is a name derived from the Hebrew word ʹadāmâ which means “ground.” We are necessarily creatures tied to this earth. We might also know that Adam is the generic word for humanity as well, translated “man.” How did God form them? We simply do not know apart from the fact that the material with which He formed man is the same stuff of the ground. The crucial thing is that somewhere along the way God “breathed” intimately into “man” and he became a living soul, the body and spirit together becoming the imago dei. That Eve was taken from the man’s side is so artfully simple! It explains in one elemental stroke the yearning for one another and completeness when together. As we study the temptation narrative we see that Adam is every man and Eve is every woman.

Written in an economy of style, this narrative unfolds into inexhaustible theological and psychological dimensions, exposing the inner essence of our humanity like nothing else written ever has. The modern world with all of its scientific knowledge and theory has nothing to compare with it. The same can be said of the snake and its symbolism!

So we are left with the faces of Adam, Eve, and the serpent. In them we have what we might call the “first man” motif, the “beautiful woman” motif, and with the serpent, the face of evil. These faces take us all the way through Scripture. The Bible is not interested in getting behind these faces to some scientific or philosophical exactitude to suit our modern cravings for explanations of origins. In them we have what we need to understand our humanity. To get behind them will do us no good. In the faces of Adam and Eve is the imago dei. In this lie all the treasures humanity could ever fathom ─ the great secret of ourselves, nature, and all created realms! The knowledge we thirst for is spiritual; the material by itself apart from the spiritual is but dust.

Takeaway: As Christians we cannot, even if we accept a theistic evolutionary model, separate ourselves from Adam and Eve as our first parents in a concrete way.  They are also symbolic as “every man,” and “every woman.”

Question: What, if anything, happens if we think that Adam and Eve are purely mythological with no connection to humanity in space and time?