On a Non-Literal Reading of Genesis

By Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

Pope Francis confessed last week that God must have used the Big Bang and non-specific, biological evolution to create the world and all that we see and interact with as humans. What doesn't seem to dawn on anyone is that this is a radical philosophical problem for Christianity.

Christ could only save through representing all of humanity in His Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection. Even if the much later theory of Penal Substitution were to be understood as the correct interpretation of that which enacts salvation (contrasted with the saving work of Incarnation and Recapitulation that the Early Church taught as a universally approved soteriology), we still must see Christ's role as essentially one of "interchangeable representation." Christ saves by mediation, by propitiation, through sacrifice and unification of our created lives with the uncreated source of life in God. He became man by nature so that we could become what He is by Grace.

This could only be true if man, as a class, was condemned and alienated from God by an original fall, a sinful nature held in common with all other men. As Scripture so aptly states, "In Adam all die..."

Therefore, if we eliminate a literal Adam, we have no fall. If we have no fall, we have no sin; and, therefore, nothing to be saved from! Without special creation, an individual ancestor who fell, receiving a real spiritual curse and was cut off from the eternal life of God, and a literal creation narrative, ultimately, there is no need for (or specific work of) Christ!

This is, truthfully, "Having a form of Godliness but not the power thereof!" The Fathers and Saints of the Roman Church must be pleading before the Throne of Christ, asking for mercy on the Bishop of Rome and the Roman Church, so derailed and distracted from the Gospel that it now seeks to substitute the historical understanding of Salvation in Christ for a postmodern standard of "Niceness."