Adam and the Genome 10: Paul and Adam

Second to last chapter review of Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science, by Scot McKnight and Dennis Venema.

Previous posts
Personal Preface
Forward and Introduction
1. Evolution as a Scientific Theory
2. Genomes as Language, Genomes as Books
3. Adam's Last Stand?
4. Intelligent Design?
5. Four Principles for Bible Reading
6. Twelve Theses about Genesis
7. Seven Jewish Texts on Adam

Finished the book. Chapter 8 is titled, "Adam, the Genome, and the Apostle Paul."

1. This was the chapter I have been waiting for. McKnight knows his Romans scholarship. But frankly, I was left unsatisfied. This is the chapter where I wrestle with evolution. I wrestle with evolution philosophically and theologically. This chapter is exegetical. It does not answer my big question.

My big question is this. Why are humans prone to sin? What is the cause? It would wreak havoc with my theology to think that God made us and the world this way. My sense of salvation says that Jesus came to free us from this condition. In my opinion, McKnight does not really try to answer this question. Yet this is the question.

Paul uses the figure of Adam to express the human condition. I agree with McKnight's exegesis. But I am left lacking an answer to the more significant theological and philosophical question.

I found the Afterword unhelpful. It will not help anyone struggling with this issue, in my opinion, except perhaps to know that Origen and other early Christians did not take the Genesis text completely literally.

2. McKnight lays out five theses in this chapter:

• The Adam of Paul is the literary, genealogical, image-of-God Adam found in Genesis.
• The Adam of Paul is the Adam of the Bible filtered through--both in agreement and in disagreement with--the Jewish interpretive tradition about Adam.
• The Adam of Paul is the archetypal, moral Adam who is the archetype for both Israel and all humanity.
• Adam and all his descendants are connected but original sin as original guilt and damnation for all humans by birth is not found in Paul. Paul doesn't tell us how this continuity works.
• The Adam of Paul was not the historical Adam.

What is McKnight getting at with these claims?

First, he is highlighting the fact that Paul is building a case out of the text of Genesis. This is the "literary" Adam. McKnight makes it clear, "I am not assuming this is fiction or that Paul somehow got it wrong" (176). He is simply pointing out that Paul is making an argument from Genesis as a text.

For me, there is a lot of hermeneutics hiding here. Most readers of the Bible are not equipped to distinguish the story world of the biblical text from the biblical text as an event in history. From a historical perspective, the writing of Genesis was an event in history and the stories in Genesis are story worlds in that text. From a pre-modern perspective, we are part of the continuous story world of the text, which we are unable to distinguish from history.

So I am not sure how many will like McKnight's distinction. In my words, I would say that God meets us where we are, and God met Paul within his reading of the Genesis text. If we exegete Genesis, we can see that Paul's reading of the Genesis text differed from the Genesis text itself in some regards. We believe both Paul and Genesis spoke inspired truths, but they were truths that were independent of each other. Again, the pre-modern reader has difficulty distinguishing the two and then cannot distinguish either from history itself.

3. McKnight has been trying to make a case that Paul interpreted Genesis as other Jews did--as a text with meanings that served his context, not as a text that served meanings in its original Ancient Near Eastern context (the original meaning of Genesis). He doesn't necessarily address the inspiration question, but this is the way God inspires. This is the incarnational principle--God meets us where we are so we can understand him.

McKnight has highlighted how various Jewish writers read Adam to serve their context. Paul does the same, and we believe in an inspired way. But this is not the original meaning of Genesis. This is an inspired meaning for Paul writing to the Romans in the first century AD. Many will be surprised at compelling evidence that Romans 1 draws heavily from the Book of Wisdom 13.

McKnight goes further, echoing evangelical scholars like Doug Moo, in noting that the absence of Eve from Paul's discussion in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 is a hint that he is thinking of Adam more in typological than historical terms. Adam is an antitype of Christ. He serves as a foil to highlight what Christ has done. The point is not Adam. The point is Christ. Otherwise, he would pay attention to Eve in this context.

4. Of course I completely agree--and the vast majority of experts on Romans do--that Paul has no theology of inherited guilt. We should only speak of original sin in terms of Adam's sin. Paul does not teach that we genetically inherit sin from Adam or that we are guilty before God because of Adam.

The key passage here is Romans 5:12 and the prepositional phrase eph ho. Augustine could not do Greek and so misinterpreted this expression to mean that we all sinned in Adam and thus are guilty of Adam's sin. But everyone agrees and McKnight gives the evidence that what Paul is saying is that death passed to all people because all sin.

There is no genetically passed on sin here. There is no sin nature here. There is only the fact that we all sin like Adam and therefore die like Adam. Let us put to rest the idea of original sin in the sense of inherited guilt. As McKnight says, "humans have been impacted by Adam's sin, but individuals are not accountable until they sin themselves" (186).

I might note McKnight's claim that the "all" in Romans 5:12 is referring to both Jew and Gentile, not to every individual. I think McKnight would say that all individuals sin too, but he may be right that Paul here is thinking "not just Gentiles have sinned and die, but Jews sin and die too because of Adam." This fits with Romans 3:23 where Paul is not thinking "all [individuals] have sinned" (although he believes that too), but all [namely both Jew and Gentile] have sinned.

5. I feel like a chapter is missing. Perhaps they needed a theologian to come in and address the big question I started out with. Even if Paul does not explain how there is a continuity of sinning from Adam to today, how would we Christians explain it in the light of evolution? Was there evil before Adam and if so, where did it come from? Surely God didn't make the world this way!

This is a question of the problem of evil. Did God create the world sinful so that Christ could eventually save us? If Adam represents a moment in the early history of humanity, what was that moment? What changed? What becomes of Christian theology if nothing ever changed at some point??? The Fall of Satan?

My understanding of Paul's theology is that Sin as a power entered the world as a result of Adam's sin. Walton and Holland understand this as a certain federalism, which makes sense to me, but McKnight seems to reject this idea at least exegetically. But the answer to our theological question--a question for our context and our situation--must surely move beyond exegesis to theology.

Adam, as the head of the human race (McKnight and Wright might rightly push us to see Adam biblically more focally as the head of Israel's race) was representative of all humanity that would come afterwards. This is good theology whether it is precisely exegetical or not. For Paul, the power of Sin over the world is surely a consequence of Adam's sin.

It is not a genetic power. The idea of a sinful nature is not Pauline. It is Augustinian. The NIV2011 has rightly expunged this anachronism and returned to the original word, flesh. My flesh is not intrinsically evil. It is just weak without the Spirit. When the power of Sin entered the world, my flesh could not withstand it. We all became destined to sin like Adam. This is my basic understanding of Paul's thinking in Romans 6-8.

I won't try to write the missing chapter. It is still a theological sticky wicket, in my opinion. Perhaps McKnight intentionally left the book open ended so that the discussion might continue.

Assuming there was a representative Adam and Eve, might we see the Fall as what was withheld from humanity rather than something added? The tree of life withheld? The Holy Spirit withheld?

The discussion continues...

Adam and the Genome 9: Seven Jewish Texts on Adam

Second to last chapter review of Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science, by Scot McKnight and Dennis Venema.

Previous posts
Personal Preface
Forward and Introduction
1. Evolution as a Scientific Theory
2. Genomes as Language, Genomes as Books
3. Adam's Last Stand?
4. Intelligent Design?
5. Four Principles for Bible Reading
6. Twelve Theses about Genesis

Chapter 7 is titled, "The Variety of Adam and Eves in the Ancient World. Let me dive into the seven Jewish texts on Adam that he explores.

Sirach
This book, which is in the Catholic, Orthodox, and other Bibles, dates in its Greek form to the late 100s, but much of it was probably written in Hebrew around 200BC. McKnight spends more time with Sirach than he does with any of the other texts. His conclusions seem to be:

• Sirach is processing the "literary" Adam more than the historical Adam. That is to say, Sirach is making use of Adam as a figure in the Genesis text rather than as a real person in history.
• Adam becomes archetypal of all humans and especially Israel. We are not constrained by his choices but as humans we behave like him. This is especially true when it comes to Adam as a moral agent. Adam is a "volitional" Adam--he makes choices like we make choices.
• Eve is treated harshly, which is typical of Sirach. She is considered the source of sin and death.

I've never been sad that Sirach is not in most Protestant canons.

Wisdom of Solomon
The book of Wisdom is also in the Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. Paul may draw on it in Romans 1, and Hebrews actually alludes to it in 1:3.

• Sin entered the world through the Devil's envy, an allusion to the Genesis 2-3 story.
• Wisdom though protects Adam, delivers him from his transgressions, gives him strength to rule.
• Wisdom is interpreting the literary text of Genesis, but Adam is also assumed to have been historical.

Philo
Philo was a Greek speaking Jew from Egypt who was about 15-25 years older than Jesus and who lived to about the time Paul was beginning his missionary journeys. He was very philosophical--a mixture of Platonism and Stoicism.

• Philo "is the paradigmatic example of our thesis that each Jewish author saw in Adam what one believed and used Adam to prop up a theology or philosophy" (158).
• Philo's primary interpretation of Adam is allegorical. There is the Platonic, archetypical human being and there is the shadowy, embodied Adam.
• But Philo does seem to think of Adam as the geneological father of the human race.

Jubilees
Jubilees dates to around 150BC and was likely a proto-Essene document. It retells the Genesis story. The main function of Adam in this text is as a prototype of the Law-observant Israelite.

Josephus
Josephus was a Jewish general to quickly surrendered to the Romans in the Jewish War (AD66-72) and thereafter became a Jewish historian writing in part for the Roman world. For him Adam was indeed the first man genealogically, but even more importantly he was an example of virtue.

4 Ezra
4 Ezra is an apocalypse that dates to about AD100 and it comes closest to Paul's use of Adam. 4 Ezra especially struggles with the problem of evil--why did God allow the Romans to destroy Jerusalem and its temple? Adam is the first human, a genealogical Adam. He is responsible for bringing the power of Sin in the world. We have a choice, but there is more of a sense of a Fall here than elsewhere.

2 Baruch
Another apocalypse that probably dates from around the same time as 4 Ezra, another book struggling with the destruction of Jerusalem. Each of us faces the same choice as Adam. Adam is everyone and we are all Adam.

Conclusion
McKnight's main point in this chapter seems to be that none of these Jewish texts focus on Adam as a historical figure. Yes, there is a sense that Adam is the genealogical father of the human race, but this is hardly the focus of any of these texts. Rather, 1) each author is focused on interpreting the text of Genesis (the literary Adam) and 2) they do so in accordance with their own theological agendas and purposes.

A common theme is that Adam is archetypal in some way, a model human either for good or bad. In particular, he presents the archetypal moral choice that faces every human. "The historical Adam that Christians now believe in has yet to make his appearance on the pages of history... The construct Christians use when they speak of the historical Adam is not to be found in the Old Testament or in other Jewish sources" (169).

Paul is now queued up for next week.

Alienation from God 2

A series overviewing the Bible. The first installment was 1 The Story of the Bible. The second installment started with Creation.

Alienation from God
Although Jews and Christians believe that God created a world that is good, Christians do not believe that the world is currently as it could or should be. Throughout the centuries, most Christians have looked to Genesis 3 as the explanation for why the world is separated from God, although some might prefer to say that it is more an expression of our current alienation from God.

Genesis 2 starts by giving us another perspective on God's creation of life, one that focuses especially on the creation of humanity. God creates a man first, "Adam," a word that is related to the word for earth. God in fact makes Adam from the ground. God takes the ground and breathes spirit into it, and Adam becomes a living being (Gen. 2:7). [1]

Then God creates the other animals, but he creates them in male-female pairs. Surely Adam begins to realize that there are pairs for all the other animals, but that he does not have a female like the other creatures. So God puts him into a sleep and creates a female from him, "Eve." She is to be at his side as a partner with him in the world. [2]

Chapter 3 then tells the story of humanity's alienation from God. God puts Adam and Eve in a garden, the Garden of Eden, and assigns them the task of taking care of it (Gen. 2:15). There are two very special trees there. One, the tree of life, would enable Adam and Eve to live forever.

The other is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God tells them not to eat from this tree. It represents a choice that Adam and Eve have. Will they serve God as God, as the most important being, as the absolute and final authority over everything? Or will they rebel and foolishly try to be little gods on their own?

In the end, they eat from the tree, seduced by a snake in the garden. [3] As a result, they are banished from the garden. And as they have turned from God, God explains to them the consequences of their rebellion (Gen. 3:14-19). Men will have to work hard to get the land to yield its fruit. Women will have painful childbirth and will find themselves subordinate to their husbands. Snakes will go on their bellies and will find in humans a mortal enemy. Most significantly of all, Adam and Eve cannot eat from the tree of life and thus face death as their fate.

Certainly the people of Israel, for whom Genesis was first written, could identify with this description of the human situation. In the New Testament, a writer named Paul would amply the story into an explanation of our fundamental human condition. After Adam and Eve, a power called "Sin" came over the world. Our weak human flesh does not stand a chance against this power. Even if I would want to do good, "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do" (Rom. 7:19).

Like Adam and Eve, in our default human state, none of us can help but do wrong, to "sin." "All have sinned," Paul says, and we have fallen short of what God had intended us to be (Rom. 3:23). We all now inevitably do wrong like Adam and Eve did (Rom. 5:12).

But Paul's message in the New Testament--and the fundamental message of Christianity--is that we do not have to be stuck in this situation. If Adam and Eve were the ultimate cause of the human problem, Christ is the ultimate solution. We do not have to face death as our final destiny. Nor do we have to remain powerless in the face of evil. We do not have to remain alienated from God. There is hope!

[1] This story thus shows us how ancient Israelites looked at a person. We are all "dust," as ministers sometimes say at funerals: "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return" (Gen. 3:19 in the King James Version). The breath inside us is "spirit." And with both body and spirit, we are alive, we are a living "soul," where in Hebrew "soul" means a whole living being (including animal beings).

[2] The word "helper" here in Genesis 2:18 does not imply inferiority. God is said to be a helper to us in Psalm 54:4.

[3] Jews and Christians would later come to understand this snake to be Satan, the supreme evil being in the world.

E5. All have sinned.

Now the fifth and final post in the third section of theology in bullet points on the nature of evil.
_____________________
"All have sinned and are lacking the glory of God" (Rom. 3:23, my translation).

1. Wesleyans would distinguish two areas in which we might consider sin. The previous entry discussed the one, what we might call a "sin nature." We argued in the previous entry, however, that it would be more Pauline to speak of a Sin power that exists over the world. Humans have a propensity to sin because our flesh is weak and Adam's sin brought Sin as a power over the world.

This Sin power is a consequence of Adam's sin in traditional theology. But we are not judged for Adam's sin, since we did not commit it. We merely experience the consequences of it, serious as they are. We all commit sin acts because our default state is one of susceptibility to sin. We are guilty because we do the same acts Adam did, not because we have inherited guilt from him. [1]

The theory of evolution presents some problems for this traditional analysis. So many Christians who object to evolution do so on the basis of Genesis 1. But Genesis 1 is a poetic presentation of creation in dialog with other ancient creation stories. It is probably an incorrect reading of it in the first place to think it is in dialog with such theories at all.

The question of evil is by far the greatest theological problem in relation to evolution. If a person believes that Adam was a literal person at the end of a long evolutionary process, who still literally sinned and brought the power of Sin into the world, the greatest theological question has to do with the nature of the world before Adam. A previous article brainstormed a little in relation to this question. Basically, death might be seen more along the lines of Genesis 3 itself, where eternal life was apparently something that would have been added to Adam rather than something taken away.

Presumably one might interpret the weakness of human flesh in a similar way. Perhaps one could say that the power to overcome self-interest was always something the Spirit needed to provide for humanity. One might say that Adam's sin prevented the Spirit from doing something he was going to do rather than taking away something humanity intrinsically had before.

The idea that the Adam story was a poetic expression of the human propensity to sin, but that he was not a literal person, presents our theology of sin (our "hamartiology") with the greatest challenge. Now we would have to suggest that the human propensity to sin was somehow part of the fundamental set up, apart from Satan and his angels. This is no problem for the hyper-Calvinist, who thinks God has directly commanded every sin anyone has ever committed anyway.

For the Wesleyan-Arminian it is more difficult. Perhaps we would have to say that God created us all with an impulse to do that which is in our own self-interest. This impulse would be a good impulse in many respects, because it would motivate us to self-preservation. It would motivate us toward excellence. We would have been created to walk with God and thereby to receive the moment by moment power not to violate him or others in our self-interest.

The fundamental problem of Sin would then come from our default separation from God and from his power to do the good, not from something that changed in our nature. Further, the collective separation of humanity would then exacerbate our propensity toward self-interest over God and others even more. The fundamental dynamic of salvation then becomes one of reconciliation and re-empowerment.

Whatever the source, it is clear that "human nature" currently has a propensity to act in self-interest over and against God and others. We can call this, somewhat figuratively, our "sin nature."

2. As a result of our sin nature, we commit "sin acts." We have hopefully begun to get some sense of what sin is in the articles that precede. Sin "properly so called" is an intentional act of mind or body that is contrary to the love of God or the love of others. We know the good we ought to do and we intentionally do not do it (Jas. 4:17) or we know we shouldn't do bad and we intentionally do it anyway.

We can, of course, wrong God or others without intending to do so. We can harm another human being by accident. We can try to take over God's rightful authority without thinking about it. True, there are those who would rationalize their behavior and their intentions. There is a human tendency to say, "I didn't know" or "I didn't intend" or "It was an accident" when in fact we are guilty of intent.

God is not fooled. The fact that we cannot always tell a person's true motives--indeed, the fact that we are prone to self-deception--does not negate the fundamental definitions. God knows, and that is all that matters. God is the one who can divide soul and spirit, who can judge the thoughts and intents of the heart (Heb. 4:12).

Sin is thus not to fall short of absolute perfection. It is defined in contrast to God's true standard in the New Testament--love of God and neighbor. And it is judged primarily in terms of intention. There is such a thing as unintentional sin. But our moral culpability before God is overwhelmingly a matter of intentional sin. In our previous article, we argued that self-interest stands at the heart of most if not all sin.

There are thus also degrees of sin. The greater our intention to act contrary to God and others, the greater the sin.

3. All humans act in their own self-interest. Even self-deprecation is a twisted cry for less pain. Even suicide is an act meant to relieve oneself of life's burdens. We are tempted to sin when our self-interest conflicts with the rightful interests of God and others.

There is a kind of depravity that gets pleasure out of the pain of others. This, and full defiance of God, are the most atrocious of sins because they are most in violation of God and others. These highest of high handed sins approach the domain of what is often called the unpardonable sin.

Theologically, we might rather say that those who commit such sins have entered a territory of evil from which they will never return. Theologically, it is not that God would not forgive them if they repented. It is that they are incapable of repentance. God has long withdrawn his offer of empowerment for repentance because they have scorned and rejected it. There is a special category of justice for such deprivation.

All have sinned. We have all, at some point or another in our lives, crossed the line between what is ours and what is God's or what is our due to others as people created in the image of God. We have lost the glory God intended us to have. We have instead become shameful. We stand separated from God and the power to move beyond our self-interest.

All have sinned and are lacking the glory of God.

[1] This is somewhat of a departure from the traditional way of speaking of inherited guilt. But it is both truer to Paul and more coherent theologically.

E2. God created the possibility of evil choices.

Now the second post in the third section of theology in bullet points.
____________________
God created everything, including the possibility of evil.

God created the world out of nothing. Therefore, there is nothing that exists that he did not create and there is nothing that exists that he did not create at least as a possibility.

For some Christian thinkers (e.g., John Piper), there is little difference between whether God created the possibility of evil or whether God created the actuality of evil. Similarly, some would suggest that the fact that God knew Satan and humanity would choose evil is therefore tantamount to God creating the actuality of evil.

The key difference is that, if God only created the possibility of evil, then we can say that the overall structure that he created was good and we can say that he did not directly create evil. We do not know enough to say whether this is the best of all possible worlds (Leibniz). But we would argue that, from the perspective of the world God has created, a world in which persons have the choice for good or evil is a better world than one in which we have no choice but to be good (or evil).

First, evil is not a "thing," as we argued in the previous article. Evil is not a noun; it is an adjective. Evil describes certain intentions, not actions or objects. God thus did not create evil things. He created the possibility of evil intentions, desires, and thus choices.

Augustine was thus wrong also to suggest that evil was the absence of goodness. It is true that, in the current situation of the world, we will do evil by default, without the power of God enabling us to do good. Our current default is to do evil in the absence of the power of God. But this is a question of evil's cause, not what evil actually is.

If evil is a matter of intention and choice, then we can explain how a being like Satan or Adam could sin without having "evil" within them or how Christ could be tempted when he did not have a "sin nature." God gave us drives such as the drive to excel ("rule," "subdue" in Genesis 1) and to have sex ("multiply"). These can be good desires.

Temptation can come from evil desires, but temptation can also come from good desires that are directed at inappropriate objects or expressed in an inappropriate context. Thus, the drive to be attracted to the opposite sex is good. Where it becomes an evil desire is when it is directed at someone else's spouse--a good drive with an inappropriate object.

For Satan to want more power or for Eve to want more knowledge or for Adam to want more power--these are good drives that became evil temptations in inappropriate contexts. In each case, all of them wanted something that conflicted with the authority and rights of God. Good desires become evil temptations.

So when God created the possibility for Satan to choose to do something God did not prefer him to choose, God created the possibility of evil. But the creation of that choice was good. This dynamic explains how a good God can create a good world that nevertheless can generate of its own will evil choices without God being thereby indicted for creating evil.

God created the possibility of evil choices without having created evil itself. God created a world that was capable of creating evil on its own, and that was good because it also created a world that could (at least initially) do good on its own as well.

Next week: Suffering is not evil.

Paul's "Conversion" (part of tonight's presentation)

From my presentation tonight:
________
But while I was on my way to Damascus, Jesus stopped me and tapped me on the shoulder and told me that I had it all wrong.  Everything was exactly the opposite of what I thought it was.  The things I thought were important weren't important, and the things I thought were evil were actually good.  God rocked my world and turned me around 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

This changed everything.  It was going to take some time to work through.  It was going to take some prayer and it was going to take some reflection.  God led me to a man named Ananias in Damascus and he told me everything he knew about what Jesus had did and taught.

But you know, I found out that Jesus' followers were still trying to figure things out too.  Although he had warned them, no one was expecting Jesus to die.  Like me, they thought that messiahs were winners.  Messiahs won and kicked the Romans out of town. They had gone to Jerusalem expecting the heavens to open and for God to crown Jesus king of Israel before the whole world.

Then after he died, they weren't expecting him to rise again.  Of course as a Pharisee, I knew what resurrection meant.  If Jesus had risen from the dead, then the resurrection was beginning, the beginning of the end, the restoration of all things.  If Jesus rose from the dead then he was the last Adam, the one to undo all the problems created by the first Adam.

Of course my thoughts would only develop over time as I thought about such things.  I would more and more come to understand that sin and death had entered the world through the first Adam.  God had made us to be full of glory, but Adam's sin made us lose that glory.  And it wasn't only us humans but the rest of the creation too.  The creation decays and disintegrates because of Adam's sin.

Jesus is the antidote.  Jesus' death sets everything right again.  The cross was God's solution to world's problem.

I hadn't anticipated that.  I thought that what God wanted was for us to keep the Law perfectly.  And I did.  I had lived blamelessly, as far as the righteousness in the Law.  I had kept the works of the Law perfectly, as I understood them as a Pharisee.

But it wasn't what God was looking for.  The cross was the solution.  Therefore, my works of Law were not.  Works of Law must not play any role in being right with God, but rather trusting in the faithful death of Jesus on the cross...

Origins (IWU Coffee Talk)

Over some lunches, coffee, and reading groups, another topic that came up from time to time these last ten years was our faith and science, not just the topic of evolution, but brain research, etc.  Thankfully, IWU doesn't have any "in the face" scientists like the gentleman at Calvin who recently parted ways.  Its science faculty present various perspectives on these sorts of issues.  In the 00s, Burt Webb was often at the lunch table wrestling with us in relation to these sorts of things.

In the absence of any official statements on the issue, Keith Drury's book, Common Ground probably comes closest to a position by the Wesleyan Church on origins currently: "Christian doctrine does not offer final answers to these questions.  Individual Christians have hunches, theories, and opinions about these things, but none of us knows for sure.  We read books on these things because we are curious, and some of us have even started organizations to promote one or another of these theories. However, we do not do this because we are Christian theologians. Christian theology says little about how God created.  Theology addresses the "who" of creation--we believe the God of the Old and New Testaments and the Father of Jesus Christ our Lord is the creator of heaven and earth.  How he created is interesting but is not relevant to our core faith.  Christians insist on rejecting any theory of creation that leaves God out, but we are open to discussing any theory that confesses God as creator.  We let Christians in the field of science give their theories on how it might have happened, but these scientific theories are merely interesting to us, not vital.  We claim only that God is creator" (46).

In my opinion, this is a very wise position.  On the one hand, as our own Wim VandeMerwe would often remind us, there are presuppositions involved in science.  As Thomas Kuhn once suggested, paradigms shift often unexpectedly and sometimes drastically.  It is impossible for us to know what the scientists of 100 years from now will be saying.

On the other hand, as Kenneth Miller warns in one of the books we read these last 10 years, it is dangerous to base your faith on gaps in our current knowledge.  I personally find it problematic to stake my faith on the hope that the vast majority of experts on any topic are incorrect--especially when they haven't substantially changed their position in over 100 years.  Christian scientists and theologians should be brainstorming how faith could fit with evolution and other prevailing scientific theories.  Those of us who are not experts on these issues--either science or theology--should be careful about our own assumptions as well.  It is not only scientists that can have unexamined assumptions.  We can have unexamined assumptions about theology as well.

Some discussions these last 10 years at IWU meandered through these sorts of topics. I can't say that we broke any new ground, but I think it would be fair to say we agreed that Christian scientists should have space to explore these sorts of things.  Not only can scientific theories be wrong but biblical interpretations can be wrong too.

Francis Collins on Adam

I heard Francis Collins yesterday here at Pepperdine.  As you may know, he is author of The Language of God and co-author of The Language of Science and Faith.  He was leader of the project that cracked the entirety of the human genome, a project that I believe will quickly result in curing most diseases like cancer, diabetes and  other gene related illnesses.  Obama appointed him to head the National Institutes of Health, an appointment new atheists like Sam Harris publicly opposed.

His faith is very evident.  Let's be clear about that.  He has a spiritual autobiography something like C. S. Lewis where he started as an atheist but was driven to faith.  It is also evident that he sees no contradiction between science and faith, and he was founder of BioLogos to that end.

I won't pretend that the question of evolution is not a difficult one at one point in particular, namely, our theology of Adam and the Fall.  Genesis 1 is a piece of cake, since it seems rather easily read as a poetic rather than a literal presentation of creation.  The problem is not even with Genesis 2-3.  The problem is with what Paul does with Genesis 2-3 and what Augustine did with Paul and with what Calvin and Wesley did with Paul.

I might describe it like this:
1. The rest of the OT doesn't do anything with Genesis 2-3.  Genesis 2-3 is not of major significance for the theology internal to the Old Testament.  Further, Adam and Eve's sin only stop them from not dying.  It does not seem to bring human death into the world except in that it prevents endless life.
2. The rest of the NT doesn't do anything with Genesis 2-3.  Genesis 2-3 is not of major significance for the theology internal to the rest of the New Testament outside Paul.  Adam is not mentioned elsewhere.
3. Adam in Romans and 1 Corinthians, however, provides Paul's explanation for where sin and death came from.  Adam seems to play a central role in Paul's theology.
4. This became central to our Christian understanding because Augustine and Protestantism focused on Paul and Adam, and made him a centerpiece in the Christian reading of Scripture.  When anyone reads Scripture, s/he must prioritize passages to form a coherent reading.  Adam would not have to be a centerpiece of such a reading.  He is central because we have inherited the readings of Augustine and the Protestant tradition.

The idea that death entered the world through Adam is one issue, since evolution requires lots of death.  There are strategies you can make.  Perhaps spiritual death entered through Adam.  Perhaps we could go with Genesis--Adam stopped life rather than started death.

Collins presented a new problem yesterday I was not aware of.  In his opinion, the human genome is too diverse to have come from one parent (remembering that Eve got her DNA from Adam).  He thinks thousands would have been necessary (he also pointed out that the genome of homo neanderthalis, which they have also decoded in full, is very similar to homo sapiens, possibly implying continuity between the two species.

He presented several possibilities.  One is that God created thousands of Adams and Eves.  One is that God did something special with two of the newly evolved thousands and then retro-did the others or it spread to the others.  Collins doesn't like the metaphorical route, that Adam and Eve are a story expressing the mystery of human identity and our condition before God, but not historical individuals.

Here is some exploration of Adam by RJS on Scott McKnight's blog, including a link to a recent CT article.  I do not offer an answer.  I do have two ground rules:

1. Having grown up with a fundamentalist view of the Bible and then feeling repeatedly stupid--indeed feeling like a complete ignoramus--as I studied the Bible in context, I reject the idea that the Christian position on these sorts of issues is a slam dunk.  The interpretation of the Bible is often complicated and unclear, and its appropriation even more susceptible to debate.

2. I reject any glib dismissal of science by those who couldn't pass a science class to save their life and yet insist on using cell phones and surgeons.  It is one and the same scientific method which has given us lap tops and evolution.  I am not a scientist.  I am not competent to judge the issue.  But I fear basing my faith on the opposite side of the vast and overwhelming majority of those who are competent to judge the evidence, in a field where you make your reputation by coming up with new discoveries, when every single scientist against evolution does so because of a presupposition they start out with rather than because the evidence drove them to that conclusion.

So have at it.  What do you think?

Adam Conclusion 2

Another area where modern study potentially impacts our discussions is in the area of brain research and psychology. Neuro-scientists still have a long way to go in mapping the brain, but it seems fairly clear that there is least some part of the brain that corresponds to each human experience. Whether it be thinking, memory, anger, personality, or even religious experience, we can say which parts of the brain "light up" when that happens. Change the structure of the brain--whether through Alzheimers, cancer, or physical injury--and you change the person.

These discoveries have led some Christians to explore whether the idea of the soul might itself be an instance of Christian language that points to something real but not exactly in the way we have thought. [1] Such Christians point out that the word soul in the Old Testament never refers to a detachable part of me that survives death. Rather, the Hebrew word soul refers to an entire living thing, whether it be a human or a fish. Even in the New Testament, it is only rarely that the word seems to refer to a part of my human make-up (e.g., Heb. 4:12*). Our common conceptions of the soul have as much to do with later Greek influence on Christianity than on what the Bible actually says.

The point here is not to take a position on this issue. Our point is that if scholars are debating on this level, then we can see how far afield the old arguments about whether our carnal nature can be eradicated or suppressed were. Yet no one who pays much attention to the world around us will doubt that our world is thoroughly "enslaved to sin." Ask the social worker at the local elementary school or the prosecutor who works at the courthouse or the nurse that works the emergency room or the person who helps with foreign aid. They can perhaps identify with the pessimism of Joshua 24:19 as Joshua tells the Israelites, "You cannot serve the LORD."

In other words, you guys can't hack it. Serving God is just too hard. Godliness and righteousness is a miracle in this world. This issue, perhaps more than any other, surfaces especially in Romans 6-7, the subject of our next section.

[1] cf. Joel Green, ***

Adam Conclusion 1

It is all fine and good to look behind the layers of Christian interpretation of Paul and Paul's interpretation of Genesis, but what do we take for life from all of it today. One benefit of analyzing the layers is the potential clarity it brings on what exactly we are believing. We now have some choices to make and a much more complex landscape to find ourselves in.

Contemporary culture brings other factors to consider in our picture as well. For example, it is virtually the unanimous consensus of scientists across the disciplines that the universe is very, very old and that complex life evolved over time from simpler forms of life. We know the dirty word, "evolution." Could virtually the entire scientific community be wrong? Certainly they seem to have been before--on whether the sun goes round the earth, on whether time was a fixed framework, on whether space was continuous and infinite. But still, when we realize how much more there is to Paul and Genesis than we might have thought, one has to wonder whether we have as firm a biblical basis as we might think to oppose the notion that God might have directed an evolutionary process in some way ("theistic" evolution).

If we want to be able to engage our culture, we had better think long and hard about the options before we simply close down discussion and just say, "No matter what evidence you see, you will lose your faith unless you close your mind to it." For example, I cannot think of anything that would contradict the authority or truthfulness of Genesis 1 if it were a poetic presentation of God as sole creator of an orderly world rather than a straightforward blow-by-blow documentary. [1] Indeed, those who think they take Genesis 1 literally somehow miss that God places the sun and moon on Day 4 in the expanse that has waters above it. In other words, if we had to take Genesis 1 literally, we would have to believe that we go straight up through sun and stars to primordial waters at the top of creation. [2]

If anything, Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 pose the greater challenge, as Paul seems to say that death and the decay of the world entered as a result of Adam's sin. At this point, some Christian scientists, convinced by the evidence of their field as they understand it, will strategize possible reinterpretations of Paul. Perhaps he meant spiritual death entered through Adam, not physical death. Perhaps he actually understood it as Genesis does--that everything would have died anyway and it was only the fact that Adam and Eve did not get to eat from the tree of life that resulted in death.

Another thing to keep in mind is that we as Christians regularly shift over time in what passages we emphasize and do not emphasize, usually without realizing it. For example, at one point in my life, passages in the Bible against women adorning themselves with jewelry caught my attention (e.g., 1 Pet. 3). An earring was such a big deal to me, given where I was raised, it seemed impossible that a woman could wear one without it being a big deal. I now laugh about that, knowing that most women are about as "prideful" to wear an earring as I might be when I try to match my shirt and pants.

Whether we should focus so hard on such a specific reading of this handful of 5-10 verses is a legitimate question, especially since the arguments of the Bible are always made in the categories of their original authors and audiences--otherwise God would not have got his message across. Paul's point, is it not, is that Christ has abolished death for all those who trust in him. To make this point, he draws on one contemporary understanding of Genesis. His point has to do with the Romans more than with history and certainly more than it has to do with science. Here we remember that it was atheistic evolution and its social consequences that got the dander up of fundamentalists in the early twentieth century. [3] Before then, many godly Christians had tried to strategize whether some form of theistic evolution might be compatible with the Bible and Christianity, as many godly Christian scientists do today.

So let those Christian scientists who are competent debate the evidence both for and against theistic evolution. Let us remember that science is often wrong and has been known to change its mind many times on a massive scale. But let us also remember that the biblical texts themselves are not without their own ambiguity, and that the Spirit has often "instructed," "corrected," and "trained in righteousness" through figurative interpretations. [4] What will only hinder faith in the long run is if we pretend we have it all sorted out and that everyone who disagrees with us is an infidel--especially when most of us are neither competent scientists or interpreters of the Bible!

[1] In other words, if it were more in dialog with the other creation stories of its day than with the concerns of the twentieth century.

[2] Not to mention the likelihood that Genesis 1 had a flat earth in mind.

[3] For example, it was ironically social Darwinism that fueled William Jennings Bryan's opposition to evolution. Social Darwinism was an attitude of "survival of the fittest" among the elite and rich entrepeneurs that was used to justify a complete disregard for the people they emploited, especially their helpless workers.

[4] See volume 1.

Adam cont. cont. cont.

Paul himself had expanded on the Genesis text. The Genesis text itself does not use words like condemnation or disobedience. Paul adds this larger perspective to the story. As much as anything, Genesis explains why men have to work so hard tilling the soil, why women have such pain giving birth to children, as well as why humans and snakes do not get along (Gen. 3:15 in its original meaning). [1] Since Adam and Eve would have still had to eat from the tree of life to live forever (3:22), the Genesis story sees human death as a result of their actions but not really the cause of death itself. Death in the story is apparently the default existence of creatures.

A couple other aspects of the story come from later interpretations rather than Genesis itself. So it was not until the first century before Christ that we have any evidence of anyone thinking the serpent was Satan. Indeed, Jewish understanding of the Satan does not seem to appear until well after the Jews returned from the Babylonian captivity in 538BC. [2] Further, the specific consequences to the soil and to pregnant women fall well short of Paul's more systemic subjugation of the creation to corruption. Here again, this dimension comes from Paul rather than from the Genesis text...

[1] Later Christians would hear overtones of Christ's defeat of Satan in Genesis 3:15, although certainly the original Israelite audience would not have understood the verse this way.

[2] Satan is not mentioned in any of the books from Genesis to 2 Kings, only in the very late book of 1 Chronicles and the post-exilic Zechariah. Job's subject matter may seem patriarchal, but the first two chapters likely come from well into the period after the exile.

Adam cont. cont.

Christian interpretations of Genesis 2 and 3 today are an interesting mixture of reinterpretation piled on reinterpretation, like a wall that has been painted over several times without completely removing the previous paint. For example, we do not find the idea that the "image of God" mentioned in Genesis 1:27 has been either marred or destroyed anywhere in the biblical texts. [1] Nowhere in the entire Bible do we find any idea of this sort. The story of Adam and Eve’s sin in Genesis 3 never mentions the image of God being damaged or destroyed, and Paul himself never thinks of it as damaged in any way. It is an idea that comes entirely from later Christian tradition. It may point to a truth, but it is not a truth that does not come strictly from the Bible.

Language of Adam’s sin being the “Fall” or the “original sin” also comes from Augustine rather than the Bible. The Fall is a shorthand term for the event of Adam’s sin that resulted in humanity and the creation being under the power of Sin and subject to decay. Adam’s sin is thus the first or “original” sin. But Augustine and later Christian tradition in the West meant much more by these terms than Paul himself, and we can probably call a great deal of it into question.

So for Augustine the original sin was sexual in nature, something that neither Genesis nor Paul taught. Augustine’s negative view of human sexuality cast an unhealthy shadow over Roman Catholicism for a thousand years. [2] Augustine and perhaps even the majority of later Christians in the West also believed that Christians continue to have the guilt of Adam’s sin hanging over their head, often believing that infant baptism is important to cleanse a child of Adam’s sin. While we have no problem with infant baptism, this particular view of it has nothing to do with anything the Bible teaches about Adam’s sin. [3] Romans 5:12 only says that death has passed on us because we all sin like Adam, not that we die as part of the penalty for Adam’s sin. We die because we all sin, Paul said. [4]

Similarly, the NIV and other versions introduce later interpretations into Paul when they translate Paul’s word flesh with the phrase “sinful nature” or, as some refer to it, our “carnal nature.” The skew here is to introduce the word “nature” into the discussion, which Paul never uses in this context. The “flesh” for Paul clearly related to my skin, since that is the starting point for understanding the word. But Paul could also say that, “those who are in the flesh cannot please God” (8:8, NRSV). Paul could use the word flesh in a morally neutral way (e.g., of Jesus in Rom. 1:3). But he could also use it of that part of me that makes me lose in my struggle against Sin (e.g., Rom. 7:5).

In short, flesh for Paul was the material part of me, the part of me that belongs to this creation, my body. As such it is the part of me that is particularly susceptible to the power of Sin in this world. [5] But as we will see in the next section, the Spirit of God inside of a person meant for Paul that that person was no longer in the flesh but in the Spirit.

Particularly in holiness circles, language of a sinful or carnal (fleshly) nature led to all sorts of rabbit trails. What was already partially a metaphor in Paul was taken so literally as to lead to debates over the absurd. Thinking of the sinful nature as a thing inside of me, thinkers debated whether the thing might be eradicated or only suppressed. So if it could be eradicated, how might it ever come back? But if only suppressed, then what did that say about the power of God over Sin. In the end, Paul thought about it in terms of powers over my body. Either I was under the power of Sin, the default state of my flesh given the current age. Or I could become a slave to righteousness under the power of the Holy Spirit.

[1] Let alone the later Christian delineation of the image of God in us to aspects like the "natural," "moral," and "political" image

[2] Not that Augustine was solely responsible for these views, which were not uncommon in his day. No doubt such views were part of the reason celibacy became a requirement of priests around the year AD1000.

[3] Augustine wrongly translated Romans 5:12 in reference to Adam, “in whom” all sinned. Augustine believed that we were all present in Adam when he sinned and thus that we all carried the guilt of Adam’s sin. But the NIV and other translations are almost certainly correct to translate the verse to say, “in this way death came to all men, because all sinned.”

[4] Notice that Paul himself interprets Genesis differently than the impression we would get from Genesis 3 on its own. There it seems that the default for Adam and Eve was to die from the beginning and that it was only by eating from the tree of life that they might live forever.

[5] Interestingly, Paul talks in Romans 7 as if my mind (and presumably spirit) was not included in this part of me (e.g., Rom. 7:25).

Adam cont.

... Later Christians would take these brief comments of Paul and develop them according to their own understandings of psychology and the world. Augustine in particular (354-430) developed Paul's thoughts into a highly developed system. For example, Augustine read Paul to teach the total depravity of humanity, the idea that human beings cannot do anything good at all in their own power. Paul never makes such an absolute statement, so if Augustine was right, it would be a God-inspired development of Christian understanding. The Western church would follow Augustine's lead, but the Eastern church to this day comes closer to Paul's understanding.

Paul told the Romans that all had sinned, by which he meant both Jew and Gentile, and he also seems to imply that every individual has sinned as well (e.g., Rom. 3:19). He also told the Romans that the world was under the power of Sin, a power that made it impossible for us mortals in our default condition not to sin (e.g., 7:19). But Augustine lifted statements like these out of a specific argument Paul was making with a specific audience and even then made them to say more than they actually said.

When Paul said that no good dwelt in his flesh (8:18), he also spoke of having a will to do good (8:19), which means he believed there could be good in your spirit. [1] He said that the power of Sin in us made us "utterly sinful" (7:13), but Paul was talking about how many sin acts the power of Sin causes in a person, not about whether any good is left in you at all. Even Paul's pastiche of quotes in Romans 3:10-18 is poetic, meant to paint a picture of the sinfulness of humanity. None of these verses from the Old Testament originally meant even that every person had sinned, let alone that no good at all existed in humanity.

In short, you will not find in Paul any statement to the effect that God has left no good in humanity at all. It was Augustine who took Paul's teaching just one step further, with Calvin and Wesley following. Perhaps they were inspired to read Paul this way. But the Eastern church is a little closer to Paul in its sense of the thoroughness of human sinfulness, stopping short of absolute statements about whether there might be any goodness in humanity at all.

[1] Paul's thinking here is thus quite different from Augustine, Calvin, and Wesley, who understood depravity precisely to mean that no one was able to want to do good in their own power...

Romans 5-8 Introduction (1)

Romans 1:16-4:25 is arguably the first major section of Romans, and it deals with the fact that Christ is the solution God has on offer to the sin problem that all humanity--both Jew and non-Jew--have. Paul begins with the key verses of Romans, which sum up the entire situation (1:16-17). Then he unfolds the coming judgment of God on everyone (1:18-3:20), with no one good enough to escape on the basis of their own goodness, not even the most law-observant Jew. Then he presents God's gracious solution, namely, faith in what God has done through Christ as the only solution (3:21-4:25).

The result is that, "since we have been justified through faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ" (5:1). Our trust in what God has done through Jesus--"through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand" (5:2)--has led God to declare us right with him, to "justify" us. We now are at peace with God. We are not facing the wrath of God, "being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness" of humanity. "Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more will we be saved from God's wrath through him!" (5:9).

God did not have to do any of these things. He had no obligation to humanity to fix its problem. What he has done through Christ is rather a demonstration of his righteousness (1:17; 3:25-26). The action of Christ and the action of God are so inextricably intertwined that Paul can move from one to the other without pause. God has demonstrated his love toward us in the fact that while we were ungodly sinners, Christ died for us (5:6-8).

Romans 5-8 then unpack some of the implications of what God has done through Christ. They step-back and unpack the implications of Romans 1-4. The first verses of Romans 5, as you can see above, give a quick summary of our new situation--we have been reconciled to God! The second half of Romans 5 then steps back and puts what Christ has done into a historical perspective. [1] Christ's act of obedience corresponds to the disobedient act of the first human, Adam. Adam caused the sin problem with his act of sin. Christ solved the sin problem with his act of faith. [2]

Romans 6 and 7 then step-back and ask about sin and the Jewish Law going forward. If only Christ's death makes a person right with God, then what is the place of the Jewish Law? Why did God institute it in the first place? And if we are not truly judged by the Law, then can we continue sinning just as before, only without any consequences. These chapters can be very confusing, and may indeed have been confusing even to the original audience (cf. 2 Pet. 3:15-16). Paul's answer is that the Law got us ready for Christ and that he actually now enables us to keep its essence, something we ironically were not able to do when we were under the Law.

Romans 8 then triumphantly puts it all together in a climactic celebration of freedom from condemnation, and it looks forward to the final redemption of our bodies and indeed the whole creation. Christ has made us right with God, but we remain in this situation of flesh still. God wants to give life to our mortal bodies even while we are still on earth (Rom. 8:11-13). But we especially look forward to the coming redemption of our bodies and the whole creation when Christ returns (8:22-23). Regardless of current suffering, nothing can compare to what is to come (8:18).

[1] The biblical authors, as is the case with most of us, did not distinguish strongly between history and the story of the Old Testament. Indeed, some Christians today, called fundamentalists, make it a key item of faith that the stories of the Bible equate exactly with history.

Unfortunately, dogmatism on these sorts of things has rarely made anyone more godly or resulted in greater unity or faith. Rather, it has more often engendered needless argument and unnecessary division. What is worse, it seems to impose foreign expectations on the biblical text that, in the end, result in far more Scripture-twisting in the name of a modern debate, rather than a stance of truly listening to what the biblical texts seem to have been saying.

[3] See the previous chapter for discussion of the "faith of Jesus Christ."