This is quite a real issue which I had to face recently as our OCF here was studying Romans 1-8 over the semester. There is an important point which both sides of the crevo debate frequently miss in the kerfuffle:
what place does Romans 5:12-21 have in Romans?
Contrary to popular belief Paul is
not trying to theologically demonstrate man's total depravity in Romans 5:12-21, at least not to me. I can justify that by pointing to the fact that:
1. Total depravity in any theological formulation, whenever it is assumed, should a truth foundational to the gospel (by telling us why we need a gospel and why it must be revealed from heaven); but Romans 5:12-21 comes
after the exposition of the gospel in Romans 3-5.
2. Paul has already demonstrated the complete sinfulness of the human race in Romans 1-3. Note that he demonstrates sin's universality by showing how it is present both in the visibly immoral and the outwardly (yet not totally) moral, even in the Jew who deems himself part of God's people; by the same token, this depravity is total (since outward signs do not amount to an inward change of the heart, leaving all humanity condemned). Thus, if Romans 5:12-21 was simply an exposition of the doctrine of total depravity, it is redundant.
3. If this was a sermon, I'd work harder at having a third point, but it isn't, so there.
If Romans 5:12-21 is the answer, what is the question? If the creationists are right about the passage, the question would be "How did sin come into the world, through a single well-defined historical human being Adam, or through an evolutionary lineage of hominids?" And of course Paul wrote 5:12-21 to tell us that sin came through Adam instead of through apes! When I put it this baldly it is quite obvious that the creationist position makes nonsense of the passage. In particular, Paul does not work at all with the hamartiology implicit in the Genesis stories. If Paul was trying to emphasize the importance of the Genesis narratives for our understanding of sin, you would expect him to exegete more on the various processes that took place on the day of the Fall, the way he quite exactingly exegetes on other passages that are important to him (an immediate example that comes to mind is his consideration at the beginning of Ephesians 4 on the closeness of truth to the Jews, or even Romans 9-11 as an extended meditation of the OT witness to predestination). Indeed, the only use Paul ever makes of the specific details of the Fall passage (e.g. the fact that there was a serpent, the fact that it involved fruit, the fact that it happened in the garden) in his letters is to talk about the relationship of men to women; surely there's got to be more to it than that!
A helpful exercise when trying to determine the meaning of a passage in a topical progression is to try and read the book or context without that passage. ("See? I
told you evolutionists pick and choose what to read in the Bible!"
) So suppose Paul never wrote Romans 5:12-21. What would the rest of Romans 5-6 look like?
But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God's wrath through him! For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
... What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?
(Romans 5:8-11, 6:1-2 NIV)
It's like a record that's skipped: you can tell that the music after connects with the music before, but something's been lost in between. For Paul has gladly told us all the joys of salvation and the benefits of being in Christ; suddenly he becomes stern and warns us that we should not sin any longer. The two connect, no doubt; and both approaches together allow us to steer clear of heresies, whether legalism on the left or antinomianism on the right. But Paul is normally tidier than this. What's the link?
Enter Romans 5:12-21. Paul skilfully constructs a comparison between Adam, the federal head of the old humanity, and Christ, the federal head of the new humanity. What is Paul trying to achieve here? He is linking between the benefits of justification and the goal of sanctification (avoiding sin) by showing us that
we are justified precisely so that we can be sanctified: the benefits of salvation are achieved precisely so that God can set aside for Himself a people who are no longer reckoned under Adam, to be vanquished as the enemy Adam made himself, but a people without sin and rebellion who conform to the likeness of His perfect Son in every way. Paul shows us that newness is not constructed
in vacuo (so that, perhaps, a Christian might be "made new" in some way that did not require him to reform a life of sin) but is precisely the eschatological possibility and present truth of our sinlessness. Because we are reconciled in Christ, we have been taken out of Adam; because we have been taken out of Adam, we should live not as Adam did but as Christ did.
Note that the creationist construction of this passage (that it can be used to answer a question about the specific historical nature of humanity's introduction to sin) obscures the point it plays in the original letter. (This is stated with charity towards creationism; when I was a creationist I knew this passage so well as a proof-text that I had no idea why Paul put it where he put it.) If Adam is dug up, it is only to show that Christ has done away with him; the point is not so much that all are in Adam as that the believer is no longer in Adam but in Christ. Indeed, Christ's work is compared to Adam's and shown to be far greater in both power and glory than Adam's.
You may ask, "Doesn't that then make nonsense of the passage unless there actually was an Adam who did actually bring sin into the world, so that Christ may be compared with Adam?" There is a cheap answer and a better answer (and I don't think they are mutually exclusive). The cheap answer is to note that all we need to know about Adam for the purpose of this passage is that in him the sinfulness of the human race originates. To quote Capon from memory, Adam and Eve could have been Oscar and Enid and lived in a Norwegian igloo instead of in a steamy Mediterranean paradise, for all we care. The fact is that they were the origin of sin, and in that respect they are comparable to Christ who is the origin of saving righteousness. To me that is a coherent solution which is compatible with evolution.
The second, better (though costlier in terms of baggage we have to discard) answer is to see what exactly it is that Paul compares between Adam and Christ. We are not told that Adam was taller than Christ, or that he couldn't run the mile as fast, or that he had whiter teeth (to be a little more flippant than the topic deserves). No, the passage systematically compares not Adam with Christ but
the trespass with
the gift. (Indeed, Adam isn't even named in direct comparison with Christ; he is a named character only obliquely in v. 14, and goes under the pseudonym of "the one man" for his half of the passage.) What is the result of the trespass of Adam? It is the total depravity of mankind. (Remember, Romans 5:12-21 is under no burden to demonstrate this total depravity; it was set out in Romans 1-3.)
Now this total depravity can be compared to the atonement and irresistible grace set in motion at the cross and resurrection, to teach us that our turning to Christ is also a turning away from sin. For Paul, this lesson was best taught by abstracting total depravity into the one act which initiated its spread through humanity, and then comparing it to the one (real, historical) act which initiated the spread of its cure. For us, we may still compare our depravity before Christ to our process of sanctification initiated and sustained by Christ,
even if we do not believe that this depravity is the result of a historical initial sin that consequently spread through mankind. To me, that is the best way that the evolutionist can look at the situation.
Is this twisting the text? I don't think so. An analogy might be drawn to discussing the origin of chaos in terms of Pandora (imaginary origins can help us make sense of real phenomena) but the comparison of Christian theology to pagan mythology is often counterproductive, especially in discussions with those who are so inclined to ask such questions in the first place.
A more neutral example to me is how we still call some problems "computer bugs". The term arose, I believe, through the fact that the first "bugs" were literally bugs - moths and other such insects that flew into the gigantic innards of the first electronic computers and short-circuited their electronics. (If this is not true, the point it makes is still true - a complicated meta-example of how wrong origins can illustrate truth still!) When I say that my latest program has a bug, I do not actually mean that it malfunctions because at the moment I run it, a moth flies into my computer and short-circuits the CPU! Yet it still makes sense to speak of such an error as a "bug": it is annoying, it gets in the way of what you intend to do, it may crop up randomly, and you need hard work to get rid of it! In the same way, when Paul speaks of sin as the handiwork of Adam, he is describing some of its characteristics in such a way that is still true even if there actually was no Adam, like its universality and its impropriety in the life of the true Christian.
As such, no, I don't see a problem with being an evolutionist and believing wholeheartedly the message of Romans.
