Genre d'Armes: Evangelical Christianity's Bizarre Hunt For The Historical Adam
Monday, June 13, 2011 at 3:26PM | by Otter 
Here's a conundrum:
The magazine that last year celebrated the failure of the quest for an historic Jesus is now guardedly suggesting that the quest for an historic Adam should be a linchpin of evangelical endeavor.
Scot McKnight, writing in April of 2010, has this to say about the methods used to identify a historical Jesus:
This leads to a fundamental observation about all genuine historical Jesus studies:Historical Jesus scholars construct what is in effect a fifth gospel. The reconstructed Jesus is not identical to the canonical Jesus or the orthodox Jesus. He is the reconstructed Jesus, which means he is a "new" Jesus.
Alright, fair enough: so history if it's done without actually doing history is, well, gospel.
But this month's edition of Christianity Today engages the quest for the historical Adam.
CT makes every effort to acknowledge the difficulties of the idea of a real, historical man named Adam who made a poor choice and thereby destined the human race to struggle with its fallibility. They acknowledge, for instance, that genomic research has indicated that the human genome requires about 10,000 humans to have been on the planet at the point of our first parents' birth.
Yet the historical Adam is essential to CT and to likeminded evangelicals.
Evangelicalism, Meet Thy Future
Several "solutions" have been proposed. The one in ascendency seems to be that of a "federal" Adam, one who was selected to represent the entire race. This view (argued out in C. John Collins' Did Adam And Eve Really Exist?) has the advantage of explaining, among other things, how there can have been 10,000 humans on the planet with the first parents, Adam and Eve, and of course that perennial teaser, where Cain got his wife.
This is of course already engaged in a misguided project, since a "federal" Adam is parsing the letter of Genesis within an inch of its life. No mention is made of other humans (until Cain migrates and marries), so the argument from silence runs that it could have been the case that other humans had been created. But if one is going to engage in such text-combing for silences, why not just approach what the text actually does say?
More on that in a minute.
But first, why bother with all this?
Because, says the opening salvo (portentously named "No Adam, No Eve, No Gospel"),
What is at stake?
First, the entire story of what is wrong with the world hinges on the disobedient exercise of the will by the first humans. The problem with the human race is not its dearth of insight but its misshapen will.
Second, the entire story of salvation hinges on the obedience of the Second Adam.
One must be careful not to caricature this influential point of view: hell, my old bountiful Wheaton College, which is usually pretty canny and balanced on such issues, even has its professors sign a statement affirming the historicity of Adam, I guess as a misguided stab at fidelity to scripture. The relevant lines: "WE BELIEVE that God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the entire human race; and that they were created in His own image, distinct from all other living creatures, and in a state of original righteousness." (Now and then I'm asked why I don't apply to teach at Wheaton. There ya go.)
But I can't think that CT's argument means anything more than, "We cannot explain what is wrong with this world in any other terms but some defect traceable back to our first ancestors."
Well, of course you can... people choose to do bad things, which is the real point of the story of Adam in Genesis Chapters 2 and 3.
But for some reason, Christianity Today's theological commitments override its common sense:
How would you identify the genre of a story in which Humankind is placed in the Garden of Delight, and forbidden to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good And Evil, and is tempted by a talking serpent to do just that, and is forthwith cast from the garden?
Well, if the story were anywhere but in the Bible, you'd say instantly that we have some sort of allegory. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Is God not allowed to inspire allegory as well as history?
The rejoinder, and much of CT's commitments, focus on St. Paul:
The apostle Paul, the earliest Christian writer to interpret Jesus' work, called Adam "a type of the one who was to come" (Rom. 5:14, ESV), and wrote that "[j]ust as we have borne the image of the man of dust [Adam], we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven [Jesus]" (1 Cor. 15:49, ESV). He elaborated an "Adam Christology" that described a fallen humanity, headed by Adam, and a new, redeemed humanity with Christ as its head.
You can't emphasize enough how much the quest for the historic Adam relies on this argument.
For people who have not been exposed to evangelical Christianity, the argument requires some explanation.
St. Paul argues in 1 Corinthians 15:20-22 that "all die" in Adam. He then contrasts that with all being "made alive" in Christ, the new Adam.
What's boggling about CT is the assumption that this requires in any way a historical Adam: it's certainly stranger at this time in history to say that there was a historical Adam than it is to say that Paul was employing images and stories that were familiar and meaningful to his audience.
If any well-read person tells another that he is reminded of Dante in the seventh circle of hell, it is hardly necessary that Dante have historically been in hell for his statement to have force. Nor is it necessary for Achilles to have really existed for me to say that a sulky halfback is like Achilles in his tent. And of course we talk freely about things like the Oedipal Complex without for an instant thinking that Oedipus ever did the things Sophocles said he did.
It's tempting, therefore, to be bewildered and to wonder, "What is wrong with evangelicals? They prefer the rabbit-hole to reality, delusion to definition."
Their cherished doctrine is that the human race requires a redeemer: but if they are wrong about the historical Adam, St. Paul could still be right, that in our choices we continually doom ourselves, Adam, Humanity, to death after lonely death.
It's a shame that they cannot envisage their gospel fitting any other paradigm but a slavish and bizarre contradiction of reality: evangelicalism has so much to offer if it would stop forcing its children to condemn their minds in order to save their souls.
Reader Comments (3)
Otter, thanks for bringing that article to my attention, and for your insightful response. This concluding statement in the article sort of tripped me up: "We need instead a positive interdisciplinary engagement that recognizes the good will of all involved and that creative thinking takes time." Maybe I'm just not in a particularly charitable mood this morning, but my reaction to that statement was one of skepticism. Would the inquiry into human origins really benefit from geneticists and archaeologists swapping notes with theologians and biblical scholars? I don't get the sense that there is any interest in reconciling genomics and Hebrew poetry, except deep, deep in the evangelical ghetto.
This is a good point, IJR.
One thing that stands out to me there though is that we're at a strange crossroads of Western spirituality, where we have to identify what the value of our myths are in a totally new way. I think that many scientists are sensitive to that need, as evidenced by the fact that they continue to engage in good-faith dialogue with people of (good) faith.
But at this point I think it's a case of fostering the sick and the old. Religious myth and story and theological articulations of human origins are of very little value to scientific disciplines, however much they may mean to humans and even to humanity. So assertions like the one you quote come off as the demands to be heard of people without a whole lot to say.
Good stuff!