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[Preached once at Westminster, Oxford on 4/6/97]

To choose this text for this occasion might seem to be an intended provocation. “You may spend a couple of days talking about evolution, but at the end we are going back to the old story of creation—Adam and Eve and the garden of Eden. Away with Darwin and his evolution. We don’t have apes as our grandfathers.” Of course it is no such thing. It is probably true that Paul read the first chapters of Genesis in a rather different way from ours, read the story as a story, and with no reference to the Big Bang or anything of the kind. But anyone can see that in this paragraph Adam, whatever else he may have been, is primarily a theological or anthropological concept, comparable with and standing over against the other theological concept—Christ. Paul has no interest in telling a tale, passing on a legend of creation. He is talking about humanity, related as it is about the two poles, the two universal and representative human beings—Adam and Christ. It is not creation but how we get from creation to here, that he is dealing with, and that process is, more or less, evolution. How did human beings, and the non-human beings who are their neighbors, and their institutions and activities become what we know, we think we know, them to be now?

I am a theologian, and an ex-mathematician with no biology whatever, and it seems to me, on the outside, that evolutionary theory itself has evolved a great deal since Darwin’s time; certainly it has been applied, not always I think convincingly, in a great variety of fields. But I am beginning with what I understand is basic Darwinianism, by which I mean evolution proceeding by way of natural selection and with Paul’s guidance I hope to see its theological and practical significance. The basic proposition from which I begin is a demythologized version of the doctrine of Original Sin. But I had better define my term.

Original Sin means there is something wrong with the human race. Not just with this or that member of it, but with the race as a whole. Nothing makes what is wrong clearer than does the old myth of Adam and Eve, the snake and the apple. Adam and Eve wanted to possess the desirable object—the fruit was to be desired. They want it because they believe it is the way to power over their environment, power over God himself. Knowledge is what you need to give you power over your environment, knowledge of how to make a wheel, knowledge of how to use electromagnetic radiation, and control genetic processes. And said the snake, “eat and you will be like God on his level, no longer one of his subordinates.” So humankind has a will to power; no harm in that, if he will use it rightly and smartly. The snake persuades him to use it wrongly.

It can of course be abused, and constantly is abused in the realm of religion. That is why I asked that Genesis 4 be read instead of Genesis 3. Here are two brothers, Cain and Abel and they are both religious men, that is, they both want to be in with God. But one of them has found out that animal sacrifice works better than vegetables. So what is poor Cain to do? He wants to control his environment, his religious environment, and his brother is winning all the time. There is only one thing to do—put Abel out of the way. Religious people have been disposing of their brothers and sisters ever since, sometimes with Cain’s violence, sometimes in more respectable ways (e.g., just excommunicate them).

So there is a will to power in humanity, and unless somehow it can be controlled, it is a ruthless will to power. And wherever it comes from, it is born in us. Whoever sees an unselfish baby? Or a baby that looks as if it wants to say, “Dear Mother: I am terribly hungry, but I will not seek your heart until you have had another three hours sleep.” Unselfishness is something we have to learn.

Demythologizing does not mean getting rid of myths; it means understanding them. This is of course old stuff among students of the New Testament and I suspect with us all. Myths are not idle tales, they are ways, often profound ways of expressing truth, often profound truth, about God and our relation with him. For some purposes the myth will serve, for others it won’t, some must demythologize it, expressing the same truth in a different style compelled to use ugly, abstract nouns instead of the attractive pictures. You will notice I have been doing it in the last few minutes.

And what of the theory that evolution proceeds by way of natural selection? We know what it means. The giraffe with the longest neck gets the fruit at the top of the tree, and lives; the rest don’t get it and starve. And so long necks develop. The rhinoceros with the thickest skin charges through the thorn bushes and survives; the rest are torn to pieces and die. And so thick skins develop. The person with the best qualifications, or perhaps with the best act at interview, gets the job and the rest go under. Each one against the rest, each one for himself, and there is Original Sin demythologized. And Paul knows it, for here precisely is the contrast between Adam and Christ, between the old community and the new. It is there in the paragraph of your text, though it has to be dug out and inferred. We know what Adam’s act was—the expression of will-to-power. Christ’s corresponding act was an act of obedience, that meant a renunciation of power. “Not what I wilt, but what thou wilt.” And on occasion Paul will spell it out in detail. “Though he was in the form of God, he humbled himself, took the form of a servant, became obedient, even unto death.” And all that is neither myth nor dialectic but history.

I have been all too well aware that so far, all this may have sounded more like a theological lecture than a sermon; but we are coming to the sermon, to the preaching of the Gospel now. And though I disavowed provocation, this may sound provocative enough, for the Gospel is the contradiction of evolution. I do not mean that it rejects evolution as a valid description of the development of creation. Paul can be said to accept it. The biblical picture of humankind is a picture of a creature exercising will-to-power. The creation narrative itself represents God as saying to the man and woman he has made: “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” The same thought is echoed in the Psalms. This dominion has led to animal developments and other developments, all good and right when they are rightly used.

We owe to human will-to-power the marvelous advances in our understanding and employment of natural phenomena and processes. But there is a good deal else we owe to human will-to-power, from Cain’s murder of Abel to Hitler’s elimination of Jews, and beyond. It is this will-to-power, this will to survive, this will to dominate our environment that somehow must be dealt with. Dealt with, not eliminated. Not eliminated because if we eliminated it we would cease to grow, to learn, to develop. We should still tread the earth in deadly fear of the dinosaur, and we should squat in our mud huts, and think ourselves lucky if we survived to the great age of twenty-one. We should lose Bach and Beethoven and Brahms and Berlioz, and Barth and Bultmann too. But there is stronger reason for holding on to any scientific theory that seems to meet the facts about humankind’s incredible search for mastery over its environment—we are still striving after knowledge of the infinite.

But there is a stronger reason—it is the command of God. I have quoted it already from Genesis, let me quote it now from the Psalms—“thou has made him a little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor. Thou has given him dominion over the work of thy hands, thou hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, the beasts of the field, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea.” I chose the Psalm because it makes explicit what is no more than implicit in Genesis. Recall the beginning of the Psalm—“when I look at the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon, the stars which thy hast established, what is a human being that thou art mindful of him; or the son of humanity that thou shouldst care for him?” A Human Being, master of his environment, looks small enough when viewed in the context of the universe—even as the universe was understood in antiquity. But the important thing is to see him in the context of God, who established the moon and the stars. “O Lord our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth.” We may fly to the moon and the stars; but God will always out pace our knowledge.

We don’t like it. I have already repeated, and begun to demythologize the old story. Adam snatches at the snake’s temptation; “take, eat, and you will be like God.” How splendid—he eats and that is the end of Paradise. For as the Prince of Tyre had to learn, “thou art human, and not God.” But we are not yet at the end of the story. For how does this majestic God behave? We have begun to glimpse this too. The one absolute ruler by right of all the environment of the universe chose to become and live his life as a servant; it was in the humiliation of death that he received the name that is above every name, with all of creation crying—Lord! So when we meet him, we find him in the shame and agony of Calvary. If we are to live with him, we must also die with him. So Paul continues.

“So what shall we say? Shall we go on in sin that grace may abound? God forbid; we who died to sin, how shall we live in it?” In Christ crucified and risen, humanity begins again, and the old pursuit of knowledge and power is disciplined by divine love.

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