Stretching the Story

In Enticed by Eden: How Western Culture Uses, Confuses, (and Sometimes Abuses) Adam and Eve, Linda S. Schearing and Valarie H. Ziegler discuss both how conservative Christians recreate the story of Adam and Eve and how the secular world reuses the story in a range of different ways. Both of these groups take the Adam and Eve narrative and interpret it in a way that serves their own purposes.

From the beginning of the book, Schearing and Ziegler show how conservative Christians are influenced by the reality of living in our modern culture. I found it very interesting how ideals based in non-biblical narratives were transferred into their glorified concept of Adam and Eve. In their conclusion, Schearing and Ziegler assess that “In their zeal to recreate Eden, conservative evangelicals have explicated Scripture through cultural constructs that have nothing to do with the Bible and in doing so have become captives to those constructs”(153). “Prince Charming” is nowhere to be found in the Bible, yet themes from this extra-biblical narrative is integrated into the Adam and Eve narrative.

After reading this book, I had to go back and read Genesis 1-3. Reading so many interpretations, I needed to return to the text that these different ideas were drawing from. Having reread it, I think that there is enough vagueness in the Adam and Eve narrative that ultimately you can read your own ideas into it. Though these conservative Christian views of Adam and Eve definitely stretch the story, I can see how they find these stretches to not be stretches at all.  Inserting other cultural narratives into the Adam and Eve story seems to come naturally because of how sparse the account is. You don’t know about Adam and Eve’s relationship, which created a need for conservative Christians to fill in this blank. Because the Bible states Adam and Eve were created for each other, conservative Christians make a leap to what this creation means in Adam and Eve’s relationship and consequently, what it means for relationships between husbands and wives today. These stretches are without a doubt influential, and the idea that conservative Christians have of Adam and Eve seems in many ways disconnected from the original text. As Schearing and Ziegler aptly described, they are captives to extra-biblical cultural constructs.