Eden - Literal or Allegorical?
The creation account is viewed by many Christians as allegorical. If, like so many mainstream believers, you see no need to historically connect the scriptural dots to have what might be termed an informed Christian faith, what happened in Genesis is not particularly important to you, nor is the history of the Israelites or any other events in the Old Testament.
But what has brought about this conclusion? Some feel that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament as represented by Jesus must be two different persons; the former focused on justice and the latter focused on mercy. Some feel that the historicity of the Christian religion as expressed by scripture is better replaced by Christian principles that exist in a context of their own.
It seems to me that the history of the Judeo-Christian religion is bookended by two allegorical sections of Genesis and Revelation. A large part of both works is historical. The creation account is a very small part at the beginning of Genesis. Revelation seems to deal with events in the first century in both real and allegorical terms and the future in allegorical terms only. What is significant is the connection between the beginning of Genesis and the end of Revelation. Here, the imagery is linked to bring the book full circle. Trees were the repositories of life and knowledge in Genesis. So too in Revelation – the leaves of the trees in New Jerusalem are for the healing of the nations, which we understand to mean the raising of the wretched resurrected to the level of perfection as sons of God. Both the Garden of Eden and New Jerusalem are domains that are created by God on earth to be managed by people. There is a sense of return to the original purpose, a new beginning.
Will this perspective on the Genesis creation account seem a reasonable one to those believers in the literal historicity of the creation account? If they agree that Revelation is definitely using imagery to make its points (rather than believing, for example, that people actually need to touch real leaves in the Holy City to transform themselves) and those images correspond exactly to those in the creation account, might it be reasonable to think that both accounts are using imagery?
This allegorical bookending begs the question why. Was it the precursor of secular civilisation, giving us the sense of the difficulty of putting into words the wonders of that first domain and the corresponding difficulty of understanding them if they could have been well articulated. Perhaps the imperfect mind could only grasp the history of post-Fall events, because they recount the world we live in. The same might be said for life in the new age, and that we are only given imagery to gain a small glimpse into a world of wonders.
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