Adam and Eve

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In terms of their place in theology, Adam and Eve are the starting point for anthropology, which is the doctrine of the nature of mankind, and are cited in Jesus Christ’s references in the Holy Gospels to marriage as being between a man and a woman. Additionally, in terms of soteriology, Adam and Eve are seen as types of Christ and of his mother, the Theotokos, who are the New Adam and the New Eve, respectively.


The Church Fathers most often viewed the Genesis account of Adam and Eve as both literally historical and typologically symbolic, as indicated in the exhaustive collection of patristic references by Father Seraphim Rose compiled by Abbot Damascene Christiansen in the late-twentieth-century English-language book “Genesis, Creation, and Early Man”. That patristic combination of literal and symbolic interpretation, evident also in Church hymnology, problematizes attempts to link Orthodox exegesis to modern liberal Protestant and Catholic views of theistic evolution. Yet Father Seraphim also argued for differences between Orthodox cosmological teachings and conservative Protestant creationist views, despite his interest in recent creationist and “intelligent design” analyses from Protestant sources.

The primary difference between such evangelical Protestant and Orthodox teachings regarding Adam and Eve in Father Seraphim’s view lay in the Orthodox emphasis on life before the Fall as unknowable mystery, and in Orthodox anthropology that emphasizes the Fall as a catastrophic Ancestral Sin making man susceptible to sin and death—not involving the personal inherited guilt of Augustinian Original Sin taught in many Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions. In addition, he saw the Church’s exegetical tradition of often reading Scripture both literally and symbolically at the same time as distinct from both modern liberal and conservative biblical studies of Adam and Eve among many Protestants and Roman Catholics. Fr. John Romanides’ late twentieth-century study “Ancestral Sin” also collects Orthodox patristic teachings in English on the issue of the Fall.

Expulsion from Eden

See also