Imago Dei E (for Evolution)

In the opening post on the current thread, one of the questions I raised was how evolutionary theory, if accurate in any sense, affects what we believe about humans being created in God’s image. Does it affect it at all? Though this is not uncommon, I was raised within a community whose tradition essentially said you can only believe in either creation or evolution and not both. Furthermore, attached to the idea of creation was the notion that Genesis 1-11 provide a journalistic account with such scientific accuracy that the only way to understand it is that the creation happened in six concurrent 24-hour periods and that the earth is only a few thousand years old. To deny any of this or that there may even be some other explanation would mark someone at best a ‘liberal’ and at worst a ‘non-Christian’ (not that the two labels were that distinct from those who use them in a derogatory manner). Questions about the origin of Cain’s wife were either ignored, given an answer not in the text like ‘God created her separate from Adam and Eve,’ or something more troubling…that she (and many others) were earlier children or descendants somehow of Adam and Eve and had moved away to form their own societies.

It was in my sophomore year of college at Murray State University where I first came across someone who emphatically believed in evolution and God. He was my Earth Science professor and told the class on the first day that he was a Christian (a Lutheran, he said, and the ‘lay leader’ of sorts for his congregation) and that he did not see believing in creation and evolution as incompatible. I didn’t know what to do with this, so I brushed it aside, which was easy since the majority of the class was studying rocks, climate, and astronomy, among other things. Granted studying these things involves issues of the age of the earth, etc. but I was able to not rely heavily on what was being said since it negated Genesis anyway. My mind was saying, ‘I know this is what science textbooks say, but Genesis says this…’

Soon after, I transferred to Asbury College, where surely classes in the Old Testament would remind me of the importance of defying evolution and all of its propaganda by the scientific community. Much to my surprise in the opening sessions of Intro to Old Testament when covering Genesis, the professor starts talking about the idea that not only is the earth probably millions or billions of years old, but that evolution was/is God’s way of creating the world. He even put it this way: ‘The Church is going to have to come to terms with Darwin like she did with Galileo and Copernicus.’ What I began to realize that it is not Genesis that has a problem with evolution, but my interpretation of Genesis that had the problem with it. Intricately linked with this is the issue of what exactly is Scripture? I had heard (and continue to hear) people speak of believing in evolution is putting authority of science (or the scientific community) over Scripture. This is not the case; rather it is reading Scripture for what it is and not reading it for what it is not (i.e., it is not a scientific textbook, not a historical account in terms of modern journalistic expectations, etc.; rather, it is the revelation of God to humanity).

In both the OT intro class in college and in seminary, the emphasis of the rhythm (or poetry) of Genesis 1 came to the forefront as the primary aspect of Gen. 1. Day 1 corresponds to 4; 2 to 5; 3 to 6. And furthermore, Days 1-3 are about the creation of the realms, Days 4-6 are about ‘adornment.’ My seminary professor called it a ‘liturgical week’ rather than a ‘literal week.’ I like that…it centers the creation story in worship, whose climax is in the Sabbath…seen not only in Genesis 1, but also as the reasoning of the 4th commandment of Exodus 20 (this chapter will show up again in a later post). He also brought out another significant theme…creation ‘responds.’ Read it again…God commands the creation to produce the things that will adorn it and the creation responds, almost in a personal sense. While I wouldn’t want to say the author of Genesis had evolution in mind, this notion seems to only make belief in creation and evolution more compatible.

Now what does this have to do with the Imago Dei, you ask? If evolutionary theory is at least partially true, then it is difficult to believe in a literally historical couple named ‘Adam and Eve’ as the first of the human species. One way of diffusing this is to recognize the difference between Genesis 1 and 2: they are two creation stories (perhaps from two different authors or traditions) that may not need to be harmonized. Since humanity in Gen. 1 is about being made in the ‘image of God,’ it may refer more directly to all humanity since ‘Adam and Eve’ are not mentioned in the first account.

Another way of accommodating evolutionary theory with the Imago Dei is to see Adam and Eve as representative theological symbols of humanity’s origins and not as a literally historical couple with those names. Here is an article I found helpful for bringing evolution and the ‘image of God’ together and the argument seems to find its potency in these lines: "That God created human beings (Gen. 1:27; Ps. 100:3) does not imply instantaneous action. God's creation of humanity encompasses past primate history, the present, and whatever is to come. The sweep of human evolution illustrates how God's work of creation is a continuing relationship of dependence between the world and God, a continuing act of God's will, an eternal covenant relationship" (Finlay 16-17). And accepting the notion of an evolving human species can still leave a place for the figure of Adam as a historical reference, as Robin Collins argues. He suggests that "Adam" can be seen as representing in a symbolic way the "father" of the "first group of evolving hominids who gained moral and spiritual awareness" (Collins 486; without, I would suggest, insisting that one locate this awareness in a specific population, time and place). Genesis itself implies that humanity and all the other living beings are made of the same stuff and given the same breath of life (Gen. 2:7, 9, 19, cf. Eccl. 3:19-21; Miller 1993), and modern science has shown that we share the same DNA and other molecules with virtually all living things (Finlay). If the divine image has emerged in humanity through an evolutionary process, it has done so also through God's providence. It does not denigrate either God or humanity to hold that God's creative evolutionary processes brought humanity to a point where it would be capable of expressing those qualities that both Scripture and theology have associated with the "image of God."