Getting God out of the box...

So the expression "Don't put God in a box" often comes too late, God is already in a box, and it takes a while for us to get our heads around a God that isn't what we thought he was.  The first place we go to is the Bible - is this possible?  Would God really have done this? Why was it done this way?  For many life events, a "reworking" of God is really a reworking of our understanding of Him, his Bible and our interpretations.

For the first few Chapters of Genesis this can be tough.  First, I need to go back to a general, lay-person understanding of the Bible.  Without knowing it, Christians constantly weigh scripture and declare it literal or figurative.  In the Old Testament (OT), people didn't know about round-spherical earths that orbited the Sun, so references to corners of the earth, and the sun going around the earth were what ancient people observed, not literal, scientific explanations of space, just don't tell the Church Officials who tried Galileo for doubting earth's universal centrality.  This non-literal reading is fine for eyewitness accounts such as, Psalmists writing songs/poems about God's wonderful world, Joshua extending the day.  The writers observed the sun cross the sky, the flat land stretching away from a mountaintop viewpoint and wrote about it, the point of these stories or psalms is not about geographical accuracy, it is about God's interactions with people, the geo-descriptions are just background information.

Literal interpretations of the bible are generally reserved for accounts of what people did in various situations.  It is historically impossible to verify weather Jezebel was, indeed, the most wicked woman ever, weather Elijah was scared of her, or David really was taken by Abigail's beauty.  History rarely leaves us clues so detailed.  Christians have no reason to doubt these are accurate stories, not just because they are entirely possible, but because the writers were inspired by God to write these details down.  Any Christian will notice that bible stories are very bereft of details.  Stories are given a little detail, but almost no background.  Turning a biblical story into a movie or book requires a lot of imaginative detail to fill out the biblical narrative.  This often gives me, and others, the impression that what few details do show up are important to the inspired biblical narrative, and must have been important for the original audience to hear, and by extension, due to God's inspiration, for us also.

The problem with Genesis 2 is that the story of Adam and Eve is not written by eyewitnesses scribbling  down what they saw and thought.  Genesis is attributed to Moses, a great and godly man who would not make stories about God up.  Therefore, you can't just say "well, that is what they thought about how people got onto the earth back then," because that would make Moses is a storyteller, not a God-inspired writer.  Why would Moses add talking reptiles, trees that have the power to give knowledge and Eve popping out of Adam's rib? He couldn't have been there and thought he saw these things happening, in the same fashion as the Psalmist, who sees the sun circle the earth.

Yet I never really thought about other ancient near eastern culture's creation stories. What did the Egyptians, Babylonians and Canaanites believe about humans?  I had taken Ancient Mesopotamian courses in university, I knew Sumerian literature had some big complicated story about gods and goddesses wanting helpers to do all sorts of work, but it didn't remotely remind me of Adam or Eve, and they made a bunch of humans all at once.  Nothing really sounded close to the Hebrew Adam and Eve, unlike the flood stories, which seemed to be a running theme throughout ancient Asia literature.  But this is what I thought: if all the ancient cultures had a flood story, that just proved the Bible right.  There must have been a world-wide flood.  If Genesis was right about a world-wide flood, surely then, the Adam Eve story was true as well.  Besides, didn't the New Testament writer (practically author) Paul bring up Adam and Eve as if they were literal figures?

God was in my box of literalism.  If His book (the Bible) was going to write about Adam and Eve, then have a (the) New Testament writer bring it up as if they existed, then they must be real and we must be their descendants.  Remove that, and the whole old and new testaments would collapse into a pit of human myths, tales and superstitions.