#96 – a response to Swamidass and Alexander

Our listeners … and we ourselves …. raise some questions about the previous two episodes and the whole ideological motive behind asking “who is Adam?”

Over the last two weeks, we’ve been perusing scholarly works on the subject of “Who was Adam?” [note: a pet peeve of mine … Eve is almost always left out of this question!?]. We heard from two scholars who have written their own books on the subject (Joshua Swamidass, and Denis Alexander), one of them gave us a critique of a third scholar’s book (William Lane Craig), and we made numerous references to a large and growing pile of books written by Christian scholars on this very question (Peter Enns; C. John Collins; Fuz Rana; Denis Venema and Scott McKnight; …). Collectively, their ideas cover a lot of range:

• a historical (“literal”) person, or a mythical/metaphorical (“literary”) figure;
• a Homo sapiens in the area of Iraq roughly 6,000 years ago … to a Homo heidelbergensis in Northern Europe roughly 750,000 years ago;
• a de novo creation made from dirt … to a representative plucked out of the human population that existed at the time through the process of biological evolution, and who was then rehabilitated or “upgraded”;
• created “in the image of God” … as understood by the Hellenic Greeks (and which later Christianity adopted), or as understood by the ancient Hebrews who wrote the story in the first place;
• the primal couple living in the wild open hinterland, or in a tiny protected private garden with a couple magical trees;
• that primal couple having crossed some kind of line … broken some kind of law … and thereby consigned all of humanity to an eternity in hell, or to some form of death, or at least to a never-ending dispute on the matter between Christian scholars and theologians.

And those two episodes generated enough questions, problems, and concerns from our listeners to merit a response episode. So here we deal with some of those:

• why are there two very different creation accounts in Genesis (note: that’s only part of the “problem” … there are also several more creation accounts in other parts of the Bible!);
• how/why would a genetic lineage and a genealogical lineage come to very different end-points?
• is the motive behind Joshua’s and/or Craig’s proposals simply to get agreement between the Bible’s version and the scientific version (aka, “Concordism”);
• why does Craig go all the way back to H. heidelbergensis to answer this question?

After addressing those follow-up questions, we deal with Luke’s own major concern here: why is this question so important? It’s not just a trivia question like “why is the sky blue?”. It’s not a nerdy, esoteric hobby like collecting stamps. And it’s not a self-exploration like digging up one’s family tree to find out whether one is related to royalty, or some other famous person. Instead, this question has a whole ideological agenda behind it. A worldview. A theological motive. Which is, simply, “original sin”. That question is the beginning of a mental pathway that leads to the conclusion that all of us bear some form of guilt or debt simply because of something that a long distant relative is guilty of. And with the momentum gained by walking that path, one is carried to another contentious theological worldview … penal substitution. And then it’s only a short leap from that rock to another even more contentious boulder: hell, and eternal conscious torment.

Luke is quite motivated to challenge that train of thought. As he put it in this episode: “if I have a great-grandfather who’s guilty of some kind of mass murder, there’s absolutely no justice at all in making my grand-daughter even the least bit guilty of what he did.” Which is NOT to say that we’re recommending the whole Christian faith be discarded. We’re suggesting some revision to some of our core ideas. In a previous series of episodes, we described our revised understanding of original sin and atonement theory.

As always, tell us what you think…

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