Historic Adam

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

Hey all.

I was looking to get your perspective on the existence of a historic Adam. Obviously we all take a framework or poetic view of Genesis 1, but what about Genesis 1-4? Is Adam just a symbol (man = Adam), or a nameless man (Adam = man) from the distant past?

Personally I take the view that Adam was a prehistoric priest-king of primitive Yahweh-worshipers in one of the earliest landed communities.

 

[shernren]

This quote sums up my feelings perfectly:

... No matter how many fine and fancy meanings we may be able to draw out of [Adam and Eve's] historicity, it must also have a plain meaning: somewhere along the line, some people had to have shown up at a real time and place as the first of a race of priestly beings.

I feel I am about to lose my audience. I shall give you one disclaimer. I am not at all concerned here with whether those people were a lonely he and she, or a crowd, or whether they were made in one shot or gradually pasted up over millions of years. The only point I want to make is that if you seriously intend to see history as a real web, then the web itself must have a beginning, and that beginning must be discussed historically. No one should be exempted from the attempt to write Genesis; and no one ever is. Admittedly, neither scientists nor theologians have reporters' notes on the event, so everybody has to do the job imaginatively; but it is precisely that job that everyone has to do, scientists as well as theologians. There is no real choice about Adam and Eve. The only open question is whether we will do them, and the rest of history that follows from them, justice.

I bring this up because a great deal of solemn nonsense has been bandied about on the subject. In the interest of making a hasty accommodation between a stale biblical chronology and a half-baked theory of universal evolution, all kinds of things were said by all kinds of people. On the one hand, biblical obscurantists made a frantic attempt to salvage the chronology by sweeping scientific knowledge under the rug. On the other, modernist theologians retreated so hurriedly before the specter of evolutionary supersession that they abandoned wholesale the theology and horse sense of the Scriptures. The first have, mercifully, met the fate they deserved; but the second are still with us. They have such a fear of sounding like Genesis that they end up sounding like gibberish. They are so afraid of making Adam and Eve particular human beings that they forget that, if history is real, some particular people will have to turn out to have been Adam and Eve. In the day of judgment we may find out that they called each other Oscar and Enid and that they lived on a Norwegian fjord; but those will be only details. They themselves will have existed. And the essential historical fact about them will be not simply that our biological inheritance came from them but that all the threads of the web began with them. It is precisely the rest of history that you lose if you unload Adam and Eve.

- Robert Farrar Capon, An Offering of Uncles

 

[gluadys]

Hey all.

I was looking to get your perspective on the existence of a historic Adam. Obviously we all take a framework or poetic view of Genesis 1, but what about Genesis 1-4? Is Adam just a symbol (man = Adam), or a nameless man (Adam = man) from the distant past?

Personally I take the view that Adam was a prehistoric priest-king of primitive Yahweh-worshipers in one of the earliest landed communities.

I am curious as to what you mean by "landed" communities. What would a non-landed community look like?

I personally feel all of Genesis 2-4 (the Adam and Eve story begins in chapter 2, not chapter 1) works well if "ha-adam" is understood to be generic man who is a type of every human being. There is no need to use a proper name anywhere in the translation of these chapters. Interestingly, the proper name, Adam, does not appear elsewhere in the Old Testament either, except in a reference to a town of that name.

It is only in the New Testament that we get references to Adam, which can possibly refer to a named individual, but can also be simply a transliteration of the Hebrew term into the Greek with the theological meaning of the Hebrew as well. By the time of the New Testament, Jewish mystics had developed a concept of a cosmic Adam, sometimes called Adam Kadmon in their writings. Paul also developed a concept of the cosmic Christ as seen in his letter to the Colossians. I find his references comparing Adam and Christ to make a lot of sense if we consider that he is referring to these cosmic figures.

Could there have been an early leader of Yahweh-worshippers named Adam? Certainly, but that is a speculation we cannot confirm or falsify. Neither with scripture, nor by any other means.

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

I am curious as to what you mean by "landed" communities. What would a non-landed community look like?

Tribes of nomadic hunter-gatherers?

My qualification of the prehistory community as being landed comes from Scripture's later emphasis on the Sabbath covenant and its ritual form of bread and wine. It's difficult for me to conceive of any Adamic community engaged in priestly mediation between Yahweh and early humans without some means of making bread and fermenting wine.

Note: This isn't to say the Adamic community couldn't have been earlier than the Neolithic era (when bread and wine first appear), since Yahweh could have guided the community in more advanced agricultural techniques lost after the community's destruction and seperation from his guidence (the fall), only to be later rediscovered with the rise of early civilizations.

Anyway, I appreciate the point Capon, cited in shernren's post, that Adam and Eve need not be the historic names of our ancestral leaders. But I'm not as readily comfortable with dismissing a mediatorial ancestor as gluadys and viewing Adam as a typological representation of all humanity. It seems.... well it makes the imago Dei and the fall almost meaningless.

 

[gluadys]

Tribes of nomadic hunter-gatherers?

I see. The terms I would have used for "landed" then would be "settled" or "agriculturalist". Where would pastoralists like Abraham fit?

Anyway, I appreciate the point Capon, cited in shernren's post, that Adam and Eve need not be the historic names of our ancestral leaders. But I'm not as readily comfortable with dismissing a mediatorial ancestor as gluadys and viewing Adam as a typological representation of all humanity. It seems.... well it makes the imago Dei and the fall almost meaningless.

I appreciate your point. But I don't see why it would make the imago Dei or the fall meaningless.

To me it personalizes the fall. It is not something that only happened to a distant ancestor; it is part of my personal history. As such it directs the focus to my sin, my rejection of God and my personal need for redemption. I don't have to puzzle out why God would condemn me for something a long-forgotten ancestor did.

And we have always taken the image of God to be a characteristic of every human, not just the first one.

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

To me it personalizes the fall. It is not something that only happened to a distant ancestor; it is part of my personal history. As such it directs the focus to my sin, my rejection of God and my personal need for redemption. I don't have to puzzle out why God would condemn me for something a long-forgotten ancestor did.

And we have always taken the image of God to be a characteristic of every human, not just the first one.

Perhaps meaningless was the wrong word.

I completely agree with you (and Karl Barth) that we should think of the fall as something that happens to each of us individually and existentially. I simply think that the biblical position indicates a fall from communion with God sometime in our prehistoric ancestory (I don't think it has anything to do with common descent, though).

As for the image of God- my real need for the Adamic community, I think, stems from the need to have the image specially created by God and implanted into the first humans. For all my acceptance of evolutionary theory, biological processes cannot work up to the image of the invisible God (keep in mind, though, that the image is a spiritual reality; I'm advocating the special creation/implantation of the spiritual reality of the image, not homo sapiens themselves).

 

[shernren]

My real need for an Adamic community stems from the idea that since God punishes sin, He must not have intended for it in this world, and hence sin must have started somewhere. It is difficult to claim that God hates sin if it has been in this world from the start of humanity. I say "difficult" because I do not feel that it is impossible. I am fully aware that I am probably committing the "is-ought" fallacy in saying this - that if sin were with humanity from the start, then there can be nothing wrong with sin. Presumably one could argue that our natural state may not be our final state, in the same vein of arguments that a gene for homosexuality would not make homosexuality right.

But it is an argument I am emotionally unready to make.

 

[gluadys]

Perhaps meaningless was the wrong word.

I completely agree with you (and Karl Barth) that we should think of the fall as something that happens to each of us individually and existentially. I simply think that the biblical position indicates a fall from communion with God sometime in our prehistoric ancestory (I don't think it has anything to do with common descent, though).

Yes, of course.

As for the image of God- my real need for the Adamic community, I think, stems from the need to have the image specially created by God and implanted into the first humans. For all my acceptance of evolutionary theory, biological processes cannot work up to the image of the invisible God (keep in mind, though, that the image is a spiritual reality; I'm advocating the special creation/implantation of the spiritual reality of the image, not homo sapiens themselves).

Oh, I quite agree. I never think of the image of God as a biologically evolved characteristic. Perhaps the most we can say from a biological perspective is that humanity evolved the potential to receive the image of God. And I would still be very tentative in supporting such a possibility.

But the actual imprinting of the image of God on/in the species would be a distinct spiritual event not discernible to science, nor achievable by natural evolution.

 

[busterdog]

This quote sums up my feelings perfectly:

... No matter how many fine and fancy meanings we may be able to draw out of [Adam and Eve's] historicity, it must also have a plain meaning: somewhere along the line, some people had to have shown up at a real time and place as the first of a race of priestly beings.

I feel I am about to lose my audience. I shall give you one disclaimer. I am not at all concerned here with whether those people were a lonely he and she, or a crowd, or whether they were made in one shot or gradually pasted up over millions of years. The only point I want to make is that if you seriously intend to see history as a real web, then the web itself must have a beginning, and that beginning must be discussed historically. No one should be exempted from the attempt to write Genesis; and no one ever is. Admittedly, neither scientists nor theologians have reporters' notes on the event, so everybody has to do the job imaginatively; but it is precisely that job that everyone has to do, scientists as well as theologians. There is no real choice about Adam and Eve. The only open question is whether we will do them, and the rest of history that follows from them, justice.

I bring this up because a great deal of solemn nonsense has been bandied about on the subject. In the interest of making a hasty accommodation between a stale biblical chronology and a half-baked theory of universal evolution, all kinds of things were said by all kinds of people. On the one hand, biblical obscurantists made a frantic attempt to salvage the chronology by sweeping scientific knowledge under the rug. On the other, modernist theologians retreated so hurriedly before the specter of evolutionary supersession that they abandoned wholesale the theology and horse sense of the Scriptures. The first have, mercifully, met the fate they deserved; but the second are still with us. They have such a fear of sounding like Genesis that they end up sounding like gibberish. They are so afraid of making Adam and Eve particular human beings that they forget that, if history is real, some particular people will have to turn out to have been Adam and Eve. In the day of judgment we may find out that they called each other Oscar and Enid and that they lived on a Norwegian fjord; but those will be only details. They themselves will have existed. And the essential historical fact about them will be not simply that our biological inheritance came from them but that all the threads of the web began with them. It is precisely the rest of history that you lose if you unload Adam and Eve.

- Robert Farrar Capon, An Offering of Uncles

Most of that is very sensible. I am just counting on more than i deserve.

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

On the one hand, biblical obscurantists made a frantic attempt to salvage the chronology by sweeping scientific knowledge under the rug. On the other, modernist theologians retreated so hurriedly before the specter of evolutionary supersession that they abandoned wholesale the theology and horse sense of the Scriptures.

That's so true, too. It's amazing to me how readily someone like Karl Barth, who I very much respect as a theologian and is himself a redemptive-historical Reformed covenantalist, should just reject a historic Adam and a historic fall in favor of an 'existential' reading. A real shame.

 

[Assyrian]

Does anyone see a contradiction between the idea of the whole human race, every generation that has ever lived, being cursed because of the actions of a single historical individual, and that great revelation of God's character:

Exodus 34:6 The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, "The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation."

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

Does anyone see a contradiction between the idea of the whole human race, every generation that has ever lived, being cursed because of the actions of a single historical individual, and that great revelation of God's character:

Exodus 34:6 The LORD passed before him and proclaimed, "The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, 7 keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation."

Well first, even though the sin of Adam himself would carry through until the only the fourth generation of humanity (according to this model), Cain independently sinned, carrying through to his great-grandsons (the fifth generation of humanity), and his son Enoch independently sinned, carrying through to his great-grandsons (sixth human generation), and so on.

Moreover, I don't think the idea of universally imputed guilt from a prehistoric Adamic figure acting as federal head and mediatorial priest of the human race before God is any more strange than double imputation (our sin to Christ and his righteousness to us) based upon the actions of Christ alone, also acting as federal head and mediatorial priest of all the people of God.

 

[Assyrian]

Except that we have a scriptural basis for Christ bearing our guilt and us sharing his righteousness. We don't have anything like that with Adam. Also the way we enter into that relationship with Jesus, through believing in him, is very different from the automatic inheritance suggested by doctrine original sin.

However our life in Christ is closely paralled to the way Paul describes us sharing in the death that came from Adam. We share in that death because we sin. But sharing in that death that comes through sin does not require some federal head imputing that death. We all share in the sin and death of our common human race (Adam).

Well first, even though the sin of Adam himself would carry through until the only the fourth generation of humanity (according to this model), Cain independently sinned, carrying through to his great-grandsons (the fifth generation of humanity), and his son Enoch independently sinned, carrying through to his great-grandsons (sixth human generation), and so on.

But it has long since ceased to be Adam's sin. All that remains is the last few generations. The point of the Exodus quote is that God doesn't hold ancient guilt over us for millennia.

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

Except that we have a scriptural basis for Christ bearing our guilt and us sharing his righteousness. We don't have anything like that with Adam. Also the way we enter into that relationship with Jesus, through believing in him, is very different from the automatic inheritance suggested by doctrine original sin.

However our life in Christ is closely paralled to the way Paul describes us sharing in the death that came from Adam. We share in that death because we sin. But sharing in that death that comes through sin does not require some federal head imputing that death. We all share in the sin and death of our common human race (Adam).

Well, I would contest your interpretation of Paul's use of 'Adam' in Romans 5. It seems to me that he is speaking of a historical human being here.

But it has long since ceased to be Adam's sin. All that remains is the last few generations. The point of the Exodus quote is that God doesn't hold ancient guilt over us for millennia.

Oh I know. I'm simply saying that the passage, while laying down one form of passing sin through biological descent, is not necessarily antithetical to passing sin through federal imputation.

 

[gluadys]

Oh I know. I'm simply saying that the passage, while laying down one form of passing sin through biological descent, is not necessarily antithetical to passing sin through federal imputation.

I am not sure that the context does suggest biological descent. What does "visit the sin of the fathers on the children" mean? Does it mean the next few generations will be held guilty for their ancestor's sin? Or does it mean they will feel the negative impact of their ancestor's sin?

I think the latter satisfies the meaning of the text just as well if not better than thinking of sin itself being inherited via biological descent. And it is certainly true of what we know about the way a negative environment affects children, and their children and so on unless something happens to transform their lives for the better.

In either case there is the promise of a limit to the spread of sin or its impact, in contrast to the promise of mercy which extends to thousands.

 

[GratiaCorpusChristi]

I am not sure that the context does suggest biological descent. What does "visit the sin of the fathers on the children" mean? Does it mean the next few generations will be held guilty for their ancestor's sin? Or does it mean they will feel the negative impact of their ancestor's sin?

I think the latter satisfies the meaning of the text just as well if not better than thinking of sin itself being inherited via biological descent. And it is certainly true of what we know about the way a negative environment affects children, and their children and so on unless something happens to transform their lives for the better.

In either case there is the promise of a limit to the spread of sin or its impact, in contrast to the promise of mercy which extends to thousands.

Good point. I probably does mean effects of sin and not the guilt of the sin itself.

But that still doesn't entirely rule out an imputation of Adam's sin to the whole of the human race through federal headship and priestly mediation. In his vocation capacity as a man and a father (lets say, given your interpretation), the ill-effects of his sin could have only carried through to his great-grandchildren. However, in his vocation capacity as the federal head of all the human race and the mediatorial priest of all the human race, his sin is imputed to all humans throughout the ages.

 

[Assyrian]

Well, I would contest your interpretation of Paul's use of 'Adam' in Romans 5. It seems to me that he is speaking of a historical human being here.

I would say Paul is looking at Adam allegorically in Romans 5. He describes him as a 'type' in verse 14. Now this could be a literal historical figure being used allegorically or Adam could be figurative all along. But whether Adam is historical or not, the way we are included in Adam's sin and death, is not because Adam mediates his sin and death to us, but because we all sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned.

Oh I know. I'm simply saying that the passage, while laying down one form of passing sin through biological descent, is not necessarily antithetical to passing sin through federal imputation.

I have just been reading the Jewish Encyclopedia about this subject and one of the earliest Jewish references to the 'fall of humanity' coming from Adam is in 2Esdras 3 which dates to about 100AD. Even there the curse that passed down the generation as a result of Adam was wiped out by the flood. It was only in the generations after Noah that the sins of these fathers began being handed down the generations again.

The site seems to be down right now, but try http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=25&letter=F or search for Fall of Man at www.jewishencyclopedia.com

In his vocation capacity as a man and a father (lets say, given your interpretation), the ill-effects of his sin could have only carried through to his great-grandchildren. However, in his vocation capacity as the federal head of all the human race and the mediatorial priest of all the human race, his sin is imputed to all humans throughout the ages.

No I think it is this idea that a federal head's sin could be imputed to all the following generations is clearly contradicted by Exodus 34:7.