What does the Bible tell us about our first parents?
And how can we put that together with the discoveries of contemporary science about
our ancestry? In this video and the next, we’ll be tackling these important questions.
We first read about Adam and Eve in chapter 2 of the book of Genesis.
This is the second creation account in Genesis, following immediately after
the rather different sequence of six days recounted by Genesis chapter 1.
As we have discussed in earlier videos, these texts were probably composed by
different human authors, and at a later point were redacted to form a single book.
These human authors and editors were acting under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and we hold
that the sacred text that has come down to us is a part of divine revelation. It is the Word of God,
which infallibly communicates to us the truths pertaining to human salvation.
The first thing that we should notice is that these texts from Genesis are not trying to
transmit to us a scientific or precise historical account of creation or of human origins.
Indeed, if they were trying to do that, we would have to say that the final editor of Genesis did
quite a poor job, since the text gives us two different chronologies side-by-side.
And that should tell us something: namely, that Genesis is revealing something of
a different order. As the Word of God, it communicates profound truths, but we should not
expect it to yield modern historical or scientific answers to questions it wasn't even addressing.
So if we were to ask: when did our first ancestors live?
Or did they have non-rational hominid biological ancestors themselves? -- we
would be asking questions that Genesis does not even attempt to answer.
Before going further, however, it might be helpful to identify what the text is telling
us. Now there is no way that this short video could set forth even a fraction of the rich
and deep revelation contained in Genesis, but we can at least identify a few capital points.
First of all, God is revealing something about himself: he is the transcendent creator of all
things, of the whole cosmos, which he brought forth by his word, and he found to be good.
Next, Genesis is telling us something about man. God included human beings in his divine plan,
creating them as the pinnacle of the visible and material creation. We have material bodies,
made up from the dust of the earth – and this makes us unlike angels, who are pure spirits.
But in another sense, we have a dimension to our being that does not come from below, from earth:
God made us in his image and likeness. As St. Thomas Aquinas would later explain,
human beings are made in God’s image above all because God gave us spiritual souls,
that is, he gave us minds with a capacity to know and to love. We are the material creatures,
special animals endowed with reason, who are capable of spiritual acts – and thus of entering
into a personal relationship with God himself, transcending what any mere animal is able to do.
Genesis also tells us that since he is in the image and likeness of God,
God entrusted the earth to man, giving him dominion over it
and all the other animals and plants, so that human beings would have a share
in God’s own providential governance – that is, God grants to the human creature a special role
as God’s steward over creation, a steward who exists in profound communion with God.
This brings us to another central truth we find in Genesis:
human beings were created in friendship with God. We’ll have more to say on this original grace or
original justice in a later video. But for now, it’s enough to point out that, in the beginning,
God placed man in what Genesis depicts as a harmonious garden. Man was first created in a
state of true happiness and harmony with God, and therefore with the rest of the things God created.
Yet another category of truths we learn from Genesis concerns the relations between man and
woman, husband and wife, named by the text Adam and Eve. We hear that it was not good
for the man to be alone: Human beings are not meant to be solitary creatures.
Rather, God made us male and female, he made us with a divinely-willed complementarity.
Both man and woman are fully human, fully in the image and likeness of God,
sharing the same dignity, but as compliments and companions to each other. As Adam exclaims
when he sees Eve for the first time: This one at last is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.
Genesis immediately goes on to connect this to the truth about marriage, which God intended in
his original plan to be an indissoluble union between a man and a woman that gives rise to
children and hence to the whole human family. So the family, too, is a part of God's original plan.
It is in the context of this loving and permanent union between man and woman
that new life is intended by God to come into the world. That original family, that first family,
was supposed to be in an ongoing relationship of perfect communion and friendship with God.
So that their new offspring would also be born into this marvelous communion.
It is at this point that Genesis tells us that something went very wrong – and this is the
next key truth that the book of Genesis reveals. Despite having been created in grace, our first
parents disobeyed God and fell from his grace – and as a result, there followed the catastrophic
consequences of exile and they become prone to illness, suffering, and death. Having disrupted
their harmony with God, they experience disorder within themselves and no longer live in harmony
with the rest of creation or with each other. And they transmit this disorder to their descendants.
Their children are not born into the garden but instead inherit a fallen human nature.
Of course, there's much more that we could say.
But this at least gives a very brief sketch of the profound truths revealed in the book of Genesis.
It doesn't purport to answer scientific or historical questions,
but in our next video, we’ll take up how to understand recent scientific investigations
of human origins in light of the important theological truths revealed by the Bible.
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