In 2005 a bishop told me the story of Adam could not be true — and that if it wasn’t, nothing built on it could be. He was right about the second half.
An airport hotel lobby, a MiniDisc recorder, and the most controversial bishop in the English-speaking church. In 2005 I watched the argument about Adam from the editor’s desk. Twenty-one years later I am in it myself — and the question has turned out to be not what we do, but where we stand.
I · The Claim
1 · The Lobby — Unity
In 2005 I was the editor-in-chief of Kyyhkynen, the magazine of the theology students at the University of Helsinki, published since 1853. That spring the church press was on fire. John Shelby Spong, the retired Episcopal bishop of Newark, was coming back to Finland. For more than twenty years he had led the Episcopal diocese of Newark and written book after book with titles like Why Christianity Must Change or Die. To his admirers he was a liberator. To his critics he was a bishop who had stopped believing. He had already shaken the church days in Helsinki two years earlier; this time one cathedral pulpit stayed closed to him.
I followed the storm from the editor’s desk and remember thinking: why on earth would anyone come all this way to cause this much confusion? Then I got the interview. We met in the lobby of an airport hotel, a room built for people on their way somewhere else. Spong was on his way to Ireland, to go hiking with his wife, away from all the noise.
I set a MiniDisc recorder on the table between us and pressed record. The heretic of the headlines turned out to be a kind man: warm, curious, in no hurry. And his argument was clean in a way theology rarely is.
2 · The Cross — Hamartia
The Christian story, he said, has a shape. God creates a perfect world. God says: do not eat. Humans eat. They have done something forbidden, the guilt must be paid, and Christ comes to pay it. The church calls it the fall, but it is a story of transgression. In his Twelve Theses Spong had called the first act “pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.” Take it away, and the rest of the play has nothing to stand on.
The sharpest cut went through the cross. Atonement — Jesus dying as a sacrifice for our sins — is an act meant to repair the story. It only works if a command was broken and a debt was run up. “Atonement theology assumes that we were created in some kind of original perfection,” Spong wrote. Without the perfection, the payment has no debt to settle. What remains is a God who demands the death of his own son, a picture that “turns God into the ultimate child abuser.” His answer fit in one line: “God does not need human sacrifice to forgive.”
His critics tried to save both ends at once — keep the rescue, quietly soften the fall. Spong refused. “How can one be rescued from a fall that never happened?” he would later ask. He took the dependency more seriously than the people shouting at him.
If Adam goes, everything built on Adam goes with him.
II · The Test
3 · The Straight Line — Complication
I had come to interview a scandal. I left carrying a problem. I had not managed to say what I was thinking, and I was not quite sold on his mission. Had he really thought it all the way through? His logic was clean. Something about where he stood was not, and I could not yet say what.
The church press had answered Spong with doctrine, and doctrine did not touch his line. Both sides were arguing about the answer. Neither asked where they were standing. He drew one straight line from Genesis to Golgotha and cut it at the first knot.
His own way out was to say that we are not fallen but “incomplete” — evolution has not finished with us. It was an honest answer, and a costly one. It turned the opening chapters of the Bible into a pre-scientific guess that the church had mistaken for a report. The garden became a misunderstanding, the serpent a folk tale, Adam a name for no one.
What remained was a choice. Either the line from the garden to the cross held, or it did not. There was no comfortable place in between, and I was too eager to pretend there was. A claim that clean cannot be argued with from a distance. It has to be tested.
4 · The Scales — Peripeteia
Somewhere in that lobby the scales fell from my eyes. It took me years to notice that the phrase is borrowed. After the road to Damascus, Saul sits blind for three days, and then “something like scales fell from his eyes.” Paul’s life turns on that moment.
Mine turned the other way. I tested Spong’s claim the only way it can be tested — by living inside it. If the first act was a fiction, the rescue was a fiction too. I walked out of the hotel with a clean argument and no faith left to put it in. For a while, I was an atheist.
But the story would not leave me alone. An atheist can close the Bible; he cannot stop a question from asking itself. Spong was right that everything hangs on the first act. So what if the first act really happened — not as myth, and not as a garden with a postcode, but as history?
Go back a hundred thousand years, give or take. Africa. People who look exactly like us, and who cannot yet do the thing we do without thinking. Somewhere between then and the piece of ochre that someone engraved with a crosshatch in a cave above the South African coast, some seventy-five thousand years ago, an event took place that no fossil records directly. The human animal began to speak.
What if Genesis is the memory of that?
What if the fall was not a fiction, but the first sentence?
5 · The Names — Pathos
Before anything goes wrong, Adam is given a task: to name the animals, “to see what he would call them.” The first thing the human does in the story is speak.
Imagine a creature that has always lived inside the world, undivided from it. No word for tree, so no distance from the tree. Then language arrives, and with it the cut. The word does not only name the world. It moves the one who speaks: after it, he stands somewhere else.
You do not have to imagine it. Every child lives through it. An infant begins inside a unity, with no border between itself and its mother. Then words arrive. The first name a child learns is usually hers — and to name her is already to stand a little apart. I. No. Mine. Each word draws a line.
That is the pathos of the story. The church calls it transgression, and Paul’s Greek agrees in its own way: parabasis, a step across a line. The line is drawn by a word — do not eat — and the step is toward the one place a human cannot stand: “you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Everything after is done from there. And there is no going back. The way to the garden is guarded by cherubim and a flaming sword that turns every way. You cannot un-speak yourself into unity. You can only keep speaking.
III · The Recognition
6 · The Eyes — Anagnorisis
“Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” Not a stain, not a curse — a recognition. Consciousness walks on stage, and separation walks on with it.
Paul never wrote the English word sin. He wrote hamartia: missing the mark. It is the word Aristotle uses in the Poetics for the error at the heart of tragedy — not vice or depravity, but the mistake of someone who does not know where he stands. Oedipus acts from the wrong place in every scene. A Greek-educated Jew from Tarsus does not choose that word by accident.
In Romans, hamartia enters the world through one man. Then Paul tells the same story from the inside: “What I reach for, I do not reach; what I do not want is what I carry out.” The I is reaching for the mark, for what was promised. But the reaching only produces more reaching. The promise is kept alive and kept at a distance, because the one who reaches is acting from outside the story he is living in. “What a miserable human being I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?”
Aristotle’s answer and Paul’s are the same. The hero does not get back by a better act. He is returned to his place by recognition — in the Poetics, “a change from ignorance to knowledge” — by seeing, at last, where he stands.
7 · The Key — Catharsis
That is the fall Spong could not imagine. He was right to reject atonement as payment, one more act from the same place. But his own answer was the same move in the other direction. He read Genesis as a report, just as the literalists did, and gave the opposite verdict. He changed the answer, not the position. So did those in between, who kept the story as a beautiful metaphor. Literal, rejected or symbolic — all three read it from outside. So do I. This essay is written from inside language, as Romans was. The difference is not where the writer stands, but whether he knows it.
What the story repairs is not the act. It is the position.
My atheism was the same kind of verdict. What changed, years later, was where I stood to read. Then Adam came back — speaking.
Spong died in 2021, at ninety. Perhaps that is why, a few years ago, I went back to that MiniDisc and listened to it once more. I was returning to that moment in my own life. Spong turns the interview around and asks me what I hope to achieve with my studies. I tell him I want to find a hermeneutical key to the Bible. Listening, I noticed what the tape does not have: my own objection. I had felt it in the lobby and could not put it into words. This essay is what I would say to him now.
In 2005 I watched the argument from the editor’s desk. Now I have stepped into the arena myself — and I understand why a man might want the quiet hills.
Biblical passages are translated directly from the Hebrew and Greek.