The Incoherence of a ‘Mythological’ Genesis

In the years since the Second Vatican Council, when the Church was made to look amenable to the world at large, we have seen innumerable attempts to reconcile the inerrancy of Scripture with the presumed evidence of a Darwinian history. Priests, bishops, and popes have tried to leave open the possibility of a divinely-guided method of evolution, believing—on false grounds—that the evidence for evolution rested on solid foundation, and therefore had to be understood in light of the creation account given in the first and second chapters of Genesis.

The impossibility of theistic evolution is covered at length in Stephen Meyer’s work, and in particular a book he edited together with J.P. Moreland entitled, appropriately, Theistic Evolution. Philosophically, the problems of rectifying Darwinian models with the existence of God end up lapsing into absurd territory, as Fr. Chad Ripperger points out in The Metaphysics of Evolution. We aren’t going to focus on that for the time being, so much as what attempts to reconcile it have done to understanding the Biblical creation account.

Theistic evolutionists have two questions they have to answer: is it likely that God intervened in the development of creatures so as to change their fundamental natures constantly over millions of years, and is there evidence of these changes? The answer to both of these is no, but that doesn’t stop them from asking—after all, if they didn’t theistic evolutionists would have to ask the real question: how is it possible for created entities to have their natures changed in the first place? “God does it” seems to be the answer, but the problem with just attributing this to God should be obvious to anyone who’s spent five minutes arguing with an atheist.

But theistic evolution has been, for the most part, an attempt to bridge the divide between the secular cosmology and the Catholic’s, usually undertaken by those oblivious to toxicity of secular ideologies. In trying to make it work, however, Biblical interpretation has to be bent in order to fit what the evolutionary models—and implied cosmologies—present as the truth, and often at extreme peril to a coherent understanding of Genesis. Undermining this inevitably leads to an undermining of the Faith itself, or at least some integral components of it, as a result of rendering references to Genesis fantastical or unreal. The Faith has to rest on a vague spiritualism and pseudo-psychological foundation of archetypes rather than the more concrete understanding of history, providence, and demonstrable morality.

Inerrancy

You don’t have to be a Protestant in order to take the words of Scripture seriously. In fact, as Catholics, denying the dogma of Biblical inerrancy places you outside of the Church. Because Scripture is without error, we can assume certain things about the nature of the Genesis account. Evolutionists, seeking some sort of compromise with the secular world, try to attribute to Genesis a purely mythological character. “It’s not that it didn’t really happen,” they say, “it’s just that Genesis isn’t an historical text.”

Bishop Robert Barron, well-known Catholic evangelist, makes just such a point in this video:

You’ve got to be sensitive to genre. What kind of text are we dealing with? I deal with this all the time. It would be a mistake to look at Moby Dick and expect it to be 19^th century literature. It would be a mistake to look at T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and expect it to be a spy novel. You have to know what kind of text you’re dealing with.

So, what is Genesis?

So, what is Genesis, then? With such a preface, we can presume the unfortunate direction the good Bishop is going here. “Whatever is going on in the Bible,” he continues, “is not what we mean by modern science.” And in this, he’s absolutely correct—but not necessarily in the way he expounds on this. “So what is it?” he asks.

I would call it theology, mysticism, spirituality. It’s a theological reflection on the origin of all things.

On this, he’s not necessarily wrong. But at the same time, he’s not telling the whole story, either. In fairness, Bishop Barron is referring specifically to the first chapter of Genesis, which even the Church Fathers and medieval theologians had to admit was complicated in terms of deriving a sense of historical accuracy. Nonetheless, they still asserted that some sort of historical sense was there.

But if you don’t believe that, then at what point does Genesis start reflecting history? At what point does it cease to be a purely (in his interpretation) abstract exercise in mysticism or spirituality? In chapter three? Seven? Twelve? The Abraham cycle is commonly attested to be more or less historically “accurate” even by secular scholars, at least in the sense that he was a real person who lived and traveled across many identified places that have been located today. We know that Genesis has “real history” in it, in the sense of history that secular scholarship and archaeology can trace, and claimants who propose Genesis to be “mythological” in character admit this. They just seem to believe that the book suddenly changes genre in chapter twelve. Or that the genre is still not an historical one, despite the obviousness of the text.

Part of this confusion stems from two places. The obvious source is the incursion of Darwinism into nearly every sphere of modern study, and the use of Darwinism to establish a competing and contrary worldview to that of Catholicism. This incongruity between what Scripture seems to plainly say and what the secular authorities teach has made it difficult to hold onto Biblical creation claims. But these alone, however, can’t explain the willingness to attack Scriptural interpretation so broadly. For that, something of distinctly Protestant bent is necessary: enter the documentary hypothesis.

If you’ve ever read modern Scriptural commentary or scholarship that starts talking about the ‘various writers of the Pentateuch’, or says something to effect of rejecting the traditional Mosaic authorship of the Torah, then you’re already somewhat familiar with the documentary hypothesis. I’ll let John Van Seters, a contemporary and leading academic in the field, explain it himself:

A particular text-unit or larger ‘source’ is the work of a single author only if it manifests a fairly high degree of consistency. Blatant contradiction, therefore, suggests that a second hand is at work. This is especially true if the work is wholly the invention of the author. If the author is using certain traditions or sources for his/her composition, he/she may not be able to eliminate all the differences between them. But the very idea of authorship demands consistency. In like fashion, an author is required to be coherent so that his/her thoughts and ideas are presented in such a way that one can follow what is being presented. Radical breaks in the chain of presentation, even if they do not contradict what has gone before, suggest the intervention of another hand. A unified work must also be grammatically and structurally cohesive, although the application of any principles of cohesiveness has often lacked rigor.¹

The silliness here is somewhat self-evident, but the monumental size of modernity’s ego is even more apparent. The presumption is, because Scripture—and in particular, for our purposes, Genesis—has slightly peculiar structures of repetition, variance in titles for God, and (rarely) different grammar in places, it can be safely presumed that there were actually multiple authors to the book. Note how this is different from presuming multiple scribes, although in practice it is the same as suggesting multiple traditions. Left unasked, of course, is why the ancient compiler of Genesis would have bothered to stitch together the book with such slipshod a method that left all the seams showing. This gets especially awkward to ask the more one dives into the attempt at these academics to date the various writers to certain periods in antiquity, especially since there’s virtually no agreement on that within the field today.

The documentary hypothesis is relevant because of how it attacks Scriptural inerrancy. If Moses didn’t really author the Pentateuch—by which we mean, come up with its original tradition, at the very least—then we don’t actually know who did, and it’s possible that there are multiple different sources for it. These sources could come from different periods in history, different regions around the Middle East, from different languages and different cultures. From this suggestion, it’s hardly a leap to call into question the work of the Holy Spirit in the inspired author’s efforts—or whether He was there at all.

While this effectively reduces Scripture to the status of being just some other Ancient Near-Eastern mythological text—something that even a plain reading and comparative study of it denies—it also undermines the entire essence of Church authority. If Genesis can’t be trusted as a legitimate book of the Bible, by which we mean that it may carry objective falsehoods about the nature of reality, of man, of God, of our relationship with the world and with Him, then there’s no reason to question the entire catalogue of the canon, including the New Testament. And while Christianity is more than the Book, it’s hard to imagine two thousand years of Magisterium using a false narrative as an integral part of its foundation.

Not all attacks on the first chapters of Genesis take the form of documentary hypothesis, however, but we can trace much of them back to traditions stemming from the same sort of ideology. A mythologization of Adam, Eve and the Fall is entirely too common by modern evangelists to appeal to secular humanists and atheist-agnostics. Even priests, worried that asserting the historical realities of Adam or Eve may alienate poorly-catechized lay Catholics from their pews, are too willing to accept or even embrace an alternative Darwinian narrative.

A Literal Sense of Genesis

What’s actually being said with regards to interpreting Genesis literally, or its literal sense? Biblical interpretation rather famously has several senses of interpretation, usually broken down as the literal, allegorical or spiritual, moral, and typological. These senses are not independent of each other, however, and interpreting Scripture through one of them requires an understanding of all of them with respect to each other. What this means is that if we are to interpret something typologically, this interpretation cannot work at the expense of another sense of the event, such as its moral or literal aspects.

As mentioned before, there’s a willingness of modern scholarship to interpret the first chapters of Genesis purely allegorically, or in a certain sense, mythologically. The allegorical sense of Scripture concerns its relevance to its readers spiritually, using a method not that unfamiliar to those familiar with Carl Jung’s exegeses of ancient myths and archetypes. The difference, however, is that the allegorical sense of Scripture can only be true when it’s founded upon solid literal interpretation—something that, as we saw above, is not exactly at the top most modern scholars’ priorities.

So what is Genesis’ literal sense? Put simply: it is whatever the divinely-inspired author of Genesis was trying to convey. So we have now the question: was the author of Genesis trying to convey historical truths in the first eleven chapters of Genesis alongside the spiritual, metaphysical, moral, and theological truths found there? Nearly every theologian up until the eighteenth century would have replied with: “yes, of course.” We know this because the cycles in Genesis build upon each other, and that the whole book develops as a series of histories—of creation, of mankind, of nations, and finally, of families and clans—until it arrives at the critical point in history when Moses is born.

Moses has traditionally been attributed with being the author, in a certain sense, of the Pentateuch. While it’s unlikely that he himself was able to write all of it down considering the circumstances, the earliest annals of the Pentateuch no doubt existed very soon after the settling of Israel by the ancient Hebrews. These chronicles were almost certainly, with the divine guidance of the Holy Ghost, derived from knowledge Moses had relayed over his life. While this is all supposition, it’s hardly without foundation.

That said, it’s also important to note how close in proximity Moses was to the patriarchs of antediluvian Genesis. When tracking family history, it’s most beneficial to go to the oldest living relative, and while it’s not known for sure, it’s certainly a reasonable expectation to hold that a tribe or clan would maintain its histories orally through this method. As the life spans of men decreased dramatically after the Flood, more history could be accumulated closer to their sources the farther back in the lineage you went.

This page explains it rather succinctly. Moses was, in a certain sense, the sixth patriarch from Adam, insofar as the oral histories he’d have had access to went back through at least six people. It’s possible—and perhaps even likely, given the providential nature of history—that it was only those six people, but it’s impossible to say for sure. The point is that the history of mankind’s early days was not as far removed from Moses’ life as is sometimes presumed.

Is it so unbelievable that the traditional take on this matter is so unrealistic, that the Mosaic authorship is, essentially, correct? Moses had a direct relationship with God, the likes of which would not be seen again on Earth until Apostolic times.

And let’s not forget that that Our Lord cites the life of Noah directly in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. St. Luke traces His lineage all the way back to Adam. St. Paul references Adam extensively in the New Testament, particularly in Romans. The sacrifice of Abel is even referred to in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Within Scripture and within tradition, Genesis does not exist within some historical vacuum of poetry or vague spiritualism. It is tied into the Bible in ways most other books aren’t due to its unique nature and content. It can’t just be dismissed.

Lack of Imagination

There are those interpreters of Genesis that cling to a more Jungian approach—those who take after Bishop Barron, for instance, but extend their presumptions a bit further than he does—who insist that the Adam cycle, and even the Flood cycle, are both at root archetypes of a creation process at work in every person’s consciousness. Naturally, this requires some explaining as to what, then, the Fall was, since the redemption made by Christ blurs into an indistinguishable and vague haze. And this is a problem not just theologically, as that would render the entire religion moot, but also just from the basis of common sense; the physical reality of Christ’s death is an historical fact so well-established that even secular historians recognize both the crucifixion and the resurrection.

For such interpretations, the excruciating complexity of abstract psychological considerations forms a smokescreen around what can actually be believed about the Genesis narrative, and worse still, about what can be believed about the actual beginning of everything. The latter issue is sidelined to the dustbins of irrelevancy, as rather than providing a background or context for our actions and our places in the world, a primarily psychological-mythological interpretation attempts to cram all of human history into the myopic box of a single human mind. This results in platitudes like, “we are all Adam, we all Fell, we all lost Eden, we all murdered Abel”: all humanistic gibberish fitting for a secular new age guru, but lacking the substance and precision of moral relevancy.

In a certain sense, we are all Adam in that what we are was found in him prior to the Fall; in another sense, we are not all Adam, as it was Adam, himself, who sinned first, who was himself exiled from Paradise, and who himself fathered all of mankind. In a certain sense, we all have our own “Falls”, when we reach the age of reason and commit our first sins; in another sense, we do not experience a second Fall that compares to the radical damaging to man’s character and the natural order as that very first disobedience. In a certain sense, we all lose Eden; in another, we don’t. Likewise with Abel. You get the idea. Of course it is possible to find relevant interpretations by reading Scripture by its moral sense, but to limit analysis to this single dimension of Scripture both limits the fullness of what Scripture offers as much as it is counter-intuitive based on what is actually written.

However, when a literal sense is suggested, some such critics will level claims our lacking imagination. “You just can’t imagine taking anything in Genesis other than literally,” might be such an accusation. This is, of course, wildly false, as anyone familiar with what any of the Church Fathers had to say about Genesis renders such a statement so stupid as to hardly deserve rebuttal. Nonetheless, modernity is plagued by the pride of its own ignorance.

By asserting a the presence of legitimate, historical truths in early Genesis narratives, one has to assert the existence of a young Earth, of unimaginably long-lived human beings, of a global cataclysm so fierce as to make an extinction-level asteroid impact look meager in comparison, and of the entire history of the planet being ordered differently than what any secular textbook asserts. Far from being less imaginative, such assertions require an imagination great enough to be considered insane by those adhering to a Darwinist or Evolutionist model of the world. Embracing this puts you firmly outside the scope of acceptable modern thought.

What a creationist finds out, upon digging into the various sciences and histories of Darwinian thought, is that the ideology behind what is being taught is, in almost every case, given greater priority than what can be substantiated. Those seeking to mythologize Genesis in order to make it compatible with the secular world are bending their interpretations of Scripture in order to adhere to ideology. They’re either letting themselves be bamboozled or, worse, doing the bamboozling themselves.

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1Seters, John Van, The Pentateuch: A Social-Science Commentary, 2nd ed. (New York: Bloomsbury, 1999), 12.