A Followup to a Followup to a Response to NPR's Story on Adam & Eve

I published comments here➚ and here➚ after hearing the NPR story that included a Calvin professor.

In response to my response, Amy Julia Becker wrote:

My resposne to Amy:

Good question.

I'm of two minds.

Since I can't go back in time, I can't answer it from first-person-experience, but despite lots of time in the bible, I can recall no point where it was obvious to me the people reading or listening to it would regard the stories as primarily representative of deeper truths (and only secondarily or unnecessarily accurate).

(IMHO with a couple exceptions - 1. Parables, and 2. Fantastical accounts, see below)

Now that is not true today. Most Christians (except American fundamentalists) interpret more incredible passages, even some accounts of Christ, as instructive, not historical. That's for the individual to decide. Many claim the name "Christian" while denying the Virgin Birth or Resurrection, for example; that is entirely their prerogative, since no one owns the title or all the pieces that define it.

I'm more interested in how Christians respond to it and invite others to respond.

When we tell a child there is no Santa Claus, the child goes through some tears, some questions, and resigns himself to the obvious (depending on the age and how much we reinforced the story to that point). To help it along, we say things like "Santa's not a real person, but his spirit lives in the hearts of everyone at Christmastime," or something similar.

In other words, we've removed the factual aspect of the story from the child's universe, and there is little left to sustain a belief. Some children are devastated, some sort of had it figured out already.

Likewise with a belief in biblical stories, which, once the factual aspect is removed, become less interesting to most people. This is often the response of someone with a Western cultural background, where accuracy is simply expected in historical reporting. There are other cultures (usually ancient ones) where the message is not in the accuracy, but in the elements of exaggeration or metaphor that served to explain a principle.

(Many biblical scholars believe that certain durations like 40 and 7, miraculous acts, or a ludicrously long life, are examples of this.)

However, our Western culture is skeptical of any account that is not also accurate; it's a wonderful expectation, for it gives us a solid foundation for science and debate; unfortunately, it misses equally great rewards that can come from literary devices that need more flexibility. Neither side is right or wrong; both sides offer insight into the substance of a thing, but from different angles.

(I don't think we disagree on this. I'm probably restating the obvious.)

BTW, I never did tell my son, now 20 years old, there was no Santa. I never stopped playing the game, and though he of course came to realize the truth, he still to this day plays along with me. I did that because I value the childlike magic of the season and think it has a great deal to offer in an age when celebrations of simple sentiments are increasingly ridiculed and cluttered with commercial nonsense.