R.E. Slater - Finding a New Normal

Finding A New Normal

by R.E. Slater

I thought today we might take a break from the heavy, practicuum stuff of process ecological civilizations to shift our gaze occasionally to the perennial Christian struggle with evolution. Here, at Relevancy22, it was one of the first topics I had focused on to help set the tone and tenor of how to read the bible in the context of science. It was during this time I found myself struggling moving forward with finding a new hermeneutic which might help my reading of the bible in a contemporary sense. Which I did, though it took awhile, and found it all too simple  in solution when applied in the context of an open and relational (process) faith. I wish to always credit Peter Enns with helping me in this journey, and later, Thomas Oord and Tripp Fuller, Roger Olson, and many others.

It took eight years of daily research, study, prayer, and methodically writing through issue after issue, doctrine after doctrine - all of which are recorded here in timeless form in the topics column listed along the right side of this blog. The some 2200+ posts show my path forward through the labyrinth of contemporary evangelical thought and how I was able to move beyond the sanctified beliefs of my generation to where I am now only by the help of the Holy Spirit and the grace of God.

And yes, it was the burden of the Spirit which propelled me for as long as I've attended to these tasks beginning with quite a dramatic first start into my own personal wilderness wherein I was quickly swallowed up and quite unable - and later, unwilling - to leave a very dark time in my life until the Spirit was done filling the cavity of God's absence in my life over the space of a very long year of unlearning and relearning. In this, I am not unlike the beat poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died this week at 101:

“Generally, people seem to get more conservative as they age, but in my case, I seem to have gotten more radical,” Ferlinghetti told Interview magazine in 2013. “Poetry must be capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.” - LF

And though this period of life was a very dark time of deconstructing my past, it had to be done. If not, I could not be released to reconstruct where my once conservative evangelical education, training, and beliefs might go when directed aright by God during an arising time of observed religious atheism and agnosticism amongst my Christian brothers and sisters.

Yes, you read this aright. The church as I knew it had shifted, and in its shift I happened to break away onto another path. I think belatedly but am glad I had by the Spirit's power. And glad that I did in the hindsight of what has happened over these past recent years since 2012 when I began (though it had been building for many decades previously). I suspect the biggest problem I've observed over this time has been my faith's reconciliation of polypluralism with the Jesus-Christian ethic from a dominant white culture I had been raised. However, there are many more issues at work here as I've attempted to write about over the years.

So it wasn't until late last August, 2020, when I realized I had completed my journey when reading through past articles I had written on quantum cosmology here on this site. By now I had discover a helpful biblical hermeneutic to compliment my Reformed faith and decided that evening in the glowing autumnal dusk I could begin a different kind of script for the years ahead.

Essentially, the past eight years I now use as a kind of postdoctoral journey out of one kind of worldview and towards another kind of perspective. Let's call it a process-based expression of my faith. For myself, all learned biblical approaches within an evangelical Reformed context ended last fall. They would not be dropped, only expanded. And placed onto different platforms and foundations. For my hermeneutical search also was looking for a radically different context.

That said, I could continue writing in the same religious venues I had been writing or try to take my journey's life lessons to then lift up the Author and God of my burgeoning faith to write in a post-Whiteheadian, post-process, post-constructivist, post-modernist, sense of a post-Reformed Christianity. I am choosing to do this latter while occasionally looking back as we are today with Peter Enns' podcast on the evolution of Adam. (For more similar articles look under the Science section of the topics list to the right as well as any appropriate indexes which I keep up as I can.)

Here, below, Peter takes his early thoughts on evangelical evolutionary creationism and updates them years later based upon what he has learned in his studies, readings, and lectures. Not unlike myself, Peter is choosing to add to his life-journey lessons which we might learn with him, having gone through his own wilderness journeys under the God of renewing, reviving faith.

Thank you again for walking with us.

Peace.

R.E. Slater

February 24, 2021

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https://peteenns.com/episode-148-adam-evangelicalism-the-metanarrative-of-evolution/

Episode 148:

Adam, Evangelicalism, and the Metanarrative of Evolution

by Peter Enns

Last Updated November 22, 2020

In this episode of The Bible for Normal People Podcast, Pete talks about his book, The Evolution of Adam, and how his thoughts have expanded since he wrote it as he explores the following questions:

• Should science influence our theology?

• How does Paul interpret the Adam story?

• What are some ways people try to support an argument for a historical Adam?

• What are entangled particles?

• What is meant by the “theory” of evolution?

• How large is the universe?

• What does it mean for us to call God “Creator” in light of what we know about science?

• What is quanta?

• Why are evangelicals resistant to incorporating science into theology?

• How does quantum physics impact our daily lives?

• What is third millennium theology?

• How do we limit our understandings of God?

TWEETABLES

Pithy, shareable, less-than-280-character statements from Pete you can share. 

• “Trying to solder together the biblical story of Adam and evolutionary science is intellectually and spiritually debilitating—it’s stressful.”  @peteenns

• “What is needed is a synthesis of theology and science where science influences our theology.” @peteenns

• “Our state of knowledge of the world today is one that the writers of Scripture—not to mention the first 1500 years of the Church—had absolutely no frame of reference for.” @peteenns

• “The same science that gives us the bizarre quantum world has also had wide-ranging, very practical impact on our daily lives.” @peteenns

• “Theology cannot be dissociated from science, in part because Christians believe that the cosmos is God’s “general revelation” of God’s self.” @peteenns

• “The Christian faith is rooted in an ancient Semitic tradition that had no philosophers or scientists. The traditions that grew out of those times and places were written by men who lived in a very different world than ours, and they cannot be expected to bear for us the burden of doing theology in our moment in time.” @peteenns

• “What of this world do we carry with us and where is this sacred book limiting God and needs to be set aside, given what we know about the nature of the cosmos today?” @peteenns

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

• Book: The Evolution of Adam
• Book: Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
• Book: The Individuation of God
• Website: B4NP Store
• Support: The Bible for Normal People

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

[Introduction]

0:00

Pete: You’re listening to The Bible for Normal People. The only God-ordained podcast on the internet. I’m Pete Enns.

Jared: And I’m Jared Byas.

[Jaunty intro music]

Pete: Hey everyone, welcome to the podcast and today’s topic is all about evolution, but more than just evolution. Let’s get right into this, shall we? Some of you know a few years ago I wrote a book called The Evolution of Adam, came out in 2012 and I’ve been working on a second edition to that book, which is going to come out sometime next year, I think late 2021. And part of what I did was rewrite some of the pretty terrible prose I had in there. It’s amazing how unclear you are when you read yourself a few years later, but anywho, that’s not the point. The point is that I’m also writing an afterword to the book, pretty much, you know, where I’ve stayed the same and where I’ve changed with respect to the book, and it’s a little bit of both. I’ve stayed the same and I’ve changed, but I wanted to share with all of you today some of my thinking on where I’ve really changed my thinking or, maybe put it this way, expanded my thinking on this whole issue of the Bible and evolution.

So, to do that, let’s start if I may, with just a quick synopsis of what the book, The Evolution of Adam was about. I wrote that, as I said, in 2012 and I wrote it to contribute to a familiar and needed, also a little bit contentious discussion concerning the relationship between biological evolution and Christian faith. And, you know, I assumed evolution at the outset. I just assumed that it’s, you know, the essentially universal scientific consensus that common descent is a compelling and powerful account of how we humans came to be. I don’t contest that. My focus was rather on the key biblical passages that tend to be seen as barriers to this discussion among evangelicals; that’s the primary audience for the book. Not the only one, but the primary audience. And of course, those biblical passages are the story of Adam in Genesis 2-3, and Paul’s use of the Adam story in Romans 5:12-21. Paul talks about Adam as well in 1 Corinthians, but I don’t deal with that because, you know, the book was long enough. Plus Romans 5, I think, is the main passage. Anywho, these biblical passages have normally been read in evangelicalism as, you know, sitting a bit uncomfortably with the scientific consensus. You know, a historical Adam is the cause not only of death, but the inbred sinfulness and even guilt at birth for all humanity. A historical Adam is a theological non-negotiable idea within the evangelical system.

Now in the book, if you’ve read it this is not a surprise, but I argue that Adam is not a historical figure at all, but a synopsis of Israel’s national story that ends in disobedience, that ends in exile, so to speak. Just as Adam, you know, was put into a lush land and given a command to obey and if you obey, you stay in the garden; if you disobey, you leave. In the same sense, the nation of Israel was put into a lush land, the land of Canaan, and if they obey God, they stay in the land; if they disobey, they are exiled. And this is a medieval Jewish idea, at least, I did not invent that. I think it’s a great way of looking at the Adam story. And if you look at it that way, the Adam story really has no bearing on the historical/scientific question of human origins. And attempts to make the Adam story fit that, I think are just completely out of place.

Now, with respect to Paul, I said that he did believe in a historical Adam, and I explain why he would think that—because he is a man of his time, a first century Jew. He’s thinking like an ancient person. He also interpreted the Adam story, and this is getting more to the meat of things, he interpreted the Adam story not, not plainly, not in a way that would be recognized by the original author, but he interpreted the story very creatively. And to cut to the chase, Paul’s interpretation, right, it’s an interpretation, his interpretation of the Adam story is a creative Christ-centered Jewish midrash. And midrash is, you know, sort of a fancy term, but it basically means the creative adaptation of a text to speak to a very different circumstance. And that creative interpretation of Paul’s was driven by a pastoral concern to drive home this new reality that he’s talking about where Jew and gentile together are part of one human family who both need Jesus.

4:58

Now, this is an interpretation of the Adam story, it’s not, it’s not a binding comment on what that author of Genesis meant, and neither does Paul answer scientifically/historically, you know, the question of human origins. And we’re just, we’re asking too much. This is sort of one of the main takeaways of the book. We’re just asking too much of Genesis and Paul to answer questions that they’re not even asking. Our questions were about science and history, and theirs were not.

Now, by trying to solder together, if I can put it that way, trying to solder together the biblical story of Adam and evolutionary science is intellectually and spiritually debilitating—it’s stressful. You know, other Christian traditions have come to peace with a symbolic reading of the Adam story, but even the best expressions of evangelical theology are still very much preoccupied to align some sort of literal first man with evolution—sort of having your cake and eating it too. And the solutions that are usually offered, as I see them, they don’t work because they are, they’re ad hoc. They’re made up to relieve some theological pressure. For example, Adam is seen in some evangelical writings not as the literal first man, in fact, not even a man at all, but as a gene pool. You know, some theories say that all of, all present humans descended from a gene pool of between 5,000-10,000 humans that lived about 100,000 years ago or so. I know some of the numbers are a little bit different, but here Adam is not a person, but a gene pool. Other theories are things like, you know, there’s an evolutionary process, sure we agree with that, that’s fine, but there’s still an Adam and Eve and here’s where we get them. God zapped two humans X number of thousands of years ago and made them Adam and Eve, and everyone past and present and future is somehow connected to these two creatures. So, it’s not that people were descended biologically from them, but, in fact they’re not even the first people. They’re just sort of picked specially by God. Those are two options and ironically, I mean, think of is this way. In an effort to protect the non-negotiable biblical truth of a historical Adam, evangelical theology seems to be content by making up an Adam that the biblical story simply can’t bear.

The truth is, evolution has rocked evangelical theology to its core. They can’t coexist as they are. You can’t fix it by pinning the evolutionary tail onto the evangelical donkey. Evangelicals cannot continue making believe that this theology is rock solid, and they just need to find some way of grafting this annoying bit of science onto it. Nothing is served by finding more and more subtle ways of like, shuffling and reshuffling the same deck and not interrogating evangelical theology itself. So, what’s needed, instead, is a synthesis of theology and science, and it’s a synthesis where the science actually influences our theology. And my thinking over the past decade or so has not strayed from this basic outline. So, that’s pretty much what I was trying to do in the book.

Now, what’s changed? Well, this is what’s changed: I have come to see the need for theology to grapple more with the broader scientific landscape. Okay? The broader landscape within which biological evolution is but one small part, and then doing that, seeing how all of this affects and informs how we talk about God.

See, evolution is a theory, and forgive me, but before we go on, just to talk about that word theory. In contract to popular usage, theory, in scientific usage, does not mean like a hypothetical idea that needs to be tested, but an idea that has been tested, widely and over time and has risen to the level of broad scientific consensus. And that’s why the common criticism that we hear sometimes that evolution is “only a theory,” it really mistakes the scientific meaning of that term with the popular one. So, I will say it again, evolution is a theory that explains not just the emergence of life on this planet but the emergence of the cosmos as a whole; that’s part of this landscape that I’m talking about, this broader landscape.

9:54

Science, evolution rather, explains the emergence of the cosmos as a whole from the Big Bang to this moment nearly 14 billion years later, from the smallest subatomic particles to the largest galaxies. Evolution is also the framework for understanding the emergence of our planet from grains of dust orbiting the fledgling sun that lumped together over many millions of years to form a sphere and thus beginning its 15-billion-year transformation. Evolution, in other words, is the indisputable meta-narrative of how all things came to be; it’s the big, overarching story that accounts for cosmological, geological, and biological reality—so pretty much everything. The question of Adam vis-à-vis biological evolution must be set against the backdrop of the meta-narrative of evolution.

You know, our state of knowledge of the world today is one that the writers of Scripture—not to mention the first 1500 years of the Church—had absolutely no frame of reference for. Those previous historical moments, you know, they’re not adequate for addressing many of the questions that we face today. We all know, for example, something of the truly incomprehensible size of the universe, you know, thanks to the breathtaking photographs of the Hubble Space Telescope: the universe is filled will billions upon billions of galaxies.

You know, our universe—to be precise, the “known universe,” which isn’t the whole thing, apparently— is as I said, about 14 billion years old, and now listen to this, 14 billion years old and 546 sextillion miles across. That’s 546 plus twenty-one zeros, or, if this helps, a billion times a billion times a thousand. You know, in an era where Americans are used to hearing about trillion-dollar national debt, speaking of mere billions seems quaint. But, to offer some perspective, think about this – if we were to count to one million, at one count per second, one, two, three, right?  If we were to do that, it would take, to count to a million, it would take about 11.5 days. Think of doing anything for 11.5 days. It takes a long time to count to a million. Now, to count to one billion would take, well, 1000 times that—which comes out to roughly 32 years of counting one, two, three, right? Ugh, that’s a long time. Now, to work up to the size of the 546 sextillion mile universe, we would need to count to one billion, for starters, a thousand times (that’s 32,000 years), and then do all that again another billion times. That would take, hmm, now is when it gets crazier, that would take 32 trillion years and that is incomprehensible and that’s just to reach one sextillion. Do that all again another 546 times, and it would take you—well, this is where my calculator just gives up and punts and spits out 1.75 followed by 16 zeros, which is just south of 20 quadrillion years to count the size of the universe and that number quadrillion means nothing to us. These are incomprehensible, incomprehensible numbers.

You know, the universe is so large, even the speed of light, 186,282 miles per second, even the speed of light takes 93 billion years to go from one end to the other. If we can even talk about the ends of the universe, we probably can’t since apparently space curves in on itself which I don’t understand, so let’s just keep moving. But just for argument’s sake, you know, 93 billion years to go from one end to the other traveling at the speed of light. It’s unbelievable. To bring some of this down closer to our scale, the speed of light covers in one second 7 ½ times the circumference of the earth. To get to the closest star in our galaxy, okay, just the closest star in our galaxy, one would need to keep that speed up every second, of every hour, of every day, of every year, for about 4 years and 4 months. Just imagine that whooshing around the earth 7 ½ times a second, which it itself incomprehensible, and keeping that up for 4 years and 4 months. That’s, that’s what it would take to get to the closest star.

14:57

You know, and there are apparently between 100 and 200 billion stars in our galaxy—which would take about 3,000 to 6,000 years to count and some estimates are closer to 400 billion stars—and on top of that 100s of billions of galaxies in the known universe. And, just to add insult to injury, the closest galaxy to ours (Andromeda) is about 2.5 million light years away. Just imagine that, whooshing around the earth 7 ½ times a second and keeping that up for 2.5 million years.

[Sigh]

Well, to sum up: the universe is big. It is immeasurably large and old, and our speck-of-dust Earth is insignificant on the cosmic scale. Our home planet is, as Carl Sagan famously put it, a “pale blue dot” just in one solar system on the outskirts of one lonely galaxy. This cannot be left to the side when we speak about the God of the Bible. What kind of a God are we dealing with? What does “God” even mean? Where is this God? Is “where” even a meaningful question? And is this God personal, and what would that even mean for the Creator of such an inhuman scale to be personal? You know, the writer of Psalm 19 raises his eyes to the heavens and praises God, for there he sees God’s glory. And this may be all fine and good from an Iron Age perspective, but for, you know, for us, our “heavens” are not “up there.” There is no “up.” The “heavens” surround us on all sides and just keep on going—infinitely, for all intents and purposes—and the thought of it all should be unsettling for all who are paying attention. You know, I’m struck by the words of seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, this rings so true to me. This really, when I first saw this years ago it was like, oh gosh, he’s known me my whole life. 

Here’s what he says:

The eternal silence of the infinite spaces frightens me. When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant, and which know me not, I am frightened, and am astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then. Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?

You know, the universe is disarmingly huge, and the thought of all this makes me freeze in my tracks. We cannot carry on employing pictures of God that arose before our immense, incomprehensible, expanding, and very weird universe came to light. The profound discoveries of the last hundred years especially have changed forever how we perceive reality, of which human origins, really, is just one very, very small part. That’s the much bigger issue before us, and whether Adam was a real person is really, I have to say, easy to figure out against that larger backdrop. Evangelical theology cannot rest content hammering out the Adam question vis-à-vis biological evolution in isolation from the bigger picture of the evolving cosmos that physicists have discovered.

The age and size of the universe are just the beginning of the scientific challenges to evangelical theology. Einstein’s work in the early twentieth century resulted in a fundamental shift in how we look at the universe and our existence in it. Among his many accomplishments, Einstein demonstrated that the passage of time, listen to this, the passage of time is not constant for everyone but experienced differently by, say, someone on the earth’s surface and someone orbiting the earth in a satellite—which is too profound a thought to be skimmed over. Time slows down the closer one is to a massive object (like the earth) and speeds up the further one is away from the object. Time is slower even for those living in a valley compared to those living in the hills above. Time is not stable. In fact, as physicist Carlo Rovelli explains, “Physicists and philosophers have come to the conclusion that the idea of a present that is common to the whole universe is an illusion and that the ‘flow’,” so called flow, “of time is a generalization that doesn’t work.”

19:56

If you’re interested, Carlo Rovelli is an Italian physicist. He wrote this beautiful little book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and I got that quote from page 60 if you’re interested. But right below that, I just love this part, right below that Rovelli goes on to cite a letter that Einstein wrote after the death of his longtime friend Michele Besso to Besso’s grieving sister, and this is what Einstein wrote. He says: “People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction made between past, present, and future, is nothing more than a persistent, stubborn illusion.” Yeah, time is not the constant forward arrow we perceive it to be.

Jared: Stay tuned for more Bible for Normal People.

[Music begins]

[Producer’s group endorsement]

[Music ends]

So, time is relative, and that relativity can only be perceived by atomic measurement devices. It would be experienced more dramatically if one were traveling near the speed of light or were near a massive black hole—you know, a few minutes there might be equivalent to ten years or decades or something to those outside of its gravitational pull (and this was depicted very well in the 2014 film Interstellar). What is truly odd about all this is the fact that gravity is not a “force” at all that “pulls” on things, but it’s only experienced as such by us. And in truth, what we call gravity is the effects of the bending of space and time by the Earth’s mass. Einstein showed that space and time, in fact, are not two independent entities but together form a single space-time “fabric,” which is affected by mass. See, how we perceive space (as like, the “pull” of gravity) and how we perceive the passage of time going in a forward, linear direction, that’s all determined by how close we are to a massive object as well as the speed one is traveling. We may experience our reality as stable (time passes at a constant rate), but the actual reality is much different.

Now, how all this works is well above my paygrade; if you’re confused, so am I. But whatever it means and whatever its implications, I think some pressing questions come to mind, namely this one: you know, if the physical universe is really such a place that at the end of the day doesn’t match our experience, could we really say any less of our experiences, and perceptions, and thoughts about the Creator of that universe? How can all of this not affect our God-talk? What would it look like for us to call God “Creator” in light of these scientific theories of the creation? How would theology change? I’m not sure, but the question can’t be avoided, and, again, in comparison, dealing with the Adam question, is not really that sophisticated or difficult.

Now, as if Einstein’s space-time continuum weren’t enough to process, and it is, his theories led others in his day to discover a world on the other end of the cosmic scale. Apparently, everything—so we’re told—everything, including space/time is made up of incomprehensibly small, discrete units or packets, “quanta” is the word that’s used, the small packets of matter and energy. This subatomic “quantum” world acts in ways that are IMPOSSIBLE according to the mathematical laws, so called, that govern the massive objects that occupied classical physics, like Newton and Einstein’s theory of relativity. Another kind of physics, quantum physics, with its own set of mathematical formulas, was needed to account for this reality.

25:00

One of the better known, and among the more bizarre, notions of quantum physics is that light on the subatomic scale, light behaves like a wave until it is measured by an outside observer, at which point it behaves like a particle. Light is not one or the other, but potentially both—until you look at it. Likewise, electrons that “orbit” the nucleus are actually not orbiting at all but are clouds of probable locations that only pop into existence when measured. Electrons aren’t really anywhere, strictly speaking, until measured.

Now, pardon me folks as I fumble through this, this is a bit comic here almost. You know, this isn’t my area, right? And I just, I’m working with this stuff as best as I can, but you know, another piece of quantum physics that has found its way into popular culture is called “entanglement.” When a particle like a single photon has been split in half (granted, that’s enough of a thought to make me want to go take a long walk somewhere) but a photon that’s been split in half, just imagine that, and the two halves are placed at a distance from each other, the two halves are still instantly entangled—which means something like the behavior of one is instantly mirrored in the other. Now here’s the thing, this happens, this could be called a fact of quantum physics, like, no one really disputes this from what I understand. But, this happens, this entanglement of these two particles, this happens no matter how far apart the entangled particles are. Well, how can that be? Well, if the two particles were, like, “communicating” with each other (whatever it means for particles to communicate, let’s leave that to the side), but if they were communicating with each other, the mirroring of the two particles could not be instantaneous, why? Because nothing exceeds the speed of light. But quantum entanglement is instantaneous. Two entangled particles could be on opposite ends of our galaxy, 200,000 light years apart, and one would still mirror the other instantly. Now, physicists are still debating what all this means, but on the quantum level of the universe, it seems that distance at the speed of light, fundamental to laws of physics, are not laws that entangled particles obey.

Now, one might think that these observations are too weird to be true, but physicists assure us that the math works and has proven itself countless times. And the same science, getting more practical here, the same science that gives us the bizarre quantum world has also had wide-ranging, very practical impact on our daily lives: things like atomic clocks, supercomputers, transistors, uncrackable codes, GPS, MRI, lasers, and a bunch of other things. Many aspects of quantum physics have been debated for a century, and there’s a lot of disagreement on things, and there’s a lot still hidden from us, but quantum physics is not smoke and mirrors. It’s science, showing us something of the universe that we inhabit. 

Now, this is as good a time as any to make clear what you have no doubt sensed already, and that is that I am not a scientist. I’m not trained in physics, you know, though, I have to say learning about the world that I live in has always fascinated me. A basic grasp of evolutionary biology, well, I think that’s possible for most people, but when it comes to relativity and quantum physics, most human beings are in exactly the same boat as I—the science is too technical, it’s too mathematical for the public to be able to follow, let alone incorporate into our theology somehow. And just a side issue here, I don’t want to be misunderstood. I’m not suggesting that the various dimensions of the study of evolution are, you know, easy to understand. They’re not. These are also things that happen in highly specialized fields that requires years of training. You can’t talk your way around the ins and outs of evolutionary biology after doing a Google search. But given some time and effort, I think most of us can follow more easily basic points concerning things like the fossil record or maybe even the human genome much, much better than something like Schrödinger’s equation, which is a basic building block to quantum mechanics and you can Google that if you want to. But any formula that basically is mostly made up of letters and not numbers and they call it math, I know I’m in over my head at that point. See, most of us, my point, most of us, including myself, should be very cautious about bringing highly specialized sciences into conversations about what God is like.

30:05

But what I will say is this: even a nontechnical, general, superficial grasp of the scientific landscape I think is enough for us to marvel at the mystery, the complexity, the incomprehensibility, the unpredictability of the cosmos in which we find ourselves. How we conceive of God needs to keep pace with what we know about the cosmos on the scale of the very large and the infinitesimally small. This would not require anyone to, you know, solve the mysteries of the physical universe, but simply to acknowledge that the mysteries are profound, not going away, and—whether we admit it or not—do not leave theology unaffected.

Theology cannot be dissociated from science, in part because Christians believe that the cosmos is God’s “general revelation” of God’s self. Special revelation, in technical theological terms, that usually refers to the Bible and/or Jesus. Mainly Jesus, but the Bible as well, that’s a special revelation, but creation is a general revelation. We learn something of God from creation. Right, the declaration of Psalm 19, I mentioned earlier, that “the heavens declare the glory of God,” that still holds, but our “heavens” today are markedly different from what medieval theologians or Iron Age psalmists understood—we know more. The staggering dimensions and vast age of the universe coupled with the revolutions of relativity and quantum physics are psychologically and spiritually disorienting. I mean, particularly for Christians whose theology, what they believe about God and all sorts of things, for people whose theology was shaped fundamentally in the 16th century and the wake of the Protestant Reformation—and that is the roots of evangelical theology today. For us to declare along with the psalmist that God’s glory is seen in our cosmos, that takes theological energy, it takes imagination, it takes an all-in embrace of mystery and ambiguity, and above all, it takes a willingness to allow for and to experience and to embrace theological change. In my experience, however, these are not always the marks that are typically associated with evangelical theology.

Now another reason why theology and science can’t be kept at a safe distance from each other, they simply CANNOT be kept at a safe distance from each other, is that they are never actually distant to begin with. Theology is a discipline that has ALWAYS expressed itself in the contexts of current ways of thinking about the world and anything else. And here, just a quick shout out, hopefully this is a good resource for you, we did a podcast a while back with Ilia Delio, a Villanova theologian, and she also has a book The Unbearable Wholeness of Being where in the first thirty or forty pages she fletches things like this out pretty well. But anyway, theology

reflects our human context. There is no “theology from above” because people do theology and all theology is a human endeavor, and this is certainly true within the Bible itself, the ancient Israelites, whose origins stories in Genesis 1,2, and 3 reflect ancient views of the cosmos in general. It’s true of the timeless Gospel which is nevertheless expressed in the clearly NOT timeless categories of 1st century Judaism. Similarly, the Early Church, which was gentile, left behind the Jewish apocalyptic vibe of the New Testament to embrace another worldview. You know, the Jewish apocalyptic view of the New Testament, it is Jewish, Jews were writing it, they’re writing it within the context of the Jewish tradition and it’s apocalyptic, meaning God’s gonna set all things right pretty soon. And Jesus’ resurrection is like the first stage of that, and the second stage is coming like, real, real, real soon. That is the context of the New Testament, that’s sort of its structure almost, but with the Early Church that was left behind. The Jewish apocalypticism of the New Testament is not a factor anymore, and another worldview is embraced, Greco-Roman philosophy.

34:54

And so they spoke of God as omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and Christ as, in the words of the Nicene Creed, “God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten of the Father, not made, being of one substance with the Father. . . ..” You know, all this stuff which is fantastic and wonderful, but strictly speaking, none of this is a biblical concept, it’s all shaped by the “state of knowledge” at the time.

Even the God that many take for granted today—sovereignly directing all things along the axis of linear time according to inviolable laws—well, this God owes a great deal to Newton’s mechanistic cosmos, were what we see is what is and can be explained by conventional “laws” of physics. Speaking of God in such ways has grown steadily obsolete over the last century. Astrophysics, relativity, and quantum physics have presented us with models of the cosmos that have fundamentally changed our understanding of reality—these models did not exist even remotely in the minds of those who gave the church much of its theological language over the centuries, including the biblical writers. These scientific models of the cosmos stagger the imagination and are placing increasing and relentless pressure on the church to develop accessible theological models that can keep pace with the science.

Historically, Christian theology has been geocentric with humans as the crowning centerpiece. This is why the church strongly resisted the heliocentrism, sun at the center of the solar system, the heliocentrism of Copernicus and Galileo, not just because the notion was not found in the Bible, but because decentering earth and humanity – we’re not the center of everything – that really destabilized the worldview within which the church has always conceived of God. You know, we’re it, and we’re at the center of the center. We’re on earth, and this is, everything is the focus of what’s happening on this planet. The Christian faith has largely come to terms theoretically with the idea of a solar system in a vast cosmos, but you know, it took time—and a willingness to conceive of God differently as our understanding of the universe changed. This posture must continue even with—I’m gonna say especially with—the unique challenges of relativity and quantum physics. And that is the real challenge before us, far more sweeping in scope and far more necessary for the church’s thriving than fixating on whether Genesis should be taken literally. Of course it shouldn’t. Why are we still talking about this?

Perhaps the time has come for what Peter Todd calls “third millennium theology,” and this is a very provocative book, Peter Todd, The Individuation of God in Integrating Science and Religion, it’s 2017. But, you know, maybe it’s time for a third millennium theology, a theology that’s suited for our state of knowledge in the third millennium. We can’t know beforehand, at least I can’t, what that third millennium theology might look like and where it might lead, I don’t know. But one thing I do know: continuing to talk about the Creator while keeping our understanding of the creation at arm’s length will ensure a parochial theology, one that’s more centered on self-defense than actually helping explain the Creator and our place in the world with, you know, I think what’s really needed, with a sense of conviction and also a sense of hope and a sense of compassion.

The Christian faith is rooted in an ancient Semitic tradition that had no philosophers or scientists. The traditions that grew out of those times and places were written by men who lived in a very different world than ours, and they cannot be expected to bear for us the burden of doing theology in our moment in time. To claim that God does not change does not mean that our understanding of God should never change. Moving forward on the question of evolution would mean embracing the fact that the biblical story reflects an ancient world, and then to have the freedom to ask, “What of this world, of this biblical world, do we carry with us and where is this sacred word limiting God and needs to be set aside, given what we know about the nature of the cosmos today?” But whatever we do, we can’t simply merge the ancient world and the modern scientific one. Yet that is exactly what evangelical theology has been trying to do by saying yes to science and then quickly adding “but we need a historical Adam, too.” Drawing a historical Adam of the Bible into the story of evolution can only fail. It may serve as a temporary sort of holding pattern, but it will not give us a true and lasting synthesis. 

The future of evangelical theology, if it wants to have a future, will have to be in true theological conversation with the meta-narrative of evolution, cosmic, geological, and biological.  This is not time for a hesitant, protective, or ad hoc posture. The question evangelicalism has to ask itself is whether its theological temperament is constituted for this theological task, for it will mean allowing in an uncomfortable degree of theological flexibility—or perhaps even rethinking core elements of that theology altogether.

The question of Christianity and evolution is only one small piece of a much larger and more pressing conversation. The first step in entering that conversation would be for evangelicalism to interrogate its own theology, especially with respect to the alleged necessity of a historical Adam when all evidence is to the contrary.

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Pete: All right folks, that’s enough of me on my soap box for a week, but listen, thanks for listening. Just before you go, just a quick plug here: did you know, I hope you know, did you know that we have an online shop with tons of Bible for Normal People merch and swag and every book that I’ve written and Jared too? And we have books for normal people and books for abnormal people, geeky scholars and stuff, and all the snarky theological swag that you can think of – even onesies for littles ones of Noah’s flood and all that kind of stuff. It’s fantastic. Listen, head over to https://peteenns.com/store/ and buy at least one thing for every person you know. I think that’ll pretty much cover your bases. Okay, or do the best you can. That’s fine too.

Hey listen folks, again, thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

Narrator: Thanks to our team: Executive Producer, Megan Cammack; Audio Engineer, Dave Gerhart; Creative Director, Tessa Stultz; Marketing Wizard, Reed Lively; transcriber and Community Champion, Stephanie Speight; and Web Developer, Nick Striegel. From Pete, Jared, and the entire Bible for Normal People team – thanks for listening.

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How God Came to Be

Amazon link

Book Description

In this remarkable, acclaimed history of the development of monotheism, Mark S. Smith explains how Israel's religion evolved from a cult of Yahweh as a primary deity among many to a fully defined monotheistic faith with Yahweh as sole god. Repudiating the traditional view that Israel was fundamentally different in culture and religion from its Canaanite neighbors, this provocative book argues that Israelite religion developed, at least in part, from the religion of Canaan. Drawing on epigraphic and archaeological sources, Smith cogently demonstrates that Israelite religion was not an outright rejection of foreign, pagan gods but, rather, was the result of the progressive establishment of a distinctly separate Israelite identity. This thoroughly revised second edition of The Early History of God includes a substantial new preface by the author and a foreword by Patrick D. Miller.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Introduction

One of the areas I have failed to speak to as I should is How God Came To Be not only in the evolution of the Judeo-Christian religion but in the evolution of man himself. Of course, this then would directly affect how the bible would be read and discussed. It certainly would be different from how the bible is typically used when we quote Scripture familiarly without really understanding the depth of God's historical legacy from the earliest evolutionary times of ancient man to today's contemporary civilizations.

I touched upon this a little bit yesterday when posting a "book review" of The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries by Chris L. Keith, Helen K. Bond, Christine Jacobi and Jens Schröter. Here the early milieu of the New Testament is discussed in three weighty volumes by 70 different scholars to help portray the complexity of the Christian bible's development in the earliest days of the church. Likewise may be found similar discussions on the development of the Old Testament in the bible such as we have here with Mark Smith's edition.

For myself, beyond the academic language of biblical scholars, I quite accidentally stumbled across one of my favorite authors on this same subject in James Michener's novel, The Source, which opens up the idea of how ancient man became acquainted with God as a developing saga in the hoary story of revelatory religion, being and event. (to borrow part of a phrase from the renown philosophy Alaine Badiou; see link here and here).

Just the idea of God as an idea, or inkling of a conscious idea, only came to light slowly but slowly in the long experience of the ancient psyche of man; it is a story I think Michener has described quite aptly to the common, non-academic reader in readable narrative. That is, we have only come to know God through the accumulated experiences of many others from the earliest of times of man's evolutionary development until now. As such, I recommend reading Michener's novel ahead of all other biblical treatises on ancient Israel's evolving religion to help adjust our thinking about how God's apprehension of Being and Event came to be.

In summary, let me end by referencing Michener's book below as a follow up to Peter Enn's posting on Mark Smith's treatise on how the idea of YHWH formed within Israel. Enjoy.

R.E. Slater

December 23, 2019

Wikipedia Link

The Source is a historical novel by James A. Michener, first published in 1965. It is a survey of the history of the Jewish people and the land of Israel from pre-monotheistic days to the birth of the modern State of Israel. The Source uses, for its central device, a fictional tell in northern Israel called "Makor" (Hebrew: "source"‎). Prosaically, the name comes from a freshwater well just north of Makor, but symbolically it stands for much more, historically and spiritually.

Unlike most Michener novels, this book is not in strict chronological order. A parallel frame story set in Israel in the 1960s supports the historical timeline. Archaeologists digging at the tell at Makor uncover artifacts from each layer, which then serve as the basis for a chapter exploring the lives of the people involved with that artifact.

The book follows the story of the Family of Ur from a Stone Age family whose wife begins to believe that there is a supernatural force, which slowly leads us to the beginnings of monotheism. The descendants are not aware of the ancient antecedents revealed to the reader by the all-knowing writer as the story progresses through the Davidic kingdom, Hellenistic times, Roman times, etc. The site is continually inhabited until the end of the Crusades when it is destroyed by the victorious Mameluks (as happened to many actual cities after 1291) and is not rebuilt by the Ottomans.

- Wikipedia 

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We All Have a History. Even God.

Article Link

by Pete Enns, Ph.D.

Mark S. Smith’s book The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel opens with a quotation from the 6th c. AD writer on Roman antiquity, Lydus.

There has been and is much disagreement among theologians about the god honored among the Hebrews (De mensibus 4.53)

Indeed.

For the next 200 pages, Smith looks at the “role of Yahweh within Israelite religion” vis-a-vis older Canaanite deities like El, Baal, and Asherah (also known to us from the Bible).

Ferreting out how the ancient Israelites came to worship Yahweh and what that meant in the context of ancient polytheistic cultures has been a huge topic ever since modern biblical scholars/archaeologists began learning new things about (1) ancient Israel and (2) ancient polytheistic cultures.

The bottom line, mainstream view—I shudder even to attempt to summarize it in one sentence—is that the Hebrew scriptures contain a record of Israel’s diverse and changing views concerning God, where the experience of the Babylonian Exile was a major turning point in the emergence of monotheism (the belief that only one God exists) out of monolatry (many gods exist but only Yahweh is worthy of worship).

God, in other words, has a history—or at least on the pages of the Old Testament. We are seeing development over time in how God was understood.

This mainstream view does not rest well with the biblical progression of events, namely: Israel knew Yahweh as the/their only God from the time of Abraham, and how well they did as a people/nation depended on remembering that and worshiping/obeying Yahweh alone.

For biblical scholars of the last century or so, this picture is complicated by

(1) the Bible’s own hints and nods at a more complicated “early history of God” (hence Smith’s book), and

(2) our considerable and growing understanding of religion in general in the ancient Near East, especially Canaanite and Ugaritic religion, which are closest to Israelite religion.

I’m used to this sort of thing, but I know many are not. That’s fine. The point, though, is that the modern study of the Old Testament has irrevocably affected what we can expect from the Bible in terms of “brute information” about God.

The modern study of the Old Testament doesn’t tell you what to believe, like a bully, but it has placed the Old Testament firmly in its culture moments—so firmly, in fact, that a well rounded view can’t just make believe the last hundred or so years of thinking on this subject didn’t happen.

Here’s my take-away from all this—and I’m asking you (or at least humor me) to believe me when I say that this is not a last minute frenzied punt from my own end zone before the sack. My life, such as it is, is about synthesizing my own spiritual life with what I’ve been trained to do and what I do for a living, which is to say I’ve thought about this a good bit and hang out with others who have done the same.

Studying the Bible and Israel’s past is a regular reminder to me that my ultimate object of trust is God, not the Bible (or how I understand the Bible). That’s not knocking the Bible. It’s acknowledging that the Bible—even where it talks about God—is a relentlessly contextual collection of ancient literature that takes wisdom and patience to handle well, and in doing so drives us toward further contemplation of God here and now.

God is bigger than the Bible. 

I see Jesus and Paul already sounding that note when they began reshaping traditional expectations of God.

I haven’t come to this place quickly or casually, though from my vantage point today, it feels rather commonsensical to me—though I don’t impose that on anyone, at least not until I gain supreme, ultimate power, which is the plan.

One last point, to anticipate a common response: “But how can you know anything about God other than what the Bible tells you?” Fair question, but that potential problem does not dismiss the observation about God in the Bible. When you get close to the Bible, prepare to have your view of the Bible reoriented. The irony is that it is the study of the Bible that has led me down this path.

And it’s a nice path, at least for me. God is more outside of my control this way, which I can’t help but think is as it should be. As Lydus said over 1400 years ago, Yahweh isn’t easy to get your arms around—for Israelites or for those who have followed in their footsteps.

You can listen to my podcast on this topic HERE. You can read more about the nature of the Bible and Christian faith in The Bible Tells Me So (HarperOne, 2014) and Inspiration and Incarnation (Baker 2005/2015).

J.R. Daniel Kirk: "Does Paul’s Christ Require a Historical Adam?"

http://cms.fuller.edu/TNN/Issues/Spring_2013/Does_Paul_s_Christ_Require_a_Historical_Adam/

by J.R. Daniel Kirk

Spring 2013

 

The Christian tradition has made much of Adam. We in the Western church speak regularly of the Fall of humanity that took place in Adam’s primal disobedience. Theologically, we speak of inherited sin and guilt—an original sin that renders us all complicit. We are guilty of humanity’s first great act of disobedience and enslaved to sin’s power.

 

Such theological claims derive more from our reading of Paul’s reflections on Adam than from the Genesis story itself. For many, the most significant theological reasons for affirming a historical Adam have to do not with what Genesis 1–3 may or may not teach about human origins, but with the theology of Adam that Paul articulates in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. In short, if there is no historical Adam with whom we are enmeshed in the guilt and power of sin, how can we affirm that in Christ we participate in the justification and freedom of grace?

 

The levels of freedom (or lack thereof) that many of us experience with regard to the question of Adam as a historical person is inseparable from the theology that we see bound up with him. For some, to reject Adam as a historical person is to reject the authority of Scripture and trustworthiness of the very passages within which we learn of justification and resurrection.¹ Others are concerned that to deny a historical Adam is to deny the narrative of a good world gone wrong that serves as the very basis for the good news of Jesus Christ. In short, if there is no Fall, there can be no salvation from it and restoration to what was and/or might have been.² Even more expansively, Douglas Farrow concludes that “there is very little of importance in Christian theology, hence also in doxology and practice, that is not at stake in the question of whether or not we allow a historical dimension to the Fall.”³

 

High stakes, indeed. But I want to suggest that things might not be so dire. Specifically, I want to open up the conversation to the possibility that the gospel does not, in fact, depend on a historical Adam or historical Fall in large part because what Paul says about Adam stems from his prior conviction about the saving work of Christ. The theological points Paul wishes to make concern the saving work of the resurrected Christ and the means by which he makes them is the shared cultural and religious framework of his first-century Jewish context.

 

CHRIST AND ADAM

 

Paul has an important story to tell. It is the story of God’s new creation breaking into the world through the surprising mechanism of a crucified and resurrected Christ. This conviction about the new creation being brought about by Christ provides Paul with the ground to stand on as he draws Adam into the conversation in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15.

 

One crucial dynamic of Paul’s Adam Christology is representation. Christ does, is, and becomes what we need to participate in, be, and become in order to be God’s eternal family. For this reason, Paul takes hold of the “image of God” language with which we are so familiar from Genesis 1, and uses it to describe Jesus as he stands in relation to us: “he decided in advance that they would be conformed to the image of his Son.”⁴ Christ represents who we are, and who we are becoming, as members of God’s new-creation family.

 

This representation is focused on two particular aspects of Christ’s saving work: his death on the cross and his resurrection from the dead. Romans 5 develops Paul’s Adam Christology around Christ’s death. Throughout the latter half of Romans 5, Paul outlines how Christ’s act entails benefits for many: it brings about God’s gracious gift in a manner that more than undoes the work of Adam, even reclaiming humanity’s privilege of ruling the world for God (5:15–17; cf. Genesis 1:26).

 

Similar dynamics unfurl in 1 Corinthians 15, where Adam is viewed as the progenitor of death in contrast to Christ who, as God’s new representative human being, anticipates humanity’s coming resurrection life (15:21–22). A new humanity has been inaugurated by the resurrected Christ.

 

This theological framework positions us to step into Paul’s statements about Adam. Paul is working with the stories of Israel, as told in the Old Testament, but from the perspective of someone who knows, now, that God’s great act of salvation has come in Christ.

 

CHRIST, THE LAW, AND HISTORY

 

This brings us to our central question: To what extent do we need to affirm a historical Adam in order also to affirm the saving dynamics of Paul’s Adam Christology?

 

Romans 5 presents us with what are arguably the most pressing reasons to affirm a historical Adam. There we find these striking words from Paul: 

• Sin entered the world through one person (5:12).
• Many people died through what one person did wrong (5:15).
• The judgment that came through one person’s sin led to punishment (5:16).
• Death ruled because of one person’s failure (5:17).
• Judgment fell on everyone through the failure of one person (5:18).
• Many people were made sinners through the disobedience of one person (5:19).

 

Paul is clearly appealing to both the common experience of enslavement to sin and death and the normative narratives of Israel regarding Adam to explain the reality that Christ overcomes. Moreover, the consistent point of comparison is that one person, Adam, represents the rest of humanity in coming under the guilt, the power, or the condemnation of sin.

 

One of the first questions worth confronting is whether this passage allows for various understandings of how Adam might represent humanity. Thus, for example, might there be room here, not for a physical, natural progenitor of all subsequent human beings, but for a person who was chosen by God from a developing or, at any rate, numerically numerous, human race to play the role of representative in obedience and disobedience?

 

But the question that will clamor for the attention of many is whether such a moment in which sin’s guilt and power are unleashed as the lords of humanity is required at all. There seems to have been death in this world millions of years before human beings came on the scene. Is it possible to affirm the point Paul wishes to make—that God’s grace, righteousness, and life abound to the many because of Christ—without simultaneously affirming the assumptions with which he illustrated these things to be true?

 

Writing to the Romans, Paul wished to argue that God’s people are found in Christ, and thereby cut off other possible ways of construing idealized human identity and what salvation and the people of God might look like. In claiming that Christ is (un)like Adam, Paul was simultaneously taking other options off the table. What difference might it make to our discussions about a historical Adam that Paul was claiming, “Christ, is (un)like Adam, therefore God’s people are not demarcated by Torah”? This latter statement is, in fact, the point of Paul’s argument in Romans 5 (cf. 5:12–14, 20–21). Paul’s Adam theology is an avenue toward affirming that God has one worldwide people; therefore, the specially blessed people are not defined by the story of circumcision. But he does not ask the question of whether an evolutionary account of human origins might stand within the story of God’s new creation work in Christ, and his argument is not aimed at denying such an explanation of where we came from.

 

RETELLING THE STORY OF ORIGINS

 

When the ancients told stories of human origins, it was never simply to tell people “what happened.” Instead, such narratives indicate why their particular people and their particular god played the roles of sovereigns of the world. Genesis 1 is an introduction to the covenant story of Israel, in which God promises to make fruitful Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and also multiply them (17:6; 28:3; 35:11; 47:27; 48:4). The story of Adam in Genesis is written with the latter story of Israel in mind, so that the reader can see that Israel is destined to fulfill God’s primordial promise of not only filling the Earth but also ruling over it (cf. 17:6).

 

Similarly, Paul employs the story of Adam based on his new understanding that Christ is the man through whom God has chosen to rule the world and that the churches are the people who are the fulfillment of the promise of numerous descendants. For neither Paul nor the writer of Genesis does the story of Adam exist as a standalone narrative to which later history must correspond. Instead, the convictions about what God has done at a later point in history determine how the Adam story is read.

 

New Testament scholarship over the past half century has developed the insight that the first data point in Paul’s Christian theologizing was his understanding that the cross and resurrection formed the saving act of God. In the 1960s, Herman Ridderbos argued that this fundamental conviction becomes the great act of God by which all other acts and ideas are understood.⁵ The significance of this focus on Christ is that it ripples out in all directions: not only does Paul rethink the future in light of Jesus’ death and resurrection, but he also reinterprets what came before. Thus, Ridderbos concludes that “Paul’s whole doctrine of the world-and-man in sin . . . is only to be perceived in the light of his insight into the all-important redemptive event in Christ.”⁶ A decade later E. P. Sanders concurred, claiming that Paul reasons “from solution to plight.”⁷ Because Paul knows that God has provided the solution to the problem of human sin in the crucified and risen Christ, he therefore reassesses the place of the Law, in particular, in God’s saving story. Romans 5 is one particular outworking of this.

 

Both Ridderbos and Sanders have come to the same conclusion: what is a “given” for Paul is the saving event of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The other things he says, especially about sin, the Law, and eschatology, are reinterpretations that grow from the fundamental reality of the Christ event. Recognizing this relieves the pressure that sometimes builds up around a historical Adam. Contrary to the fears expressed by Douglas Farrow, we can now recognize that Adam is not the foundation on which the system of Christian faith and life is built, such that removing him means that the whole edifice comes crashing down. Instead, the Adam of the past is one spire in a large edifice whose foundation is Christ. The gospel need not be compromised if we find ourselves having to part ways with Paul’s [perceived] assumption that there is a historical Adam, because we share Paul’s fundamental conviction that the crucified Messiah is the resurrected Lord over all.

 

Where, then, are we left, if the pressures of scientific inquiry lead us to take down the spire of a literal, historical Adam? What might it look like for us to faithfully receive Paul’s testimony not merely by saying what he said, but by doing what he did? Might it be possible that we could retell the stories of both Adam and evolutionary sciences such that they continued to reflect our conviction that the endpoint of God’s great story is nothing else than new creation in the crucified and risen [historical] Christ? For many, the cognitive dissonance between the sciences and a historical Adam has already become too great to continue holding both.⁸ We therefore have to carefully determine whether the cause of Christ, and of truth, is better served by indicating that a choice must be made between the two, or by retelling the narrative about the origins of humanity as we now understand it in light of the death and resurrection of Christ.

 

The task of reimagining a Christian story of origins for our modern era has already begun.⁹ As it continues, faithful articulation of our story will have to attempt to hold together for our day what Paul’s articulation held together so beautifully for his own: humanity as a whole, not one particular race or ethnicity or nationality of people, is the purview of God’s saving work in Christ; humanity’s final destiny has been determined by the advent of the new creation in Christ’s resurrection; and this solution in Christ indicates that the problem to be solved entails not only personal estrangement from God, but a whole world that fails to live up to the harmony, peace, fruitfulness, life, and eternality of the God who created it. Perhaps most importantly, we must not allow biology or physics or chemistry to have the last word about the destiny of humanity. The reality of our lives as creatures limited by death and decay must stand in subordinate relationship to the eschatological reality of new creation that God has granted us in Christ.

 

To accompany Paul on the task of telling the story of the beginning in light of Christ, while parting ways with his first-century understanding of science and history, is not to abandon the Christian faith in favor of science. Instead, it demands a fresh act of faith in which we continue to hold fast to the truth that has always defined Christianity: the crucified Messiah is the resurrected Lord over all. Belief in Christ’s resurrection was a stumbling block for the ancients, and it is a stumbling block for us moderns as well—and increasingly so as we learn more about our human story and the biological processes entailed in life on this Earth. We do not give up on the central article of Christian faith when we use it to tell a renewed story of where we came from. On the contrary, we thereby give it the honor which is its due.

 

 

ENDNOTES

1. E.g., A. B. Caneday, “The Language of God and Adam’s Genesis and Historicity in Paul’s Gospel,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 15 (2011): 26–59.
2. E.g., C. John Collins, Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? Who They Were and Why You Should Care (Wheaton: Crossway, 2011), 133–35; John W. Mahoney, “Why an Historical Adam Matters for the Doctrine of Original Sin,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 15 (2011): 60–78; Stephen J. Wellum, “Editorial: Debating the Historicity of Adam: Does It Matter?” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 15 (2011): 2–3.
3. Douglas Farrow, “Fall,” in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (ed. A. Hastings, A. Mason, and H. S. Pyper; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 233–34.
4. All scriptural citations are from the Common English Bible unless otherwise indicated.
5. Herman Ridderbos, Paul: An Outline of His Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 44–90.
6. Ridderbos, Paul, 137.
7. E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1977), 474–508.
8. See, e.g., John R. Schneider, “Recent Genetic Science and Christian Theology on Human Origins: An ‘Aesthetic Superlapsarianism,’” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 62 (2010): 196–213.
9. E.g., Daniel C. Harlow, “After Adam: Reading Adam in an Age of Evolutionary Science,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 62 (2010): 179–95.

 

Review: Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?

A companion peice to this article may found here -

Resolving the Genesis Story between Traditional and Contemporary Theologies

In it I propose a solution to the impasse found in the article below showing how

to connect traditional theologies with contemporary research and discoveries.

RE Slater

January 6, 2012

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This past fall we had conducted a thorough review of C. John Collins book found in the sidebar section: Science - The Search for Adam by Collins. From that study many conclusions were reached in which Peter Enns only mentions a few in the article below. Though I like reading Peter Enns, I found this current review only generally helpful, but limited, whereas our more formal study had included separate chapter discussions of the same book over a period of nine different articles by a Christian scientist who favors Evolutionary Creationism as the preferred model of explaining human origins.

As such, Peter's present digest requires uninitiated traditional Creationists better insider knowledge of the arguments that he is making here for the rejection of the traditional view. So that when reading through the article one is left lost and confused and not sure what to believe. To help alleviate confusion on this topic I have listed several articles below that could better pose the problems that Evolutionary Creation seems to resolve when faced with the scientific evidences of cosmology, geology, biology, and anthropology. And importantly, how Evolutionary Creationism is theistically different from the agnostic/atheistic views of (Darwinian) Naturalism which are commonly lumped together by undiscerning Christians to the former even though both systems apply themselves towards the same scientific researches.

That said, I have been following Peter Enns because he has shown a simple clarity to the evolutionary understanding of the Genesis record which we have been investigating this past year along with the additional help of biblical theologians and scientific review journals and abstracts. Here, Enn's review of Collins books typifies the difficulties traditional Creationists have when trying to reconcile the creation story within traditional (evangelic or orthodox Christian) parameters. As has been said, all of these difficulties have been written about before: For new readers please refer to the appropriate sidebars for further discussions (sic, the Bible, or Hermeneutics, or Science sidebars on the right side of the blog).

Peter then goes on to describe two groups of people - those traditionalists trying to come to terms with evolution; and those Evolutionary Creationists who understand that Collin's presentation doesn't go far enough and simply is recreating the bible into his own Creationistic preferences and assumed paradigms. And as we have said earlier this year, it's either one or the other as we now understand it. To be halfway just confuses the picture. One either has to deny all contemporary findings across all fields - both biblical and scientific; or begin accepting contemporary findings and re-integrating what all these new discoveries mean for today's Christian faith.

More importantly, C. John Collin's solutions confuse the authority and authenticity of Scripture by using naive and out-of-date arguments. And more to the point it creates an inauthentic and non-authoritative bible when using such arguments. And because this blog journal chooses to give priority to Scripture first, we have been investigating how to reconcile Evolutionary Creationism to the biblical records. Thus, we have been reworking our traditional understanding of Scripture into a more profound and authentic voice found within the biblical record itself. One that better accounts for cosmic process and theistic mediation.

And if all of this sounds oblique please refer to the sample articles below in addition to the sidebar listings mentioned above. There has been quite a lot of work put into this subject area by myself in this blog journal here, and many thousands of hours of research performed by scientists, theologs and critics as well. But do not despair in your research. There is enough here in this web blog to give you direction to discovering a very credible faith and authenticate Bible. But it requires movement in both directions - by science towards God and by the Bible towards science (actually, our understanding of the Bible is what is the problem within Christian circles). This type of study will take time to digest because it involves so many different areas of research (especially the Hermeneutics and Bible sections for one). It also will require a new line of contemporary critical thinking quite different from the non-postmodern mindset typically found within present-day Evangelic Christianity relying on extra-biblical dogmas and Enlightenment polemics.

Overall my arguments will be for Evolutionary Creation but within those arguments I will show the validity of the Christian faith and the authority/authenticity of the Scriptures we hold near-and-dear to our hearts without having to do sleight-of-hand tricks. From those presentations you will be better able to judge important and critical directions to both the traditional, and evolutionary, understandings of Theistic Creation, as they occur in colleges and universities around the world.

Thank you.

R. E. Slater

January 5, 2011

Sample Articles

Science - Human Origins

The God of Creation - Why Would God Use 4.6 to 6.2 Billion Years to Create the Earth? Subtitle: The God of Creation: Narrative, Hermeneutics, Theology and Creative Evolution

Academic Integrity in the face of Evolutionary Eviction by Evangelicals

Evangelicals Question The Existence Of Adam And Eve

Pete Enns - The Evolution of Adam, Parts 1, 2, 3

 Common Christian Mistakes Made about Adam and Evolution

Science - The Search for Adam by Collins

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Did Adam & Eve Really Exist?

Stilhttp://www.rca.org/Page.aspx?pid=7796l in the Weeds on Human Origins

by Peter Enns

December 2011: Review

Did Adam and Eve Really Exist?

Who They Were and Why You Should Care by C. John Collins, Crossway Books, 2011
$15.99. 192 pages.

C. John Collins has taken on the important task of explaining who Adam and Eve were in view of evolutionary theory—which he accepts, at least in its broad outlines. More importantly, Collins wishes to instill in his readers a firm confidence in Adam and Eve as the historical "headwaters" of the human race, and so retains the biblical metanarrative of creation, fall, and redemption. In other words, Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? is an apologetic for the traditional view of Adam and Eve

I see two audiences for this book. The main audience is those who share Collins's doctrinal commitments but may be skeptical of, or hostile to, the Adam/ evolution debate. Collins is professor of Old Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary, the denominational seminary of the Presbyterian Church of America (in which he is ordained). The document that governs their theological deliberations is the seventeenth-century Westminster Confession of Faith, which clearly stipulates a first couple. I commend Collins for the courage to engage this group in a conversation about evolution.

The other audience is a broader Christian one, already invested in and knowledgeable about this discussion, but not necessarily committed to Collins's theological predispositions, and not pressured to conform to them.

Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? may help the former audience by nudging them toward some openness to accepting scientific realities and addressing the theological ramifications [of evolution]. Those familiar with these sorts of delicate negotiations will quickly perceive where Collins goes out of his way to remind readers of his firm theological commitments.

In the long run, however, I am not convinced that all—or even most—of these readers will feel comfortable following Collins. Collins's synthesis requires an ad hoc Although I am sympathetic to Collins's efforts to blaze such a path (and he is not alone), I do not see how such an ad hoc Adam will calm doctrinal waters, since the Westminster Confession of Faith leaves no room for anything other than a first couple read literally from the pages of Genesis and Paul, and therefore entails a clear rejection of evolutionary theory.

Further, this type of hybrid "Adam," [that is] clearly driven by the need to account for an evolutionary model, is not the Adam of the biblical authors. Ironically, the desire to protect the Adam of scripture leads Collins (and others) to create an Adam that hardly preserves the biblical portrait. Evolution and a historical Adam cannot be merged by positing an Adam so foreign to the biblical consciousness.

As challenging as Collins's synthesis is for conservative Reformed readers, numerous obstacles exist for a broader readership of theologians, scientists, biblical scholars, and others who have circled around the block on these issues more than once. In my estimation, Collins's efforts will not advance this discussion. It is evident that Collins's assessment of the biblical and extrabiblical data is driven by a doctrinal position he feels compelled to defend, which leads him to numerous questionable conclusions, some of which, if presented in other intellectual contexts, would be summarily dismissed.

I outline these problems below.

1. Ancient Near Eastern mythology. Collins stresses that ancient authors were under the conviction that they were writing about real people (which is debatable, but I leave that to the side). Curiously, Collins believes that we need to allow the intentions of these ancient authors to shape our own thinking about whether or not these literary figures actually were real people. But surely, what ancient authors intended does not determine historicity. If Collins's defense of a historical Adam is rooted in such a claim, it is only a matter of time before he reaches his desired end. He need only point to Paul, who (and I agree with Collins here) assumed Adam was the first human, thus making further argumentation superfluous.

Collins finds support for the above notion in the work of the Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen, who claims that ancients tended to mythicize historical accounts (however minimally historical they might be), rather than simply conjuring up mythical stories out of whole cloth. I agree that "mythicized history" accounts well for the manner in which biblical authors spoke of their past (e.g., the "cosmic battle" theme that appears throughout the exodus story).

But Collins spends much time discussing the mythicized history of the flood story. This is a problem for two reasons. First, Collins apparently thinks that what holds for the flood story holds automatically for any part of the primeval history, including the Adam story. But this is not the case. To support his argument that the Adam story is mythicized history, Collins would have needed to focus on origins stories of the ancient Near East. But these origins stories can scarcely be considered "mythicized history." What, after all, is the historical "core" of the Babylonian Enuma Elish, which includes many well-known parallels to Genesis 1, or the creation of humans in Atrahasis, which bears striking similarities to Genesis 2–9? One cannot read these stories and extract from them a historical core to be used as support for a historical Adam.

Second, even though I would concur that a massive local flood around 2900 BC accounts for the existence of the flood accounts in Atrahasis, Gilgamesh, and Genesis, this does not help us address whether the stories themselves have any historical value. The flood-event has been so mythicized in the written accounts that we can conclude only that they have no historical value whatsoever, other than reminding us of an ancient echo of a cataclysmic flood.

Stepping back from these details reveals a much deeper difficulty. Collins is appealing to ancient Near Eastern parallels to Genesis 1–11—the very texts that generated the historical problem of Genesis to begin with—to establish the historicity of Adam. This is a stunning move that, if taken seriously, amounts to a complete reorientation of biblical scholarship on this matter. The monumental impact and pressing hermeneutical and theological challenges of the ancient data cannot be credibly handled like this.

2. Second Temple Judaism. Collins catalogues how Paul's Jewish contemporaries all understood Adam to be a real person, and I generally agree with his observations. But, as with his use of the ancient Near Eastern texts, Collins again presses this observation in a baffling direction. He somehow considers the Second Temple Jewish view of Adam to be evidence that should be included in our own deliberations over human origins. This is an inexplicably odd use of ancient sources. One can only ponder what would happen if we treated all ancient points of view in this manner. The Second Temple view of human origins is not part of the solution—it illustrates the very problem before us, the divide between ancient and modern ways of thinking of origins.

3. The view of other biblical authors. Collins claims that biblical authors all bear witness to Adam as a historical figure (e.g., the author of Chronicles and Luke's genealogy), and so we should follow their lead. But here, too, what biblical authors thought about Adam (sparsely mentioned as he is) does not solve the problem—it exacerbates it.

We all know that the biblical view of origins and scientific models are in tension in many areas, not merely human origins. The whole point of this discussion is to address how we today, confronted with the compelling evidence for human evolution, can view that biblical metanarrative. Stating "the biblical view" of Adam is simply restating the problem, not solving it. Bringing ancient and modern views into conversation requires a willingness to explore hermeneutical and theological territory, not a mere rehearsal of biblical passages. Moreover, as I mentioned above, the hybrid "Adam" Collins leaves us with is most certainly not the Adam of these biblical authors, so it is not clear to me what is gained by this line of argumentation.

4. Scientific data. Collins makes a questionable move by implying that some debates in genomic studies implicitly support a single first pair of humans in relatively recent history (an ad hoc Adam of about 40,000 years ago) from whom all current humans are descended. Although I am neither a geneticist nor the son of a geneticist, Collins seems to dispatch mainstream genomic studies far too quickly in this regard, particularly for a readership with likely little means to evaluate the scientific literature. Also, the sources Collins cites (a 1997 study, years before the human genome was mapped; another study now five years old; an essay from a well-known Christian apologetics organization) would be viewed with suspicion by the mainstream scientific community.

Further, Collins argues that scientific studies on human origins must account for the apparently universal "intuitions" that the world is not as it should be. Since the biblical story of Adam and Eve "makes sense of these intuitions," Collins asserts, science must also account for these intuitions when offering scientific models of human origins. I am sure scientists will want to weigh in on whether religious intuitions are the stuff of scientific investigations.

5. The biblical story. Collins insists that, contrary to common opinion, Adam is a prominent character in the biblical narrative. His catalogue of biblical passages, however, refers to the Garden story in general, not to Adam and Eve specifically—which actually undermines his point about Adam's prominence. (After Genesis 5, Adam is mentioned only one other time in the Old Testament, in 1 Chronicles 1:1).

Further, the Adam that Collins finds typologically in the Old Testament is indeed prominent: Noah, Abraham, David, and others are "Adam figures." But I fail to see why typological Adams require an historical antecedent. Moreover, these typological Adams do not fit the description of Paul's Adam in Romans— the first human, cause of universal sinfulness and death. Collins does not address satisfactorily that the Adam needed to support the Christian metanarrative is absent from the Old Testament.

Collins has not arrived at a conclusion about Adam but has begun with one, and finds creative—but unconvincing—pathways through various scholarly terrains to support a first pair of some sort. Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? offers a succession of "it's possible" arguments: casting doubt, however minimal, on alternate positions is presented as counterargument and, ipso facto, as support for the possible plausibility of the traditional position. Such arguments will have little effect on those Christians who are seeking lasting solutions to a very real and pressing hermeneutical problem.

Peter Enns is a biblical scholar, teacher, and author. He is the author of Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament (Baker, 2005). His book The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins (Brazos) has just been released.