Most people who opened the first door on their Advent calendar today will have found a picture or a piece of chocolate. But at St Helen’s Church there’s a different kind of calendar.
Each day, a new figure is added to the Jesse Tree, tracing the family line from Adam all the way to Jesus.
Today, Monday 1st December, it began with Adam and Eve — complete with serpent and apple. As the first people in the biblical story, they mark the beginning of humanity and the start of the journey that the Jesse Tree will follow through Advent.
do most religious people still believe in the factual reality of adam and eve?
i thought the new testament was meant to pretty much replace the old?
I believe in the factual reality of Adam ad Eve. The New Testament talks of a fulfilment of the Old, rather than a replacement. Adam is in fact referred to in several books of the New Testament as a factual reality.
Most Christian scholars would today say that the early chapters of the Book of Genesis, including the Adam and Eve narratives, are the type of writing known as ‘mythopoeic’; that is, it conveys truths through stories which have profound meaning. This is a genre we’re not used to in modern Western thought – these ancient texts use language and concepts we aren’t familiar with. So we need the fruits of scriptural research to understand them (though it’s worth adding that early Christian writers also understood that these stories were to be read in symbolic or allegorical ways.)
So, to put it briefly, Christians do not need to read the Adam and Eve story literally; nor do they need to reject it as ‘untrue’. These texts convey that humans are the climax of God’s creation (through evolution, as we would understand it today) and that God offered them his friendship and love, but people turned away from God and rejected his laws of goodness and justice. But the Book of Genesis also shows, through its stories, that God continued to reach out to humanity; and later biblical writings trace the long centuries of what scholars call ‘salvation history’, climaxing in Jesus Christ who was a real historical person and whom Christians thus see as the ‘new Adam’, the new beginning or model for humanity, whose birth we celebrate as Christmas.
Sorry for a long reply, but you did ask!
no,
very interesting and non ranty, refreshing.