A reader offers three questions about the Bible that we will treat in three different posts today. Here we deal with the first one.
He writes:
I have follwed your blog for the past couple of months with interest. Recently, it occurred to me that you might be able to steer me in the right direction on a few questions about the Catholic faith. You should know that I graduated from one of those hyper-orthodox (my term) colleges (Christendom), so I guess I already have a few good theology courses under my belt. Oh yeah, I got a doctorate in philosophy as well. But I don’t know diddly about the Old Testament, and at least a couple of things going on there bug me. They are listed in #1 & 2 below:
1. What if science offers evidence that seems to disprove the story of Noah and/or Adam ?
The Church teaches that the narrative of Gen 1-3 reflects real historical events but also is written in a stylized manner that incorporates symbolic elements. Thus the Catechism of the Catholic Church states:
337 God himself created the visible world in all its richness, diversity
and order. Scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a
succession of six days of divine "work", concluded by the "rest" of the
seventh day.390
The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a
primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of
man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of
human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first
parents.
The Church does not have a similar contemporary statement on the historicity of the Flood narrative (Gen. 6-9), but it would likely apply the same considerations to it that are applied above to Genesis 1 and 3. In other words: The account should be taken to reflect actual history but to be written in a stylized manner that may incorporates symbolic elements.
With this approach there is considerable latitude of how to understand the accounts. They might contain many historical elements and few symbolic ones or they might be primarily a literary construct built around a core historic nucleus. It is up to the individual interpreter to decide.
In making that determination–to the extent that making a precise determination is necessary–the interpreter would need to draw on all the resources available to him, including the text itself, knowledge of the biblical languages, knowledge of biblical modes of writing (including comparisons to other, non-biblical ancient texts), the understanding of the Church Fathers, subsequent interpreters, and science.
To the extent that science offers evidence that particular elements of the early Genesis narratives were are non-historical, that pushes the interpreter in the direction of viewing more elements of these narratives as symbolic. The Church would hold that some kind of historical nucleus remains, but that is consistent with saying that large amounts of the text are symbolic.
Now, short of the invention of a time machine or at least a form of remote temporal viewing, I know of no evidence that science could offer that would outright proof that particular elements in these narratives are symbolic, but as the amount of scientific evidence offered increases, the more reasonable it is for an interpreter to view particular elements as symbolic.
Hypothetically (and I am not advocating this), an interpreter might conclude that Adam and Eve represent the early human community as a whole. Pius XII strongly discouraged this interpretation in his enecyclical Humani Generis, but did not altogether preclude the possibility that the Magisterium might be open to it in the future, and some members of the Magisterium (such as the German bishops’ conference) have been explicitly open to it in recent years.
Simiarly, one might conclude that the Flood narrative does not deal with a global flood and that Genesis’ language saying that the flood covered the whole of the land is meant more restrictively–e.g., the land with which Scripture is concerned–though there certainly were numerous and at times catastrophic floods in this region and science cannot exclude the idea that one of these serves as the historical nucleus around which the biblical Flood narrative is built.
