This sin vitiates all relationships: between animals and human beings (3:15); mothers and children (3:16); husbands and wives (3:16); man and the soil (3:17, 18); man and his work (3:19). Whereas in creation man and woman know harmony and equality, in sin they know alienation and discord.80
Expressing her appreciation for Trible’s work on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, Jennifer Koosed remarked, “Phyllis Trible taught me to read Genesis 2–3 with new eyes, to strip off thousands of years of interpretation, and to look at the text itself, to ask—is this really there or could the passage be interpreted another way? Is it obvious that Eve is a secondary creature, created inferior to Adam, subject to him for all eternity for her disobedience?”81 Indeed, one of Trible’s most lasting contributions to the study of the second creation story has been her insistence that we need to return to a close reading of the text and be aware of how our own assumptions about a story (deeply shaped by individual and communal readings of the text) can skew our results. This issue strikes at the heart of the current theological debates among the orthodox, liberal, postliberal, and postmodern proponents. Is the tradition a help or a hindrance to our reading? Are some interpretations better than others, and if so, by what standard are they measured? Is there a meaning to a text? If so, is that meaning based on the intention of the author?
Trible’s argument does not always fall neatly on either side of many of these questions. First, though clearly critical of many of the traditional readings of the text, Trible develops that critique using the very exegetical tools (e.g., etymology, rhetoric) that have been developed and employed by Jewish and Christian scholars for centuries. In this way, her argument is both revolutionary and traditional. Second, Trible unreservedly holds that some interpretations are better than others. Egalitarian readings of Gen 2–3 are clearly better than patriarchal readings. Reading texts is not like taking a Rorschach test in which we project our own inner world onto the ink blot. Third, on the question of meaning, Trible’s argument can go in two possible directions. In another article published in the same year, she argues, “Depatriarchalizing is not an operation which the exegete performs on the text: It is a hermeneutic operating within Scripture itself. We expose it; we do not impose it.” Here Trible asserts that there is a meaning embedded in the text that exists prior to readers discovering it. However, she continues, “Tradition history teaches that the meaning and function of biblical materials is fluid. As Scripture moves through history, it is appropriated for new settings.”82 This latter comment could be taken in one of two ways: first, multiple legitimate interpretations can emerge over time. The Christian orthodox tradition has long held that a biblical text can have different spiritual meanings or “senses.” For example, the temple can refer to the physical structure in Jerusalem at the time of Jesus (“the literal sense”), the human soul (“the moral sense”), or heaven (“the anagogic sense”). A second reading of Trible’s observation moves in a postmodern direction. The Scripture scholar Dale Martin, for example, argues, “Texts are not containers that hold meaning. The meaning of a text is a result of the interpretive process itself, which is not possible apart from the activities of human interpreters . . . Texts cannot dispense their meaning, and they cannot control their interpretation. These activities are done by human beings.”83
The Revitalization of the Image of the Second Creation Story
While certainly moving in their own unique direction in their readings of Genesis 2–3, Gregory, Bunyan, and Trible share a deep appreciation for the ways in which the human heart can pursue desires that bring disorder to our personal and social lives. Gregory compared that first step away from the good “like a rock, torn asunder from a mountain ridge, which is driven down headlong by its own weight.” The person is “dragged away from his original natural [propensity] to goodness and gravitating with all his weight in the direction of vice . . . and borne away as by a kind of gravitation to the utmost limit of iniquity.”84 Bunyan declares in a similar vein, “Man indeed is the most noble, by creation, of all the creatures in the visual world: but by sin he has made himself the most ignoble.”85 Trible emphasizes the social and interpersonal distortion pictured in Genesis 2–3, yet sees its original vision as a hopeful challenge. “The [second creation story] tells us who we are (creatures of equality and mutuality); it tells us who we have become (creatures of oppression); and so it opens possibilities for change, for a return to our true liberation under God. In other words, the story calls female and male to repent.”86 Just as the seemingly dissimilar theologies of Gregory, Bunyan, and Trible can enrich our appreciation for the many dimensions of the fall, the perspectives of orthodox, liberal, postliberal, and postmodern theologians can revitalize our own thinking about the image of the second creation story.
The Pauline pattern of seeing Adam as a “type” (Rom 5:14) or foreshadowing of Christ pervades orthodox Christian thought. “Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous” (Rom 5:18–19). In his battle with the Pelagians, Augustine asserted the doctrine of original sin using the Adam-Christ typology. Countering the Pelagian claim that human sin persists because humans imitate the bad example of Adam, Augustine argued,
Moreover, if Christ alone is He in whom all men are justified, on the ground that it is not simply the imitation of His example which makes men just, but His grace which regenerates men by the Spirit, then also Adam is the only one in whom all have sinned, on the ground that it is not the mere following of his evil example that makes men sinners, but the penalty which generates through the flesh. Hence the terms “all men” and “all men.” For [those] who are generated through Adam are actually the very same as those who are regenerated through Christ; but yet the language of the apostle is strictly correct, because as none partakes of carnal generation except through Adam, so no one shares in the spiritual except through Christ.87
For Augustine, the concept of a universal flawed human nature (“Adam is the one in whom all have sinned”) undergirds the Christian claim that Christ is the savior of all people. If sin is the common malady afflicting all humans, then Christ is the physician who heals their wounded nature. As orthodox theologians dealt with the myriad of questions stemming from the story of the fall, they followed Augustine’s lead and understood “the fallen state of Adam” to be the equivalent of “the human condition”—the universal, inescapable state of being in which all humans found themselves. As Augustine wrote regarding Adam in City of God, “For, we all existed in that one man, since, taken together, we were the one man who fell into sin . . . Although the specific form by which each of us was to live was not yet created and assigned, our nature was already present in the seed from which we were to spring.”88 Only in this light, orthodox thinkers concluded, can we fully understand ourselves as “dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus” (Rom 6:11).
Reinhold Niebuhr’s criticism of liberalism, especially in what he regarded as its overly optimistic assessment of human potential and its mistaken belief in the inevitable scientific and moral progress of human history, is well-known. He would, then, seem to be an odd choice to represent the contribution of liberalism to the present discussion. His discussion of myths, however, is remarkably liberal in tone.