Curiosity: But why do the Flood and the creation account in the Bible have to be literally true for this to work
There is no other sort of 'true' in this case because of the claimed historicity of the narrative.
Note the amount of work being done by the passive voice here. Who is claiming the historicity of the Genesis narrative? The account itself doesn't make any explicit claim about what genre it falls into. The purported author is Moses who, by definition, was not a witness to any of the events of Genesis. For that matter there are, by definition, no human witnesses of any sort for most of the Creation, at least as depicted in the first chapter of Genesis. The parallel Creation story in the second chapter of Genesis has humans there at the start and then everything else gets created. At any rate what @MPaul is trying to smuggle into the conversation is the idea that some neutral observer (or possibly the author) has claimed the historicity of Genesis, rather than explicitly stating that this is simply his own claim.
The Bible does not teach a flat earth.
Job 26:7 He hangs the world upon nothing
That says nothing about whether the world is flat or not. And it differs from the account given in Genesis where the world is under a dome with water above and below, kind of like a reverse snow globe. This dome has the sun, moon and stars attached to it, and also has physical floodgates that can be opened if God decides he ever wants to drown everything. I'm not sure I buy the whole "if there are not physical windows in the dome of the sky we are of all people most to be pitied" argument, not to mention the idea certain human lineages are cursed to perpetual slavery. I seem to recall someone claiming that kind of thing was grounds for rejecting the factuality of certain claims.
Indeed, as regards genre, when I see trees with fruit named for abstract concepts, talking snakes, flashing magic swords and a God walking about a garden in the evening chatting with people called things like "Man" (or "Clay"), it very much looks like myth to me.
I've long felt the message of Genesis 1-3 is "If you take people, give them everything they need and could realistically want, and just have one button marked 'do not press', the moment you turn your back, they'll press it." It's actually quite Pratchettesque.
I would like to hear from MPaul as well. But I do not expect his beliefs to be outside the range ofYEC possibilities described in the Wiki YEC article I linked earlier.
There are actually two concerns which have dominated the reluctance to accept ancient origins. The loss of the authority of scripture and the loss of the historical Fall. (Before Adam's sin there was no sin and no death.)
In terms of orthodox Christian belief, the loss of the historic Fall is seen by many as very serious, since it affects the way redemption can be understood. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
That is a topic worthy of serious discussion. I often think that the YEC defence is driven by the fear that if belief in YEC is lost, then the Fall is lost and redemption is lost. The whole thing is seen as a domino effect.
I can understand that fear. I wish we spent more time discussing that, rather than the pseudo-scientific nonsense which is prayed in aid of the YEC position.
Why must it be about fear rather than faith? You cannot conceive that the reasoning of Paul in saying:
“As Adam all die in Christ,so in Christ all are made alive.”
can only work if both are real. If one is mythical how can it make sense?
I see no reason why "as in Adam all die, so all in Christ are made alive" requires Adam to be anything other than a representative of humanity any more than it requires us to be direct physical descendants of Christ.
What in the Bible leads you to believe in a young earth?
If we see 'Adam' as a representative or symbolic human rather than a real live, flesh and blood individual then 'as in Adam all die' still applies as it's clear that all human beings for and that 'all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.'
If we were talking about a mythical Christ and a mythical or symbolic crucifixion and resurrection then I could understand the concern.
(Apologies, I broke my self imposed shore leave but thought that point was worth a quick visit).
Why must it be about fear rather than faith? You cannot conceive that the reasoning of Paul in saying:
“As Adam all die in Christ,so in Christ all are made alive.”
can only work if both are real. If one is mythical how can it make sense?
Because Adam is you and me. We all fall short of the glory of God. (As Paul also said)
What I want to know is where we can see the Incarnation that is MPaul that we might follow Him. Or must we believe in Him by faith? But belief as a criterion of Christliness is utter bollocks, especially His aracana we are not worthy to believe. Where are His mighty works of social justice? Of righteousness?
So right belief in impossible insane meaningless bollocks is more important to me than ever thinking about twitching a little finger to lift a load in front of me?
Since it was clear that MPaul was in difficulties in evaluating the science related to the evidence of a very old earth and universe, I thought it might be possible to discuss with him and others the theological impact of losing belief in a young earth. It matters more to some than others, and reasoning varies.
So right belief in impossible insane meaningless bollocks is more important to me than ever thinking about twitching a little finger to lift a load in front of me?
No, but none of us here are in a position to judge how other people's beliefs as expressed here translate (or are modified) in terms of their actual incarnational practice. I think that meeting some posters here in RL might be a source of some surprise.
B. My faith in God was hugely restored against my existential angst by hearing The Antichrist make untransferable fundamentalism and mere exluding conservativism irrelevant over the past two days. I was moved to tears this morning and acknowledged the working of the Spirit in all of that.
According to MPaul I'm wrong. My faith is wrong. I cannot believe because I don't believe in his Bronze Age fairy story.
I see no reason why "as in Adam all die, so all in Christ are made alive" requires Adam to be anything other than a representative of humanity
How then can humanity have an ancestral representative who was not human?Pretty well the whole of Christian thought depends on Adam being man not myth. If I concede he was mythical then he is mine to recreate. No authority can devolve from him, no responsibility can be on me as a consequence of a mythical fall.
In 2017 Stephen Greeblatt published another variation on ‘Adam was a myth’. I only read a review of it and probably should get and read it. Someone may have read it but the reviewer in the NY Times insightfully remarks :
Marilynne Robinson NYTimes 2017 Oct 6..review of Stephen Greenblatts book
The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve
There is, however, a complicating factor here, having to do with the question of truth. Greenblatt, an English professor at Harvard University and author of the National Book Award-winning “The Swerve,” frames his inquiry in terms of truth or fiction. For him truth means plausibility, and by that measure the story of Adam and Eve is no more than a miracle of storytelling. But science tells us that Homo sapiens does indeed roughly share a single lineage, in some sense a common origin, just as ancient Genesis says it does. In the Hebrew Bible the word adam often means all humankind, mortals. Greenblatt never seems to consider why the myth might have felt so true to those who found their religious and humanist values affirmed by it — and their own deepest intuitions, which science has partly borne out. It is interesting that those who claim to defend the creation narrative from rationalist critiques ignore the fact that its deepest moral implications, a profound human bond and likeness, have been scientifically demonstrated
No Nothing is of course proved here. Nothing can be proved in an evidential way but to me, from a faith POV, Adam only works as a real bloke.
Since it was clear that MPaul was in difficulties in evaluating the science related to the evidence of a very old earth and universe, I thought it might be possible to discuss with him and others the theological impact of losing belief in a young earth. It matters more to some than others, and reasoning varies.
I am not attempting to evaluate anything regarding Science from within any specific area and no one else is either. There are one or two people that clearly know their stuff and display it but to me, none of that matters. What matters to me is very simple. It is how belief impacts ones view of scripture. This is to do with how one reads and understands it and the ways it is relevant.
I think I understand. Belief that the world is very old is incompatible with Christianity as you understand it? Therefore the world cannot be very old. Is that a fair summary of what you believe?
So people who know their stuff doesn't matter and is of no consequence?
I imagine you wouldn't deploy that same criteria when visiting a doctor or dentist or when taking your car to a garage to be serviced or repaired?
You appear able to compartmentalise things into neat and binary chunks. My faith trumps your reason, sort of thing.
Or is that an unfair assessment?
I can see the logic of your position but not how it necessarily follows. If Adam is somehow some kind of representive Everyman figure, then I don't see how that undemines the Fall and redemption etc.
If we were saying that Jesus never existed and was some kind of representative figure then that'd be different.
I don't understand how the whole thing unravels if we see the Genesis account as myth in the C S Lewis sense.
There is a nice quote from 'The Pilgrim's Regress', C S Lewis's semi-automatic allegory about conversion in which the Christ-guide to John (the hero of the fable) observes 'a myth if you like. But it is my myth.'
Which I think is Gamaliel's point, MPaul. But I'd still like to know if my post is a decent summary of what you believe. And I should think Eutychus would still appreciate an answer to his question as well.
How then can humanity have an ancestral representative who was not human?Pretty well the whole of Christian thought depends on Adam being man not myth.
I didn't say Adam was a myth. I said he was representative. The two are not the same thing. There is a flaw in your logic here.
The logical sense of "as in Adam all die, so all in Christ are made alive" does not require one to believe that everybody physically descended from a real Adam any more than it requires all those "in Christ" to be physically descended from Christ.
The issue of whether Adam was a real individual is neither here nor there in Paul's argument.
What matters is that Adam is a representative of the human race, all of whom, as Boogie points out, have according to that same Paul sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
A belief in a real representative Adam who is not the physical ancestor of all humankind is only a problem if one believes sin to be in effect a sexually transmitted disease. Do you believe sin is something we physically, genetically inherit from our parents all the way back to Adam? If not, what in the Bible requires you to insist we are all physically descended from him? And (especially if nothing does) what in the Bible tells you the earth is young?
I personally have an open mind on whether there was a literal Adam and Eve, but I think their historicity is entirely tangential to the message of the book of Genesis and the rest of the Bible and to its integrity.
Also, I didn't say Adam "wasn't human". He is certainly a representative human for Paul in Corinthians, but he doesn't have to be a flesh-and-blood person for Paul's argument to work. Adam may be a flesh-and-blood person, but he only has to be for the purposes of that argument if sin is physically (genetically or similarly) transmitted.
Also, I didn't say Adam "wasn't human". He is certainly a representative human for Paul in Corinthians, but he doesn't have to be a flesh-and-blood person for Paul's argument to work. Adam may be a flesh-and-blood person, but he only has to be for the purposes of that argument if sin is physically (genetically or similarly) transmitted.
This seems like confusing categories. The transmission of sinfulness cannot be a physical or genetic thing; it has to be a spiritual thing, an imprintable but non physical, transference because of Adam's sin, that affected their offspring.
But if you can't lock it down to a definite ancestor, however it is transmitted, then it cannot have that effect, the effect of creating human sinfulness. That is, it cannot reach down the ages to the point of requiring a propitiatiory sacrifice from Jesus Christ on behalf of the rest of us.
But it does since Paul specifically tells that this is where human sin originated. We already quoted it.."But as in Adam, all die, so in Christ, all are made alive."
Therefore, a physical ancestor, Adam, is still theologically necessary.
Also, I didn't say Adam "wasn't human". He is certainly a representative human for Paul in Corinthians, but he doesn't have to be a flesh-and-blood person for Paul's argument to work. Adam may be a flesh-and-blood person, but he only has to be for the purposes of that argument if sin is physically (genetically or similarly) transmitted.
Mmm I was wondering about this "not human" comment by MPaul.
I concluded that maybe it was a typo or slight editing error. I suspect that the problem isn't the question of whether Adam himself was human, but whether he had non-human ancestors.
As far as I can understand, the thinking is that humanity is different, special, unique compared to the rest of creation - because it (humanity) was created specially, uniquely, directly from the hand of God, and so talking about mankind coming into being from existing creation somehow dilutes that special sovereign creative act and leaves open the claim that we humans are "nothing more than animals".
Also, if one believes that all (animal) creation happened within a very short time, then there just isn't time for the deity to use existing organisms to form humans.
But this seems to me to include a level of biblical oxymoron. The deity is pictured as creating humanity from existing created material - Adam from soil, Eve from Adam.
I don't know of any theological reflection on this, but there is clearly to me a difference between "dirt" and "soil". The former, I think, must imply to ancient readers something dead. Gravel, desert sand, etc. Stuff that you could never use to farm and produce food.
Soil, though, is alive. Good soil brings forward fruitfulness.
So if the deity is picking up a handful of broken stone and molding it into humanity, he is creating a golem.
Also, you know, it's a pretty daft process to create broken bits of stone only to use a day later to create a human. Why do that? And if it is soil, then that by definition needs death in order to have life. What died in the first few days to produce soil?
But if you can't lock it down to a definite ancestor, however it is transmitted, then it cannot have that effect, the effect of creating human sinfulness. That is, it cannot reach down the ages to the point of requiring a propitiatiory sacrifice from Jesus Christ on behalf of the rest of us.
I don't see why that requires a "definite ancestor" rather than a representative. Our faith in Christ is based on God accepting him as being our representative, not on his being directly related to us. Why should things be any different as regards Adam?
But it does since Paul specifically tells that this is where human sin originated. We already quoted it.."But as in Adam, all die, so in Christ, all are made alive."
What makes you think this is "Paul specifically telling us this is where human sin originated"? The passage is not a discourse on the origins of sin but on the hope of the resurrection. Paul is appealing to the representative nature of Adam to make a point about the universality of the resurrection (at least for those "in Christ").
And I still want to know what in the Bible requires a young earth.
A literal Adam and Eve puts us in a similar position to a young earth - an apparently deceptive God. The human genome evidence does not point to a single pair bottleneck; talk of "Mitochondrial Eve" is misunderstood; the presence of any given allele in a population shows that the individual in whom that allele first appeared by de novo is in the ancestry of that entire population, but that doesn't mean that was the only ancestor or the only one of its species at that point.
Essentially we have an argument from adverse consequences here. "The scientists must be wrong because otherwise my religious beliefs would have to be wrong" . The problem is there is an objective body of evidence the scientists can point to; religious belief is just that. There are thousands of contradictory religious beliefs; the odds of any given belief being wrong are actually quite high.
This is why most Christian groups have had little problem accommodating scientific discoveries.
This is why most Christian groups have had little problem accommodating scientific discoveries.
That and the fact that they work! We may not like all that science has done, but it is astounding. Especially medical science, which relies on what we know of genetics, eveolution, the whole gamut.
What ‘works’ in religion? Some things maybe give solace/comfort - but plenty doesn’t even do that 🤔
There is a nice quote from 'The Pilgrim's Regress', C S Lewis's semi-automatic allegory about conversion in which the Christ-guide to John (the hero of the fable) observes 'a myth if you like. But it is my myth.'
Which I think is Gamaliel's point, MPaul.
Yes, it was partly that, but also the belief Lewis had, as a literary scholar, that myth often conveys higher forms of truth. MPaul appears to have a very 'low' view of myth, that it's all about fibs and fairy tales.
Lewis would disagree. I would disagree. A myth may not be literally true in the historically accurate sense but it still tells us something at a very deep level about the human condition or theological truths and so on.
A myth isn't just 'my' myth, it's 'our' myth.
There are 'founding myths' for all manner of societies. The Australian Aboriginal 'dream time'. The myths - albeit based on historical facts - that surround the founding of the USA or the summer of 1940 when Britain 'stood alone' (in actual fact we didn't, we had the Empire and lots of other backers) against Hitler.
My point is a similar one to yours, I think, but perhaps looking at it in a wider and more sociological way - the underpinning myths of societies and cultures as well as our own individual belief systems.
There is a nice quote from 'The Pilgrim's Regress', C S Lewis's semi-automatic allegory about conversion in which the Christ-guide to John (the hero of the fable) observes 'a myth if you like. But it is my myth.'
Which I think is Gamaliel's point, MPaul.
Yes, it was partly that, but also the belief Lewis had, as a literary scholar, that myth often conveys higher forms of truth. MPaul appears to have a very 'low' view of myth, that it's all about fibs and fairy tales.
Lewis would disagree. I would disagree. A myth may not be literally true in the historically accurate sense but it still tells us something at a very deep level about the human condition or theological truths and so on.
A myth isn't just 'my' myth, it's 'our' myth.
Yes, I've been thinking as I've read some of the recent posts that there seem to be a variety of meanings of "myth" at play here, which may be resulting in some misunderstanding, or at least risk of understanding.
If I recall correctly, C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain referred to the Adam and Eve story as a "Socratic myth," by which I think he meant a myth in the understanding of Euhemerus and the Presocratics—an account of an historic event that has morphed and become distorted over many retellings. Again if I recall correctly (I don't have a copy handy), Lewis describes how, when humans reached a particular state of development, they were given by God the capacity for self-understanding and understanding of God, and were in harmony with each other and with God, but that one or more of these humans chose themselves over God, resulting in a "Fall" for all of humanity. This story, over many, many retellings, became the story of Adam and Eve.
There are other understanding of "myth" as well, including the popular usage of a fantasy or invented story.
When I talk of Adam and Eve (and some other stories in Scripture) being "myth," what I mean is that they are stories that convey truths about ourselves—about who we are as both fallen and redeemed people—and about God. In that understanding, whether they are historically accurate is pretty much irrelevant, and debating that question may even be a distraction from understanding what the story is really about.
I think there are some speculative pitfalls we need to navigate carefully in all of this.
If we take Lewis too 'literally' in the example you've given we end up with a parallel Adam and Eve story that effectively does the same job but relies upon creating additional or putative 'Adam and Eves' somewhere else. In which case, why bother? Why not just stick with the Genesis story?
I thought that when reading something John Stott suggested - and I've heard others do the same - that there was a putative hominid couple at some point who had some kind of 'God awareness' moment followed by an insight into their own failings.
It's a bit like some of the 'explanations' given for some of the OT miracles such as the parting of the Red Sea or the Manna and the quail etc.
The explanations end up as 'far fetched' if you like than the miraculous happenings they purport to explain or replace.
I'm not suggesting you are doing that, by the way, simply making some observations.
Soil, though, is alive. Good soil brings forward fruitfulness.
Something more to think about: soil only brings forth life because it is full of death. Decomposing plant and animal matter are what make soil fertile.
Soil, though, is alive. Good soil brings forward fruitfulness.
Something more to think about: soil only brings forth life because it is full of death. Decomposing plant and animal matter are what make soil fertile.
Not really. Tis the microbes living on the decomposing material that give life - they're the critical bits of the nutrient cycle that mean the plants - and everything else - gets the nutrients they need.
If you have death but no living microbes then nothing would grow. But then nothing would decay either - you'd just have piles of corpses lying around.
I'll tell you what, let's not get into surface chemistry because it's horribly complex.
To be slightly more accurate than I was before - we all need plants to grow, and in order to grow plants need essential nutrients, primarily from the soil.
And they get those nutrients from the complex interactions of physical, chemical and biological (alive and dead) entities in the soil.
In theory, one could get all nutrients the plant needs without having any death at all - as the bedrock degrades, nutrients are released which the plant can use. And, of course, one can replicate this using fertiliser - most of which can be obtained from non-living things.
In practice.. well, it's complicated. You can't really have a completely sterile soil, and non-soil systems still have microbes working away.
So yes, the system needs death, and yet at the same time it kinda doesn't.
I think you agree together about what makes soil work as a good environment for growing plants. Perhaps the point is that for soil to function as an environment for growth, some things must die and some things must live.
The human author(s) of Genesis can hardly be blamed for not knowing anything about soil chemistry, or human anthropology, or geology, or Cephied variables, or the speed of light, or radioactive decay, or any of the myriad scientific disciplines which point to the mythical nature of the young earth stories. Such blame that exists is due to attaching undue value to the literal meaning of such texts. And far too often involves constructing an edifice of defensive support which includes attacks on the integrity of generations of researchers in many disciplines.
How then can humanity have an ancestral representative who was not human?Pretty well the whole of Christian thought depends on Adam being man not myth.
I didn't say Adam was a myth. I said he was representative. The two are not the same thing. There is a flaw in your logic here.
The logical sense of "as in Adam all die, so all in Christ are made alive" does not require one to believe that everybody physically descended from a real Adam any more than it requires all those "in Christ" to be physically descended from Christ.
The issue of whether Adam was a real individual is neither here nor there in Paul's argument.
What matters is that Adam is a representative of the human race, all of whom, as Boogie points out, have according to that same Paul sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
A belief in a real representative Adam who is not the physical ancestor of all humankind is only a problem if one believes sin to be in effect a sexually transmitted disease. Do you believe sin is something we physically, genetically inherit from our parents all the way back to Adam? If not, what in the Bible requires you to insist we are all physically descended from him? And (especially if nothing does) what in the Bible tells you the earth is young?
I personally have an open mind on whether there was a literal Adam and Eve, but I think their historicity is entirely tangential to the message of the book of Genesis and the rest of the Bible and to its integrity.
Spot on until the last para. When were they literal? Before or after two-four hundred thousand years of H. sap.?
Why must it be about fear rather than faith? You cannot conceive that the reasoning of Paul in saying:
“As Adam all die in Christ,so in Christ all are made alive.”
can only work if both are real. If one is mythical how can it make sense?
Because Adam is you and me. We all fall short of the glory of God. (As Paul also said)
Absolutely! I think of how that happened ( the falling short) as via a spiritual inheritance..A kind of download from an ancestral source. I can only see the consequence as real if the person or people were. That’s why I believe in a literal First couple...which ISTM the Bible teaches as well.
Eutychus: A belief in a real representative Adam who is not the physical ancestor of all humankind is only a problem if one believes sin to be in effect a sexually transmitted disease
Well I hear you but cannot agree. ISTM this is applying physical genetics to what was never a physical problem despite having physical consequences. Sin is not a physical disease, it is descriptor for the opposite of holiness, a situation we can probably only understand by analogy but was serious enough to necessitate the death of the saviour.
Absolutely! I think of how that happened ( the falling short) as via a spiritual inheritance..A kind of download from an ancestral source. I can only see the consequence as real if the person or people were. That’s why I believe in a literal First couple...which ISTM the Bible teaches as well.
Does this rule of "spiritual inheritance" apply in other situations as well? For example, the descendants of Canaan (Noah's grandson) are cursed to perpetual enslavement according to Genesis. The fact that Canaan's descendants are cursed because of the actions of Canaan's father Ham, not Canaan himself, does tend to lend credence to this notion of "spiritual inheritance".
Why must it be about fear rather than faith? You cannot conceive that the reasoning of Paul in saying:
“As Adam all die in Christ,so in Christ all are made alive.”
can only work if both are real. If one is mythical how can it make sense?
Because Adam is you and me. We all fall short of the glory of God. (As Paul also said)
Absolutely! I think of how that happened ( the falling short) as via a spiritual inheritance..A kind of download from an ancestral source. I can only see the consequence as real if the person or people were. That’s why I believe in a literal First couple...which ISTM the Bible teaches as well.
No, Adam is you and me because he’s human, no more no less. He represents us all. He didn’t need to be an actual person to do that.
The power is in the story, not the need for it to be placed in time.
Why must it be about fear rather than faith? You cannot conceive that the reasoning of Paul in saying:
“As Adam all die in Christ,so in Christ all are made alive.”
can only work if both are real. If one is mythical how can it make sense?
Because Adam is you and me. We all fall short of the glory of God. (As Paul also said)
Absolutely! I think of how that happened ( the falling short) as via a spiritual inheritance..A kind of download from an ancestral source. I can only see the consequence as real if the person or people were. That’s why I believe in a literal First couple...which ISTM the Bible teaches as well.
No, Adam is you and me because he’s human, no more no less. He represents us all. He didn’t need to be an actual person to do that.
The power is in the story, not the need for it to be placed in time.
Is that not the point though? His humanity can only be established if he was actually created imagio dei and fell from grace. I agree it is a powerful metaphor but how can one establish ancestry without history?
Absolutely! I think of how that happened ( the falling short) as via a spiritual inheritance..A kind of download from an ancestral source. I can only see the consequence as real if the person or people were. That’s why I believe in a literal First couple...which ISTM the Bible teaches as well.
Does this rule of "spiritual inheritance" apply in other situations as well? For example, the descendants of Canaan (Noah's grandson) are cursed to perpetual enslavement according to Genesis. The fact that Canaan's descendants are cursed because of the actions of Canaan's father Ham, not Canaan himself, does tend to lend credence to this notion of "spiritual inheritance".
Croesus, FWIIW, slavery was part of the landscape of scripture. Sure it is not ideal and It is sad IMV if you feel that it tarnishes the character of God. To me it rather tarnishes the character of man.
Regarding Ham, yes, there is obviously power in a curse. To believe it you have to experience it. David for instance cursed the mountains of Gilboa. Joshua I recall cursed any future person who attempted to rebuild Jericho. Fortunately curses can be broken. Jesus taught to bless those who curse you. and to forgive those who wrong you.
Regarding Ham, yes, there is obviously power in a curse. To believe it you have to experience it.
I'm not sure what you're arguing here. That it's blasphemous to defy God and emancipate those He's justly sentenced to slavery? That enslavement is only bad if you're the one who "experience[ s ] it"? I'm not really getting what you're trying to say about the idea that God sentenced certain lineages to perpetual slavery. Clarification please?
ISTM this is applying physical genetics to what was never a physical problem despite having physical consequences. Sin is not a physical disease, it is descriptor for the opposite of holiness, a situation we can probably only understand by analogy but was serious enough to necessitate the death of the saviour.
As far as I can see it's you who's doing that not me.
What aspect of humankind's universal sinful nature requires us all to be direct biological descendants of Adam?
Why don't we need a similar direct "descendancy" from Christ. When Paul says Christ is the "firstborn of many brethren" does that mean he must be him literally so?
I personally have an open mind on whether there was a literal Adam and Eve, but I think their historicity is entirely tangential to the message of the book of Genesis and the rest of the Bible and to its integrity.
Spot on until the last para. When were they literal? Before or after two-four hundred thousand years of H. sap.?
Henri Blocher in his book In the Beginning has a nice little appendix called "Adam, where art thou?" which attempts to address this question. He struggles with the evidence of religious behaviour pre-homo sapiens.
I'm basically trying to meet @MPaul half way here. If Adam is representative, not necessarily a direct ancestor, whether or not he is literal doesn't matter either way. So I'm happy to accept the possibility, especially as I don't think anthropology is anywhere near as set in stone (ha ha) as evolutionary biology in the current state of the art.
Comments
Note the amount of work being done by the passive voice here. Who is claiming the historicity of the Genesis narrative? The account itself doesn't make any explicit claim about what genre it falls into. The purported author is Moses who, by definition, was not a witness to any of the events of Genesis. For that matter there are, by definition, no human witnesses of any sort for most of the Creation, at least as depicted in the first chapter of Genesis. The parallel Creation story in the second chapter of Genesis has humans there at the start and then everything else gets created. At any rate what @MPaul is trying to smuggle into the conversation is the idea that some neutral observer (or possibly the author) has claimed the historicity of Genesis, rather than explicitly stating that this is simply his own claim.
That says nothing about whether the world is flat or not. And it differs from the account given in Genesis where the world is under a dome with water above and below, kind of like a reverse snow globe. This dome has the sun, moon and stars attached to it, and also has physical floodgates that can be opened if God decides he ever wants to drown everything. I'm not sure I buy the whole "if there are not physical windows in the dome of the sky we are of all people most to be pitied" argument, not to mention the idea certain human lineages are cursed to perpetual slavery. I seem to recall someone claiming that kind of thing was grounds for rejecting the factuality of certain claims.
I've long felt the message of Genesis 1-3 is "If you take people, give them everything they need and could realistically want, and just have one button marked 'do not press', the moment you turn your back, they'll press it." It's actually quite Pratchettesque.
I would like to hear from MPaul as well. But I do not expect his beliefs to be outside the range ofYEC possibilities described in the Wiki YEC article I linked earlier.
There are actually two concerns which have dominated the reluctance to accept ancient origins. The loss of the authority of scripture and the loss of the historical Fall. (Before Adam's sin there was no sin and no death.)
In terms of orthodox Christian belief, the loss of the historic Fall is seen by many as very serious, since it affects the way redemption can be understood. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
That is a topic worthy of serious discussion. I often think that the YEC defence is driven by the fear that if belief in YEC is lost, then the Fall is lost and redemption is lost. The whole thing is seen as a domino effect.
I can understand that fear. I wish we spent more time discussing that, rather than the pseudo-scientific nonsense which is prayed in aid of the YEC position.
“As Adam all die in Christ,so in Christ all are made alive.”
can only work if both are real. If one is mythical how can it make sense?
What in the Bible leads you to believe in a young earth?
If we see 'Adam' as a representative or symbolic human rather than a real live, flesh and blood individual then 'as in Adam all die' still applies as it's clear that all human beings for and that 'all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.'
If we were talking about a mythical Christ and a mythical or symbolic crucifixion and resurrection then I could understand the concern.
(Apologies, I broke my self imposed shore leave but thought that point was worth a quick visit).
Ahoy!
Identity.
Because Adam is you and me. We all fall short of the glory of God. (As Paul also said)
Since it was clear that MPaul was in difficulties in evaluating the science related to the evidence of a very old earth and universe, I thought it might be possible to discuss with him and others the theological impact of losing belief in a young earth. It matters more to some than others, and reasoning varies.
No, but none of us here are in a position to judge how other people's beliefs as expressed here translate (or are modified) in terms of their actual incarnational practice. I think that meeting some posters here in RL might be a source of some surprise.
According to MPaul I'm wrong. My faith is wrong. I cannot believe because I don't believe in his Bronze Age fairy story.
Eutychus. Oh yes we are.
And if you dismiss someone else's views, in print, as "Bronze Age fairy story" it's hardly surprising you get short shrift from them in return.
In 2017 Stephen Greeblatt published another variation on ‘Adam was a myth’. I only read a review of it and probably should get and read it. Someone may have read it but the reviewer in the NY Times insightfully remarks :
No Nothing is of course proved here. Nothing can be proved in an evidential way but to me, from a faith POV, Adam only works as a real bloke.
I think I understand. Belief that the world is very old is incompatible with Christianity as you understand it? Therefore the world cannot be very old. Is that a fair summary of what you believe?
I imagine you wouldn't deploy that same criteria when visiting a doctor or dentist or when taking your car to a garage to be serviced or repaired?
You appear able to compartmentalise things into neat and binary chunks. My faith trumps your reason, sort of thing.
Or is that an unfair assessment?
I can see the logic of your position but not how it necessarily follows. If Adam is somehow some kind of representive Everyman figure, then I don't see how that undemines the Fall and redemption etc.
If we were saying that Jesus never existed and was some kind of representative figure then that'd be different.
I don't understand how the whole thing unravels if we see the Genesis account as myth in the C S Lewis sense.
Which I think is Gamaliel's point, MPaul. But I'd still like to know if my post is a decent summary of what you believe. And I should think Eutychus would still appreciate an answer to his question as well.
Of course you can ignore both requests.
The logical sense of "as in Adam all die, so all in Christ are made alive" does not require one to believe that everybody physically descended from a real Adam any more than it requires all those "in Christ" to be physically descended from Christ.
The issue of whether Adam was a real individual is neither here nor there in Paul's argument.
What matters is that Adam is a representative of the human race, all of whom, as Boogie points out, have according to that same Paul sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
A belief in a real representative Adam who is not the physical ancestor of all humankind is only a problem if one believes sin to be in effect a sexually transmitted disease. Do you believe sin is something we physically, genetically inherit from our parents all the way back to Adam? If not, what in the Bible requires you to insist we are all physically descended from him? And (especially if nothing does) what in the Bible tells you the earth is young?
I personally have an open mind on whether there was a literal Adam and Eve, but I think their historicity is entirely tangential to the message of the book of Genesis and the rest of the Bible and to its integrity.
But if you can't lock it down to a definite ancestor, however it is transmitted, then it cannot have that effect, the effect of creating human sinfulness. That is, it cannot reach down the ages to the point of requiring a propitiatiory sacrifice from Jesus Christ on behalf of the rest of us.
But it does since Paul specifically tells that this is where human sin originated. We already quoted it.."But as in Adam, all die, so in Christ, all are made alive."
Therefore, a physical ancestor, Adam, is still theologically necessary.
Mmm I was wondering about this "not human" comment by MPaul.
I concluded that maybe it was a typo or slight editing error. I suspect that the problem isn't the question of whether Adam himself was human, but whether he had non-human ancestors.
As far as I can understand, the thinking is that humanity is different, special, unique compared to the rest of creation - because it (humanity) was created specially, uniquely, directly from the hand of God, and so talking about mankind coming into being from existing creation somehow dilutes that special sovereign creative act and leaves open the claim that we humans are "nothing more than animals".
Also, if one believes that all (animal) creation happened within a very short time, then there just isn't time for the deity to use existing organisms to form humans.
But this seems to me to include a level of biblical oxymoron. The deity is pictured as creating humanity from existing created material - Adam from soil, Eve from Adam.
I don't know of any theological reflection on this, but there is clearly to me a difference between "dirt" and "soil". The former, I think, must imply to ancient readers something dead. Gravel, desert sand, etc. Stuff that you could never use to farm and produce food.
Soil, though, is alive. Good soil brings forward fruitfulness.
So if the deity is picking up a handful of broken stone and molding it into humanity, he is creating a golem.
Also, you know, it's a pretty daft process to create broken bits of stone only to use a day later to create a human. Why do that? And if it is soil, then that by definition needs death in order to have life. What died in the first few days to produce soil?
What makes you think this is "Paul specifically telling us this is where human sin originated"? The passage is not a discourse on the origins of sin but on the hope of the resurrection. Paul is appealing to the representative nature of Adam to make a point about the universality of the resurrection (at least for those "in Christ").
And I still want to know what in the Bible requires a young earth.
Essentially we have an argument from adverse consequences here. "The scientists must be wrong because otherwise my religious beliefs would have to be wrong" . The problem is there is an objective body of evidence the scientists can point to; religious belief is just that. There are thousands of contradictory religious beliefs; the odds of any given belief being wrong are actually quite high.
This is why most Christian groups have had little problem accommodating scientific discoveries.
That and the fact that they work! We may not like all that science has done, but it is astounding. Especially medical science, which relies on what we know of genetics, eveolution, the whole gamut.
What ‘works’ in religion? Some things maybe give solace/comfort - but plenty doesn’t even do that 🤔
Yes, it was partly that, but also the belief Lewis had, as a literary scholar, that myth often conveys higher forms of truth. MPaul appears to have a very 'low' view of myth, that it's all about fibs and fairy tales.
Lewis would disagree. I would disagree. A myth may not be literally true in the historically accurate sense but it still tells us something at a very deep level about the human condition or theological truths and so on.
A myth isn't just 'my' myth, it's 'our' myth.
There are 'founding myths' for all manner of societies. The Australian Aboriginal 'dream time'. The myths - albeit based on historical facts - that surround the founding of the USA or the summer of 1940 when Britain 'stood alone' (in actual fact we didn't, we had the Empire and lots of other backers) against Hitler.
My point is a similar one to yours, I think, but perhaps looking at it in a wider and more sociological way - the underpinning myths of societies and cultures as well as our own individual belief systems.
If I recall correctly, C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain referred to the Adam and Eve story as a "Socratic myth," by which I think he meant a myth in the understanding of Euhemerus and the Presocratics—an account of an historic event that has morphed and become distorted over many retellings. Again if I recall correctly (I don't have a copy handy), Lewis describes how, when humans reached a particular state of development, they were given by God the capacity for self-understanding and understanding of God, and were in harmony with each other and with God, but that one or more of these humans chose themselves over God, resulting in a "Fall" for all of humanity. This story, over many, many retellings, became the story of Adam and Eve.
There are other understanding of "myth" as well, including the popular usage of a fantasy or invented story.
When I talk of Adam and Eve (and some other stories in Scripture) being "myth," what I mean is that they are stories that convey truths about ourselves—about who we are as both fallen and redeemed people—and about God. In that understanding, whether they are historically accurate is pretty much irrelevant, and debating that question may even be a distraction from understanding what the story is really about.
If we take Lewis too 'literally' in the example you've given we end up with a parallel Adam and Eve story that effectively does the same job but relies upon creating additional or putative 'Adam and Eves' somewhere else. In which case, why bother? Why not just stick with the Genesis story?
I thought that when reading something John Stott suggested - and I've heard others do the same - that there was a putative hominid couple at some point who had some kind of 'God awareness' moment followed by an insight into their own failings.
It's a bit like some of the 'explanations' given for some of the OT miracles such as the parting of the Red Sea or the Manna and the quail etc.
The explanations end up as 'far fetched' if you like than the miraculous happenings they purport to explain or replace.
I'm not suggesting you are doing that, by the way, simply making some observations.
But yes, your points are well made.
Not really. Tis the microbes living on the decomposing material that give life - they're the critical bits of the nutrient cycle that mean the plants - and everything else - gets the nutrients they need.
If you have death but no living microbes then nothing would grow. But then nothing would decay either - you'd just have piles of corpses lying around.
I'll tell you what, let's not get into surface chemistry because it's horribly complex.
To be slightly more accurate than I was before - we all need plants to grow, and in order to grow plants need essential nutrients, primarily from the soil.
And they get those nutrients from the complex interactions of physical, chemical and biological (alive and dead) entities in the soil.
In practice.. well, it's complicated. You can't really have a completely sterile soil, and non-soil systems still have microbes working away.
So yes, the system needs death, and yet at the same time it kinda doesn't.
The human author(s) of Genesis can hardly be blamed for not knowing anything about soil chemistry, or human anthropology, or geology, or Cephied variables, or the speed of light, or radioactive decay, or any of the myriad scientific disciplines which point to the mythical nature of the young earth stories. Such blame that exists is due to attaching undue value to the literal meaning of such texts. And far too often involves constructing an edifice of defensive support which includes attacks on the integrity of generations of researchers in many disciplines.
Spot on until the last para. When were they literal? Before or after two-four hundred thousand years of H. sap.?
Does this rule of "spiritual inheritance" apply in other situations as well? For example, the descendants of Canaan (Noah's grandson) are cursed to perpetual enslavement according to Genesis. The fact that Canaan's descendants are cursed because of the actions of Canaan's father Ham, not Canaan himself, does tend to lend credence to this notion of "spiritual inheritance".
On the other hand I seem to recall someone claiming that the promotion of slavery was a reason to discount the source of such a teaching in its entirety.
No, Adam is you and me because he’s human, no more no less. He represents us all. He didn’t need to be an actual person to do that.
The power is in the story, not the need for it to be placed in time.
Croesus, FWIIW, slavery was part of the landscape of scripture. Sure it is not ideal and It is sad IMV if you feel that it tarnishes the character of God. To me it rather tarnishes the character of man.
Regarding Ham, yes, there is obviously power in a curse. To believe it you have to experience it. David for instance cursed the mountains of Gilboa. Joshua I recall cursed any future person who attempted to rebuild Jericho. Fortunately curses can be broken. Jesus taught to bless those who curse you. and to forgive those who wrong you.
Wow! Way to literally dehumanize slaves.
I'm not sure what you're arguing here. That it's blasphemous to defy God and emancipate those He's justly sentenced to slavery? That enslavement is only bad if you're the one who "experience[ s ] it"? I'm not really getting what you're trying to say about the idea that God sentenced certain lineages to perpetual slavery. Clarification please?
What aspect of humankind's universal sinful nature requires us all to be direct biological descendants of Adam?
Why don't we need a similar direct "descendancy" from Christ. When Paul says Christ is the "firstborn of many brethren" does that mean he must be him literally so?
And where in the Bible do you see a young earth?
Henri Blocher in his book In the Beginning has a nice little appendix called "Adam, where art thou?" which attempts to address this question. He struggles with the evidence of religious behaviour pre-homo sapiens.
I'm basically trying to meet @MPaul half way here. If Adam is representative, not necessarily a direct ancestor, whether or not he is literal doesn't matter either way. So I'm happy to accept the possibility, especially as I don't think anthropology is anywhere near as set in stone (ha ha) as evolutionary biology in the current state of the art.
Cut loose. You'll feel better for it.