Theology Midterm

You must submit your completed exam on Canvas. Your exam will be run through the plagiarism software. Please submit as an attached document. Please use only one document to answer all of the following parts of the exam. Provide sections and question numbers on the document so that your responses correspond to the sections and question numbers on the exam.

You will need to cite the theologians that you are engaging with in order to provide evidence for your claims throughout this exam. Citations should be parenthetical and in text. Cite any ideas that are not your own and any quotations that you pull directly from the text. Use the last name of the author and the page number followed by a period after the parentheses. For example: (Trible, 65) or (Class Notes, 9.20.17). Y​ ou may only use “class notes” as a citation for things thatwehavediscussedinclassthatdidnotappearinyourcoursereadings.​ Youmaynotcite class notes to summarize what a theologian we have read says. You must cite their text directly for full credit. Citations belong at the end of the sentence. I​​ f you do not include citations and page numbers, you will not receive full credit for your response.

Helpfultips:​ Thismidtermexaminationisyouropportunitytodemonstratewhatyouhave learned in the first half of this class. Please be sure to be as specific and detailed as possible in your answers in each section below. Define anything that needs to be defined and back up your analysis with evidence from the texts. Be sure to explain any quotes that you use. Take the time to show your work in order to demonstrate your mastery of the material. Make sure to answer all questions in each prompt and focus on the quality and content of your response. Incomplete answers without supporting arguments will not receive full credit. Remember to proofread your work and check your spelling and grammar.

Midterm Exam

Part I: Quote identification​: Choose any t​ wo​ of the following three quotes. Briefly state (in 1-2 paragraphs) the meaning of the quote a​ nd​ the quote’s significance and relationship to the theologian’s overall project. Use appropriate citations when necessary. (5 points each for 10 points toal)

1. “However, it appears that only a minority of U.S. teenagers are naturally absorbing by osmosis the traditional substantive content and character of the religious traditions to which they claim to belong. For, it appears to us, another popular religious faith — Moralistic Therapeutic Deism — is colonizing many historical religious traditions and, almost without anyone noticing, converting believers in the old faiths to its alternative religious vision of divenly underwritten personal happiness and interpersonal niceness.” (Christian Smith, 56).
2. “Rahner’s contribution is to arrive at this insight through the dynamism of human experience, making God’s incomprehensible holy mystery the very condition that makes possible the functioning of our human spirit.” (Elizabeth Johnson, 37).
3. “Before this episode the Yahwist has used only the generic word​ ‘adham.​ No exclusively male reference has appeared. Only with the specific creation of woman (‘​ ishshah​) occurs the first specific terms for man as male (‘ish). In other words, sexuality is simultaneous for woman and man. The sexes are interrelated and interdependent.” (Phyllis Trible, 76).

PartII:ShortAnswer:​ chooseany​two​ofthefollowingnumberedpromptsandprovideashort answer (in about 2-3 paragraphs). ​Read the prompt directions carefully and answer all parts of each prompt.​ Use appropriate citations when necessary. (20 points each for 40 points total)

1. In her chapter on “The Crucified God of Compassion,” Elizabeth Johnson examines arguments about whether or not God suffers. What is at stake in these arguments? (In other words, why are there heated disagreements over whether or not God suffers?) Why does Johnson think that any theological attempt to explain the suffering of the world by relying on arguments about God having a plan for the world or by appealing to human freedom is problematic?
2. In what way does John Noonan think that doctrine develops? What are the examples he offers of how Christian doctrine has developed? How does the development of doctrine help us to better understand what it means to say that the Catholic tradition is a living tradition?
3. Sanda Schneiders examines three models of service in light of the foot washing event in the Gospel of John. What are these three models of service and how do they differ? Which model of service does Schneiders think Jesus is enacting in this story and why does Peter object? Why does Schneiders think this interpretation of the foot washing event is significant for Christians today?

PartIII:Essay:​  Your answers should draw upon course materials. Your essay should be 850-1000 words, which is about double spaced 3-4 pages in 12 point Times New Roman font​. Read the prompt directions carefully and answer all parts of each prompt.​ Use appropriate citations when necessary. (50 points)

2. What are some of the methods described by Marcus Borg and Richard Clifford that readers can rely on as they interpret scripture? For Catholics, are the stories in scripture “true”? How does the historical critical method differ from hermeneutics? How has scripture been interpreted from the position of people who have been historically marginalized and what sorts of truths have they found contained in scripture? Place Marcus Borg ​and​ Richard Clifford into conversation with ​either​ Kelly Brown Douglas o​ r Lisa Cahill in order to answer the last question.

On “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” as U.S. Teenagers’ Actual, Tacit, De Facto Religious Faith1

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Christian Smith

My book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, coauthored with Melinda Lundquist Denton, follows over hun- dreds of pages a variety of topical trains of thought and sometimes pursued diversions and digressions. But what does the bigger picture of the religious and spiritual lives of U.S. teenagers look like when we stand back and try to put it all together? When we get past what we discovered about adolescent inarticulacy regarding religion, systematically sort through the myriad stories and statements about religious faith and practice, and pull apart and piece back together what seem to be the key ideas and relevant issues, what did we conclude?

Here we resummarize our observations in venturing a general thesis about teenage religion and spirituality in the United States. We advance this thesis somewhat tentatively, as less than a conclusive fact but more than mere con- jecture. Namely, we suggest that the de facto dominant religion among con- temporary teenagers in the United States is what we might call “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” The creed of this religion, as codified from what emerged from our interviews with U.S. teenagers, sounds something like this:

1. A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.

Christian Smith is the Stuart Chapin Distinguished Professor and associate chair in the Department of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent publication is Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers, coau- thored with Melissa Lundquist Denton. Smith is the director of the National Study of Youth and Religion, a research project funded by the Lilly Endowment Inc.

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2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.

3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about one- self.

4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.

5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

Such a de facto creed is particularly evident among mainline Protestant and Catholic youth but is also more than a little visible among black and conser- vative Protestants, Jewish teens, other religious types of teenagers, and even many “nonreligious” teenagers in the United States.

Note that no teenagers would actually use the terminology “Moralistic Therapeutic Deist” to describe themselves. That is our summarizing term. And very few teenagers would lay out the five points of its creed as clearly and concisely as we have just done. But when one sifts through and digests hun- dreds of discussions with U.S teenagers about religion, God, faith, prayer, and other spiritual practices, what seems to emerge as the dominant, de facto reli- gious viewpoint turns out to be some version of this faith. We could literally fill another chapter of this book with more quotes from teen interviews illus- trating Moralistic Therapeutic Deism and exploring its nuances and variants. Given space limitations, however, suffice it here to examine merely a few more representative quotes depicting this religion’s core components.

First, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is about inculcating a moralistic approach to life. It believes that central to living a good and happy life is being a good, moral person. That means being nice, kind, pleasant, respectful, and responsible; working on self-improvement; taking care of one’s health; and doing one’s best to be successful. One seventeen-year-old white Mormon boy from Utah said this very clearly: “I believe in, well, my whole religion is where you try to be good and, ah, if you’re not good then you should just try to get better, that’s all.” Being moral in this faith means being the kind of person who other people will like, fulfilling one’s personal potential, and not being socially disruptive or interpersonally obnoxious. As more than one teenager summa- rized morality for us: “Just don’t be an asshole, that’s all.” Such a moral vision is inclusive of most religions, which are presumed ultimately to stand for equiv- alent moral views. Thus, a nonreligious white girl from Maryland said,

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Morals play a large part in religion; morals are good if they’re healthy for society. Like Christianity, which is all I know, the values you get from like the Ten Commandments. I think every religion is impor- tant in its own respect. You know, if you’re Muslim, then Islam is the way for you. If you’re Jewish, well, that’s great too. If you’re Christian, well, good for you. It’s just whatever makes you feel good about you.

Feeling good about oneself is thus also an essential aspect of living a moral life, according to this dominant de facto teenage religious faith.2 Which leads to our next point.

Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is also about providing therapeutic benefits to its adherents.3 This is not a religion of repentance from sin, of keeping the Sabbath, of living as a servant of a sovereign divine, of steadfastly saying one’s prayers, of faithfully observing high holy days, of building character through suffering, of basking in God’s love and grace, of spending oneself in gratitude and love for the cause of social justice, etc. Rather, what appears to be the actual dominant religion among U.S. teenagers is centrally about feeling good, happy, secure, at peace. It is about attaining subjective well-being, being able to resolve problems, and getting along amiably with other people. One fifteen-year-old Hispanic conservative Protestant girl from Florida expressed the therapeutic benefits of her faith in these terms: “God is like someone who is always there for you; I don’t know, it’s like God is God. He’s just like some- body that’ll always help you go through whatever you’re going through. When I became a Christian I was just praying, and it always made me feel better.” Making a similar point, though drawing it out from a different religious tra- dition, this fourteen-year-old white Jewish girl from Washington describes what her faith is all about in this way: “I guess for me Judaism is more about how you live your life. Part of the guidelines are like how to live and I guess be happy with who you are, cause if you’re out there helping someone, you’re gonna feel good about yourself, you know?” Thus, service to others can be one means to feeling good about oneself. Other personal religious practices can also serve that therapeutic end, as this fifteen-year-old Asian Buddhist girl from Alabama observed, “When I pray, it makes me feel good afterward.” Similarly, one fifteen-year-old white conservative Protestant girl from Illinois explained: “Religion is very important, because when you have no one else to talk to about stuff, you can just get it off your chest, you just talk [to God].

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It’s good.” And this fourteen-year-old East Indian Hindu girl from California said of her religious practices, “I don’t know, they just really help me feel good.” It is thus no wonder that so many religious and nonreligious teenagers are so positive about religion. For the faith many of them have in mind effec- tively helps to achieve a primary life goal: to feel good and happy about one- self and one’s life. It is also no wonder that most teens are so religiously inarticulate. As long as one is happy, why bother with being able to talk about the belief content of one’s faith?

Finally, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is about belief in a particular kind of God, one who exists, created the world, and defines our general moral order, but not one who is particularly personally involved in our affairs—espe- cially affairs in which we would prefer not to have God involved. Most of the time, the God of this faith keeps a safe distance. He is often described by teens as “watching over everything from above” and “the creator of everything and is just up there now controlling everything.” As one fifteen-year-old Arabic Muslim boy from California put it:

God is like an entity that decides when, if, he wants to intervene with a lot of things. To me God is pretty much like intervention, like extreme luck. Say you’re $50 away from something and you find $50 on the floor, then that’s probably God’s intervention or something like that. But other than that it just seems like he’s monitoring. He just kind of stays back and watches, like he’s watching a play, like he’s a producer. He makes the play all possible and then he watches it, and if there’s something he doesn’t like, he changes it.

For many teens—as with adults—God sometimes does get involved in people’s lives, but usually only when they call upon him, which is usually when they have some trouble or problem or bad feeling that they want resolved. In this sense, the Deism here is revised from its classical eighteenth- century version by the Therapeutic qualifier, making the distant God selec- tively available for taking care of needs. As this fourteen-year-old white mainline Protestant boy from Colorado said, “I believe there’s a God, so some- times when I’m in trouble or in danger, then I’ll start thinking about that.” Like the Deistic God of the eighteenth-century philosophers, the God of con- temporary teenage Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is primarily a divine Creator and Law-Giver. He designed the universe and establishes moral law and order.

But this God is not Trinitarian, he did not speak through the Torah or the prophets of Israel, was never resurrected from the dead, and does not fill and transform people through his Spirit. This God is not demanding. He actually can’t be, since his job is to solve our problems and make people feel good. In short, God is something like a combination Divine Butler and Cosmic Therapist—he is always on call, takes care of any problems that arise, profes- sionally helps his people to feel better about themselves, and does not become too personally involved in the process. As one fourteen-year-old white Catholic boy from Pennsylvania responded to our inquiry about why religion matters, “Cause God made us and if you ask him for something I believe he gives it to you. Yeah, he hasn’t let me down yet. [So what is God like?] God is a spirit that grants you anything you want, but not anything bad.” Similarly, this seventeen-year-old conservative Protestant girl from Florida told us, “God’s all around you, all the time. He believes in forgiving people and what- not, and he’s there to guide us, for somebody to talk to and help us through our problems. Of course, he doesn’t talk back.” This last statement is perhaps doubly telling: God, being distant, does not directly verbally answer prayers, according to this girl, but he also does not offer any challenging comebacks to or arguments about our requests. Perhaps the worst the God of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism can do is to simply fail to provide his promised therapeu- tic blessings, in which case those who believe in him are entitled to be grumpy. Thus, one sixteen-year-old white mainline Protestant boy from Texas com- plained with some sarcasm in his interview that, “Well, God is almighty, I guess [yawns]. But I think he’s on vacation right now because of all the crap that’s happening in the world, cause it wasn’t like this back when he was famous.” Likewise, this fourteen-year-old white conservative Protestant boy from Ohio told us that, “God is an overall ruler who controls everything, so like, if I’m depressed or something and things aren’t going my way, I blame it on him. I don’t know why.” But few teens we talked to end up blaming God for failing them, since Moralistic Therapeutic Deism usually seems to be effec- tive in delivering its promised benefits to its many teenage believers in the United States.

We want to be very clear about our thesis here. We are not saying that all

U.S. teens are adherents of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Some teens are simply disengaged from anything religious or spiritual, and other teens embrace substantive religious beliefs and practices that effectively repudiate those of this revisionist faith. Some teens do appear to be truly very serious

about their religious faith in ways that seem faithful to the authoritative or orthodox claims of the faith traditions they profess. We are also not saying than anyone has founded an official religion by the name of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, nor that most U.S. teenagers have abandoned their reli- gious denominations and congregations to practice it elsewhere or under another name. Rather, it seems that the latter is simply colonizing many estab- lished religious traditions and congregations in the United States, that it is merely becoming the new spirit living within the old body. Its typical embrace and practice is de facto, functional, practical, and tacit—not formal or acknowledged as a distinctive religion. Furthermore, we are not suggesting that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a religious faith limited to teenage adherents in the United States. To the contrary, it seems that it is also a wide- spread, popular faith among very many U.S. adults. Our religiously conven- tional adolescents seem to be merely absorbing and reflecting religiously what the adult world is routinely modeling for and inculcating in its youth.

Moreover, we are not suggesting that Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is a religion that teenagers (and adults) adopt and practice wholesale or not at all. Instead, the elements of its creed are normally assimilated by degrees, in parts, admixed with elements of more traditional religious faiths. Indeed, this reli- gious creed appears in this way to operate as a parasitic faith. It cannot sustain its own integral, independent life. Rather it must attach itself like an incubus to established historical religious traditions, feeding on their doctrines and sensibilities, and expanding by mutating their theological substance to resem- ble its own distinctive image. This helps to explain why millions of U.S. teenagers and adults are not self-declared, card-carrying, organizationally gathered Moralistic Therapeutic Deists. This religion generally does not and cannot stand on its own. So its adherents must be Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deists, Jewish Moralistic Therapeutic Deists, Mormon Moralistic Therapeutic Deists, and even Nonreligious Moralistic Therapeutic Deists. These may be either devout followers or mere nominal believers of their respective traditional faiths. But they often have some connection to an established historical faith tradition that this alternative faith feeds upon and gradually co-opts if not devours. Believers in each larger tradition practice their own versions of this otherwise common parasitic religion. The Jewish version, for instance, may emphasize the ethical living aspect of the creed, while the Methodist version stresses the getting-to-heaven part. Each then can think of themselves as belonging to the specific religious tradition they name

as their own—Catholic, Baptist, Jewish, Mormon, whatever—while simulta- neously sharing the cross-cutting, core beliefs of their de facto common Moralistic Therapeutic Deist faith. In effect, these believers get to enjoy what- ever particulars of their own faith heritages appeal to them, while also reaping the benefits of this shared, harmonizing, interfaith religion. This helps to explain the noticeable lack of religious conflict between teenagers of appar- ently different faiths. For, in fact, we suggest that many of them actually share the same deeper religious faith: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. What is there to have conflict about?

One way to gauge people’s interest in different matters is to track their lan- guage use. What do people talk about? How often do they use different kinds of key words and phrases? The idea behind this approach is that people’s dis- course roughly reflects their concerns and interests. We used this method as one means of assessing U.S. teenagers’ relative orientations to religious and therapeutic concerns. We systematically counted in our interview transcripts the number of teenagers who made reference to specific subjects or phrases of interest. We found, first, that relatively few U.S. teenagers made reference in their interviews to a variety of historically central religious and theological ideas. The following list shows the number of teenagers who explicitly men- tioned these concepts in their interviews:

47—personally sinning or being a sinner 13—obeying God or the church

12—religious repentance or repenting from wrongdoing 9—expressing love for God

8—righteousness, divine or human 7—resurrection or rising again of Jesus 6—giving glory to or glorifying God 6—salvation

5—resurrection of the dead on the Last Day 5—the kingdom of God (2 Christian, 3 Mormon) 5—keeping Sabbath (of 18 Jewish interviews)4 4—discipleship or being a religious disciple 4—God as Trinity

4—keeping Kosher (of 18 Jewish interviews)5 3—the grace of God

3—the Bible as holy

3—honoring God in life 3—loving one’s neighbor

3—observing high holy days (of 18 Jewish interviews) 2—God as holy or reflecting holiness

2—the justice of God 0—self-discipline 0—working for social justice

0—justification or being justified 0—sanctification or being sanctified

When teenagers talked in their interviews about “grace,” they were usual- ly talking about the television show Will and Grace, not about God’s grace. When teenagers discussed “honor,” they were almost always talking about tak- ing honors courses or making the honor role at school, very rarely about hon- oring God with their lives. When teens mentioned being “justified,” they almost always meant having a reason for doing something behaviorally ques- tionable, not having their relationship with God made right.

For comparison with these tallies on religious terms, we also counted the number of teens who made reference to the key therapeutic ideas of feeling happy, good, better, and fulfilled. What we found—as shown in the following list—is that U.S. teenagers were much more likely to talk in terms broadly related to therapeutic concerns than in the religious terms examined above:

112—personally feeling, being, getting, or being made happy 99—feeling good about oneself or life

92—feeling better about oneself or life

26—being or feeling personally satisfied or enjoying life satisfaction 21—being or feeling personally fulfilled

Note that these are not total number of times that teenagers used a word or phrase, but simply the number of teens who used them. In fact, our inter- viewed teenagers used the single, specific phrase to “feel happy,” for instance, more than two thousand times. In short, our teen interview transcripts reveal clearly that the language that dominates U.S. adolescent interests and think- ing about life—including religious and spiritual life—is primarily about per- sonally feeling good and being happy. That is what defines the dominant epistemological framework and evaluative standard for most contemporary

U.S. teenagers—and probably for most of their baby-boomer parents. This, we think, has major implications for religious faiths seriously attempting to pass on the established beliefs and practices of their historical traditions.

What we are theorizing here, in other words, is the very real existence of a shared American religion that is analogous to the American civil religion that Robert Bellah astutely described in 1967,6 yet which operates at an entirely different level than civil religion. It is not uncommon for people to think of the United States as comprising a variety of diverse religions that coexist more or less harmoniously: Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Freewill Baptist, Irish Catholic, Conservative Judaism, Reformed Presbyterian, Latter-day Saint, and so on. But the reality is actually more complicated than that. “Religion” in the United States separates itself out and operates at multiple levels in different ways. American religion is most obvious at the level of formal organizations, the plane on which denominations, seminaries, religious congregations, pub- lishing houses, and other religious organizations operate. But religion also often operates distinctively at a level “below” the organizational plane, at the level of individual belief and practice. Here religious faith is often eclectic, idiosyncratic, and syncretistic, inconsistently—from the perspective of most organized religious traditions, at least—mixing together elements as diverse as belief in infant baptism, interest in horoscope predictions, and the collection of religious kitsch. This is the dimension that some scholars have called “lived religion” or “popular religion.”7 Beyond these two levels, Bellah’s major con- tribution in 1967 was to reveal civil religion operating in the United States at yet another level—“above” the plane of formal religious organizations. Bellah very insightfully showed how religious symbols and discourse—appropriated and abstracted from the Judeo-Christian tradition—are mobilized at a nation- al civic level for purposes of national order, unity, and purpose.

What we are suggesting here in our observations about Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is that, to understand the fullness of “religion” in the United States, we need to come to see yet another level or plane of religious life or practice operating in this social order (as shown in figure 2 on page 169 of Soul Searching). At the “bottom” exists the eclectic, idiosyncratic, and dis- cretely syncretistic faiths operating at the level of individual religion. “Higher up” abides the more coherent, systematized faiths operating on the plane of organizational religion. Even “higher” exists the nationally unifying political faith of American civil religion. But situated between the individual level at the “bottom” level and the organized religions and civil religion on planes above that, there operates yet another distinct level of religion in the United

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States—the widely shared, interfaith religion of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. Like American civil religion, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism appropri- ates, abstracts, and revises doctrinal elements from mostly Christianity and Judaism for its own purpose. But it does so in a “downward,” apolitical direc- tion. Its social function is not to unify and give purpose to the nation at the level of civic affairs. Rather, it functions to foster subjective well-being in its believers and to lubricate interpersonal relationships in the local public sphere. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism exists, with God’s aid, to help people succeed in life, to make them feel good, and to help them get along with others—who otherwise are different—in school, at work, on the team, and in other routine areas of life.

Finally, to suggest that “religion” in the United States operates complexly and distinctly on different levels, however, does not mean that those levels never interact or influence each other. They do. Purely individual beliefs, for instance, are shaped in part by the teachings of organized religion—as well as by horoscopes, advice columns, talk show hosts, and so on. American civil religion is affected both by liberal religious activism and by the Religious Right operating at the level of formal religious organization. The same obser- vation about interlevel interaction and influence is also true of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. It helps to organize and harmonize individual religious beliefs “below” it. It also both feeds upon and shapes—one might say infects—the religious doctrines and practices at the organizational and insti- tutional level “above” it. In addition it mirrors and may very well interface with American civil religion at the highest level by providing the nation’s inhabitants a parallel and complementary common, unifying, functional faith that operates at a more apolitical, private, and interpersonal level of human life. The cultural influence of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism may also be nudging American civil religion in a “softer,” more inclusive, ecumenical, and multireligious direction. What is conservative becomes more “compassion- ate,” what is liberal becomes more “bleeding heart” and “inclusive,” and what is remotely particularistic is increasingly universalized. All can then together hold hands and declare in unison, “Each person decides for himself/herself!” And those who believe that only the born again who are justified by the spilled blood of Jesus Christ go to heaven, or that the Angel Moroni really did appear to Joseph Smith with a new and commanding revelation, or that God’s cho- sen people really must faithfully observe his laws are suspect. The flock of

sheep is diversified and expanded, but certain goats remain part of the picture nonetheless.8

Adults in the United States over the last many decades have recurrently emphasized that which separates teenagers from grown-ups, highlighting things that make each of them different and seemingly unable to relate to each other. But, as reported in our book, Soul Searching, our conversations with ordinary teenagers around the country made the contrary clear to us, that in most cases teenage religion and spirituality in the United States are much bet- ter understood as largely reflecting the world of adult religion, especially parental religion, and are in strong continuity with it. Few teenagers today are rejecting or reacting against the adult religion into which they are being social- ized. Rather, most are living out their religious lives in very conventional and accommodating ways. The religion and spirituality of most teenagers actually strike us as very powerfully reflecting the contours, priorities, expectations, and structures of the larger adult world into which adolescents are being socialized. In many ways, religion is simply happily absorbed by youth, large- ly, one might say, “by osmosis”—as one sixteen-year-old white Catholic boy from Pennsylvania stated so well: “Yeah, religion affects my life a lot, but you just really don’t think about it as much. It just comes natural I guess after a while.”

However, it appears that only a minority of U.S. teenagers are naturally absorbing by osmosis the traditional substantive content and character of the religious traditions to which they claim to belong. For, it appears to us, anoth- er popular religious faith—Moralistic Therapeutic Deism—is colonizing many historical religious traditions and, almost without anyone noticing, con- verting believers in the old faiths to its alternative religious vision of divinely underwritten personal happiness and interpersonal niceness. Exactly how this process is affecting American Judaism and Mormonism we refrain from fur- ther commenting on, since these faiths and cultures are not our primary fields of expertise. Other more accomplished scholars in those areas will have to examine and evaluate these possibilities in greater depth. But we can say that we have come with some confidence to believe that a significant part of “Christianity” in the United States is actually only tenuously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition,9 but has rather substantially morphed into Christianity’s misbegotten step-cousin, Christian Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. This has happened in the minds and hearts of many individual believ- ers and, it also appears, within the structures of at least some Christian organ-

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izations and institutions. The language—and therefore experience—of Trinity, holiness, sin, grace, justification, sanctification, church, Eucharist, and heaven and hell appear, among most Christian teenagers in the United States at the very least, to be being supplanted by the language of happiness, niceness, and an earned heavenly reward. It is not so much that Christianity in the United States is being secularized. Rather more subtly, either Christianity is at least degenerating into a pathetic version of itself or, more significantly, Christianity is actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith.

Notes

1. This paper is a version of “Summary Interpretation: Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” from Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, copyright © 2005 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Used by permission of Oxford University Press.

2. There is a strong connect between this vision of morality and the “emotivism” described by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982).

3. For more on the therapeutic in culture, see James Nolan, The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century’s End (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Warner Books, 1979); James Hunter, The Death of Character: Moral Education in an Age without Good or Evil (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Joel Shuman and Keith Meador, Heal Thyself: Spirituality, Medicine, and the Distortion of Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Andrew Polsky, The Rise of the Therapeutic State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); John S. Rice, A Disease of One’s Own: Psychotherapy, Addiction, and the Emergence of Co-Dependency (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1996); Ronald Dworkin, The Rise of the Imperial Self (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996); Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976); Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down (New York: Bantam Books, 1981); James Nolan, Reinventing Justice: The American Drug Court Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).

4. Four other Jewish teenagers mentioned Sabbath specifically to say that they do not keep or observe the Sabbath.

5. Three Jewish teens mentioned keeping Kosher to say that they do not.

6. Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus (Winter 1967): 1–21.

7. See, for example, David Hall, Lived Religion in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Erling Jorstad, Popular Religion in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993).

8. For an explanation about how such status differentiations and cultural constructions of difference are essential to the making of human identities, see Christian Smith et al., American Evangelicalism: Embattled and Thriving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

9. As specified by numerous, defining historical creeds and confessions, including the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Creed, the Athanasian Creed, Canons of the Council of Orange, the Belgic Confession, the Westminster Confessions, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Augsburg Confession, the Canons of Dort, the Scots Confession, the Thirty Nine Articles of the Church of

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PHYLLIS TRIBLE

On the whole,’the Women’s Liberation Movement is hostile to the
Bible, even as it claims that the Bible is hostile to women. The Yahwist
account of creation and fall in Genesis 2-3 provides a strong proof text
for that claim. Accepting centuries of (male) exegesis, many feminists
interpret this story as legitimating male supremacy and female subor-
dination.’ They read to reject. My suggestion is that we reread to
understand’ and to appropriate. Ambiguity characterizes the meaning
of ‘adham in Genesis 2-3. On the one hand, man is the first creature
formed (2:7). The Lord God puts him in the garden “to till it and keep
it,” a job identified with the male (cf. 3:17-19). On the other hand,
‘adham is a generic term for humankind. In commanding ‘adham not
to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the Deity is
speaking to both the man and the woman (2:16-17). Until the
differentiation of female and male (2:21-23), ‘adham is basically
androgynous: one creature incorporating two sexes.
Concern for sexuality, specifically for the creation of woman, comes

last in the story, after the making of the garden, the trees, and the

Phyllis Trible received her Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary and Columbia
University. She teaches at Andover Newton Theological School and is author of God and
the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Her articles on feminism and biblical faith have appeared in
Soundings, Journal oj the American Academy of Religion, and Religion in Life. This
essay is reprinted by permission from Andover Newton Qparterly 13 (March, 1973).

Eve and Adam 75

animals. Some commentators allege female subordination based on this _,
order of events.’ They contrast it with Genesis 1:27 where God creates ”
‘adhom as male and female in one act.3 Thereby they infer that
whereas the Priests recognized the equality of the sexes, the Yahwist
made woman a second, subordinate, inferior sex.’ But the Iast may be
first, as both the biblical theologian and the literary critic know. Thus
the Yah wist account moves to its climax, not its decline, in the creation -r
of woman.’ She is not an afterthought; she is the culmination. Genesis ‘–
1 itself supports this interpretation, for there male and female are
indeed the last and truly the crown of all creatures. The last is also first
where beginnings and endings are parallel. In Hebrew literature, the
central concerns of a unit often appear at the beginning and the end as
an inc/usia device.” Genesis 2 evinces this structure. The creation of
man first and of woman last constitutes a ring composition whereby the
two creatures are parallel. In no way does the order disparage woman.
Content and context augment this reading.
The context for the advent of woman is a divine judgment “It is not

good that ‘adham should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for
him” (2:18). The phrase needing explication is “helper fit for him.” In
the Old Testament the word helper (‘ezer) has many usages. It can be
a proper name for a male.” In our story, it describes the animals and
the woman. In some passages, it characterizes Deity. God is the helper.
of Israel. As helper Yahweh creates and saves.” Thus ‘ezer is a
relational term; it designates a beneficial relationship; and it pertains to
God, people, and animals. By itself, the word does not specify positions
within relationships; more particularly, it does not imply inferiority.
Position results from additional content or from context. Accordingly,
what kind of relationship does ‘ezer entail in Genesis 2:18, 20? Our
answer comes in two ways: (1) The word neged, which joins ‘eeer,
connotes equality: a helper who is a counterpart.” (2) The animals are
helpers, but they fail to fit ‘adham. There is physical, perhaps psychic,
rapport between ‘adhom and the animals, for Yahweh forms (yasar)
them both out of the ground (‘adhamah). Yet their similarity is not
equality. ‘Adham names them and thereby exercises power over them.
No fit helper is among them. And thus the narrative moves to
woman …. God is the helper superior to man; the animals are helpers ‘:’-/
inferior to man; woman is the helper equal to man.
Let us pursue the issue by examining the account of the creation of

woman ([verses]21-22). This episode concludes the story even as the

76 -TRIBBLE:

creation of man commences it …. The ring composition suggests an
interpretation of woman and man as equals. To establish this meaning,
structure and content must mesh. They do, In both episodes, Yahweh
alone creates. For the’ last creation the Lord God “caused a deep sleep
(tardemah) to fall upon the man.” Man has no part in making woman;
he is out of it. He exercises no control over her existence. He is neither
, participant nor spectator nor consultant at her birth. Like man, woman
owes her life solely to God. For both of them, the origin of life is a
divine mystery. Another parallel of equality is creation out of raw
materials: dust for man and a rib for woman. Yahweh chooses these
fragile materials and in both cases processes them before human beings
happen. As Yahweh shapes dust and then breathes into it to form man,
so Yahweh takes out the rib and then builds it into woman.” To call
woman “Adam’s rib” is to misread the text, which states’ carefully and
dearly that the extracted bone required divine labor to become female,
a datum scarcely designed to bolster the male ego. Moreover, to Claim
that the rib means inferiority or subordination is to assign the man
qualities over the woman which are not in the narrative itself.
Superiority, strength, aggressiveness, dominance, and power do not
characterize man in Genesis 2. By contrast, he is formed from dirt; his
life hangs by a breath which he does not control; and he himself
remains silent and passive while the Deity plans and interprets his
existence.
The rib means solidarity and equality. ‘Adham recognizes this

meaning in a poem:”

This at last is bone of bones
and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called ‘ishshah [woman]
because she was taken out of ‘ish [man]. (2:23)

The pun proclaims bot” the similarity and the differentiation of female
and male. Before this episode the Yahwist has used only the generic
term ‘adham. No exclusively male reference has appeared. Only with
the specific creation of woman (‘ishshah) occurs the first specific terms
for man as male (‘ish).” In other words, sexuality is simultaneous for
. woman and man. The sexes are interrelated and interdependent. Man
as male does not precede woman as female but happens concurrently,
with her. Hence, the first act in Genesis 2 is the creation of androgyny
(2:7), and the last is the creation of sexuality (2:23).” Male embodies

Eve and Adam 77

female, and female embodies male. The two are neither dichotomies
nor duplicates. The birth of woman corresponds to the birth of man
but does not copy it. Only in responding to the female does the man
discover himself as male. No longer a passive creature, ‘ish comes alive
in meeting ‘ishshoh,
Some read into the poem a naming motif. The man names the

woman and thereby has power and authority over her.” But again
… reread. Neither the verb nor the noun name is in the poem. We
find instead the verb gam’, to call: “She shall be called woman.” Now,
in the Yahwist primeval history this verb does not function as a
synonym or parallel or substitute for name. The typical formula for
naming is the verb to call plus the explicit object name. This formula
applies to Deity, people, places, and animals. For example, in Genesis
4 we read:

Cain built a city and called the name of the city after the
name ofhis son Enoch. (v. 17)

And Adamknew his wife again, and she bore a son and
called his name Seth. (v. 25)

To Seth alsoa son was born and he called his name
Enoch. (v. 26.)

At that timemen began to call upon the name of the Lord.
(v. 26b)

Genesis 2:23 has the verb call but does not have the object name. Its
absence signifies the absence of a naming motif in the poem. The
presence of both the verb call and the noun name in the episode of the
animals strengthens the point:

Soout of the ground the Lord God formedevery beast of the fieldand every
bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would coli them;
and whatever the man called everylivingcreature, that was its name. The man
gavenames to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the
field. (2:19-20)

In calling the animals by name, ‘adham establishes supremacy over
them and fails to find a fit helper. In calling woman, ‘adham does not
name her and does find in her a counterpart. Female and male are
equal sexes. Neither has authority over the other.”
A further observation secures the argument: Woman itself is not a

name. It is a common noun; it is not a proper noun. It designates
gender; it doesnot specify person. ‘Adham recognizes sexuality by the

78 TRIBBLE:

words ‘ishshab and ‘ish. This recognition is not an act of naming to
assert the power of male over female. Quite the contrary. But the true
skeptic is already asking: What about Genesis 3:20, where “the man
called his wife’s name Eve”? We must wait to consider that question.
Meanwhile, the words of the ancient poem as well as their context
proclaim sexuality originating in the unity of ‘adham. From this one
(androgynous) creature come two (female and male). The two return
to their original unity as ‘ish and ‘ishshah become one flesh (2:24):”
another instance of the ring composition.
Next the differences which spell harmony and equality yield to the

differences of disobedience and disaster. The serpent speaks to the
woman. Why to the woman and not to the man? The simplest answer
is that we do not know. The Yahwist does not tell us anymore than he
explains why the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was in the
garden. But the silence of the text stimulates speculations, many of
which only confirm the patriarchal mentality which conceived them.
Cassuto identifies serpent and woman, maintaining that the cunning of
the serpent is “in reality” the cunning of the woman.” He impugns her
further by declaring that “for the very reason that a woman’s imagina-
tion surpasses a man’s, it was the woman who was enticed first.”
Though more gentle in his assessment, von Rad avers that “in the
history of Yahweh religion, it has always been the women who have
shown an inclination for obscure astrological cults” (a claim which he
does not document).” Consequently, he holds that the woman “con-
fronts the obscure allurements and mysteries that beset our limited life
more directly than the man does,” and then he calls her a “temptress.”
Paul Ricoeur says that woman “represents the point of weakness,” as
the entire story “gives evidence of a very masculine resentment.” 18
McKenzie links the “moral weakness” of the woman with her “sexual
attraction” and holds that the latter ruined both the woman and the
man.”
But the narrative does not say any of these things. It does not sustain

the judgment that woman is weaker or, more cunning or more sexual
than man. Both have the same Creator, who explicitly uses the word
good to introduce the creation of woman (2:18). Both are equal in
birth. There is complete rapport, physical, psychological, sociological,
and theological, between them: bone of bone and flesh of flesh. If there
be moral frailty in one, it is moral frailty .in two. Further, they are
equal in responsibility and in judgment, in ‘shame and in guilt, in

Eve and Adam 79

redemption and in grace. What the narrative says about the nature of
woman it also says about the nature of’man.
Why does the serpent speak to the woman and not to the man? Let”a

female speculate. If -the serpent is “more subtle” than its fellow
creatures, the woman is more appealing than her husband. Through-
out the myth, she is the more intelligent one, the more aggressive one,
and the one with greater sensibilities.” Perhaps the woman elevates the
animal world by conversing theologically with the serpent. At any rate,
she understands the hermeneutical task. In quoting God, she interprets
the prohibition Clneither shall you touch it”), The woman is both
theologian and translator. She contemplates the tree, taking into
account all the possibilities. The tree is good for food; it satisfies the
physical drives. It pleases the eyes; it is esthetically and emotionally
desirable. Above all, it is coveted as the source of wisdom (haskil).
Thus the woman is fully aware when she acts, her vision encompassing
the gamut of life. She takes the fruit, and she eats. The initiative and
the decision are hers alone. There is no consultation with her husband.
She seeks neither his advice nor his permission. She acts independently.
By contrast, the man is a silent, passive, and bland recipient: “She

also gave some to her husband, and he ate.” The narrator makes no
attempt to depict the husband as reluctant or hesitating. The man does
not theologize; he does not contemplate; he does not envision the full
possibilities of the occasion. His one act is belly oriented, and it is an
act of quiescence, not of initiative. The man is not dominant; he is not
aggressive; he is not a decision maker. Even though the prohibition not
to eat of the tree appears before the female was specifically created, she
knows that it applies to her. She has interpreted it, and now she
struggles with the temptation to disobey. But not the man, to whom the.
prohibition came directly (2:16). He follows his wife without question
or comment, thereby denying his own individuality. If the woman be
intelligent, sensitive, and ingenious, the man is passive, brutish, and
inept. These character portrayals are ‘truly extraordinary in a culture
dominated by men. I stress their contrast not to promote female
chauvinism but to undercut patriarchal interpretations alien to the text.
The contrast between woman and man fades after their acts of

disobedience. They are one in the new knowledge of their nakedness
(3:7). They are one in hearing and in hiding. They flee from the sound
of the Lord God in the Garden (3:8). First to the man come questions
of responsibility (3:9, 11), but the man fails to be responsible: “The

80 TRIBBLE:

woman whom Thou gayest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree,
and I ate” (3:12). Here the man does not blame the woman; he does
not say that the woman seduced him;’! he blames the Deity. The verb
which he uses for both the Deity and the woman is ntn (cf.
3:6)…. This verb neither means nor implies seduction in this context
or in the lexicon. Again, if the Yahwist intended to make woman the
temptress, he missed a choice opportunity. The woman’s response
supports the point. “The serpent beguiled me, and I ate” (3:13). Only
here occurs the strong verb nsh’, meaning to deceive, to seduce. God
accepts this subject-verb combination when, immediately following the
woman’s accusation, Yahweh says to the serpent, “Because you have
done this, cursed are you above all animals” (3:14).
Though the tempter (the serpent) is cursed,” the woman and the

man are not. But they are judged, and thejudgments are commentaries
on the disastrous effects of their shared disobedience. They show how
terrible human life has become as it stands between creation and grace.
We misread if we assume that these judgments are mandates. They
describe; they do not prescribe. They protest; they do not condone. Of
special concern are the words telling the woman that her husband shall
rule over her (3:16). This statement is not license for male supremacy,
but rather it is condemnation of that very pattern.” Subjugation and
supremacy are perversions of creation. Through disobedience, the
woman has become slave. Her initiative and her freedom vanish. The
man is corrupted also, for he has become master, ruling over the one
who is his God-given equal. The subordination of female to male
signifies their shared sin.” This sin vitiates all relationships: between
animals and human beings (3:15); mothers and children (3:16);
husbands and wives (3:16); people and the soil (3:17-18); humanity
and its work (3:19). Whereas in creation man and woman know
harmony and equality, in sin they know alienation and discord. Grace
makes possible a new beginning.
A further observation about these judgments: they are culturally

conditioned. Husband and work (childbearing) define the woman; wife
and work (farming) define the man. A Iiteral reading of the story limits
both creatures and limits the story. To be faithful translators, we must
recognize that women as well as men move beyond these culturally
defined roles, even as the intentionality and function of the myth move
beyond its original setting. Whatever forms stereotyping takes in our

Eve and Adam 81

own culture, they are judgments upon our common sin and disobedi-
ence. The suffering and oppression we women and men know now are
marks of our fall, not of our creation.
At this place of sin and judgment, “the man calls his wife’s name

Eve” (3:20), thereby asserting his rule over her. The naming itself
faults the man for corrupting a relationship of mutuality and equality.
And so Yahweh evicts the primeval couple from the Garden, yet with
signals of grace.” Interestingly, the conclusion of the story does not
specify the sexes in flight. Instead the narrator resumes use of the
generic and androgynous term ‘adham with which the story began and
thereby completes an overall ring composition (3:22- 24).
Visiting the Garden of Eden in the days of the Women’s Movement,

we need no longer accept the traditional exegesis of Genesis 2-3.
Rather than legitimating the patriarchal culture from which it comes,
the myth places that culture under judgment. And thus it functions to
liberate, not to enslave. This function we can recover and appropriate.
The Yahwist narrative tells us who we are (creatures of equality and
mutuality); it tells us who we have become (creatures of oppression); -.and so it opens possibilities for change, for a return to our true
liberation under God. In other words, the story calls female and male
to repent.

NOTES

1. See inter alia, Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1970),pp. 51-
54; Eva Figes, PatriarchalAttitudes (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1970),pp. 38f;
Mary Daly, «The Courage to See,” The Christian Century, September22,1971, p.
1110; Sheila D. Collins, “Toward a Feminist Theology,” The Christian Century,
August 2, 1972, p. 798; Lilly Rivlin, “Lilith: The First Woman,” Ms., December
1972, pp. 93,114.

2. Cf. E. Jacob, Theologyo/the Old Testament (New York: Harper & Bros., 1958),
pp. 172f; S. H. Hooke, “Genesis,” Peake’s Commentary on the Bible (London:
Thomas Nelson, 1962),p. 179.

3. E.g., Elizabeth Cady Stanton observedthat Genesis 1:26-28 “dignifieswoman as an
important factorin the creation, equal in powerand glory with man,” while Genesis
2 “makes her a mere afterthought” (The Woman’s Bible, Part I [New York
European Publishing Company, 1895],p. 20). See also Elsie Adams and Mary
Louise Briscoe,Up Against th~ Wall, Mother … (Beverly Hills: Glencoe Press,
1971), p. 4.

82 TRIBBLE:

4. Cf. Eugene H. Maly, “Genesis,” The Jerome Biblical Commentary (Englewood
Cliffs, N.)..: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 12: “But woman’s existence, psychologically

l and in the social order, is dependent on man.”
5. See John L. McKenzie, “The Literary Characteristics of Gen.’ 2-3,” Theological
Studies, Vol. 15 (1954), p. 559; John A. Bailey, “Initiation and the Primal Woman
in Gilgamesh and Genesis 2-3,” journal of Biblical Literature, June 1970, p. 143.
Bailey writes emphatically of the remarkable importance and position of the woman
in Genesis 2.,..3,”all the more extraordinary when one realizes that this is the only
account of the creation of woman as such in ancient Near Eastern literature.” He
hedges, however, in seeing the themes of helper and naming (Genesis 2:18-23) as
indicative of a “certain subordination” of woman to man. These reservations are
unnecessary; see below. Cf. also Claus Westermann, Genesis, Biblischer Kommentar
1/1 (Neukerchener-Vluyn: Newkirchener Verlag, 1970), p. 312.

6. james Muilenburg, “Form Criticism and Beyond,” Journal of Biblical Literature,
March 1969, pp. 9f; Mitchell Dahood, “Psalm I,” The Anchor Bible (New York:
Doubleday, 1966), passim and esp. p. 5.

7. See 1 Chronicles 4:4; 12:9; Nehemiah 3:19.
8. See Psalm 121:2, 124:8; 146:5; 33:20; 115:9-11; Exodus 18:4; Deuteronomy 33:7,
26,29.

9. L. Koehler and W. Baumgartner, Lexicon in Veteris Testamenti Libros (Leiden: E.
J. n-m, 1958), pp. 59lf.

10. The- verb bnh (to build) suggests considerable labor. It is used of towns, towers,
altars, and fortifications, as well as of the primeval woman (Koehler-Baumgartner,
op. cit., p. 134). In Genesis 2:22, it may mean the fashioning of clay around the rib
(Ruth Amiran, “Myths of the Creation of Man and the jericho Statues,” BASOR,
No. 167 [October 19621, p. 24).

11. See Walter Brueggemann, “Of the Same Flesh and Bone (Gen. 2:23a),” Catholic
Biblical Q}larterly, October 1970, pp. 532-42.

12. In proposing as primary an androgynous interpretation of ‘adham, I find virtually
no support (rom (male) biblical scholars. But my view stands as documented from
the text, and I take refuge among a remnant of ancient (male) rabbis (see George
Foot Moore, Judaism [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1927]), I, 453;
also joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Meridian Books, The
World Publishing Company, 1970), pp. 152ff., 279f.

13. See e.g., G. von Rad, Genesis (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1961), pp. 80-82;
John H. Marks, “Genesis,” The Interpreter’s One- Volume Commentary on the
Bible (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1971), p. 5; Bailey, op. cit., p. 143.

14. Cf. Westermann, op. cit., pp. 316ff.
15. Verse 24 probably mirrors a matriarchal society (so Von Rad, op. cit., p. 83). If the

myth were designed to support patriarchy, it is difficult to explain how this verse
survived without proper alteration. Westermann contends, however, that an empha-
sis on matriarchy misunderstands the point of the verse, which is the total
communion of woman and man (ibid., p. 317).

16. U. Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis, Part I (Jerusalem: Magnes
Press, n.d.), pp. 142f.

17. Von Rad, op. cit., pp. 87f.

Eve and Adam 83

18. Ricoeur departs from the traditional interpretation of the woman when he writes:
“Eve n’est done pas fa femme en tont que ‘deuxieme sexe’; louie femme et tout
homme sont Adam; tout homme et louie jemme sont Eve.” But the fourth clause of
his sentence obscures this complete identity of Adam and Eve: “louie femme peche
‘en Adam, tout homme est seduit ‘en Eve.” By switching from an active to a passive
verb, Ricoeur makes only the woman directly responsible for both sinning and
seducing. (Paul Ricoeur, Finitude et Culpabilite, II. La Symbolique du Mal, Aubier,
Editions Montaigne [Paris: 1960]. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil [Boston:
Beacon Press, 1969), p. 255).

19. McKenzie, op. cit., p. 570.
20. See Bailey, op. cit., p. 148.
21. See Westermann, op. cit., p. 340.
22. For a discussion of the serpent, see Rlcoeur, The Symbolism of Evil,’ op. cit., pp-

255- 60.
23. cr. Edwin M. Good, Irony in the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,

1965), p. 84, note 4: “Is it not surprising that, in a culture where the subordination
of woman to man was a virtually unquestioned social principle, the etiology of the
subordination should be in the context of man’s primal sin? Perhaps woman’s
subordination was not unquestioned in Israel.” Cf. also Henricus Renckens, Israel’s
Concept of the Beginning (New York: Herder & Herder, 1964), pp. 127f.

24. Contra Westermann, op. cit., p. 357.
25. Von Rad, op. cit., pp. 94, 148.

Theological Studies
54 (1993)

DEVELOPMENT IN MORAL DOCTRINE*

JOHN T. NOONAN, JR.
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

THAT THE MORAL teachings of the Catholic Church have changed over time will, I suppose, be denied by almost no one today. To refresh
memories and confirm the point, I will describe four large examples of
such change in the areas of usury, marriage, slavery, and religious
freedom, and then analyze how Catholic theology has dealt with them.

Usury

The first is the teaching of the Church on usury. Once upon a time,
certainly from at least 1150 to 1550, seeking, receiving, or hoping for
anything beyond one’s principal—in other words, looking for profit—
on a loan constituted the mortal sin of usury. The doctrine was enun-
ciated by popes, expressed by three ecumenical councils, proclaimed by
bishops, and taught unanimously by theologians. The doctrine was not
some obscure, hole-in-the-corner affectation, but stood astride the Eu-
ropean credit markets, at least as much as the parallel Islamic ban of
usury governs Moslem countries today. There were ways of profiting
from the extension of credit, ways that were lawful; but these ways had
been carefully constructed to respect the basic prohibition; and it was
a debated question at what point they crossed the line and were them-
selves sinfully usurious. The great central moral fact was that usury,
understood as profit on a loan, was forbidden as contrary to the natural
law, as contrary to the law of the Church, and as contrary to the law of
the gospel.1

All that, we know, has changed. The change can be exaggerated.

* A more developed form of the Thomas Verner Moore Lecture sponsored by St.
Anselm’s Abbey, September 29, 1990, at the Catholic University of America.

1 On the whole topic, see John T. Noonan, Jr., “Authority on Usury and on Contra-
ception,” Tijdschrift voor Theologie 6 (1966) 26-50, republished in Cross Currents

16

(1966) 55-79 and The Wiseman Review (Summer, 1966) 201-29. The standard defini-
tion of usury was given by Gratian, Decretum, Corpus iuris canonici, ed. E. Friedberg
(Leipzig, 1879-1881) 2.14.3.1. The Second Council of the Lateran condemned usury
(G. D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio [Paris, 1901-1920]
21.529-30); the Third Council of the Lateran declared usury to be condemned “by the
pages of both Testaments” (Mansi 22.231). The Council of Vienne declared that anyone
“pertinaciously affirming that to practice usury is no sin should be punished as a her-
etic” (Clement, Constitutiones 5.5, Corpus iuris canonici, ed. E. Friedberg).

662

DEVELOPMENT IN MORAL DOCTRINE 66

3

Even at the height of the prohibition of usury not every form of credit
transaction was classified as a loan from which no profit might be
sought. The idea of legitimate interest was also not absent. Formally it
can be argued that the old usury rule, narrowly construed, still stands:
namely, that no profit on a loan may be taken without a just title to
that profit. But in terms of emphasis, of perspective, of practice, the old
usury rule has disappeared: the just title to profit is assumed to exist.
The centrality of “Lend freely, hoping nothing thereby,” construed as
a command, has disappeared. We take interest as profit on our banking
accounts. We expect our banks to profit from their lending business.
Our entire financial world is built on profitable charges for credit. The
idea that it is against nature for money to breed money, or that it is
contrary to church law to deposit in a savings institution with the hope
of a profit, or that hoping for profit at all from a loan breaks a com­
mand of Christ—all these ideas, once unanimously inculcated with
the utmost seriousness by the teaching authority of the Church, are
now so obsolete that one invites incredulity by reciting them.

Marriage

Usury was a moral doctrine dependent on economic conditions that
could change. Let us now consider, as something related to fundamen­
tal unchanging human nature, moral doctrine on adultery, bigamy,
and marriage. Monogamy without divorce is the law of the gospel,
established by words attributed to Jesus himself and related by him to
the primordial order established by God (Matt 19:2-9). Within the
New Testament, however, a perceptible change occurs. If, of two mar­
ried unbelievers, one converts and the other does not but deserts the
convert, St. Paul teaches that the convert is free: “Neither a brother
nor a sister is a slave in these matters” (1 Cor 7:10-16). The implica­
tion, teased out in patristic times, is that the convert can commit what
otherwise would be adultery and bigamy and enter a second marriage
in the Lord.

2

Until the 16th century, this so-called Pauline privilege remained the
solitary exception to Christian monogamy. Then, on behalf of African
slaves torn from their African spouses and shipped to South America,
the privilege was radically extended. The slave who wanted to convert
could not know whether his absent spouse would abandon him or not.
No matter, Gregory ΧΠΙ ruled in 1585, it was important that such
converts be free to remarry “lest they not persist in their faith.” On
their behalf, the pope dissolved their old marriages and declared them

2
See John T. Noonan, Jr. Power to Dissolve (Cambridge: Harvard Univ., 1972) 343.

664 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

free to enter a second marriage that would otherwise have been adul­
terous and bigamous.

3

The next step in this direction was taken under the impetus of the
great canonist Cardinal Pietro Gasparri in the 1920s. In a case from
Helena, Montana, Gerard G. Marsh, unbaptized, had married Frances
F. Groom, an Anglican. They divorced; Groom remarried. Two years
later Marsh sought to marry a Catholic, Lulu La Hood; Pius XI dis­
solved Marsh’s marriage to Groom “in favor of the faith” of Miss La
Hood. Apparently exercising jurisdiction over the marriage of two non-
Catholics (Groom and Marsh), the Pope authorized Marsh to marry a
Catholic under circumstances that but for the papal action would (mor­
ally, not civilly) have constituted bigamy for Marsh and adultery for
La Hood.

4
Prior to 1924 the teaching of the Church, expressly

grounded on both the commandment of the Lord and on the natural
law, was that marriage was indissoluble except in the special case of
conversion of an unbeliever. The teaching was unanimously expressed
by papal encyclicals and by the body of bishops in their universal
ordinary teaching. Then, in 1924, by the exercise of papal authority,
the meaning of the commandment against adultery was altered; what
was bigamy was revised; and a substantial gloss was written on the
Lord’s words, “What God has joined together let no man put asunder.”

Slavery

Let us now examine two examples taken from an area more funda­
mental than justice in lending, more fundamental than rectitude in
sexual relations—examples that bear on the basic conditions of moral
autonomy. I mean moral doctrine on human liberty. And first, moral
doctrine on a human being’s right to be free from ownership by another
human being.

Once upon a time, certainly as late as 1860, the Church taught that
it was no sin for a Catholic to own another human being; to command
the labor of that other human being without paying compensation; to
determine where he or she lived and how much he or she was fed and
clothed; to restrict his or her education; to pledge him or her for a loan,
forfeit him or her for a default, sell him or her for cash; to do the same
as to his or her offspring; and to discipline him or her by physical
punishments if he or she were rude or boisterous or slack in service. I
refer, of course, to some of the features of chattel slavery as it existed
in the United States, as it was upheld by American law, and as it was

3
Ibid. 356, citing Gregory ΧΙΠ, Populis et nationibus, reprinted as Document VII in

the appendix to Codex iuris canonici (Rome: Vatican, 1917).
4
Power to Dissolve 370-371.

DEVELOPMENT IN MORAL DOCTRINE 665

applied by Catholic laymen, bishops, and religious orders with the
approval of ecclesiastical authority. No qualm of conscience troubled
that leading Catholic jurist, Chief Justice Roger Taney, as he wrote
Dred Scott, or disturbed the slaveholding Maryland Province of the
Society of Jesus.5 That loving one’s neighbor as one’s self was observed
only in a Pickwickian way by holding one’s neighbor in bondage was
not a commonplace of Catholic moral thought.

It was Catholic moral doctrine that slaves should be treated hu-
manely, and that it was good to give slaves freedom. With some qual-
ifications it was Catholic moral doctrine that slaves should be allowed
to marry.6 But Catholic moral doctrine considered the institution of
slavery acceptable. St. Paul had accepted it, returning Onesimus to his
master (Phlm 11-19) and instructing the Christian slaves of Corinth
to obey their masters (1 Cor 7:21).

The premier moralist of the West, St. Augustine, said succinctly that
Christ “did not make men free from being slaves.” The greatest of
reforming popes, Gregory I, accepted a young boy as a slave and gave
him as a gift to another bishop; his famous decision to send mission-
aries to England is said to have arisen from his musings as he browsed
in a slave market in Rome.7

The greatest of Catholic jurisprudents, Henri de Bracton, thought
slavery was contrary to natural law, but accepted it as an institution
of the law of nations; he merely copied the great Catholic lawgiver,
Justinian. St. Antoninus of Florence followed St. Thomas in acquiesc-
ing in the civil law permitting slave status to follow birth to a slave

5 According to Ambrose Maréchal, Archbishop of Baltimore, the province in 1826
owned as personal property “about 500 African men” (Maréchal to Cardinal Delia So-
maglia, January 15, 1826, in Thomas Hughes, S.J., History of the Society of Jesus in
North America: Documents [New York: Longmans, Green, 1908] 1.1.544). Anthony
Kohlmann, S.J., commenting on this assertion, put the number of slaves at half this
figure; he added that their value was less than Maréchal supposed because “those over
45 cannot be alienated,” the clear inference being that those under 45 could be sold (ibid.
545).

6 Gratian, Decretum 2.29.2.8 upheld the validity of slave marriages but required the
consent of the slaves’ owners. In the U.S., Bishop Francis Kenrick thought that “the
majority” of slave agreements did not have “the force of marriage” since “the intention
of contracting a perpetual bond is lacking to them” (Francis P. Kenrick, Theologia
moralis [Philadelphia, 1843] 3.333).

7 Augustine, On Psalm 125 no. 7 (J. P. Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus. Series
latina [hereafter PL] (Paris, 1844-1891) 37.1653; Gregory, Epist. 7.30 (PL 77.887 [ac-
cepts slave]). For the story of the slave market, see Bede, Historia ecclesiastica genüs
anghrum, ed. George H. Moberley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1869) 2.1; cf. Anon., The Earliest
Life of Gregory the Great, ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ., 1968) 91.

666 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

woman. Paul ΠΙ praised the benevolent effects of slavery on agricul­
ture while approving the traffic in slaves in Rome. The eminent Jesuit
moralist Cardinal Juan De Lugo was in harmony with the moralists’
tradition when he found slavery ”beyond the intention of nature,” but
“introduced to prevent greater evils.” Near the end of the seventeenth
century, the master French theologian, Bishop Bossuet, declared that
to condemn slavery would be “to condemn the Holy Spirit, who by the
mouth of St. Paul orders slaves to remain in their state.”

8

In 1839 Gregory XVI condemned the slave trade, but not so explic­
itly that the condemnation covered occasional sales by owners of sur­
plus stock.

9
In the first treatise on moral theology written for Ameri­

cans, Bishop Francis Kenrick in 1841 declared it no sin against nature
to own slaves treated in a humane way and added that, even if Afri­
cans had been brought to America unjustly, long lapse of time had
cured any defect in title on the part of those who had inherited them.

10

Up until actual abolition occurred, the Church was mute on the insti­
tution. Or, rather, the Church endorsed the institution as compatible
with Christianity, indeed as Bossuet observed, expressly approved in
Christian Scripture.

Again, all that has changed. In the face of the repeated teachings of
modern popes, beginning with Leo XIII, on the rights of labor, uncom­
pensated slave labor is seen as a moral outrage. In the light of the
teachings of the modern popes and the Second Vatican Council on the
dignity of the human person, it is morally unthinkable that one person
be allowed to buy, sell, hypothecate, or lease another or dispose ofthat
person’s children.

11
And all the usual and inevitable corollaries of

8
Henri de Bracton, De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae, ed. S. E. Thorne (Cam­

bridge: Harvard Univ., 1970-77) 2.30, following Justinian, Digesta 50.17.32; Antoninus,
Summa sacrae theologiae (Venice, 1581-82) 3.3.6; Paul ΠΙ, Motuproprio, November 9,
1548, trans, in John F. Maxwell, Slavery and the Catholic Church (Chichester: Ross,
1975) 75; Lugo, De iustitia et iure 6.2, Disputationes scholasticae et morales (Paris, 1899)
voi. 8; Jacques B. Bossuet, Avertissement sur les lettres du Ministre Jurieu, in Bossuet,
Oeuvres complètes (Lyons, 1877) 3.542.

9 Gregory XVI, In supremo apostolat us, Acta, ed. Antonio Maria Bernasconi (Rome:
Vatican, 1901) 2.388. Bishop John England was at pains to explain to Secretary of State
John Forsyth that none of the bishops at the Provincial Council of Baltimore thought
that Gregory XVTs condemnation affected the American institution of slavery; see John
England, Works, ed. Ignatius A. Reynolds (Baltimore: J. Murphy, 1849) 3.115-119. The
Holy Office in 1866 ruled that the buying and selling of slaves was not contrary to
natural law (Holy Office to the Vicar Apostolic of the Galle tribe in Ethiopia, June 20,
1866, Collectanea S. C. de Propaganda Fide [Rome, 1907] I n. 1293).

10 Kenrick, Theologia moralis, vol. 2, tract 5.2.6.
11 E.g. Vatican Π, Gaudium et spes no. 67, in Decreta, Declarationes, ed. secretaria gen-

DEVELOPMENT IN MORAL DOCTRINE 667

chattel slavery (the denial of education, the denial of vocational op­
portunity, the destruction of the family) have been so long and so
vigorously denounced by bishops and moral theologians that today
there is a rampart of authority condemning the conditions without
which such slavery could not exist. Slavery has disappeared from most
of the world. The Catholic Church stands as one of the great modern
teachers excoriating it as evil.

Religious Freedom

Finally, I turn to moral doctrine on the freedom that should attend
religious belief. Once upon a time, no later than the time of St. Au­
gustine, it was considered virtuous for bishops to invoke imperial force
to compel heretics to return to the Church. Augustine’s position was
expressly grounded in the Gospels.

12
At a later point in time (the rule

is well-established in St. Thomas Aquinas) it is doctrine that a re­
lapsed heretic will be judged by the ecclesiastical authorities and re­
manded to the secular authorities for execution. Forgers are put to
death for debasing the currency. Why should not those disloyal to the
faith be killed for falsifying it? God may pardon them; the Church and
the State should not.

13

For a period of over 1,200 years, during much of which the Catholic
Church was dominant in Europe, popes, bishops, theologians regularly
and unanimously denied the religious liberty of heretics; no theologian
taught that faith may be freely repudiated without physical conse­
quences, no pope extended the mantle of charitable tolerance to those
who departed from orthodox belief. On the contrary, it was universally
taught that the duty of a good ruler was to extirpate not only heresy
but heretics.

14
The vast institutional apparatus of the Church was put

at the service of detecting heretics, who, if they persevered in their
heresy or relapsed into it, would be executed at the stake. Hand and
glove, Church and State collaborated in the terror by which the here­
tics were purged.

Nor did doctrine change markedly as the Protestant Reformation led
to the acceptance not of religious liberty but of religious toleration in

erali concilii oecumenici Vaticani Π [Rome: Typis polyglottis Vaticanis, 1966] 790 (Con-
stitutiones 790).

1 2
Augustine to Boniface, Epistula 185, PL 33.803.

1 3
Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, ed. Pietro Caramello (Turin: Marietti, 1952),

2-2, q. 11, a. 3 (death penalty; comparison to forgery); q. 11, a. 4 ad 1 (Church “cannot
imitate” God in reading hearts and so does not keep relapsed heretics “from peril of
death” imposed by the state).

1 4
Lucius ΙΠ, Ad abolendam (Decretales Gregorii IX, 5.7.9).

668 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

parts of Europe. Tolerance is permission of what is frankly described as
an evil, but a lesser evil. Eventually, as religious peace became the
norm in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, the hypothesis was advanced
and accepted that in such circumstances it was for the common good to
refrain from religious persecution.

15
The thesis required that in ideal

circumstances the state be the physical guarantor of orthodoxy.
All that changed quite recently—only 28 years ago. Then the Sec­

ond Vatican Council taught that freedom to believe was a sacred hu­
man right; that this freedom was founded on the requirements of the
human person; that this freedom was at the same time conveyed by
Christian revelation; and that the kind of respect that must be shown
for human freedom of belief had been taught from the beginning by
Jesus and his Apostles, who sought not to coerce any human will but
to persuade it. No distinction was now drawn between the religious
freedom of infidels (in theory always respected) and the religious free­
dom of heretics, once trampled on in theory and practice. Now each
human being was seen as the possessor of a precious right to believe
and to practice in accordance with belief. Religious liberty was estab­
lished. The state’s interference with conscience was denounced.

16

The minority in opposition strenuously maintained that the teach­
ing of the magisterium was being abandoned; they cited express texts
and hitherto unchallenged papal statements. Archbishop Marcel Le-
febvre, a leader of the minority, debating the document at the council,
said sarcastically that what was proposed was “a new law,” which had
been condemned many times by the Church. What was being taught
did not come from the tradition of the Church, but from “Hobbes, Locke
and Rousseau,” followed by rejected Catholic liberals such as Lamen­
nais. Pius IX had rejected it. Leo XIII had “solemnly condemned it” as
contrary “to Sacred Scripture and Tradition.”

17
A commentator after

the fact calmly observed that the Council had “reversed the teaching of
the ordinary papal magisterium.”

18
The doctrine regnant from 350 to

1964 was, in a cryptic phrase, reclassified as conduct occurring
through “the vicissitudes of history.”

19

1 5
John A. Ryan and Francis J. Boland, Catholic Principles of Politics (New York:

Macmillan, 1940) 317-21. The same teaching appears in John A. Ryan and Moorhouse
F. X. Millar, S J., The State and the Church (New York: Macmillan, 1924) 35-39.

1 6
Vatican Π, Dignitatis humanae personae no. 2, Second Vatican Council, Constitu-

tiones 55.
1 7

Lefebvre, Intervention, Sept. 20, 1965 (Acta Synodalia Sancii Concila Oecumenici
Vaticani II [Rome, 1976] 4.1, p. 409).

1 8
J. Robert Dionne, The Papacy and the Church (New York: Philosophical Library,

1987) 193.
19
Dignitatis humane personae 11.

DEVELOPMENT IN MORAL DOCTRINE 669

ANALYSIS

Enough has been said, I trust, to suggest the nature of the problem.
Wide shifts in the teaching of moral duties, once presented as part of
Christian doctrine by the magisterium, have occurred. In each case one
can see the displacement of a principle or principles that had been
taken as dispositive—in the case of usury, that a loan confers no right
to profit; in the case of marriage, that all marriages are indissoluble; in
the case of slavery, that war gives a right to enslave and that owner-
ship of a slave gives title to the slave’s offspring; in the case of religious
liberty, that error has no rights and that fidelity to the Christian faith
may be physically enforced. These principles were replaced by princi-
ples already part of Christian teaching: in the case of usury, that the
person of the lender, not the loan, should be the focus of evaluation; in
the case of marriage, that preservation of faith is more important than
preservation of a human relationship; in the case of slavery, that in
Christ there is “neither free nor slave” (Gal 3:28); and in the case of
religious liberty, that faith must be free. In the course of this displace-
ment of one set of principles, what was forbidden became lawful (the
cases of usury and marriage); what was permissible became unlawful
(the case of slavery); and what was required became forbidden (the
persecution of heretics).

It is true that the moral doctrine of the Catholic Church can be seen
as sui generis; it belongs to no type and so yields no laws. Change
depends on two free agencies: human will and the Holy Spirit. No
a-priori rules can bind or predict their course.20 Nonetheless, when a
palpable change has taken place (and surely usury, slavery, religious
liberty, and divorce are cases in point) it should be possible to look back
and determine what the conditions of change were; to observe the
extent of the change that was possible; and to construct a provisional
theory as to the limits to change. At least, in Newman’s words, one
might propose “an hypothesis to account for a difficulty.”21

While a large literature exists on the development of doctrine, ex-
amination reveals that this literature is focused on changes in theo-
logical propositions as to the Trinity, the nature of Christ, the Petrine
office, or Marian dogma. I have found no well-known writer on devel-
opment who has addressed the kinds of change I have described above;
no great theologians have immersed themselves deeply in these mu-
tations of morals. One exception, as will be noted below, is Bernard

2 0 See Karl Rahner, S.J. Theological Investigations I, trans. C. Ernst (Baltimore:
Helicon, 1961) 41.

2 1 John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, ed.
Charles Frederick Harrold (New York: Longmans, Green, 1949) 28.

670 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

Hâring, but he does not theorize at length. But perhaps we can profit
by analogy if we look at what theologians have had to say about
changes in propositions of faith.22

One approach, of which Bishop Bossuet and Orestes Brownson are
representative, has been to deny that any real change has ever oc-
curred; there has only been an improvement in expression. For Bossuet
and Brownson the invariance of Catholic teaching was a mark of the
true Church, to be triumphantly contrasted with “the variations”
found among Protestants. A second approach, of which Spanish 17th-
century theology affords an example, took the position that it is pos-
sible for the Church to work out the logical implications of Scripture
and so reach, and declare as true, propositions not contained in Scrip-
ture; real advances occur.23

A third, and highly influential theory, was put forward in 1843 by
John Henry Newman. Writing still as an Anglican, yet as one about to
become a Catholic, Newman produced a work that is part detective
story (what is the true Church?) and part apologia (all the apparent
defects of the true Church are defensible). His mind, teeming with
images, offered a variety of ways of understanding how the Church’s
doctrine of today was not literally the same as the Church’s doctrine of
yesterday, but yet the Church was faithful to her Founder. Doctrine,
he declared, developed. In the later Apologia pro vita sua, development
became one of the ”principles” of Catholic Christianity.24 What was
meant by development was illustrated in the Essay on Development by
analogy: by analogy to the beliefs of a child as these beliefs matured in
the mind of the child become adult; by analogy with the thought of a
poet, whose verse contained more than was explicit in his mind as he

2 2 Consider as representative of recent work, Jan Hendrik Walgrave’s Unfolding Rev-
elation: The Nature of Doctrinal Development (London: Hutchinson, 1972). It has no
discussion of moral doctrine. Jaroslav Pelikan’s massive work, The Christian Tradition:
A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1971-1989) does
not deal with any of the four changes used as examples here; in other words, the devel-
opment of moral doctrine is no part of his comprehensive treatment of “the development
of doctrine.” A recent sensitive account of the history of moral theology offers no theory
of development; see John A. Gallagher, Time Past, Time Future: A Historical Study of
Catholic Moral Theology (New York: Paulist, 1990). But John Mahoney, The Making of
Moral Theology (New York: Oxford/Clarendon, 1987) 320 observes that ‘the Church has
a great difficulty… in handling the subject of change as such.” Mahoney goes on to note
that change is “an unavoidable element of human existence” and to suggest that change
in moral doctrine is sometimes the right response to changed conditions (326-27).

23 See Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Doctrinal Development
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ., 1957) 20 (Bossuet); 171 (Brownson); 25-44 (Spanish).

24 Newman, Apologia pro vita sua, ed. Charles Frederick Harrold (New York: Long-
mans, Green, 1947) 79.

DEVELOPMENT IN MORAL DOCTRINE 671

composed; by analogy with any organic life as it grows from bud to
flower; and by analogy to the course of an idea embraced by a society,
an idea whose detailed consequences can be grasped only as the idea is
lived out in the society. By all these comparisons Newman confessed
that changes had occurred in the doctrine of the Church but main­
tained that the changes had been rooted in the original revelation and
were a perfection, not a distortion, of it. True development, he wrote,
“corroborates, not corrects, the body of the thought from which it
proceeds.”

25

The Modernists took the idea of development and ran away with it.
Doctrine became the projection of human needs, changing in response
to those needs. Control of doctrine by the objective content of revela­
tion disappeared.

26
The Church rejected Modernism and retained New­

man’s conclusion that there was genuine growth in doctrine from un­
changed foundations. Vatican Π put it tersely: “Insight grows both into
the words and the realities that have been handed on.”

27
Change, that

was in fact doctrinal progress, was celebrated. The central reality, in
relation to which insight grew, was Jesus Christ, himself “both the
mediator and the plenitude of the whole revelation.”

28

How would any of these approaches work if applied to moral doc­
trine? To deny that real change had occurred, as Bossuet and Brown­
son did, would be an apologetic tactic incapable of execution and un­
worthy of belief. To say, as did the 17th-century Spanish, that the
unfolding had been by logical implication would be equally incredible:
the acceptance of slavery did not imply freedom, the endorsement of
religious persecution did not entail respect for religious freedom. The
method might indeed be used if the most basic principles, such as
“Love your neighbor as yourself,” were the starting point. But would
logic alone suffice?

Newman’s complex set of analogies is different. At one level of doc­
trine, of course, one cannot maintain that the Church’s present cham­
pioning of freedom, personal and religious, “corroborates” an earlier
stage in which the Church defended chattel slavery and religious per­
secution. At another level, Newman’s notion of an idea maturing can

2 5
Newman, Essay on Development 2.5.6, p. 186. Newman wrote as an Anglican but did

not amend the quoted passages when he revised the Essay as a Catholic. On the anal­
ogies, see Chadwick 151,155. Aidan Nichols sees Newman’s fundamental metaphor as
that of a seal cutting a design of wax (From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Doctrinal
Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council [Edinburgh: T. & T.
Clark, 1990] 44).

2 6
See John T. Noonan, Jr., “The Philosophical Postulates of Alfred Loisy” (M.A. the­

sis, Catholic University of America, 1948).
2 7

Vatican Π, Dei verbum 8, Second Vatican Council, Constitutiones 430.
2 8

Ibid. 8, p. 424.

672 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

be criticized by taking his analogy with organic life literally; he can
then be caricatured as supposing that spiritual growth is similar to
vegetative growth.29 But Newman’s rich range of arguments and met-
aphors cannot be so neatly written off. In a passage dealing with the
nature of development in general that I read as decisive, he declares:

The development then of an idea is not like an investigation worked out on
paper, in which each successive advance is a pure evolution from a foregoing,
but it is carried on through and by means of communities of men and their
leaders and guides; and it employs their minds as its instruments and depends
upon them while it uses them It is the warfare of ideas under their varying
aspects striving for the mastery. . . .30

This passage acknowledges an objectivity in the idea or ideas at issue;
at the same time it fully recognizes that development occurs by con-
flict, in which the leading idea will effect the “throwing off’ of earlier
views now found to be incompatible with the leading idea more fully
realized.31 Principles, broadly understood, underlie and control specific
changes.32 Newman’s approach is adaptable to the development of
moral doctrine.

The Modernist position that human needs will shape doctrine carries
the cost of eliminating any objective content; it is, as Pius X put it, “the
synthesis of all the heresies.”33

Finally, there is the position of Vatican II: there can be and is a
growth in insight into a reality that is Jesus Christ. It comes from “the
contemplation of believers, the experience of spiritual realities, and
the preaching of the Church.”34 As Bernard Häring has amplified the
words of Dei verbum: “Christ does not become greater through ongoing
history, but our knowledge of the plan of salvation which is revealed in
the world in Christ does become more complete and close to life in our
hearts through the working of the Spirit in the history of the Church
and above all in the saints.”35

To hold that moral doctrine changes with increased insight into

2 9 Compare the criticism of Newman’s metaphor by Ambroise Gardeil, Le Donné révélé
et la théologie (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1910) 156, noting the difference between “la vie d’un
végétal et la vie d’un esprit.”

3 0 Newman, Essay on Development 1.1.6, p. 74.
3 1 Ibid. 3 2 Ibid. 2.5.2, p. 167.
3 3 Pius X, Pascendi dominici gregis, Sept. 8, 1907 (Acta sanctae sedis 40.632; Eng.

trans, in All Things in Christ, ed. Vincent A. Yzermans [Westminster, Md: Newman,
1954] 117).

3 4 Vatican Π, Dei verbum no. 8, Second Vatican Council, Constitutiones 430.
3 5

Bernard Häring, My Witness for the Church, trans. Leonard Swidler (New York:
Paulist, 1992) 122.

DEVELOPMENT IN MORAL DOCTRINE 673

Christ is an attractive proposition. It entails one obvious danger. When
one sees more deeply into Christ, is one looking into a mirror merely
reflecting one’s own deepest feeling? The answer must be that the
Church has the mission of determining what is only the projection of
subjective feelings and what is an authentic response to Christ as
revealed.

If insight into Christ is taken from the realm of faith to that of
morals and applied to our four examples, it will be found to afford at
least partial explanation of what has happened. On the great question
of religious liberty, a stronger appreciation of Christ’s own methods
has led to repudiation of all violence in the enforcement of belief. On
the great question of human slavery, a better grasp of the fellowship
effected by Christ has made the holding of any person in bondage
intolerable.

In the other cases one factor facilitating change was a deeper, less
literal reading of the words of Christ. Where “Lend freely, hoping
nothing thereby,” had been understood as a peremptory command, it
came to be understood as an exemplary exhortation.

36
Where “What

God has joined together, let no man put asunder” was read as absolute,
the possibility of exception has been eventually envisaged and ex­
panded. In these cases, too, one could say that the reality of Christ was
better reached by the abandonment of the letter.

Yet it would be preposterous to imagine that all these profound
changes occurred simply by the acquiring of deeper insights into
Christ. Human beings do not reach moral conclusions in a vacuum
apart from the whole web of language, custom, and social structure
surrounding them. Λ society composed entirely of free human beings
was unknown in the Mediterranean world of the first centuries; a
society where the state did not support religion was equally unknown.
Only as social structures changed did moral mutation become possible,
even if the change in social structures, as it might reasonably be ar­
gued, was owed at least in part to the perception that structures fos­
tering liberty were more congruent with deeper insight into Christ.

37

Those structures could not have shifted without experience. The cen­
tral European experience leading first to religious tolerance and then
to religious liberty was the experience of the evil of religious persecu­
tion. The experience was long and bloody and sufficient to demonstrate

3 6
Urban ΙΠ treated the words of Christ on lending as mandatory (Urban ΙΠ, Consu-

luit, Decretalia Gregorii IX 5.19.10, Corpus iuris canonici, ed. E. Friedberg). Domingo de
Soto is the first major scholastic theologian to challenge this interpretation (De iustitia
et iure libri decern [Lyons, 1569] 6.1.1).

3 7
Cf. Louis Vereecke, Storia della teologia morale moderna (Rome: Lateran, 1979)

1.4-5 (moral theology is where the unchanged gospel encounters changing cultures).

674 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

how demoralizing the enforcement of religion by force was. Equally, I
would argue, it was the centuries-old experience of slavery that led to
the conclusion that slavery was destructive both for the slaves and for
the masters.38

Experience as such, taken as “raw experience,” the mere participa-
tion in this or that phenomenon, is, however, not the key. Raw expe-
rience carries with it no evaluation. But experience, suffered or per-
ceived in the light of human nature and of the gospel, can be judged
good or bad. It was the experience of unfreedom, in the gospel’s light,
that made the contrary shine clear.39

The negative experience of religious persecution was reinforced by
the American experience of religious freedom, for America launched
the great experiment of a nation committed to the nonestablishment of
any national religion and the free exercise of religion. The American
experiment had blemishes, such as the persecution of the Mormons
and of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the denial of constitutional free-
dom to conscientious objectors to unjust war. But the American ideal,
and its relative success, were clear, and taught to Europe by Tocque-
ville, Lamennais, and Lacordaire. In the end, the theologians built on
the American experience, guided in no small part by an American
theologian, John Courtney Murray. Finally, sealing all by fire, was the
experience of religious unfreedom under the terrible dictatorships of
the 20th century. Without those experiences, negative and positive,
and without the elaboration of the ideal by Tocqueville and Murray,
the changes made by Vatican II could not have occurred.40

The advance on slavery also depended on articulation by individuals
who were ahead of the theologians and the Church. In Catholic France,
Montesquieu challenged the morality of slavery, writing with fine
irony of blacks: “It is impossible that we should suppose those people to
be men, because if we should suppose them to be men, we would begin
to believe that we ourselves are not Christians.”41 It was 18th-century

3 8 See Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel
Hill: North Carolina, 1955) Query 18.

3 9 See Roger Williams, The BLOUDY TENENT, of Persecution, for Cause of Con-
science, discussed, in A Conference between TRUTH and PEACE (1644), reprinted and
ed. Samuel L. Caldwell, The Complete Writings of Roger Williams (New York: Russell &
Russell, 1963) 3.3-4.

40 See Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, rev. Francis
Bowen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945) 308-9; John Courtney Murray, “Governmen-
tal Repression of Heresy,” Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of America 3
(Washington: Catholic Theological Society, 1948) 161.

41 Charles de Secondât, Baron de Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, in his Oeuvres com-
plètes (Paris, 1843) 5.309.

DEVELOPMENT IN MORAL DOCTRINE 675

Quakers and Baptists and Methodists and 19th-century Congregation-
alists who led the fight against slavery in the English-speaking world,
and it was the French Revolution that led to its abolition in the French
empire. The gospel, as interpreted by Protestants and as mediated by
Rousseau and the revolutionaries of 1789, achieved much.

42
Only after

the cultures of Europe and America changed through the abolitionists’
agency and only after the laws of every civilized land eliminated the
practice, did Catholic moral doctrine decisively repudiate slavery as
immoral. Only in 1890 did Pope Leo XIII attack the institution itself,
noting that slavery was incompatible “with the brotherhood that
unites all men.”

43
At the end of the argument and articulation and

legal upheaval that had gone on for two centuries, the requirement of
Christ was clear.

In contrast, the change regarding divorce and remarriage, adultery
and bigamy, appears to have been almost entirely an internal process.
But was it? St. Paul’s original modification of monogamy responded to
conditions he encountered affecting conversion. His rule worked well
enough until the extreme conditions of African slavery in South Amer­
ica suggested the need for radical expansion. And that change was not
improved upon until, in modern religiously mixed societies, it became
common for unbaptized persons and Catholics to fall in love and want
to be married. Then a new expansion was made. Canonistic ingenuity
and exaltation of papal power played a dominant part. The canonists
responded to changed external conditions as they discovered the true
meaning of Christ’s command.

The change with regard to usury, basically effected in the course of
the 16th century although formally acknowledged only in the 19th,
came from the convergence of several factors. Europe moved from an
agricultural to a commercial economy. Moral theologians began to give
weight to the experience of otherwise decent Christians who were
bankers and who claimed banking was compatible with Christianity.
The morality of certain types of credit transactions (the so-called triple
contract and the personal annuity and the foreign exchange contract)
were all re-examined and re-evaluated in the light of credit transac­
tions already accepted as legitimate. Perhaps above all, the perspec­
tive of moral analysis shifted, from focus on the loan in itself to focus
on the lender and the investment opportunity the lender lost by lend­
ing. All these factors—commercial developments, attention to experi­
ence, new analyses, shift in perspective—produced a moral doctrine on

4 2
See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell

Univ., 1966) 291, 333, 401.
4 3

Leo ΧΙΠ, Catholicae ecclesiae, November 20,1890 (Acta sanctae sedis 23.257).

676 THEOLOGICAL STUDIES

usury that was substantially different from that taught throughout
the Middle Ages and substantially similar in practice to what is ac-
cepted today. All these factors, plus re-evaluation of the words of
Christ, created the new moral doctrine.44

CONCLUSION

Where morals are at issue, the process of change requires a complex
constellation of elements. Every society, including the Church, lives by
rules that keep its vital balance. Change one, and the balance is jeop-
ardized. Hence there is a conservative tendency to keep the rules as
they are, there is fear when they are given up, and sometimes nostal-
gia for the loss.

Change is also resisted for other reasons. There is a praiseworthy
desire to maintain intellectual consistency. There is a longing in the
human mind for repose, for fixed points of reference, for absolute cer-
tainty. There is alarm about the future: What else can change? There
is the theological conviction that as God is unchanging, divine de-
mands must also be unchanging. How could one have gone to hell
yesterday for what today one would be held virtuous in doing? How
could one have done virtuously yesterday what one would be damned
for doing today? How could one once have been bound to a high and
demanding standard that later is said to be unnecessary? How could
one once have been permitted to engage in conduct that is later con-
demned as uncharitable? A mutation in morals bewilders. Hence there
is a presumption of Tightness attending the present rules, and author-
ity is rightly vigilant to preserve them. Not every proposed mutation is
good; the majority, it could be guessed, might be harmful.

But a new balance can be struck. The consistency sought should not
be verbal nor literal; nor can conformity to every past rule be required.
The consistency to be sought is consistency with Christ. The human
desire for mental repose is not to be satisfied in this life. One cannot
predict future changes; one can only follow present light and in that
light be morally certain that some moral obligations will never alter.
The great commandments of love of God and of neighbor, the great
principles of justice and charity continue to govern all development.
God is unchanging, but the demands of the New Testament are differ-
ent from those of the Old, and while no other revelation supplements
the New, it is evident from the case of slavery alone that it has taken
time to ascertain what the demands of the New really are. All will be
judged by the demands of the day in which they live. It is not within

4 4 See John T. Noonan, Jr., The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ., 1956) 199-201.

DEVELOPMENT IN MORAL DOCTRINE 677

human competence to say with certainty who was or will be saved; all
will be judged as they have conscientiously acted. In new conditions,
with new insight, an old rule need not be preserved in order to honor
a past discipline.

Another response to change is to ignore it, to deny explicitly or
implicitly that it has occurred, to be aware of the mutations described
here and find them without significance—just so many well-
established and well-known historical facts. Denial of that sort also
betrays fear of change, fear that change is simply chance. Mutations
are muted. But why should believers in Christ have such a fear? The
Spirit guides the Church. The acts of development have a significance
beyond themselves. ‘The idea of development was the most important
single idea Newman contributed to the thought of the Christian
Church.”45 The idea of development had this importance because it
contained an explanation of the passage from the past and a Delphic
prophecy of the future.

In the Church there can always be fresh appeal to Christ, there is
always the possibility of probing new depths of insight. To grow is to
change, and the gospel parable of the mustard seed promises growth
(Matt 13:31-32). The kingdom of heaven, we are told, is like a house-
holder who from his storeroom brings forth things old and new (Matt
13:52). Our world has grown by mutation, should not our morals, es-
pecially when the direction and the goal are provided by the Lord?
“[H]ere below to live is to change. And to be perfect is to have changed
often.”46 Must we not, then, frankly admit that change is something
that plays a role in Catholic moral teaching? Must not the traditional
motto semper idem be modified, however unsettling that might be, in
the direction of plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose? Yes, if the
principle of change is the person of Christ.

45 Owen Chadwick, Newman (Oxford: Oxford Univ., 1983) 47.
4 6 Newman, Essay on Development 1.1.7, p. 38.

4
Reading the Creation

StoriesAgain

,,;::::is)”)t We begin with the Hebrew Bible, commonly known
among Christians as “the Old Testament. “1 As in most
recent scholarship, I will use the term “Hebrew Bible”

instead of “Old Testament,” for two reasons. The first is respect
for Judaism. For Jews, the Hebrew Bible is the Bible, not “the
Old Testament.”
The second reason pertains to Christians. For many Christian

readers, the adjective “old” implies outmoded or superceded, as
if the “New” Testament were intended to replace the “Old” Tes-
tament. Commonly accompanying this usage is the notion that
the “Old” Testament speaks of a God of law and judgment,
whereas the “New’: Testament speaks of a God of grace and
love. Though this stereotype is widespread among Christians, it
is simply wrong: both visions of God appear in both testaments.
The notion that the New Testament (and its God) replaces the
Old Testament (and its God) was rejected by earlyChristianity in
the second century.? Despite a continuing Christian tendency to
relegate the “Old” Testament to second place, it is for Christians

57

58 THE HEBREW BIBLE

just as much “Biblc.t’jusr as sacred scripture, as is the New Tes-
tament. When Christians do not see this, we not only reject
much of our heritage but impoverish our understanding on esus,
the New Testament, and Christianity itself.
Within the Jewish tradition, the Hebrew Bible has three main

divisions. In English, they are called “the Law,” “the Prophets,”
and “the Writings.” In Hebrew, they are, respectively, Torah,
Neviim, and Ketbuvim. The first letters of each of the Hebrew
terms form the acronym Tanak, a common Jewish term for the
Hebrew Bible as a whole.
The Torah is the first and foundational division of the Hebrew

Bible. Itconsists of fivebooks: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Num-
bers, and Deuteronomy. Though the books themselves do not
say anything about their authorship, both the Jewish and Chris-
tian traditions have attributed them to Moses. Thus they are
sometimes spoken of as “the fivebooks of Moses.” And though
the most common English designation for this group of books is
“the Law,” the Torah contains much more than what is com-
monly meant by the word “law.” The word “torah” itself means
more; it can be translated as “instruction” or “teaching.” The
Torah does indeed include the laws of Israel, but it also contains
the stories of her origins. It is “instruction” and “teaching” about
the people’s story and identity, aswell as the foundation of their
laws. In other words, it combines narrative and legal traditions.
The Torah is also commonly called “the Pentateuch” (as we

sawearlier), a Greek word meaning “the fivescrolls.” In fact, this
is probably the most commonly used term for these fivebooks.
The Pentateuch begins with Israel’s stories of creation, to

which we now turn.

Israel’s Stories of the World’s Beginnings

Ancient Israel’s stories of the world’s beginnings in the first
eleven chapters of Genesis are among the best-known parts of
the Bible. Almost everybody in Western culture has heard of
them:

Reading the Creation Stories Again 59

• The creation of the world in six days
• Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, their tempration by a .
talking serpent, and their expulsion from Edeu

• Their sons Cain and Abel, and Cain’s murder of Abel
• The great ages of early people, with Methuselah toppiug the
list at 969 years

• The giants. born from the sexual union of “the sons of
God” with “the daughters of men”

• Noah’s ark and the great flood
• The building of the Tower of Babel, its destruction by God,
and the fragmentation of humankind into different lan-
guage groups

Major battles about the factual truth of these stories have
marked Western culture in the modern period. Prior to the birth
of modernity in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, however, the factual truth of Genesis was ac-
cepted in the Jewish and Christian worlds without controversy,
even though its stories were not always read Iitcrally.f There was
little or no reason to question their factuality. Theology and sci-
ence alike took it for granted that the universe was relatively
young and that the earth and its continents, mountains, oceans,
and varieties of life were created in very much the same form in
which we now find them. Common estimates of the time of cre-
ation ranged from 6000 BCE to 4000 BCE.
Around 1650, the age of the earth was calculated with great pre-

cision by an Anglican archbishop of Dublin named James Ussher.
Using the genealogies in Genesis, Ussher concluded that creation
occurred in the year 4004 BCE.4 His calculation was made just in
time to collide with the birth of modern science. Geology and pa-
leontology soon began to point to ari immeasurably older earth.
The challenge to the factual reading of the Genesis stories of cre-
ation was intensified by Charles Darwin’s argument for evolution
in On the Origin of Species,published in 1859. Suddeuly the issue
was not simply the age of the earth but the development of present
life forms from much earlier life forms through natural processes.

60 THE HEBREW BIBLE

The nineteenth century was a time of intense conflict between
science and the Bible. Some intellectuals and village atheists de-
lighted in using science to debunk the Bible and Christianiry.
Among Christians, some adjusted quickly to thenew scientific
claims and integrated them into a nonliteral reading of Gcnesis.f
Others felt that the truth of the Bible and Christianiry were
under attack.
The controversy continues to this day, though it involves a

much smaller number of Christians. Advocates of scientific cre-
ationism still defend the factual accuracy of the six-day creation
story.v Expeditions are launched every fewyears to Mt, Ararat in
Turkey, in search of the remains of Noah’s ark. Some still think
of the Garden of Eden as a real place and seek to figure out its
geographical location. (Most often it ispinpointed somewhere in
the Middle East, though I recall seeing a pamphlet arguing that
it was in Wisconsin.)
But contemporary biblical scholarship does not read these

stories as historically factual accounts of the world’s begin-
nings. Instead, it sees them as ancient Israel’s stories of the
world’s beginnings and interprets them as profoundly true
mythological stories. In this chapter, I will describe these sto-
ries as seen through the lens of contemporary scholarship.
More specifically, I will offer a historical-metaphorical reading,
focusing primarily on the creation stories in the first three
chapters of Genesis.
First, though, I will describe how I heard these creation stories

the first time.

Hearing the Creation Stories the First Time

As a child growing up in the church, I heard the stories in Gene-
sis in a state of precritical naivete and thus heard them as true
stories? Though I cannot recall a time when I took the sixdays
of creation literally, I am sure I did so in very early childhood.
And I would have done so without effort, even as I apparently
let go of hearing them literally without conflict. When I learned

Reading the Creation Stories Again 61

about dinosaurs and the immense age and sizeof the universe in
elementary school, I did not experience a religious crisis.
But as I think back on those years, I realize that I continued to

take Adam and Eve quite literally as the first two human beings
and that letting go of them was more of an issue. In elementary
school, I learned about early humanoids with names like Nean-
derthal, Cro-Magnon, and Peking.” But it was not until my
teenage years that I was struck by the implications of the evi-
dence of such creatures. When I entered the stage of critical
thinking, I began to wonder if I was supposed to identify the
earliest of these with Adam and Eve. But I thought of these early
humanoids as “hulking brutes, perhaps barely capable of lan-
guage. They did not seem likely candidates for Adam and Eve,
whose sons Cain and Abel had engaged in the complex tasks of
farming and herding-and Cain had even built a city.
So I began to take seriously the likelihood that Adam and Eve

had not been real people. But if that likelihood turned out to be
true, what were we to make of the story of the first sin, com-
monly called “the fall,” in the Garden of Eden? If “the fall” was
not historical, how (I wondered) would this affect the Christian
story of universal sin, our need for redemption, and Jesus’ death
as the necessary sacrifice?Something more seemed to be at stake
in the historical factuality of Adam and Eve and “the fall” than
was involved in lengthening the sixdaysof creation to geological
epochs. Resolving these questions was a major theological prob-
lem for me. As I wrestled with it, the foundations of my religious
understanding began to shake. If the story ofAdam and Evewas
not “true” (as a modern teenager, I thought of truth as that
which was factual), what happened to the truth of the Bible and
Christianity as a whole?
I now see these chapters quite differently. Reading them

through the lens of historical scholarship and with sensitivity to
their meanings as metaphorical narratives has enabled me once
again to see them as profoundly true stories. And because their
purpose is not to provide a factually accurate account of the
world’s beginnings, it is beside the point to argue whether they

62 THE HEBREW BIBLE

are accurate or mistaken factual accounts. They are not God’s
stories of the world’s beginnings; rather, they are ancient Is-
rael’s stories of the world’s beginnings.
As we look at these stories now, we will ask two key questions:

Why did ancient Israel tell these stories? And why did they tell
them this way?A historical-metaphorical approach provides illu-
minating answers to both.

Historical Illumination
The first eleven chapters of Genesis need to be understood not
only as the introduction to the Pentateuch, but also in the con-
text of the Pentateuch as a whole.
They are ancient Israel’s stories of her prehistory. By that I

mean two things. First, they are Israel’s account of humankind
in the. time before her own particular history, a history whose
telling begins with the stories of Abraham and Sarah, the father
and mother of Israel. Abraham and Sarah, then, are the first his-
torical figures in the Bible.” Their names appear in a genealogy at
the end of Genesis 11, and the story of their call to be the ances-
tors ofIsrael begins in Genesis 12. Everything before them is Is-
rael’s prehistory and functions as a prologue to the Pentateuch
and Israel’s story of her own ancestors.
Second, to call these early chapters of Genesis prehistory

means that they are not to be read ashistorical accounts. Rather,
as ancient Israel’s stories about the remote beginnings before
there was an Israel, they are to be read as a particular kind of
metaphorical narrative-namely, as myths, about which I will
soon say more. For now, I simply note that while myths are not
literally true, they can nevertheless be profoundly true, rich in
powerfully persuasive meanings.
There is one further point before we turn to the stories them-

selves. Namely, though we typicallybegin reading the Bible with
the first chapters of Genesis, they are not where ancient Israel
first began telling her story. The creation stories were written rel-
atively late. Israel as a people came into existence with the exo-

Reading the Creation Stories Again 63

dus from Egypt in the thirteenth century BCE. At the earliest, Is-
rael told a story of creation some three hundred years later. As
we shall see in the next chapter, the story of the exodus, the
covenant, and the gift of the promised land is Israel’s primal nar-
rative and foundational story. In short, Israel told the story of
the exodus and God’s creation of her as a people long before she
told the story of God’s creation of the world.

Two Stories of Creation

The first three chapters of Genesis contain two stories of creation,
written about four hundred years apart. The first one, Genesis
1.1-2.3, wasprobably written in the 500s BCE. Commonly called
the “priestly” or “P” story, it is part of a larger block of material
extending through the Pentateuch and reflecting priestly and rit-
ual concerns. The second one was written earlier. It begins in
Genesis 2.4 and continues through the end of chapter 3. Perhaps
written in the 900s BCE, it is commonly called the “Yahwist” or
“J” creation story, because the author uses “Yahweh” as the name
of God. 10 The Yahwist story is also part of a larger narrative ac-
count of Israel’s origins that extends throughout much of the
Pentateuch.U The two stories are quite different.

The P Story
The P story (and the Bible as a whole) begins with the earth as
“a formless void.” In the primeval darkness, the wind (or Spirit)
of God moves over the primordial waters:

In the beginning, when God created the heavensand the
earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered
the faceof the deep, while awind from God sweptover the
face of the waters.P

Then God creates the universe in six days. In a literary struc-
ture repeated for each day of creation, the story begins with the
creation of light:

64 THE HEBREW BIBLE

Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And
God saw that the light was good; and God separated the
light from the darkness. God called the light Day.and the
darkness God called Night. And there was evening, and
there was morning, the first day.13

In rapid succession, the rest of the universe is created. On day
two, God creates the dome of the sky (the “firmament”), sepa-
rating the primordial waters above the sky from those below. On
day three, God creates dry land, the seas, and vegetation. On day
four, lights are placed in the dome of the sky: sun, moon, and
srars.t- On day five, God creates sea life and birds. Finally, on day
six, God creates land creatures, concluding with the simultane-
ous creation of man and woman: “Then God said, ‘Let us make
humankind in our image, according to our likeness …. So God
created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created
them; male and female he created them.”‘!.’
There are interesting correlations between what God creates on

each of the first three days and what God creates on each of the
second three days. A “domain” is created and then populated:

Day one: light
Day two: waters and the sky
Day three: dry land

Day four: sun, moon, and stars
Day five: sea life and birds
Day six: land creatures

Then, we are told, on the seventh day God rests, thereby
blessing and hallowing that day as the sabbath.

TheJ Story
The J creation story begins in Genesis 2.4. It focuses on the cre-
ation of humankind and barely treats the creation’ of the world.
It does not mention the creation of light, or firmament, or sun,
moon, and stars, or sea creatures. Rather, it begins with the cre-
ation of humankind, of adhasn, a Hebrew word meaning “hu-
mankind” and often translated “man.” The creation of adbam is
. the climax of the very long sentence with which the story begins:

Reading the Creation Stories Again 65

In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heav-
ens, when no plant of the fieldwasyet in the earth and no
herb of the fieldhad yet sprnng up-for the LORD God had
not yet caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no
one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the
earth, and water the whole faceof the ground-then the
LORD God formed adham from the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath oflife; and adham be-
came a livingbeing.le

The P story portrays humankind as the climax of creation by
having people created last, after everything else. The J story
gives humankind priority by having people created first, before
vegetation and animals. In the P story, humans as male and fe-
male are created simultaneously; in J, the creation of woman
comes later.
To provide adham with a place to live, God plants the Garden

of Eden and gives adham permission to eat of all of its trees, ex-
cept one: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of
the tree of the knowledge of good and evilyou shall not eat, for
in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”!?
Then God creates companions for adham: “Then the LORD

God said, ‘It is not good that adham should be alone; I will
make him a helper as his partner. ,,, God creates every beast of
the field, and every bird of the air, and brings them to adham.
But none of them meets the need: “There was not found a
helper fit for adham.” So God puts adham to sleep and forms
woman out of one of his ribs. No longer alone, adham exclaims,
“This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.”18
Into this paradise comes a talking snake. The serpent tempts

the primeval couple to eat from the forbidden tree, “the tree of
the knowledge of good and evil.” He promises them that if they
do, they “will be like God, knowing good and evil.” They accept
the serpent’s invitation, and their liveschange dramatically. Now
aware of their nakedness, they make loincloths out of fig leaves.
Of more serious consequence, they are afraid and hide themselves

66 THE HEBREW BIBLE

from God. Punishment follows. The woman, now named Eve, is
sentenced to pain in childbearing and subjugation to her hus-
band. The man, now named Adam, is sentenced to the toil and
sweat ofraising food from an earth filledwith thorns and thistles.
Both are exiled from the Garden of Eden. The story concludes
with Adam and Eve living “east of Eden,” the garden’s entrance
guarded by an angel with a flaming sword. Life in paradise is
over.l9
To return to our two key questions: Why did the people of an-

cient Israel tell these stories, and why did they tell them this way?
One answer sometimes given is that these stories functioned as
primitive science: ancient Israel did not know how the world
came into existence, and so she created these stories in order to
explain how things came to be. But there is much more going
on here thin a prescientific explanation of origins. To state my
central claim in advance, Israel told these stories to express her
deepest convictions about God and the world, and about what is
often called “human nature “-that is,what we are like, and what
OUf lives “east of Eden” are like.
Before treating more fully the first of these key questions, I

begin with the second question: Why did ancient Israel tell the
stories this JVay?

Reading the P Story through a Historical lens
Historical study helps us to understand why ancient Israel told
these stories in the way that she did. As already noted, the P
story was most likelywritten in the 500s BCE. To connect this to
ancient Israel’s history, the Jewish people went into exile in
Babylon after the Babylonian Empire conquered their homeland
and destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE. The exile lasted almost fifty
years, until 539 BCE, when a small number of Iews returned to a
Jerusalem in rnins and began the task of rebuilding a Jewish
homeland under the domination of anew imperial power, Persia.
Thus, the P story of creation was written during or shortly after
the exile.

R,eading the Creation Stories Again 67

The Six-DayCreation
Because the Jews were.sharply reduced in numbers duriug this
period of history, distinctive practices as a means of sustaining
their identity as a people became vitally important. Among these
practices was the observance of the sabbath (the seventh day of
the week) as a day of rest. Thongh sabbath observance predated
the exile, it became even more important during and after the
exile. So why does creation take sixdays in the P story? To make
the point that even God observes the sabbath. Rather than being
intended as a literal account of how long creation took, the six-
day creation story was meant to reinforce the importance of the
sabbath. ‘

The Ancient Cosmology
The word “cosmology” refers to one’s image or “map” of the
cosmos or universe. In common with Babylonian and other an-
cient Middle Eastern cosmologies, the ancient Israelites thought
of the earth as the center of the universe. Above the earth was
the dome of the sky, called the “firmament” in many English
translations. This understancling is reflected in the P story. On
the second day of creation, God said, “Let there be a dome in
the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the
waters …. And God called the dome Sky.” On the fourth day,
God created the sun, moon, and starsand “set them in the dome
of the skyto give light upon the earth. “20
What seems like a strange notion to us today actually coincides

well with human experience. The sky looks like a dome over our
heads. On it are mounted the sun, moon, and stars, and it rotates
around us. Moreover, the notion that there is water above the
dome of the sky also reflects experience: water comes from the
sky as rain aud snow. Thus, as the flood begins in the time of
Noah, we are told, “The fountains of the great deep burst forth
and the windows of the firmament were opened.”2l Far from pro-
viclingus with an understanding of the universe that can be rec-
onciled with modern or postmodern science, the cosmology of
the P creation story simply reflects the way ancient Israel thought

68 THE HEBREW BIBLE

things were. Israel told the story this way because she thought of
the uuiverse this way. Thus it is Israel’s story of creation, not
God’s story of creation.

The Literary Form of the P Story
The P story of creation was likely adapted from an ancient Is-
raelite liturgy or hymn of praise to God. Its use of repeating
phrases suggests refrains such as are found in hymns and litur-
gies. Each of the following is repeated seven times:

“God said, ‘Let there be … ‘”
“And it was so.”
“And God saw that it was good.”

“There was evening and there was morning .-.. “.is repeated
after each day of creation. Moreover, the sixdays of creation sug-
gest six stanzas. If a liturgy does lie behind the first chapter of
Genesis, we should imagine it being sung or chanted, perhaps
antiphonally with a cantor and one or more choirs.
The recognition that the P story is likely to have been a hymn

or liturgy has an immediate implication: we do not expect hymns
to provide accurate factual information. When Christians sing
the hymn “Jesus shall reign where’re the sun does its successive
journeysrun,” we arenot saying that we believe the sun goes
around the earth. The language of hymns is the language of po-
etry, metaphor, and praise. Creation cannot be described, but it
can be sung.22
Indeed, Genesis 1 has been described as a “doxology.” The

roots of that word mean “words of, or about, glory.” A doxol-
ogy is a hymn ofpraise, as the most familiarEnglish doxology re-
minds us: “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,praise God
all creatures here below.” Thus the book of Genesis and the
Bible as a whole begin with a hymn of praise to God as creator.
It is difficult to imagine amore appropriate beginning.

Reading the Creation StoriesAgain 69

The Proclamation of Israel’s God as Creator
The origin of the P story in the time after the Babylonian con-
quest adds one more dimension of meaning. In antiquity, when a
nation was decisively conquered by another nation, it was com-
monly thought that the god (or gods) of the victorious nation
had defeated the god of the vanquished nation, exposing that
god as inferior or perhaps as no god at all. To many-Babyloni-
ans and Jews alike-s-it looked during the exile as if the gods of
imperial Babylon had triumphed over the God ofIsrael.
In this setting, the opening line and the central claim of the P

creation story defiantly assert that the God ofIsrael is the creator
of heaven and earth-of all that is. It proclaims the lordship of
Israel’s God over against the lordship of Babylon and its gods.
The story affirms a “counter-world,” an alternative world to the
world of ernpire.P This affirmation is, as we shall see, a theme
that runs throughout the Bible from beginning to end.

Reading the J Story through a Historical Lens
Just as the P story is illuminated by setting it in its historical con-
text, so also is the J story of creation.

The Symbolic Meaning of Names
The author of the J story uses names in such a way as to suggest
that they are symbolic. Adam is not a proper name in ancient.
Hebrew; no other person in the Bible is named Adam..Rather,
Adam is the Hebrew adham, which (as already noted) is a com-
mon noun meaning “humankind.” Indeed, the term involves a
play on words: adham comes from the Hebrew word adhamah,
which means “ground” or “dust.” In other words, the first
human is a “dust-creature.” We are made of dust, made from the
earth. Moreover, because this word means “humankind,” its use
suggests that the author is thinking not of a specifichuman but
of Everyman (to borrow the name of the well-known meclieval
morality play). The author is telling the story not of a particular
person but of “everyone.”

70 THE “HEBREW BIBLE

So also the name Eve is not a proper name in Hebrew. It
means “mother of all living.” “Garden of Eden” also has a sym-
bolic meaning: it means “garden of delights” (and, by extension,
paradise). Living in a semiarid climate, the ancient Hebrews pic-
tured paradise as a green and bountiful garden filledwith streams
of flowing water.

Connections to Israel’s History
There are a number of suggestiveparallels between the narrative
flow of the J story and Israel’s history, Like adham, ancient Israel
was created in a dry land (through the covenant with God in the
Sinai desert). Like adham, ancient Israel was given a green and
pleasant land in which to live.As in the caseof adham, a prohibi-
tion came with the covenant and gift of the land, with the threat
of expulsion if the prohibition was violated. And, more specula-
tively, the tempter is a serpent, a common symbol of Canaanite
fertility religion, which was the primary temptation to infidelity
to God that Israel faced in the land. The J story may thus have
a prophetic edge to it: if Israel abandons the covenant of faith-
fulness toYahweh,she facesexpulsionand exilefrom the land/ gar-
den that God had given to her.>

Reading the Creation Stories through a
Metaphorical Lens

Now that we have seen some of the historical reasons why Israel
told the creation stories as she did, we turn to a reading of these
chapters as metaphorical narratives. A metaphorical (and thus
nonliteral) approach to these stories is not new. In the third cen-
tury, a Christian biblical scholar named Origen, commouly seen
along with St. Augustine asone of the two most brilliant theolo-
gians of the early church, wrote:

What intelligent person can imagine that there was a first day,
then a second and third day, evening and mortling, without the
sun, the moon, and the stars? [Sun, moon, and stars are ere-

Reading the Creation Stories Again 71

ated on the fourth day.] And that the first day-if it makes
sense to call it such-existed even without a sky?[The sky is
created on the second day.]Who is foolish enough to believe
that, likea human gardener, God planted a garden in ‘Eden in
the East and placed in it a tree of life, visibleand physical,so
that by biting into its fruit one would obtain life?And that by
eating from another tree, one would come to know good and
evil?And when it is said that God walked in the garden in the
evening and that Adam hid himself behind a tree, I cannot
imagine that anyonewilldoubt that thesedetailspoint symbol-
icallyto spiritualmeanings byusing a historicalnarrativewhich
did not literallyhappcn.s-

The Creation Stories as Myths
As we begin to address the question of why Israel told these sto-
ries, it is important to realize that the Genesis stories of creation
are myths. That term needs careful explanation, because it has
been virtually ruined by its most common modern use. In popu-
lar language, “myth” is a dismissive term. To call something a
myth is to dismiss it: one need not take it seriously.A myth is
seen as a mistaken belief, a falsehood.
But the term means something very clifferent in the study of

religion. Myths are not explanations. Myths are not primitive sci-
ence. Myths are not mistaken beliefs. Rather, myths are meta-
phorical narratives about the relation between this world and the
sacred. Myths typically speak about the beginning and ending of
the world, its origin and destiny, in relation to God. Myths use
nonliteral language; in this sense, they do not narrate facts. But
myths are necessary if we are to speak at all about the world’s
origin and destiny in God. We have no other language for such
matters.
The clifference between the common clismissiveuse of the

word “myth” and its meaning in the srudy of religion is pointed
to in the tide of a book written by Mircea Eliade, one of the
greatest scholars of religion in the twentieth century: Myth and
Reality.26 In the modern world, myth and reality are commonly

72 THE HEBREW BIBLE

seen as opposites: we speak of myth or reality. Eliade’s point is
the opposite: myth and reality go together, myth being the lan-
guage for talking about what is ultimately real. For Eliade, myths
are true, even though not literally true.
To cite another definition: “Myth is a form of poetry which

transcends poetry in that it proclaims a truth. “27 To echo what I
said about metaphor in the previous chapter, myth ispoetry plus,
not science minus.
In Christian thought, the Genesis stories of creation have been

.an exceedingly rich mine of mythological and theological mean-
ings. They treat the great themes of God as creator, the God-
world relationship, the nature of reality, human nature, and the
character of human existence. As we explore these themes, we
will use conceptual language to clarify the meanings of Israel’s
myths of the beginnings.

God as Creator
To the extent that there is a literal affirmation in ancient Israel’s
creation myths, it is simply this: God is the source of everything
that is. As one of my seminary professors said several decades
ago, “The only literal statement in Genesis 1 is ‘God created the
heavens and the earth.'”
Genesis speaks of creation as having happened “in the begin-

ning.” In subsequent Christian thought, there are two quite dif-
ferent ways of understanding this statement. The first sees
creation as “historical origination.” Namely, at_a particular mo-
ment in the past, at the beginning of time, God created. The sec-
ond sees the notion of creation as pointing to a Telation of
“ontological dependence.” This perhaps unfamiliar phrase means
that God is the source of everything that is in every moment of
time.28 For this view,affirming that God iscreator is not primarily
a statement about origination iri the remote past; rather, it is a
statement about the present dependence of the universe upon
God. If God ceased to vibrate the universe (and us) into exis-
tence, it (and we) would cease to exist. In traditional Christian
language, God ascreator is also the sustainer of everything that is:

Reading the Creation Stories Again 73

The latter way of thinking about creation seems more impor-
tant. From a scientific point of view,we do not know whether
there was a time when there was “nothing.” The contemporary
“big-bang theory” of the universe’s origin, which speaks of a
moment roughly fifteen billion years ago when the present
universe began, is quite compatible with thinking of creation as
historical origination. Indeed, some have seen the primordial
“cosmic flash” of the big-bang theory as strikingly similar to the
first act of creation on the first day of the Genesis story: “Let
there be light.” Twenty years ago, a scientist wryly observed
about the big-bang theory:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of
reason, the story euds like a bad dream. He has scaled the
mountains of ignorance;he is about to conquer the highest
peak; ashe pulls himselfover the finalrock, he isgreeted bya
band of theologians who have been sitting there for ccn-
turies.J?

But it is alsopossible that there were universes before the pres-
ent one. Indeed, it is possible that there have alwaysbeen uni-
verses. Seeing the statement “God is the creator” as a claim
about ontological dependence means that Christians and Chris-
tian theology can be religiously indifferent to the question of
whether the universe had a beginning. To say “God is creator”
affirms a relationship and process that continues into the pres-
ent. It need not refer to a specificevent at aparticular time in the
distant past.
This way of thinking about God as creator is compatible not

only with the big-bang theory but also with whatever scientific
theory might (and almost certainly will) replace it. Indeed,
thinking about creation this way means that the affirmation of
God as “maker of heaven and earth” is compatible with any sci-
entific account of the universe’s origins. At the level of ultimate
origins, there need be no conflict between Genesis and science.
The two do not direcdy compete.

74 THE HEBREW BIBLE

The God-World Relationship
Just as there are two ways of thinking about creation, so there
are two models for thinking about the God-world relationship-
that is, the relation of God as creator to the universe.s? The first
is known as a “production” model. Namely, like an artisan or
artist, God makes the universe as something separate from God’s
self. Once created, the universe exists separate from God, just as
a house or a painting exists separate from the builder or artist
who produced it. This model is associated with a particular con-
cept of God. Known as “supernatural theism,” this way of think-
ing about God conceptualizes God as “another being” separate
from the universe.
The second way of thinking about the God-world relation has

been called a “procreative” or “emanationist” model: God brings
forth the universe from God’s being. Because the universe comes
out of God’s being, it is in some sense “God-stuff.” This model
does not identify the universe with God, for God is more than the
universe; rather, it sees the universe as being “of God” and “in
God.” (In other words, the model is panentheistic.)31 To quote a
passage from the New Testament, God is “the one in whom we
[and everything] liveand move and have our being.”32
The differences between these two models for thinking about

the God-world relation matter. The production model suggests
that the universe is separate from God and that creation hap-
pened in some past moment. The procreative model affirms the
presence of God within and beyond the universe and fits the no-
tion that creation is an ongoing process, not simply a past event.
Finally, whereas the production model and its association with
supernatural theism emphasize God’s separation from the world,
the latter model leads to a much more intimate sense of the
closeness of God to the world-indeed, of the presence of God
in the world.
Obviously, the Genesis stories speak of creation using a pro-

duction model. In Genesis 1, God speaks and the universe comes
into being. In Genesis 2, God is like an artisan molding adham
out of earth, like a gardener planting a garden, and so forth. In

Reading the Creation StoriesAgain , 75

short, God is portrayed as creating a universe separate from God.
But because this is the language of myth and metaphor, the

way we think about the creation stories need not be confined to
a semiliteral reading. To cite an analogy, the Bible often speaks of
God as a person-like being; this is the natural language of wor-
ship and devotion. But that does not mean we must think of
God as a person-like being. In any case, whether our thoughts of
creation follow a production model or a procreative model, the
central truth-claim of the myth remains: God is the source of
everything.

The Nature of Reality
Central to Genesis 1 is the refrain repeated after each day of cre-
ation: “And God saw that it was good.” The pronouncement
covers everything that exists. To nse a Latin phrase from me-
dieval theology, Esse qua essebonum est, or “Being as being is
good.” This does not mean that everything that happens is good.
But whatever exists is good.
The creation story is thus strikingly world -affirming. Indeed,

the Jewish tradition as a whole has consistently been world-
affirming, in spite of the horrendoussufferings that Jews have
experienced. The affirmation is also central to Christian the-
ology, although popular Christianity, with its emphasis on the
afterlife, has sometimes seen the world (especially “the flesh”) as
highly problematic, something to keep at a distance, a place to
get through on the way to one’s heavenly home. But against all
world-denying theologies and philosophies, Genesis affirms the
world as the good creation of the good God. All that is is good.

Human Nature
Ancient Israel’s stories of creation affirm two things about us.
We are the climax of creation, created in the image of God and
given dominion over the earth. Yetwe are also “dust-creatures,”
people made of earth. As dust-creatures, we are finite and mor-
tal. “You are dust, and to dust you will return” are the final
words spoken by God to Adam in paradise.ss

76 THE HEBREW BIBLE

We do not know what ancient Israel meant by affirming that
we are created “in the image of God.” Perhaps the claim simply
reflects the fact that the Genesis stories of creation are anthro-
pocentric; that is, they are told from a human point of view and
are human-centered, highlighting humans as the climax of cre-
ation. The stories are also theocentric, of course-that is, cen-
tered in God-but the divine creation they describe leads up to
us: we are God’s culminating act of creation. Thus whatever cre-
ated “in the image of God” means, it is clear that ancient Israel
thought there was something special about us.
The paradoxical juxtaposition of our special status and our

. smallness in relation to the universe is expressed in the familiar
words of one of the creation psalms. In the first half of Psalm 8,
the author addresses God and reflects on our insignificance:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established:

what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?

Then the author affirms:

Yetyou have made them a little lower than the angels,
and crowned them with glory and honor.

You have given them dominion over the works of your hand;
you have put all things under their feet.

The assessment is realistic. We are small, we are finite, we are
mortal. And yet there is something different about us.
Though we have learned in the last half-century not to speak of

an absolute difference between us and the nonhuman animals, we
do have greater consciousness than any species we know of. In us,
the universe has become conscious of itself. And to a degree that
ancient Israel clid not dream of, we have become dominant, with
very mixed consequences for the earth and ourselves.st Yetwe are

Reading the Creation Stories Again 77

creatures of dust, fated to return to dust. Moreover, according to
Genesis, we are not simply mortal, but “fallen.”

The Character of Human Existence
The term “the fall” does not occur in the Genesis story of cre-
ation. As a description of the events surrounding Adam and
Eve’s expulsion from paradise, it is largely a Christian label; Jews
typically,do not speak of “the fall.”
Within the Christian tradition, “the fall” has commonly been

understood to mean “the fall into sin.» It has also been associ-
ated with the notion of “original sin,” which is not simply the
first sin, but a sinfulness that is transmitted to every individual in
every generation. This latter notion, which goes far beyond what
the Bible says, is usually attributed to the brilliant but troubled
theologian Augustine around 400 CEo So as we hear and read
this story again, we should try to free ourselves of specifically
Christian associations of “the fall.”
Though the term “the fall” does not occur in rile story itself,

the story of Adam and Eve’s accepting the temptation offered
by the snake points to something having gone wrong. The con-
sequences are vivid, evocative, and thorough, Adam and Eve
find themselves living east of Eden in a world that must endure
toil and sweat for one’s bread and pain and suffering in child-
birth. They are banished from paradise forever. The rest of the
stories in the first eleven chapters of Genesis describe the deep-
ening consequences. In the next generation, murder: Adam and
Eve’s son Cain kills his brother Abel. The violence deepens,
until even the boundaries of the cosmos are violated: “the sons
of God” are mating with “the daughters of men,” with mon-
strous consequences. Things are so out of control that God
sends a flood to destroy all life except for those on Noah’s ark,
so that creation can be renewed. But soon thereafter, the cycle
begins again in the story of the tower of Babel: humans try to
build a tower that reaches into the heavens. But God overturns
their effort and humankind is ftagmented into its “babble” of
different languages.

78 THE HEBREW BIBLE

Clearly the Hebrew storyteller is saying that something has
gone wrong. Life began in paradise but is now lived outside the
garden, in an exile of hard labor, suffering, pain, violence, and
fragmentation. Though the world is beautiful, something is not
right; we do live in a world of suffering and pain.
But what went wrong? What action, desire or deed, led to

such pervasive consequences? The language of the storyteller is
evocative, not precise. It does not clearly point to a particular
reading. Thus, over the centuries, a variety of understandings of
“what went wrong” have emerged. Each leads to a somewhat
different understanding of “sin”-that primal act that plunged
human beings into a world of suffering-and each expresses nu-
ances of “whatwent wrong.”

The Primal Act as Disobedience The first understanding is the
simplest, though not necessarily the most perceptive. The act re-
sponsible for Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden was disobedi-
ence. God gave them a command, they disobeyed it, and that was
that. The emphasis is on the disobedience itself, not on what the
act of disobedience was. For this view in its most elementary
form, it would have made no difference if God’s prohibition had
been, “Please don’t eat the daisies.” This view typically leads to
seeing sin in general as a matter of disobedience: God gives us
commands and rules and laws, and we break them. The human
problem is disobeying God the law-giver.

The Primal Act as Hubris A second understanding agrees that
disobedience was involved but emphasizes what the act of disobe-
dience involved. In particular, it focuses on the first half of the ser-
pent’s temptation: «You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
The desire is to become Godlike, to tower above who we are, to be
the center of creation. In the Christian theological tradition, this is
known as hubris, a Greek word commonly translated “pride.”
But in this context it means more than the everyday meaning

of the word “pride,” as in the sentence, “I was proud of myself
when I did that.” Hubris means exceeding one’s proper limits; it

Reading the Creation Stories Again 79

means giving to one’s self the place that belongs to God alone; it
means malting one’s self the center. Hubris can take many forms,
ranging from aworld-conquering arrogance to aself-preoccupied
malaise. What these forms have in common is a life centered in
the self and its concerns. Sin-the human problem-is thus
hubris understood asself-centeredness.

The Primal Act as Sloth A third understanding is almost the op-
posite of the pride discussed above. The word “sloth” does not
mean “laziness” in this context. Rather, it means “leavingit to the
snake”-letting something else author one’s existence. It means
uncritically accepting somebody else’s ideas about how to. live
one’s life. In this view,sin-the human problem-is heteronomy:
living the agenda of others.3S

The Primal Act as the Birth of Consciousness A fourth under-
standing also focuses on what the primal act was, but it empha-
sizes the second half of the serpent’s temptation: “Youwill be like
God, knowinggood and evil.” “Knowing good and evil” is under-
stood broadly to mean having knowledge of opposites, a capabil-
ity that is intrinsic to the birth of consciousness. Consciousness
involves distinguishing one thing from another; above all, it in-
volves the self-world distinction, the awareness that the world is
“other” than one’s self.
The birth of consciousness is something we all experience; all

of us become aware of the self-world distinction very early in
life. Thus we cannot avoid the primal act. Iudeed, this under-
standing emphasizes not the disobedience and sinfulness of “the
fall,” but its inevitability. All of us begin life in the womb with
an experiential sense of undifferentiated unity; we begin in par-
adise. But the very process of growing up and the birth of
consciousness that is intrinsic to it propels us into a world of di-
vision, anxiety, and suffering. Living “east of Eden” is intrinsic
to the experience of being human. We all go through “the fall”
and live in a state of exile and estrangement; it cannot be
avoided.w

80 THE HEBREW BIBLE

These various understandings can also be combined. For exam-
ple, the birth of consciousness typically leads to hubris, under-
stood as being centered in one’s self. Moreover, centering in
one’s self intensifies the sense of separation from the world,
deepening the experience of exile. The process of socialization
leads to sloth understood asheteronomy: we internalize and live
in accord with the agendas of others, including parents, culture,
and religion.
Al; already mentioned, it is impossible to say that the Hebrew

storyteller intended one of these more than the other, or in-
tended any or allof these. But the creation stories are an example
par excellence of a religious classic: they are stories that have a
surplus of meanings.
Moreover, whatever the storyteller’s sense of what went wrong

in paradise, the story’s picture of the consequences is persuasive
and compelling. Most of us most of the time live “east of Eden.”
What this means isvividlyportrayed in the painting The Expulsion
ofAdam and Eve by the fifteenth-century Italian artist Masaceio.
As the first couple is driven out of Eden, Adam’s head is down,
both hands covering his eyes; Eve’s face is upturned, but her
mouth is open in ahowl of pain, her features full of grief and sor-
row. At least some of the time, lifeoutside of Eden is like that.

The Creation Stories and Postcritical Naivete

Given the richness of meaning that a historical-metaphorical
reading of Genesis reveals, the creation stories strike me as pro-
foundly true. Critical thinking leads to an understanding of why
the details of Genesis are as they are and also makes clear that
their truth is not to be understood in literal, factual terms.
Rather, their truth is expressed in the nonconceptuallanguage of
myth and metaphor, and no particular reading can exhaust their
meanings.
But I can hear the truth of their central claims. “This”-the

universe and we-is not self-caused, but grounded in the sacred.
“This” is utterly remarkable and wondrous, a Mystery beyond

Reading the Creation Stories Again 81

words that evokes wonder, awe, and praise, We begin out lives
“in paradise,” but we all experience expulsion into a world of
exile, anxiety, self-preoccupation, bondage, and conflict. And
yes, also a world of goodness and beauty: it is the creation of
God. Bur it is a world in which something is awry.
The rest of the Bible is to a large extent the story (and stories)

of this state of affairs: the human predicament and its solution.
Our lives east of Eden are marked by exile, and we need to re-
turn and reconnect; by bondage, and we need liberation; by
blindness and deafness, and we need to see and hear again;
by fragmentation, and we need wholeness; by violence and con-
flict, and we need to learn justice and peace; by self- and other-
centeredness, and we need to center in God. Such are the central
claimsofIsrael’s stories of human beginnings.

NOTES
1. The Hebrew Bible and the Protestant Old Testament arc identical in con-
tent, though divided differently. In the former, there are twenty-four
books; in the latter, thirty-nine books. The Catholic Old Testament in-
cludes another twelve books, commonly called “The Apocrypha” or
“Deuterocanonical” books. Orthodox Christians (often called “Eastern
Orthodox”) include another four.

2. This rejection came about in what is known ‘as the Marcionite controversy.
Marcion was a second-century Roman Christian who rejected the Hebrew
Bible as un-Christian and affirmed a very abbreviated portion of what later
became the New Testament.

3. See quotation from the third-century Christian theologian Origen later in
this chapter.

4. The dates he calculated still appear in the margins of some Bibles.
5. See George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 17-26; Ian G. Barbour, Issuesin Science a’nd
Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), pp- 9~104, and Religion and
Science (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), pp. 49-74.

6. For an analysis and critique of Sscieutific creationism” orvcreation science,”
see Conrad Hyers, The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science
(Atlanta: Knox, 1984). His book as a whole is an excellent study of the cre-
ation stories, integrating modern biblical scholarship, science, and myth.

7. For a discussion of precritical naivete, see chap. 3.
8. And, of course, we now know of humanoids much older than the ones I
heard of when I was a child.

9. To speak of them as historical figures does not imply that the stories about
them are straightforward historical reports, or even that we have any accu-

82 THE HEBREW BIBLE

rate historical information about them. Rather, it means that Israel located
the story of Abraham and Sarah in a recognizable historical context.

10. Let me explain why J is the common abbreviation for the “Yahwist” source
of the Pentateuch. The source theory of the Pentateuch originated in Ger-
man biblical scholarship in the nineteenth century. The German language,
which does not have the letter 1;uses the letter] for the sound made by the
English Y Thus in German the name of God is “Iahweh” and the abbrevia-
rion is]. But it is conventional in English to spell “Iahweh” as “Yahweh.”
Hence the odd result that the Yahwisr source is the J source.

II. In this section I accept what has been the common scholarly understanding
of the sources of the Pentateuch for over a century. Recently that under-
standing has come under review and revision bv some Hebrew Bible schol-
ars. Though P and its dating in the 500s are still widely accepted, there are
serious questions about whether J should be thought of as an early con-
nected narrative or as a mixture of traditions from many periods of Israel’s
history, with some of it as late in date as P. For a summary of the case made
by several scholars for regarding much of J as late, see Joseph Blenkinsopp,
TIle Pentateuch (New York: Doubleday, 1992). Some recent scholars con-
tinue to see] as early. See, for example, Terence Fretheim’s commentary on
Genesis in The New Interpreter’s Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), vol. 1,
Pp. 319-674. Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg’s The Book of] (New
York; Grove Weidenfeld, 1990) is based on an early date for] (and some-
what provocatively and eccentrically argues that the author was likely a
woman). If the debate among Hebrew Bible scholars concludes with a later
date for J, my analysis would not be affected in any significant way, for my
comments on J do not depend upon an early date.

12. Gen. 1.1-2.
13. Gen. 1.3-5.
14. The sequence of creative acts points to the impossibility of reconciling the

Genesis stories of creation with modern scientific knowledge simply by ex-
tending the timeframe from days to geological epochs. Note that light is
created on the first day and yet sun, moon, and stars are not created until
the fourth day. Indeed, the creation of vegetation (day three) precedes the
creation of sun, moon, and stars.

15. Gen. 1.26-27. The use of the plural pronouns “us” and “our” has often
puzzled people: Who is God talking to? Though Christians have sometimes
seen this as a reference to the Trinity, that is impossible in an ancient He-
brew story, roughly a thousand years earlier than the notion of the Trinity.
Most scholars think that the passage makes use of the image of God as a
king surrounded by a heavenly council, such as we find, for example, in I
Kings 22.19-23. .

16. Gen. 2.4–7. Note: whenever the word LoRD appears all incapital Ietrers, as
it does here, it is a translation of “Yahweh,” the Hebrew sacred name of
God.

17. Gen. 2.17.
18. Gen. 2.18-23.
19. Gen. 3.1-24.

Reading the Creation Stories Again 83

20. Gen. 1.6,14-17.
21. Gen. 7.11.
22. For other hymns of creation in the Hebrew Bible, see Ps. 8, Ps. 104.
23. Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Atlanta: Knox, 1982), pp. 24-27. His expo-

sition of Gen. 1-3 is filled with brilliant insights (pp. 11-54).
24. If T is early, then the possibility of exile is a warning. If J is late, then exile

has happened. And whether or not the J material is early, its integration into
the P narrative occurs during or after Israel’s actual experience of exile..

25. Origen, De Principiis, 4.1.16. Translation is mine; parenthetical material
added. For an older English translation, see The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. by
Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979,
reprint of1885 edition) vol. 4, p. 365. Origcn also says that the Bible con- .
tains “countless instances of a similar kind that were recorded as having oc-
curred, but which did not literally take place.” Even “the gospels themselves
arc filled with the same kind of narratives.” Origen also strongly affirms that
he sees much of the Bible as historical.

26. Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
27. H. ‘and H. A. Frankfurt, The InteltectualAdventure ofAncient Man (Chicago:

Univ. of Chicago Press, 1946), p. 8. The quotation continues by affirming
that myth is “a form of reasoning which transcends reasoning.”

28. But not of everything that happens. The distinction between “everything
that is” and “everything that happens” is important. To say that God is the
source of every existing entity is not to say that God is the cause of every-
thing that happens. This applies especially to human behavior, but also to
“natural” occurrences such as weather, earthquakes, hurricanes, and so
forth. .

29. Robert Iastrow, God and the Astronomers (New York: Warner Books, 1980),
pp. 105-6. The literature on the relationship between religion and science is
vast. Among recent books that I especially recommend are Conrad Hyers,
The Meaning of Creation: Genesis and Modern Science (see note 6 above);
Barbara Brown Taylor, The Luminous Web (Harrisburg: Morehouse, 2000);
Philip Clayton, God and Contemporary Science (Grand Rapids: Ecrdmans,
1997); Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science (San Francisco: HarperSanFran-
cisco, 1997).

30. For the two models, see Sallie McFague, The Body of God (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 1993), pp. 151-57. See also her Models of God (Philadelphia: For-
tress, 1987), pp. 109-16.

31. This view is not to be confused with pantheism, commonly understood to
mean the identification of the universe with God. The roots of panentheism
are very ancient. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, the roots go back to
the Bible’s affirmation of both the transcendence and tile immanence of
God. For my description of the differences between supernatural theism,
pantheism, and panentheism, see The God We Never Knew (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1997), chaps. 2-3. As an explicitly developed concept, .
panentheism is becoming more and more common among mainline Christ-
ian theologians. See, for example, Clayton, God and Contemporary Science,
pp.82-124.

84 THE’ HEBR·BW BIBLE

32. Acts 17.28.
33. Gen. 3.19
34. Some historians of culture have argued that the modern domination and

destruction of nature has its roots in the Bible as the sacred text of Western
culture, especially the creation story with its affirmation of God-given
human dominion in Gen. 1.28:·”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.” The
indictment has some substance: the dominion text was often cited to legit-
imate modern Western “development” of the world. But it is probably not
fair to the text itself. Walter Brueggemann comments that the dominance
referred to in Gen. 1.28 “is that of a shepherd who cares for, tends, and
feeds the animals” and notes that it pertains to “securing the well-being of
every other creature and bringing the promise of each to full fruition”
(Genesis, p. 32).

35. lowe this understanding to the title and content of Harvey Cox’s On Not
Leaving It to the Snake (New York:Macmillan, 1967). Paul Tillich, one of
the two most important Protestant theologians of the twentieth century,
makes the same point when he speaks of “heteronomy” asone of three ways
of living one’s life. “Heteronomy” means living in accord with the agenda
of others (people, culture, the nation) and so forth). “Autonomy” means
livingwith one’s self as the center (and is thus hubris). “Theonomy” means
living with God as one’s center; it is the desirable state of affairs, and that
from which we have “fallen” into either heteronomy or autonomy.

36. For an exposition of this understanding within the framework of Jungian
psychology, see Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype (New York:Penguin)
1973), esp. pp. 16-36.

GLOBAL JUSTICE,
CHRISTOLOGY, AND
CHRISTIAN ETHICS

LISA SOWLE CAHILL
Borton Col/ege

~CAMBRIDGEV UNIVERSITY PRESS

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IS-
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Cahdl, Lisa Sowle, author.

Global justice, Chrisrology and Chrtsdan ethics I Lisa Sowle Cahill.
pages em. – (New studies in Chnsrian ethics)
Includes blbhograpbrcal references and index.

ISE:”!978+1°7-02877-7 (hardback)
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or will remam, accurate or appropriate.

Creation and evil 45

is precisely the function of religious narratives, stories, and practices ori-
ented around maxims such as “All are made in the image of God,” “Love
your neighbor as yourself,” or “Do unto others as you would have others
do unto you.” Though the absolute claims of religions can be co-opted for
violent ends, I submit that rhe heart of true religiosity, asdemonstrated in
all the major world religions, is humility and gratitude before God; uniry
of all in the name of God; and, in moral terms, mutual forbearance, a
spirit of reconciliation, inclusive cooperation, and compassionate action
againsr suffering.

GENESIS CREATION NARRATIVES

Christian faith puts love and mercy at the center of the narrative of
redemprion culminating in Jesus Christ. Readers of the bible and
theologians alike often see crearion as mere background ro rhe story of
salvation carried forward by Abraham, Moses, Exodus, Sinai, and Jesus.
They understand God’s liberation of Abraham’s descendants and God’s
covenant at Sinai as signs of saving love.A sort of prelude ro God’s action
in history, creation is but the first chapter of a human career that went
horribly wrong with rhe “fall.” Theologians like Aquinas, Luther, and
Calvin understand creation ro have established a certain ordering of
human life and of nature in general that continues ro guide ethics and
politics. Yet the real concern of Christian fairh is subsequent actions
of the covenanting God to redeem God’s people from the calamity by
which, as Calvin put it, we are no longer able to see in creation the “mir-
ror” of God’s glory.”
To so view creation is to misunderstand its scope and to short-circuit

the redemptive significance of Genesis. There has been a recent move by
biblical rheologians ro reconnect creation rheology ro salvation history,
and even to see salvation in terms of God’s continuing creative action.
Here again, erhical practices and aims influence theological perspectives
and priorities. The creation texts are works of moral and religious imagin-
ation that shape a communal erhos.v Interest in creation is strong among
scholars committed to ecology and ro dialogue among the world’s reli-
gions. But sometimes ethical categories, salutary in themselves, have left
creation in the shadows.

>l John Calvin. lnstiruta of th~ Cbnstian &/igton, vel. I, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids.
MI: Eerdmans, J981). book I.v’1-4.

” See Wllliarn P. Brown, TheEthos of the Cosmos: TheGenesis of Moral Imagination in the Bible
(Grand Rapids. MI: Eerdmans, 1999).

Global justice, cbristology, and Christian ethics

In fact, the twentieth-century marginalization of creation by influen-
tial Europeans such as Gerhard von Rad and Karl Barth was itself ethic-
ally inspired. Despire Barth’s prima facie claim that theology is simply a
response ro God’s unilateral self-revelation, nee-orthodoxy was motivated
in no small part by the need ro reinvigorate the gospel’s countercultural
edge. Midcentury theologies of election and ofGod’s hisrorical command
to the church were part of a struggle against the so-called theology of
creation devised by National Socialism ro legitimize its ideology.” In the
t950S,G. Ernest Wright’s God Who Acts lifted up God’s historical activity
as central to the bible, again at the expense of nature and creation. Other
factors diminishing attention to creation have been anrhropocenrrism,
existentialism, and liberalism, all of which privilege the human perspec-
tive and especially human freedom and choice. More recently, political
and liberation theologies have rightly accented oppressive social forces,
but neglected the rest of nature and humanity’s place within it.’

\

In the past decade or two, many biblical theologians have come ro
“regard creation as the very foundation upon which all other foundations
of biblical faith rest (e.g.,election, covenant, salvation, and eschatologyj.?”
!God’s creative presence in the world is as real and dynamic as God’s
[redemption of a people. In fact, the rwo cannot be separated. Terence
Fretheim maintains that the present organization of the biblical canon
indicates a distinct theological orientation and judgment, as of at least
500 BCE, and mosr probably centuries earlier. The bible places creation
before exodus and redemption precisely because, from the perspective of
Israelite faith, the experience of salvation refers ro creation as a basic and
integral part.” Creation lends depth to redemption and suggests its uni-
versal frame of reference.”
The biblical creation narratives establish the essential goodness of exist-

ence (asover against existential suffeting and guilt). They portray relation-
ship as rhe divinely modeled form that created goodness takes. Moreover,
the creation narratives fill out the substance of good and divinely blessed
relationship as mutuality, generosity, and life-givingness (“fruitfulness”).

>1 See William P. Brown and S. Dean Mcbride, jr .• Preface to William P. Brown and S. Dean
McBride, Jr. (eds.]. God W’lJoCreaUl: bsay! in Honor ofW. 51lJlq TOW71~r(Grand Rapids. MI:
Eerdmans, 2000), pp. xi-xhi, and Terence E. Pretherm, God and World in the Old Testament: A
Rr:latir;nal1heology a/Cr/atlOn (Nashville: Abingdon Press. 200S), pp. ix-xi.

.6 See Prerheim, God and World, pp. Ix-x.
‘7 Brown and McBride, Preface to God Who CuatCf, P’ xiv. For comribunons to the literature, see
Frerheirn, God and World, pp. xi-xiv .

.. Frethelm, God Imd World, pp. xiv-xvl.

.~ Ibid., pp. XIV, xvl.

Creation and evil 47

First, creation isgood. In the vision of the biblical creation narratives,
what exists is made, validated, and blessed by God. This is not a particu-
larly iconoclastic point; familiar ro most ate the repeated declarations of
Genesis I, “God saw that it was good,” culminating in “God saw evety-
thing that he had made, and indeed, it was vety good” (Gen. 1:31).More
interesting to the careful reader are the ways in which this verdict can
be complexified. It is useful to compare creation in Genesis with other
ancient, more prevalent Near Easrern myths of “creation by combat,” like
the Enuma Elish. The trouble with s,!!chJ1’Y!hsis that they “ontologjze”
evil, see it as primordial, and vindicate violence as God’s way ordeal-
ing with it.’? The combat myth, probably in a Canaanite (Ugariric) ver-
sion, did leave its mark on the biblical narrative (e.g., Job 26:7-t4; Ps.
74:t2-17, 89:5-14), but in a minority voice. According to the prevailing
witness, God creates with remarkable ease, even empowering (“letting”)
the waters and the earth to share in the process” and commissioning all
living things to “be fruitful” in their own ways.
It is intriguing, therefore, that the God of Genesis 1says to humans not

only that they should be fruitful, multiply, and fill the earth, but also that
they must “subdue” it and, in troublesome wording, “have dominion” over
all that lives (Gen. 1:28).Chaos, perhaps not; but is there some hint here
of unruliness, of disorder, in the world as originally made, even before
the fall? And is there some way to think of a “not yet ordered quality”
without pulling that quality into an Augustinian framework, in which
the systematic ordeting of all things is constitutive of the very meaning
of goodness? Catherine Keller notes that chaos precedes the Creator’s
activity (Gen. 1:2). The Creator’s action models creative responsiveness ro
“chaos” as “uncertainty, unpredictability, turbulence, and cornplexiry,”
Problematizing “order” in nature harks back to the discussion of evo-
lution and the prospect that nature may be inherently multivalent and
multidirectional.
Disorder, the unpredictability of complex interactions, and divergent

natural needs and purposes may not be evil in themselves. They may be
the necessary conditions of growth and creativity. Yet they do tequire
certain human responses. There will be competitive goods and goals

JO J. Richard Middleton. 7h~ Libadtmg lrnag~: 7h~ Imago Dti m Gemms 1 (Grand Rapids, Ml:
Brazos Press, 2005), p. 254. See also J. Richard Middleton, “Created in the Image of a Violem
God? The Ethical Problem of the Conquest of Chaos in Biblical Creation Texts,” Interpretation,
58/4(October 2004), pr· 341-H·

II Middleton, Liberating Image, pp 264-5. See also W. Sibley Towner’s review of Middleton’s
Lihmmng Image in Inurprrtation. 59/4 {October 2005). pp. 408-11.

J’ Catherine Keller, “The Lost Chaos of Creation,” LiVing PuLpit. 9:2 (2000), pp. 4-5.

Global justice, christology, and Christian ethics

within humans, among humans, and among different forms of life.These
cannot always be “harmonized,” and perhaps they should not be. Still,
humans are called to enhance life and diminish suffering. The command
ro humans to take responsibility for creation’s unsynchronizarion, even
when they are not to blame for it, even in some way to “subdue” it, dis-
closes the narure of “evil” as responsibility’s converse. Moral evil is the
failure to avoid or minimize the harm that plurality and contingency can
cause, to manipulate contingent drives and ends for selfish advantage, and
to resolveconflicts through domination of perceived competitors. Genesis
does nor answer the question of why aspecrs of creation as humans know
it should be liable to causing harm. It does answer the question of the fit-
ting human response, the response that images God.
The Lord permits the first human to name the other creatures, con-

noting God-given powet and authority. In the ancient world and in the
Hebrew Bible, names indicate the essential quality of something; ro
know someone’s name is ro have (at ro be given) power in relation ro
that person. The naming of rhe animals by the human suggests a pro-
cess of understanding, familiarizing, and assuming power as responsibil-
ity. Humans within the world are ro take responsibility for “every living
creature” (a mandate that seems ro call fat the addition of a “helper” and
“partner”, v; 18). Together, human beings, as commissioned by God, ate
to help bring beneficent order to a creation that is not already orderly and
harmonious in every vliay.
This approach does not explain the origin of disorder or the rationale,

if any, behind it. It simply accepts that unordered ness and potential con-
flict do exist, that creation is good nonetheless, and that the goodness of
creation includes human responsibility to “subdue” at least some aspects
of earthly existence as we are given it. In this frame, “dominion” does
not mean destructive or prideful domination, but “ruling” that emulates
God’s wisdom and care. Because all humans ate in God’s image, this
ruling is democratized ro all, not merely to a kingly or royal subset.” The
purpose of the special role with which God commissions humanity is
“rule within the ecosphere in God’s manner,”>
The picture of creation’s goodness receives still another nuance from

the story of humanity’s sequential fabrication by God from preexisting
materials. God personally fashions and gives life ro each human being.

)l Pretheim, God {lnd World, pp. 50-3.
,~ W. Sibley Towner. “Clones of Cod. Genesis 1:26-28 and the Image of God in the Hebrew Bible,”
InUrprn4ltOll, 59/4 (October Z00S). p. 348.

Creation and evil 49

Yet, at stage one, humanity is determined by its maker to be “not yet
good” – a fact expressed by God in view of the human’s loneliness. The
human needs a suirable kind of “helper” and “partner.” Together, God
and crearure venrure an unsuccessful trial of various candidates for the
posirion (Gen. 2:18-20). Although the animals are already “good,” none
are a good “fit” wirh the needs and capacities of the human. The search
process and eventual creation of the woman as a solution to the man’s
“nor good» solirude reinforce rhe poinr rhar created goodness and respon-
sibility rake the form of relationship – between God and the first human,
between the two humans together, and finally between the pair and God.
And the humans are always envisioned as part of a larger created envir-
onmenr with which they are also in relation and which even constitutes
them (humaniry derives from “dust of the ground”; Gen. 2:7)·
From the beginning, whether in Genesis I or 2, God creates in multi-

pies. “In the beginning … God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen.
1:1; cf. 2:4). And crearures generate their own relationships. All living
creatures, and in Genesis I even nonliving ones, have a generative relation
to successivecreations. “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living crea-
tures” (1:20). Among living rhings, fruirfulness is premised upon multipli-
city and relationship within every distinct kind or species. Likewise, the
creation of humans is complere and good, as indicated in borh Genesis
crearion stories, when there is more than one of them. The first sexually
undifferentiared “earth creature” (ha-adam) (2:5)is soon joined by a part-
ner.The creation of humanity is complete when there is a pair of sexually
different humans, a man (‘iss) and woman (‘issa) (2:2r-4).”
Together the female and male are creared in the image of God (1:27).

Unique among creatures, they disclose in a special way the reality of One
who remains “wholly orher.?” The aspect of humanity that constitutes rhe
image is mutual and creative relationship, not intelligence, freedom, or a
human soul. Humans, in the image of God, are fulfilled in relationship
to others. Humans are essentially social creatures. Together the firsr pair
takes up the commands to “be fruitful” of their own kind and to assume
responsibility for fellow humanity and for creatures of other kinds (1:28;

II The first human is called ha-‘adam in a play on the word for {he earth or ground, from which
“i(~was taken- )Ja-tldamah. After the creation of the second human, distinct words for male
and female are employed (‘ iss and ‘iSIR). See Phyllis Trible. God and tht Rhetoric of Sexuality
(PhJaddphia: Fortress PII:SS, (978), pp. 76-80. 94-J05.

JO For 3. review of interpretations of [he image and of current proposals. see Towner, “Clones of
Godj” and }anell Johnson. “Berweee Text and Sermon: Genesis 1:26-28,” Interpretation, 59h
(AprH200~). pp. 176-9.

5° Global justice, cbristology, and Christian ethics

2:15,18). The “complicated responsibility” of humanity, “for and with the
Other,” and for the earth, “mediates the very presence of God.”?
The image as personal, relational, and reciprocal is supported by the

“let us” rhetoric in Gen. 1:26 (seealso 3:22, H:7). The Priestly author and
editor does not, of course, refer ahead to the doctrine of the Triniry. Most
scholars agree that the plural divine subject reflects an earlier polythe-
istic notion of a retinue of divine beings, a “Divine Council,” clustered
around a heavenly king (seealso I Kings 22:19-23; Job 1:16, 2:1; Ps. 82, 89:
5-7; Isa. 6:1-8; and Jer. 2j:l8). Yet rhis plurality can be recaptured within
monotheistic faith as implying that “whatever it is in human beings that
mirrors God mirrors the divine realm as a whole.?”
Undeniably, the nature of divine relations with humaniry is in the

Hebrew Bible a complex matter, even in Genesis. “At times rhe reader
finds a God who is angry, jealous, and a deliverer of death and destruc-
tion against those who obstruct the divine plan. At other times, God
appears compassionate and forgiving.’~’ But the fundamenral and over-
arching role of the creation narrative in the Pentateuch makes it plausible
for communities of faith to select its depiction of God as the one that
ultimately controls the interpretation of other narratives of divine activity.
The ethical and political test elaborated in the first chapter of this book
is operarive in the discernment process. In Genesis I and 2, God does not
rule as a despot or as an angry monarch, but with love, life-givingness,
and generosity. God even acts as the “servant” of the human image in ere-
arion by determining to make for the first human a mosr suitable partner
and permitting the human to test whether the goal has been achieved.”
The human image of God takes shape in relation to this model. God is
mirrored in human dialogue, joinr decision making, and active cooper-
ation cocreate and sustain life.
The image of God in humanity is found in relationship that recog-

nizes the “other” as a suitable partner for companionship and help.”
The imaginative device of God taking the woman from the man’s rib

J~ Knsnn M. Swenson, “Care and Keeping East of Eden: Gen 4:1-16 in Light of Gen 1.-3,”
lntrrpretanon, 60/4 (October 2.006), p. 373.

l~Towner, “Clones of God,” 3.
J9 Johnson. “Between Text and Sermon,” 1.This complexity will be addressed later in the chapter.
4° Frecbeim, God and World, pp. 48-60.
4′ The Hebrew word for “helper” {‘t’ur} should be understood to mean, not a subordinate, but an
equal companion. a “suitable counreepan.” In fact, the word Can even be used to refer (0 God
as the savior of Israel. See Trible, God and the Rhrtori, o!Sexuality. P: 90; and Carol Meyers,
Discovering Eve: Ancimt Israelite Women in Context (Oxford: Oxford Universiry Press. 1988),
p.85·

51
underscores the uniry of two diffetentialed creatures in a single embodied
nature, a one-flesh unity and a social unity. Two human beings not joined
by “blood ties” or kinship, nor yet in sexual union, not certainly by the
(later) “institution” of marriage, are drawn together as “one.” Proclaims
the first human in recognizing a counterpart: “This ar last is bone of my
bones, and flesh of my flesh” (2:23). The first man compates the woman to
rhe animals, after all, not to human males. He recognizes her not specif-
ically as a “woman,” but as first and foremost a human being, much ber-
rer than any other “living creature” to remedy his loneliness (z:18-20).
The second human’s creation isa model for human relationships in gen-

eral, as constituted by a sort of “different sameness.” Human beings ate
irreducibly unique but called to mutuality in one-flesh relationship. They
are to be “helpers” and parmers for one another. As constitutively dif-
ferent human individuals, they are constitutively destined for fellowship.
Their sociality is not merely psychological at spiritual; it has an inherent
reference to shared life in the material world. Materialiry or physicality
is a necessary condition of human personhood. Embodiment is a qual-
iry nor shared wirh God, but it is still necessary for humans to “image”
God. In Genesis 2, it is specifically their embodiment that distinguishes
the woman and man as “different” partners in relationship, and it is their
embodiment as ‘same” that allows mutual recognition (though the story
is told from the man’s point of view).
The exclamation of the first man, when presented with rhe first human

“other,” represents the capacity for fellowship of all human beings, inher-
ent in our embodied connectedness and communicative capacity: “This at
last is bone of my bones, fleshofmy flesh” (2:23). Karl Barth seesimage as
our call to “fellow-humanity,” to “freedom in fellowship.” “God created
man in His own image in the fact that He did not create him alone but in
this connexion and fellowship,” for God, like humanity, “is not solitary,”
but properly” in connexion and fellowshlp/”
The human body establishes basic needs that society is meant to

serve for everyone in every culture. The body also makes it possible to
communicate and cooperate with others, and to express our spiritual cap-
acities in art and religious practices. Above all, rhe human body makes
it possible to recognize and acknowledge other human beings as like
ourselves,with the same essential needs and vulnerabilities, and aspersons
wirh whom we can enter into relationship. Human embodiment and

Creation and evil

… Karl Barth, Church DQgrmuu’i Ill/”, (Edinburgh: T & T Clark. 1961), p, 117.
iJ Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics lJIh (Edinburgh. T &T Clark, 1960), p. 32+

52 Globaljustice, cbristology, and Christian ethics

inherent socialiry make it possible to name some fundamental and uni-
versal goods that every human seeks in cooperation with other humans.
Among the most obvious are food, shelter, and the labor that provides
these: reproduction of the species and the institutions that organize and
socialize reproduction, that is, marriage and family: and political organ-
ization that arranges social roles to the mutual benefit of society’s mem-
bers and defines means of access to the basic goods. (The universality of
basic goods will be elaborated in Chapter 7)·
The embodied differences of the first two, accentuated by their naked-

ness) are part of their creation for embrace and partnership. They are not
yet cause for suffering or strife (2:25). “Bone of my bones, flesh of my
flesh” fellowship is the moral ideal or critetion that should structure all
human differences in relationships that image God. From the beginning
of their existence, God is in beneficent relation to humans; so to be in
God’s image, humans are to be in similar relations with each other. In
Genesis, the two most fundamental of all embodied social endeavors are
family and work. Each is connected to the creation of the human body
in God’s image, because each constitutes a basic form of relationship, in
which bodily needs and capacities bring people rogether cooperatively, in
joint projects. Together, humans ate charged to care for and work with the
rest of creation and to be the parents and educators of future genera dons.
Though the creation stories deal directly with only two individuals,

these stories implicitly refer “image” to larger communities and society.
The mandates to be fruitful by bearing children and to work project for-
ward to human community, ro social identities created through shared
practices. A collective sense of humanity and of the image is conveyed
in the first version by the terms of God’s decision to create (“let us make
humankind in our image”: r.z.e), by the double use of the plural “them”
to indicate both “humankind” and “image” (1:27), and by God’s decision
to “let them have dominion” (1:26). In the second version, the collective is
suggested by the Hebrew word for the first human being (“ha-adam” in
2:7), which can be used either singly or collectively.” The collective image
of God in humans begins with the first pair, expands via intergenera-
tional relations, and moves outward to all the forms of collective human
endeavor necessary to sustain human goods and fulfill human porenrials.
In Genesis, creation is neither static nor a past event. Creation has a

forward momentum, evident in the command to “subdue the earth” and
in the blessing of fertility (1:28), as well as in the idea that the humans

H Towner, “Clones of God,” PP 3-4.

Creationand evil 53

are nor only [0 “keep” or preserve the garden, bur also to “rill” or culti-
vate it (2:15). Humans are not placed in creation as a completed paradise
for their passive enjoyment, or even for protective conservation. Work, as
endowing human life with purpose and fulfillment and as an activity rhar
images God’s own creating, is a fundamental aspect of human existence.”
Throughout the book of Genesis, work on the land, tilling the land, and
reaping the bounty of rhe land are pan of God’s promises. As humans cre-
ate and nurture the next generation, they contribute “procreatively” to the
future of all for which God conrinues to provide inreractively. Procreation
establishes the family and kin groups that carry God’s promises forward,
in Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The embodied work of procreation, par-
enthood, and conrribution to the ongoing life of extended families blesses
humans with their most fundamenral and universal experiences of love,
Out of which they learn concern for others and the discipline of cultivat-
ing goods and wholes orher than or larger than the self.
Two literary devices in Genesis link originally diverse sources. They are

the “generations” formula, which occurs eleven times in Genesis, and the
divine “promises” of blessing, beginning immediately after the creation
of male and female in God’s image (1:28), and eventually extended to “all
the families of the earth” through Abraham (12:3).” The generations and
promises themes extend the relation and calling of two first individuals
into communal vocations, linking the creation of humanity with fam-
ily histories and community, with the well-being of the earth and of the
earth’s diverse peoples, concretizing the universality of God’s continuing
creation.
Though all creation remains under the active reign of God,” creation

is vulnerable to human misdoing. Humans as in God’s image must fulfill
a moral mandate. They are to unite differences in fellowship, fulfilling
God’s promises through family, social cooperation and work, and pro-
ductive stewardship of the environment.

THE fALL

Into this dynamic of promise intrudes “the fall,” dramatized in Genesis
3- This srory is often inrcrprered as a straightforward narrative of Willful

l~ Claus Westermann. Creanon, trans. John J. Scullion, S J. (Philadelphia: Ponress Press. 1974).
pp.80-2. .

• 6 Thomas W. Mann, ” ‘All [he Families of [he Earth’: The Theological Unify of Genesis,”
Interpretation, 4)/4 (1991). P: 34}·

,” Fretheim, God Ilnd World. pr· 4-5, B. 172-3.

54 Global justice, cbristology, and Christian ethics

ingratitude and disobedience to God. Yet the story of Eve and Adam’s
expulsion from the garden is actually complex and ambiguous. Feminist
scholar Phyllis Trible noted long ago that, just as the creation story has
been misconstrued to validate the inferiority of women, so the fall story
has been misread to set trouble in paradise on Eve’s side of the ledger.” In
fact, when the woman interacts with the serpent (3″-5), [he man is also
present (3’6). Both the active and [he passive sinner are equally guilty, and
the consequences of their sin bring an ironic reversal. The passivepartner
in crime will be forced to earn a living with [oil and exertion (3’i7-19).
The active agem will be subject to the uncontrollable pain of childbirth
and to [he “rule” of the man (3:16).49
In addition to the question of relative human guilt and punishment,

the narrative of Genesis 3 suggests further perplexing questions. Indeed,
[he story does not come together in a dear picture of created harmony,
willful wrongdoing, and unequivocal guilt and responsibility. Instead,
it reflects evil’s enigmatic and even absurd quality, as well as rhe blurry
boundaries of moral agency and the ineluctable quality of sin. The story
ishighly suggestive and rich with layers of psychological and socialmean-
ing. No one reading can resolve its contradictions or do justice coitssym-
bolic depth.
One common interpretive mistake is. in my view, to try (0 explain

the origin of evil in terms of some “necessary” aspect of God’s good cre-
ation. For instance, the humans’ liability to sin is sometimes seen as an
unavoidable concomitant of human freedom.” Such explanations reflect
a perceived need to vindicate the Creator’s goodness and justice. But
Genesis really offers no such explanation, fot it does not conceive of the
divine ways as in need of justificarion. I agree with theologian Terrence
Tilley that “theodicy is legerdemain.” Theodicies attempt unbiblical and
unpersuasive “rational” answers, while “the testimonies of scripture and
tradition about God and suffering ate obscured.” The testimony of the
creation narratives about evil and suffering is that humans should respond
to it in the way the Creator does and should do so in relationship with
God. Terence Frerheim wiselyentitles his chapter on the fall “Creation at

~I Tnble, God and rhrRhetonc ofSrxuallty, pp. 72, 112-14, 12,6-31.
~9 Ibid.
lO Even Frerhelm makes an uncharacteristic departure from the content of Genesis on this score.
He speculates, “For God ro have forced compliance to rhc divine will and not allowed creatures
{he freedom to fail would have been (0 deny any genuine relationship”; Cod and World, p. 70.

II Terrence W. Tilley, Prologue to Anthony J. Tambasco (ed ), tht Bib/~ on Suffmng: Sonal and
PolmcalImplications (New York: Pauhsr Press, 200r), P: I.

Creation and evil 55

Risk: Disrupted, Endangered, Restored (Genesis 3-11).'” This title makes
two important points.
First, the fall portrays the reality of human sin but does so from the

standpoint of the possibility of salvation, not from the standpoint of its
ultimate origin and rationale. Second, the fall must be seen in light of the
first eleven chapters of Genesis, the “primeval history” (and indeed of the
whole Pentateuch). Seen as a whole up to the calling of Abraham (Gen.
rz), the narrative does not explain why evil exists, so much as examine
its dynamics, implying strategies of reform. Evil exists primarily as dis-
ruption of relationships; the proper response is to restore those relation-
ships in alignment with God’s continuing activity as Creator, Savior, and
Susrainer,
Genesis 3makes it hard to pinpoint the precise origin or “first moment”

of moral evil. It also makes it hard to see the sin of the fitst humans as
truly “original” or as an entirely “free” choice, The role of the serpent is
especially puzzling. Why does the serpent suggest to the woman that the
fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden would be good to eat (3=1-4),
even though God has apparently forbidden it (Z:9, z:ty), all creatures are
“good,” and “sin” has not yet occurred?” Genesis I already intimates that
creation is not “naturally” orderly in every respect – hence humans are
to subdue, name. and exercise dominion over destructive varieties of dis-
order. But the setpent, described as “crafty” (3’1), seems bent on inducing
in the woman a process of rationalization or self-deception toward very
questionable ends. She does not come up with this herself.
The humans ate portrayed as “naked” and “not ashamed” (2:25). This

characterization, albeit with sexual overtones, connotes a more general
state of innocence and defenselessness.” The serpent. in contrast. comes
across as manipulative, unaccountably insinuating doubt, suspicion, and
disharmony into the human-divine relationship. Though nor overtly
“evil,” the serpent is not neutral either. The serpent is disruptive. He is
immediately successful in destabilizing the woman’s trusting relation to

5′ Frerheim, God and World, P: 69.
II Genesis 2’9 actually mentions two trees in the middle of the garden, the tree of life and the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil. In Genesis 2:17, God tells the first human (before the creation
of the second) not to eat of the latter. the former having apparently dropped out of the picture.
Genesis 3 mentions only a singular “eree in {he middle of the gardeo,” but the serpent’s predic-
tions about the consequences of euing, “Youwill nor die … and you will be like God, knowing
good and evil” (3·4-5), allu~e to both. Moreover, the two are sent away from the garden Jest they
“take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” (p.2). The story is likely a combination
of fWO versions or two traditions about the trees, borrowing from other ancient myths.

\4 Trible, God and the RhetOriC a/Sexuality. P.109.

56 Globaljustice, christology,and Christian ethics

God. “Youwill not die … you will be like God, knowing good and evil”
(3:4). The intelligence of their conversation is ironic. The woman’s first
and fatal mistake is to not name the serpent for what he is, not subduehis
promptings, and not assume righrful dominion as one made in the divine
image.
Yet it is not without cause that the woman, questioned by the Lord,

tries to evade responsibility with the rejoinder, “The serpent tricked
me” (3=13). The man’s similar excuse is that “she gave me fruit from the
tree, and I ate,” but he points our even more boldly that it was the same
woman “whom you gave to be with me” (3:12). Of course, the woman
could just as easily have taken God to task for creating the serpent. God
does not accept the blame game and declares the serpent cursed for hav-
ing started the process (3’14).But this only reinforces the impression that
moral evil and responsibility originate prior to human choices. And it
cerrainly does not resolve the issue of why God so made the world in the
first place.
If rhe fall narrative isnot an account of the originofevil, it does capture

evil’s captivating dynamics, the dynamics of what later came to be called
“original” sin. Genesis 3 shows us how evil entraps human agency. Once
evil has blighted our relationships, it becomes unavoidable for each of us.
The inevitability of sin is not due to a blot on the soul, a defect inherited
through sexual reproduction, or a twist in the wills of individual agents.
It is due ro a combination of factors: the evolved and “natura!” instinct
of evety living thing (and gtoUp) to preserve itself and its advantages, an
instinct that is not morally wrong in itself; the social and practical ways
in which identity and selfhood necessarily are consrirured; the gradual
developmenr of moral awareness in all persons; and the de facto perva-
sivenessof biased social behavior.
“Social” explanations oforiginal sin haveoften been rejected asnot doing

justice to sin’s universality and necessity. This line of critique, however,
resrs on the wrong assumption that the self isessentially independent of its
social environment and able in principle to resist mere “socialization.” As
has been shown by pragmatists like Charles Sanders Peirce, G. H. Mead,
and William James, and more recently by Catherine Keller and Charles
Taylor, identity, agency,and freedom alwaysarise within a COntextof inter-
actions among selvesand all the aspects of their environmenrs.s Solidarity,

II The pragmatists and Taylor were discussed In the preceding chapter. See also Catherine Keller,
From a Broken Wt’b: Separation, Sexism and Srlf(Boston: Beacon Press. 1986); and Faa o/rhi’
Deep: A Theology ofBuoming (London: Routledge. 2003).

Creation and evil 57

not individuality, is the most illuminating framework for understanding
sin” – as it will be also for salvation.
Perhaps the serpent stands for thepreexisting and thepractical character

of human implication in waywardness, in guilty relationships in which
one seems to be caught even before recognizing them for what they are.
While yet in a state of innocence, the woman is drawn into a process
of rationalization, impairing her capacity fot clear-eyed and responsible
judgment. The story presents human evil as somehow tied to knowledge,
specifically moral knowledge (“knowledge of good and evil”) and to the
conditions under which moral knowledge is obtained. Moral knowledge
concerns tighr relationships, relationships that humans can affect and for
which they have responsibility. The woman desires such knowledge but
adopts a strategy to acquire it that compromises her relationship to God
and consequently her moral relationships. She allows the setpent to shape
her understanding of what she can, does, and should know.
Rationalization is not jusr a willful, self-generated seties of intellectual

conrortions. It is a biased yet plausible interpretation of events and pos-
sibilities, pulled together from among options, within an environment,
by an interested agent, to constitute a viewpoint that legitimates action.
Rationalization isa strategy of self-deception. Rationalization depends on
preexisting contexts and relationships, and on already being invested in
certain outcomes. It is a warped exercise of practical reason about real
goods to be achieved, an exercise in which the self averts attention from
the real worth of various goods, the relation among the goods, and the
effects that seeking a good, at a certain time, in a certain way, will have
on other beings.
Inreraction with the serpent, which the story portrays as initially unex-

ceptional, gradually induces the woman to reason in the wrong way about
goods available to her. She privileges a perceived opportunity for wisdom
(j:6) over her trusting relation with God and over her vocation !O image
God’s rule, a vocation she should be fulfilling in partnership with her
(silent) partner, The crux of the woman’s sin is forgetting her own dignity
within creation. In addition to her failure ro order her decision rightly
regarding the serpent, the man, and wisdom, the woman also fails to

~ ~ed Pc.[Crs. Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), P: jo. On
sm, original sin, and the social nature of sin, see Peters, Sin, Andrew Sung Park, 1h~WQund~d
Heart of God: ‘Ibr AHlin Concept of Han and tht CJmstian Docmne (JfSin (Nashville; Abingdon
Press, 1992); Tatha Wiley. Origina/Sm: Origins, Deoelopmenn. Contemporary Mtanings (New
York; Paulist Press, 2002); and Darlene Fozard Weaver. “How Sin Works; A Review Essay,”
Journal of Rt/’glOus Ethics, 29 (200I). pp. 473-501.

Global justice, christology, and Christian ethics

order her relation to the “good” tree and its attractive fruit. Instead, her
sense experience, her alfections, and her reasoning process all confirm the
serpent’s enticements.
Though the woman’s moral state in the process prior to eating the fruit

could be termed “temptation” but not yet sin, the matter is not so simple.
In fact, the woman, by conversing with rhe serpent, is already participat-
ing in a social interaction that has power to draw her consciousness, her
thoughts, her emotions, and her imagination away from God’s life-giving
activity. Responsibility, accountability, and guilt emerge in a process, not
at a “point.” What is true of the woman is also true of all other humans.
We develop moral consciousness already within social relarions that are
dangerous if not already damaging. We understand what is “good and
evil” within contexts that potentially distort our evaluation of goods and
of how priorirization of goods for ourselves affects others with whom we
are in relationship (personally or through social structures).
Though the serpent encourages the woman to adopt a distorted per-

spective on knowledge and its fruits, the serpent’s predictions are not
entirely wrong. A symbol in the ancient Near East ofwisdom and immor-
tality, the serpent delivers on half of his promise that the woman will
enjoy both. The humans will in fact die after their eating, but they do
gain knowledge: “the eyes of both were opened” (3:7). Even God con-
cedes rhar the humans had “become like one of us, knowing good and
evil” (}:22). But did they know “good and evil” like God – as the serpem
had predicted?
Some interpreters see the fall as a fall “upward” into maturity and

understanding,” Perhaps the first pair needed to change, and “should”
have. “They had to enter the world of work, sweat, and tears, of child-
bearing and the joys and frustrations of sexual relations (Gen. 3:16-19),
and they had to do so at the price of surrendering a life wirhout risk and
without end.?” But the details of the story do not support this view.Afrer
all, life in the garden before the fall was already not risk-free, nor had
immortality been explicirly promised (though threat of death was part of
God’s warning to obey; 2:17). In fact, death is presented as a consequence
of the man’s having been taken out of dust in the first place (P9). It is

l7 See Prerheim. God and World, p. 7I. .
II Joseph Blenktnsopp. Treasurer Old and New’ Dsays m ,the TJ;(~/ogyof tht Pentereuch (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmam, 2004), p. JOI. The chapter is ruled GJlgamesh and Adam: Wisdom
through Experience In Gdgamesh and in the Biblical SlOry of the Man, the Woman. and the
Snake.”

Creation and evil 59
hard ro claim either rhar rhe garden was a fool’s paradise or rhar rhe nar-
rarive itself presents rhe fall in a positive lighr.
Byearing rhe fruit, rhe first humans do come ro know what good and

evil are, and in rhis way they are more like God. But Eve is unlike God in
rhar, when she reaches the capacity and rhe duty ro recognize evil, she is
already involved in its processes. In their state of original nakedness, the
couple is naive and vulnerable, like children whose moral sense and sense
of self ate not far developed. Infants and children naturally, innocently,
and unconsciously seek to have their own needs met, and only gradually
become aware that others have similar needs and that others are affected
by one’s choices. (This is why Augustine’s illustration of original sin with
a “greedy” nursing infant is ludicrous and unconvlnclng.)? By the time
moral awareness emerges, a child is already involved in practices that pri-
oritize the needs of the self Ir is then difficult ro reverse the pattern. One’s
emergent moral sense is already biased coconrinue pre-moral behavior of
advantage ro the self. It is much easier and more attractive co “justify”
ongoing or accustomed behaviors and rarionales that work to one’s advan-
tage than to widen the scope of moral consideration.
The environment is not just an environment; it is a constituting aspect

of the self and its habits. To say that selfish behavior is irresponsible and
sinful is not co say that the good of the self is not a proper end among
others. Ir is often morally necessary ro assert the needs and goods of the
self(orof a group) over against oppressive relations and structures.” Also,
one has an obligation ro advocate for those for whom one is most respon-
sible bJ’ virrue of special relations, such as children in one’s care. But at
the root of all oppressive structures is disproportionate self-interest that
has successfully arranged the social system in its service. Moral evil and
oppression may be described verysimply as the violation of some relation-
ships or persons, so rhat different persons can lay claim to more power,
goods, and benefits than they deserve.
It is not only the relation between the serpent and the woman that is

problematic even before the fatal decision to take and eat. The relation
of the two humans is equally indicative of the impending disaster. The
rwo are ro embody God’s image as rogether ordering in a life-giving
way.YerGenesis never depicts the couple as acrually engaging in activ-
ities thar fulfill this calling. The first active move after the woman’s

l~ Augustine, ConfeSSions. Lvil
(.r, Valc~ie Saiving Goldsfetn, “Ihe Human Situation: A Feminine View,” ]ollmal of Religion, 40
(ApnI196o), pp. 100-11..

60 Global [ustice, cbristo logy, and Christian ethics

crearion is her solo rejoinder ro the serpem, repeating God’s command.
From there the conversation goes downhill. The man and woman do
not react together at all, much less demonstrate equality, reciprocity,
and mutual care. The woman and man are both in the garden when the
serpem approaches (3:6), but they do not reflect rogether about God,
the garden, the tree, the serpent, their own relationship, or the proposal
before them. The woman is reflective with the serpent, who is not her
“helper”: if the man is reflective he certainly keeps quiet about it. She
talks, he sits, she takes and eats and gives, he eats. Then their eyes”were
opened” – passive voice. Their first joint actions seem to be making
loinclorhs (3:7) and hiding from God (3:8). Questioned, they hurl accu-
sations rather than face up ro their shared vocation and their failure to
assume it.
Even before the pair disobeys the tree command, they are already

exhibiting a “fall” from unified relationship. Though created “good,” the
human beings did not waste much time in destabilizing the situation.
Separately eating the fruit, the two fall definitively out of order ro God,
each other, and the other aspects of creation. “Life has lost to Death, har-
mony ro hostility, unity and fulfillment ro fragmentation and dispersion.
The divine, human, animal, and plant worlds are all adversely affected …
Truly a love story gone awry:~’
As God announces (not commands).” the human body will now resist

the blessings of fruitfulness and land, turning blessings into the painful
labor of childbirth and agriculture (3:16-t9)6, The woman will “desire”
her lost union with the man, but he will now “rule over” her, in a fallen
way (3′!6). The man soon names “his wife,” as he did the animals (3:20).
Patriarchy designates the rule of man over woman, but patriarchy is
much more (han the institution of marriage, a family system, or a system
of sexual subordination. “It is a domination system. Such systems, then
and now, are characterized … by ‘unjust economic relarlons, oppressive
political relarions, biased race relations, patriarchal gender relations,
hierarchical power relations, and the use of violence [0 maimain them

6r Trible, God and th~Rhaonc of Sesualny, p. 139.
6, There is a modern consensus, stimulated not least of .allby femimst biblical interpretation. that
the so-called curses and punishments of GenesIs 3 are not divine decrees to be observed for-
ever. They are God’s announcement or dedaration of (he consequences that Eve and Adam (and
(he serpent) have broughc on themselves and the test of crearfon. These consequences arc to be
resisted and Hans formed as part of the process of redemption. See Frechclrn, God and lX/or/d.
p.75·

6l Carol Meyers proposes that the Hebrew phrasmg suggests Eve is not destined to suffer in child-
birth specifically, bur through a grealer number of pregnancIes, stress and grief in parenting., and
toil in general See Meyers, Discovering £/1(, pp 103-9,118

Creation and evil 61

aII.”’6, Patriarchy exemplifies and is the first instance of all social domin-
ation systems, especially ones built around ideologies that inscribe social
inequality in the innate differences of human bodies. Rather than rec-
onciling conflicts and rectifying harms among creatures, such systems
exploit them to the advantage of a few. Domination systems ate the
deplorable result of human betrayal of God’s image.
Following on their parents’ choice, Cain and Abel present an almost

immediate and ultimate destruction of God-imaging relationship. In a
corruption of the embodied “generations” trajectory of creation, which
ought to be the basis and school of fellowship, Adam and Eve’s children
pull their parents’ legacy into the future in terrifying ways. The brothers
divide in conflict over the value and rights of their work on the land, and
its social and religious significance. Their fraternal and human one-flesh
unity ends in fratricidal violence, causing further alienation from the
earth itself and exile from kindred and community kl-14). The later
bestowal of blessing on Noah and his sons in Genesis 9,with its compan-
ion outlawing of murder, confirms that human life in the image of God
especially excludes the killing of other human beings (9:6).
Sin consists not in wanting to know good and evil, but in seeking

undue control over the conditions and results of this knowledge, with-
out humility about the scope of one’s power or the justice of one’s vision.
Cain is understandably disappointed that God does not look favorably on
hisoffering, preferring that ofhis brother. This preference seems arbitrary.
Cain’s real fault is in reacting with rage and not accepting that God’s
waysare not always explained.” Humans and their communities sin when
they, like Cain, make themselves and their particular projects the center
of religion and morality, justifying the destruction of their competitors.

BETWEEN SIN AND REDBMPT10N: ABRAHAM.

SARAH, AND HAGAR

The story of redemption through God’s chosen people Israel begins
with the call of Abraham (Genesis 12), a character whose trust in God
amidst uncertainty and “unfair” demands contrasts strongly with Cain.
The srory begins abruptly, as the Lord simply and suddenly speaks ro
Abraham (Abram), summoning him to abandon all that is familiar and

6.1 Wiley, OrIginal Sin, P’ ~7,clttng Walter Wink. Engagmg the Powers: Discernmenr and Resistana
m a ‘lJ?orJdojDomination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, J992), p. 107.

6\ See Frerheim, God and W/Jr/d, p. 78.

Global justice, cbristology, and Christian ethics

journey into the unknown. “Go from your country and YOUtkindred and
your father’s house to the land that I will show you … So Abram went”
(Gen. 12:1, 4). Abraham leaves his home in southern Mesopotamia C’Ur
of the Chaldeans”, II:28) and travels into the “promised land” of Canaan,
where he makes a covenant with the Lord (Gen. 121:6-8). With divine
help, Abraham and his wife, Sarah, already past childbearing age, estab-
lish a family line through which God’s plan of redemption will be real-
ized (Gen. Z1:1-3).
Abraham’s trust in the ways of the unknowable God is proved in his

obedience to the command to sacrifice his son, Isaac, the child through
whom Abraham had expected God to fulfill the promise to “make of you
a great nation.” This demand is no more intelligible in human terms than
God’s command not ro eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
God’s creation of a world that humans need ro “subdue” lest they fall into
evil, or God’s preference for Abel’s offering over that of Cain. In fact,
this and other commands of God deserve to be quesrioned from a moral
standpoint. But the point of the story is that Abraham does not falter in
his relation to God or his confidence in God’s agenda: “I will bless you,
and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing … and in you
all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (12:2-3).
The srory ofAbraham, Sarah, and Isaac, however, is no mote a story of

unambiguous faith than is the story of Adam and Eve a story of unam-
biguous sin. While Abraham is usually remembered as a paragon of trust,
first he and then Sarah doubt the predicted miracle birth, laughing at the
news (17:17, 18:12).And Abraham eventually goes along with Sarah’s plan
to take the matter into their own hands. Thus commences an incident
that shows that even the patriarchs and matriarchs of God’s chosen live
in a world marked by evil and are not immune [0 its perverse practices
or exempt from its “domination systems.” The couple’s wrongdoing does
not stop with their determination to control a course of events that God
is inexplicably allowing to go “off course.” Confronted with continuing
“barrenness,” Sarah proposes to use her foreign slave, Hagar, as surrogate
mother, and Abraham approves (16:2).
On the surface, it may look like all the evil plans are motivated by

Sarah. No doubt the narrative was recorded by a male editor interested
in protecting Abraham as a model of faith. Yet the editor of Genesis
has also placed the srory of Abraham under the judgment of the srory
of Adam. Ironically, Abraham repeatSAdam’s sin by nor making this a
well-considered, truly joint, and much more prudent decision. The pair’s
actions also illustrate the way patriarchy structures the institutions of

Creation and evil

childbearing, as projected by Genesis 3.Rather than patiently wait for the
blessing of fruitfulness to be fulfilled through their own one-flesh part-
nership, rhey exploit Hagar’s powerlessness and fertiliry. She is ordered
to have sex with Abraham, producing a child for his benefit and rhat of
Sarah. Hagar is not envisioned to share in the Lord’s “blessings: but
expected merely to serve as their unconsenting instrument.
Hagar does become pregnant. But almost immediately, rhe arrange-

ment unravels, for now Hagar “looked with contempt on her mistress”
(16:4). Hagar is only too eager to rake advantage of the cultural equa-
tion of women’s value with childbearing to turn the tables on her abuser.
Rather than rectify any of the accumularing injustices, Abraham under-
writes the dynamics of the power game, reminding his wife of her super-
ior status: ”’Behold, your maid is in your power; do to her as you please'”
(16:6). So Sarah “dealt harshly” with Hagar, and Hagar runs away. In one
of the few places in the bible where God appears directly to a woman and
speaks to her, God tells Hagar to go back to Sarah, assuring Hagar that
“the Lord has given heed to your affliction” and promising thar she will
bear a son, Ishmael (r6:7-13).
For good reason, some African American womanist rheologians find

in Hagar a sort of “patton saint” of those triply exploited by race or erh-
niciry,gender, and slavery.Ante-bellum U.S. slaveswere forced to accept
the sexual advances of masters and bear them children, while suffering
the abuse of harsh and jealous plantarion wives. Like Hagar, they longed
for escape, fleeing into great danger, little refuge, and unknown futures.
Delores Williams, in Sisters in the Wilderness, acclaims the Hagar story
asa rich resource for a long tradition of African American biblical inrer-
preration, a story that is particularly apt for the expression of the experi-
enceof women.” She poinrs out that Hagar does exert her own agency
and escapes into freedom, but that action brings her into very precarious
strairs, a situation that persisted for American slaves even afrer the Civil
War.God does not exactly “liberate” Hagar, but does provide the neces-
sities of survival.
Ar God’s instruction, the pregnant Hagar returns to the household,

where she can at least be assured of security in giving birth and nurs-
ing her infant. But after Sarah has her own baby, Isaac, she sees Ishmael
and Isaac play together and becomes angry. She wants to ensure that no
“son of this slave woman” will “inherit along with my son Isaac.” Since

60 Delores S. WiUiams. Siurrs in the Wi{deT’11m: ]he Challenge ajWomanist God-Talk (Maryknoll,
NY. Orbis Books, 1993).

Global justice, christo logy, and Christian ethics

women’s lives are defined largely through their sons and the sons’ fathers,
rhe women compete. Sarah fully intends to protect her own son’s priority
over that of her rival. At her insisrence and over Abraham’s reluctance to
repudiate a son, he accedes to Sarah’s demand to send Hagar and Ishmael
away from the family (21:8-14).
The Lord’s actions pose questions of rheir own, for God compensates

Hagar without directly challenging the patriarchal structures, or even
raking Abraham and Sarah to task for their unjust manipulation of rhem.
It isnor clear whether God really has compassion on Hagar or isonly con-
cerned about the safety of Ishmael, the offspring of Abraharn.v The Lord
assures Abraham thar though Isaac will be rhe heir of the promise, God
will “make a nation” of his other son too. Therefore, ir is apparemly not a
problem that Sarah isdemanding rhey be ousred (21:12-13).Giving Hagar
bread and water, Abraham sends her imo the wilderness. Hagar has not
been apprised of the plans God has disclosed to Abraham. Her suffering
is great, and her desperation grows. When the water is gone, she casts her
child under a bush and retreats, pleading, “Let me not look on the death
of rhe child” (21:16).What more onerous suffering than that of a mother
unable to save her baby from starvation at human hands, a mother also
lacking any human offer of consolation in her sorrow? But God hears the
baby crying. God tells Hagar to pick him up and shows Hagar a well of
water – now revealing that he is going to give Ishmael descendams too.
Ishmael is finally saved by the mercy of God (21:17-t9).
The story of Hagar is a pU221e.It provides such a good model for the

experience of oppressed women today because it reflects emrenched injus-
tices with which women must cope – with the help of their own courage
and God’s guidance, but nor always with rhe result of rrue liberarion.
Sometimes the best rhat can be achieved is mere survival; Hagar and her
child come close enough to desrruction that we are reminded how often
survival is out of reach. Why does God permit and even encourage the
unjusr rreatment of Hagar byher “owners”?Why does God not denounce
their sinfulness and call them to repentance?
One way to understand the tale of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and their

children is in relation to Israel’s process ofidentiry formation. It reflects, if
arnbivalenrly, on the dynamic of particularity and universality, the prob-
lematic of us-them thinking, and the human realities of self-assertion
and attempted dominance, that thread through both the Hebrew Bible

6-> Mignon R. jacobs, G~ndtr, Pourer. and Persuasion: 7h~ Genais Narratiim and Conumporary
Portratrs (Grand Rapids. 1.11: Baker Academic, 2007), pp. 147-9, lSi.

Creation and evil

and the Chtistian New Testament. “Hagar the Egyptian” is an outsider
(Gen. 16, 21) whose origin recalls the tempting power of a wealthy people
where Abraham temporarily sertled (after passing Sarah off as his sisrer ro
Pharaoh) and where Joseph rook refuge and became prosperous. The fam-
ily of Abraham becomes enrangled with the family of a foreign woman,
whose son with Abraham it must reject or “abject” in order to assert its
own permeable and insecure identity.” Hagar ultimately asserts her own
identity, in a parallel contrast to Abraham: she procures a wife for het
own son from among her people, Egypt.” Ishmael, however, remains ar
rhe borders of Israel’s consciousness, never fully separated and unwilling
to be tamed. The identities of Abraham and Hagar, Isaac and Ishmael,
ate established, but the connection is never entirely broken: Ishmael goes
back to bury his father, though he remains an outsider to the family his-
tory (Gen. 25:9).
The process of establishing identity for these figures and the peoples

they represent is hazardous and conflicrual, even violent. Secure identity
seems £0 require self-definition “over against” others, implying exclusion
if not dominance. The story leaves unsettled the divine reaction to this
situation. It is clear that Abraham and his descendants are God’s favored
people and that the son of Sarah is the true link to the future of Israel.
YetIsrael seems unable to pursue het destiny in full separation from other
peoples. Relationships with other people are relationships that Israel both
chooses and abjures, both exploits and repents. Even though God sets
Israel apart, God roo is related to other peoples and takes steps toward
their protection. The book of Genesis still has religious authority and
appeal because its mediation of the divine is rich, complex, and ultimately
redemptive. The creation stories set a tone for what follows. The universal
presence and providence of God in creation are echoed in Israel’s stories
of redemption, even though Israel’s election is the prominent theme.
The bible construes gteat continuity between creation and redemption.

Redemption is the restoration of the image of God and liberation fat
ever new and greater human community, fruitful interdependence with
nature, and personal intimacy with God. The universality of God’s creat-
ing and saving acts is established in creation, reestablished in God’s cov-
enant with Noah (Gen. 8:21, 9:n), reaffirmed in God’s promise to bless
all peoples of the earth through Abraham (Gen. 12:3), focused through

6′ J Cheryl hum. “Hagar m Proch; The Abject in Search of Subjeceiviry,” In Peter S. Hawkins
and Leslergh Cushing Stahlberg {eds.), From the Margi1JS I: Women a/the Hebrno Bible and Their
AfUTllVt’l (Sheffield; Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009), pp. 1-16.

69 Ibid .. p. 16.

66 Global justice, christo logy, and Christian ethics

Israel’s election as “light ro the nations” (Isa. 49:6), and cosmically expan-
sive. The liberation of Israel from Pharaoh’s cruelty is depicted as a uni-
versal victory. demonstrating “the reign of God over the entire cosmos
(15’18)” and the promise of a new heaven and a new earth (Isa. 65’17; 2
Cor. 5’17)7′ Redemption is a continuation of God’s creative power, a
reclaiming of humans to fulfill the image of God as they were given life
to do. As illustrated in the wilderness events, redemption is also a restor-
ation of the life-giving abundance of the land and of nature.” “God who
created continues to Create- not abandoning the primal cosmic design …
but renewing, adjusting, and amplifying it (e.g., Isa. 34-35; 40-45; Ezek.
34:Z5-3I; Rom. I-II; Rev. Z[-Z2; cf. Sir. 24).””
On the assumption, then, that rhe central messages of Genesis are

the righteousness and beneficence of the Creator, the mandate that all
humanity embody the image of God, and God’s redeeming covenant, the
following conclusions may be drawn. First, the image of God is reflected
in human relationships. If relationships truly image God, they will not
violate the one-flesh union of spouses, of women and men, and of every
human with every other. The true humanity of all must be respected,
even when needs conflict. The eloquent “subrext” in the story of Hagar
is that her situation is unjust and deserves compassion. as interpretations
and artistic ponrayals over the centuries have’ accentuated.” Second,
when relationships are subject ro violence and exploirarion, the redemp-
tive response follows the lead of God’s compassion for the powerless.God
includes Hagar as a beneficiary of the saving acrions directed in the story
primarily to the good ofIshmael. Third, despite redemptive experiences,
relationships. and practices, evil remains. The destructive force of evil,
especially evil against the most vulnerable, must be confronted. It can
be resisted but not explained in any satisfactory moral or religious terms.
Hence the ambiguity of the story of Hagar. Fourth, historical human rela-
tionships inevitably take shape within structures of personal and social
sin, but that does not mean the end of responsibiliry. Nor does God cease
to act redemptively for and with humans, even when they remain captive
to rhose structures and even when God’s intentions seem opaque. Neither
patriarchy nor unjust treatment of outsiders is overturned in Hagar’s
story, but rheir effects are alleviated, and their victims given a future.

7° Prerheim, God and World. p. 1II. 4′ Ibid .. p. 125.
7′ S Dean Mcbride, [r., “Drvme Protocol: Genesis 1.1-2:3 as Prologue to the Pentateuch,” in Brown
and Mcbride (eds.), God Who Creates, p. 40.

7J J. Cheryl Exum, “The Accusing Look: The Abjecrton of Hagar in Arc,” Religion tlnd thr Arh, n
(Z007), pp 143-71.