In the past five posts, I have been discussing Irenaeus of Lyon, an early Church Father from the second century, and his claim that the earliest Church saw Adam and Eve as children who, though created in God’s image, had not yet reached full maturity and God likeness, and whose sin was one of childish disobedience. This was the Traditional Church teaching of Adam and Eve—it was the teaching that Irenaeus received from Polycarp, who received it from John the Apostle, who received it from Jesus Christ himself.
The Figure of Augustine
The reason why such an understanding seems so foreign to Western Protestants is because both Catholicism and Protestantism have been predominantly influenced by Augustine. Now Augustine was a brilliant theologian, and his own story is truly remarkable. It is what he wrote about Adam and Eve and their relationship to the rest of humanity that has dominated Western Christian thinking.
The thing you have to know about Augustine, though, is that before he became a Christian, he was somewhat of a playboy. He’s famous for saying, “Lord, make me chaste, but not just yet!” Without going into a full-blown explanation of the views on sex within the Church in the 4th and 5th centuries, I’ll just summarize Augustine’s take on “the Fall.”
Simply put, Augustine saw Adam and Eve as the first two people who, through their reason, were in full control of their passions. If they did engage in sex before the Fall, Augustine speculated, it would not have involved lust and passion—it would have been controlled by their faculties of reason.
Once they sinned though, they fell from that state of perfection, where they were in full control of their passions, and they thus became slaves to their passions. Sex itself was infused with lust and uncontrollable passion, and the “sign” of this “original sin” was essentially the male erection: he couldn’t control it when it happened…it just happened. Thus, according to Augustine, every time a man and woman have sex, since it obviously involves passion, the child conceived in that sex act would be literally “conceived in sin.” And that is why, according to Augustine, that we are sinful: we are literally “conceived in sin,” during an act between our parents that involved passion, and was thus sinful.
Now when most people talk of “original sin” and “being born sinful,” they simply mean in a very generalized sense that human beings are sinful, period—from the time you are born, you have a tendency to sin. Basically, that’s true. Most people, though, don’t realize precisely what Augustine’s take on “original sin’ really entails.
Given Augustine’s background before he was a Christian, it is understandable why he went this route in his interpretation of Adam and Eve. Unfortunately, though, his interpretation reveals more of a wrestling with his own issues than an accurate understanding of the text. Nevertheless, it has been his take on Genesis 2-3 that has largely dominated the thinking of both Catholicism and Protestantism.
I think we would be much better off reclaiming Irenaeus’ teaching on Genesis 2-3. Like I said in an earlier post, if you want to get back to what the early Church taught, particularly on Genesis 2-3, Irenaeus is the man you should look to.
Irenaeus and Evolution
In a roundabout way, I think Irenaeus’ teaching also has an impact on the current creation/evolution debate. I say “roundabout” because obviously he did not directly comment on the debate. He, like most Christians at the time, probably assumed Adam and Eve were real people, but his teaching on them did not focus on that “historical question” at all. He was combating heresy and interacting with philosophy—he wasn’t addressing modern historical and scientific questions.
Therefore, when young earth creationists like Ken Ham trot out isolated quotes from Christians like Irenaeus, as well as other Christians throughout history before rise of modern science, and claim that they were young earth creationists, they really are being deceptive: the very issue and questions regarding the age of the earth and the historicity of Adam were not really even raised yet. Sure, Irenaeus assumed a historical Adam and Eve, just as he assumed the sun travelled around the earth—it was an ignorant assumption, based on the limited knowledge of the day. When I say “ignorant,” I do not mean it in a derogatory way—it simply is a fact: certain scientific knowledge was not available to them yet.
Yet I think the way Irenaeus understands not only Genesis 2-3, but also God’s purposes in salvation as a whole, can have something to say in regards to the issue of evolution. If Irenaeus is right, and if Genesis 2-3 is the story of God creating a childish-humanity who is given the challenge and free will to choose to obey God and mature into the likeness of God He has created humanity to be, then we can see that salvation itself, by virtue of the indwelling presence of the Spirit, is a process of Spiritual transformation and evolution. The biological theory of evolution, therefore, can serve as yet another example in creation that points to God and His purposes. By doing so, it can give glory to God. C.S. Lewis says pretty much the same thing in Mere Christianity.
Of course, there is an obvious difference between salvation and evolution. On the biological, natural level, evolutionary changes happen all on their own, depending on the environment in which an organism finds itself. The organism really has no say in the matter—it just happens.
With human beings, though, in addition to the mere biological life that we share with the rest of creation, there is something more: the Spiritual life. When it comes to the Spiritual life, it is not just a matter of automatic genetic switches. It is entirely dependent on the choices we make. When faced with the inevitable sufferings in life, we have the choice to adapt, evolve, and be Spiritually transformed by them. Whether or not we are transformed into more heavenly creatures is entirely dependent on our choices. Just as an organism that fails to adapt to its environment soon goes extinct, we, if we fail to trust and obey God through those times of trials, will eventually lose our lives as well.
Simply put, evolution helps us understand that our Christian salvation is not an “I got saved and now I have my get out of hell card all sown up!” It is not a one-time transaction. Christian salvation is a transformative journey of Spiritual evolution, where God, through Christ and the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, slowly re-creates us into the fullness of Christ, into beings who fully reflect God’s image.
Therefore, the biological evolution we see in the natural world acts as a pointer to the reality of our Spiritual evolution by the transformative power of the Holy Spirit. It helps us get a better grasp of eternity and how God’s plan and purposes stretch far beyond what our limited perspective can clearly see—and that necessitates faith. It helps us also to get a better grasp of suffering and tribulations in this world—they too are part of God’s purposes. They either will be the means by which we achieve maturity in Christ, or the instruments of our ultimate destruction—and it all depends on how we react to them. Do we accept them as Christ accepted the cross, or do we let them embitter us and push God away, and thus reject the very source of life that can redeem us?
As Denis Minns has said, for Irenaeus, “The goal of the divine plan is that created earth should be so transformed that, without ceasing to be a creature, it shares in the glory of the uncreated God” (90). (Irenaeus goes into detail on this point in Against Heresies IV.38). Therefore, we as creatures, as long as we follow Christ, find that we “can exist in an infinite process of becoming perfect, drawing incrementally closer to the uncreated without ever ceasing to be a creature because it never ceases to be in a state of Becoming” (90).
If we can reclaim the early Church’s understanding of salvation as an infinite process of becoming more and more like God in Christ—always being God’s creatures, but ever being taken up into the transformative life of the Trinity—I think we would be much better off in our understanding of God, Christ, salvation, ourselves, and creation around us.
Conclusion
Throughout the Middle Ages, Christian theologians and scholars saw theology as the “Queen of the Sciences,” and they saw what we call science as “natural philosophy.” They did not see an insurmountable divide between “science” and “faith.” Rather, they saw everything in nature, particularly what we now call the “natural sciences” as being the “handmaiden to Queen Theology.” Everything that they discovered about the natural world, they would use to help further explain the Christian faith and theology.
During the Enlightenment though, when certain secular thinkers took a philosophical axe and completely cut the cord that bound theology and the natural sciences, everything started to change in the Western worldview. Before, what was discovered about the natural world was used in the service of theology; helping to further explain the wonderful world God had created.
Now, though, in parts of the Evangelical world, we have men like Ken Ham denying the findings of the natural sciences. He actually goes around saying that “our assumptions” must determine how we “interpret the evidence of science.” Instead of allowing the discoveries in the natural sciences to serve as “handmaidens” to Queen Theology, and serve as examples in the natural world that reflect theological teachings, he not only tells people that the natural sciences are the enemy to Christian faith, he completely ignores what the true fundamentals of the Christian faith are. In their place, he has taken Genesis 1-11 and has constructed his own idol of “historical science,” and teaches people that a belief in a young earth and a historical Adam is a fundamental tenant of the Christian faith.
It isn’t. It never has been. We have the writings of the early Church—such a thing has never been claimed.
I think that if Irenaeus were alive today, he would have seen biological evolution as a tremendous teaching tool to help illustrate God’s purposes for His creation and the nature of salvation. One thing, I think, is for certain: if we understand what Irenaeus revealed about the early Church’s view of Adam, the nature of humanity, and salvation really was, we should realize that the modern theory of evolution (again, whether or not you are convinced of it) not only does not pose a threat to the Christian faith, it can actually be seen to reflect on a biological level the theological teaching of Christianity.
Great post.
I love Augustine. He is a brilliant thinker but he was not always right. Given that he himself wrote a book of retractions and suggested that we could read his books in order to see his development, he was humbly aware of his own limitations.
On this topic, I too think Irenaeus offers a better understanding of the early chapters of Genesis. There is a difference between being very good and being perfect. A descent from perfection is an idea imported into the text. The theme seems to be grasping at being god-like rather than growing into the likeness of the LORD as a gift. The consequence is exile and death which are ultimately finding ourselves apart from and outside of god’s presence.
I have been reading Augustine’s Literal Meaning of Genesis and his idea of Literal focuses much more on what the persons of the Trinity are doing than what we would see as scientific or historical questions. This Trinitarian focus makes sense in his post-Nicene context (see Lewis Ayres’ books). Moreover, he frequently admits the difficulty of finding literal meaning and that his interpretations may be incorrect or insufficient.
So, returning to Irenaeus, even the idea that death did not occur for animals before the forbidden fruit was eaten is questionable. It seems to me that Genesis 2-3 is redefiining death in terms of our relationship with the LORD rather than with the simple though seemingly inevitable organ failure and decomposition.
IWP
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Very interesting post! I’m enjoying this line on Irenaeus.
Yes, I think Irenaeus is fascinating, and his take on Adam and Eve makes a whole lot more sense to me. If you read Ian Panth’s comment on this post, it’s good as well. Augustine himself was admittedly very tentative about his speculations. I doubt even he would approve of the way the West has just uncritically accepted what he said.
Searched for Irenaeus VS Augustine, and ended up here. Thanks so much for a great blog post, very helpful in answering my questions.