Is a literal Adam necessary for Catholics?

The document you need is the Papal encyclical of Pius XII, Humani Generis (1950). The third part of the encyclical contains a paragraph about polygenism, which excludes the idea of “true men” who did not take their origin from Adam as the first parent of all. This teaching has never been revoked by the successors of Pius. It doesn’t require a literal serpent or a literal tree of life or knowledge, but it does insist on a single original human couple. Benedict would have had to consciously and explicitly overrule that teaching of the encyclical for it to cease to be Catholic teaching, and he didn’t do that in the passage you quote, or anywhere else. No time to go into more detail now, but this should be enough to enable you to find it.

1 Like

Sorry to gatecrash the discussion with an entirely non-Catholic comment… but after all, neither of you is Catholic either. But I’ve just posted a piece on the historical Adam that seems relevant to the theme, if not particularly to Benedict etc.

The basic theme is, “How pervasive does Adam have to be in Scripture before his non-existence becomes a problem?”

2 Likes

Nice article @jongarvey

But who came first? Adam or Jesus? Did Paul base his interpretation of the Adam story off of his experience with Christ or off his interpretation of Adam which he had as a former Christ persecutor? Was he looking for someone to save him because Adam put us in a mess or did he meet his Savior and realize he needed to be saved? Who came first for Paul? Christ, or Adam? Our theology of sin is only made because we have met the healer of sin, not because we read and understood Genesis 3 before the advent of Christ.

And can you show us a statement from McKnight where he says that Paul considered Adam’s existence an important part of the gospel, but that this doesn’t matter?

As far as Benedict,

“At the centre of the scene it is not so much Adam, with the consequences of his sin for humanity, who is found as much as it is Jesus Christ and the grace which was poured out on humanity in abundance through him.”

Doesn’t prove anything, but an interesting statement.

And @Eddie,

I’ll look at Pius’s statement soon.

Well, of course, the solution is always greater than the problem, especially when the solution is God the Son, the lamb slain from the creation of the world. That’s an entirely different matter from questioning the historicity of the problem.

But Paul’s issue, before the Damascus road, was living committedly within Israel’s narrative, and sharing its hopes, without fully appreciating where he stood with God and, more importantly, that Jesus was the centre of those hopes. He was within the right story, but in the wrong character and with lack of clarity on the plotline. He returned from Arabia without any diminution of his commitment to the story, as his letters demonstrate.

To separate Paul from Israel (or Jesus from Israel, for that matter) is to create a false dichotomy. Remember that Jesus taught the women from Samaria that “salvation is from the Jews”, clearly referencing not only himself happening to be Jewish, but himself in relation to the revelation in history. Likewise, Paul before the court reminded his accusers that it was for the hope of Israel he stood before them. I could multiply instances affirming the centrality of Israel’s hope, or consolation, or restoration, in the New Testament teaching even after the gentile inclusion - after which it’s simply applied to an enlarged Israel. It’s no coincidence that the Book of Revelation ends in Edenic and temple imagery.

The issue I address in the Hump post is that Adam - both his intended role and his failure - is a more defining part of that narrative than is usually realised. Certainly many of the Fathers - Irenaeus springs to mind as the first - had such an idea clearly in mind.

1 Like

@Eddie

This is what I was referring to from Catholic Apologist Jimmy Akin:

“Hypothetically (and I am not advocating this), an interpreter might conclude that Adam and Eve represent the early human community as a whole. Pius XII strongly discouraged this interpretation in his enecyclical Humani Generis, but did not altogether preclude the possibility that the Magisterium might be open to it in the future, and some members of the Magisterium (such as the German bishops’ conference) have been explicitly open to it in recent years.”

I think his point is that Pius said “Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin…”

http://jimmyakin.com/2005/08/tough_bible_que.html

This implies that it is left open for a Catholic to SHOW how one could hold such teachings. But I guess if I were Catholic, it would give me great pause before embracing such a doctrine. Eastern Orthodox don’t have the same problem because although we have an understanding of original sin, it is (ironically) not as genetically based as was Augustine’s. As, or IF Catholics moves closer to the Orthodox view, seeing Adam and Eve represent the first sinful human acts will probably be much more plausible.

But yeah…if I were Catholic, I would probably feel pretty weird advocating for polygenism. I think you win. :wink:

This is not polygenesis. What is Polygenesis?

Thanks! Good to know.

OK, I kinda have to say it now, either Adam and Eve are just a story to represent humanity as a whole, and the fall from grace, or, their names weren’t Adam and Eve.

You gotta admit, it’s suspicious how first humans’ names were Humanity and Mother in Hebrew.

2 Likes

@Djordje this is an entertaininly one-way argument. Have you ever thought of understanding it in the other direction? If you can’t even identify the other reading, how could you know which one is correct?

1 Like

What do you mean?

Maybe Adam was named Adam, but our biological kind became Adams as it fell into the lineage of Adam. His name becomes synonymous with mankind as his lineage becomes all of us.

1 Like

You mean, word ‘Adam’ became a word for ‘humanity’ because of Adam?

If so, it’s possible.

1 Like

That’s right. Another way of reading it that also makes perfect sense. Which one is right? Can’t say from this alone, but it certainly doesn’t make a coherent case against a historical Adam.

1 Like

Yeah, I sometimes fail to consider other possibilities.

2 Likes

@Djordje
Or a variant on that: “adam” is a particularly semitic word for “man”, with apparent etymological links to “red”, or “red soil”. So Adam, the man associated with (or even made from, taking that verse literally) the red soil, becomes the people of Adam, the people of the red soil, and the word is later generalised by that people as a word for mankind. And so the word adam either becomes Hebrew as the language develops, or is translated into Hebrew from whatever the original tongue.

Linguistically, the same process could be true for Eve - but our narrative implies that this couple were very well aware of their special calling and status, and so a husband might very well have given his wife a prophetically significant name.

There are many precedents - many tribes refer to themselves (alone) as “people” - in Britain, “Folk” was the self-designation of the Angles, but has now become a common noun for … folk.

2 Likes

Can you enumerate some examples please?

1 Like

A few in here.

1 Like

I disagree with this. I don’t think that an encyclical is automatically de facto Catholic teaching that has to be explicitly refuted for it to be superseded. Of course this depends on how one defines “Catholic teaching”.

This teaching (Humani Generis) is not binding at all to Catholics. Although coming from the office of the pope, an encyclical is not infallible.

Absolutely not. The assumption and immaculate conception are dogmas that are defined to be infallible, unlike Humani Generis.

In general, encyclicals are not infallible. This might be confusing, as there is one instance in which a teaching that is explicitly in an encyclical is considered infallible: the immorality of murder, directly willed abortion, and euthanasia in Evangelium vitae. However, this one instance is actually not the pope exercising his papal infallibility (which, as I said, is not done in encyclicals), but the exercising of the infallibility of the Universal and Ordinary Magisterium. In other words, PJPII was just stating in an encyclical a doctrine that has been taught infallibly throughout Church history, and not exercising his papal infallibility to define an infallible statement.

1 Like

@jongarvey

Forgive me, I’ll have to retrieve my name to post on your blog.

Could you provide some support for your statement about McKnight? I see a lot “McKnight and Venema say this crazy thing about Adam,” from several people, but could you give a quote?

I’ve read some of McKnight’s chapters in AATG very closely and was honestly dissapointed because I felt he was SO careful, he ended up hardly saying anything about Adam. I am much more satisfied with Enns’ book because he says what he thinks and defends a position.

1 Like

@Mark

I don’t have the book to hand, but this quote from McKnight on BioLogos seems to summarise his view of the matter.

What I am convinced of is that the Adam of Genesis 1-4 is a theological, moral Adam, a literary Adam, a figure in a text who tells the truth of human beings… And I am also convinced that the Adam of Genesis became the First Person as Hebrews, Israelites and Jews read the Bible. The interpretive tradition grew and Paul was part of it.