Here are two quotes from just about opposite ends of the Christian spectrum.
From Robert Farrar Capon, an American Episcopal priest and author:
... 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 [emphases in original]
He is just about as liberal as you can get without heading irrevocably down Spong's path; for example, he basically says (in the same book, or a collection including it) at one point that no Calvinist has ever made sense of Romans 9 to 11. (To those who would consider that the unpardonable sin, I can only say that no less than Luther considered James "right strawy stuff". Oh the irony.)
At the other end of the spectrum is John Stott, who certainly gives Paul and Moses their full weight, and whom nobody could possibly accuse of taking the historicity of Scripture lightly. He says in his commentary on Romans, right about Romans 5:18-21 too:
But the case with Adam and Eve is different. Scripture clearly intends us to accept their historicity as the original human pair. For the biblical genealogies trace the human race back to Adam; Jesus himself taught that ‘at the beginning the Creator “made them male and female” ’ and then instituted marriage; Paul told the Athenian philosophers that God had made every nation ‘from one man’; and in particular Paul’s carefully constructed analogy between Adam and Christ depends for its validity on the equal historicity of both. He affirmed that Adam’s disobedience led to condemnation for all, as Christ’s obedience led to justification for all (5:18).
... But surely the human fossil and skeleton record indicates that the genus homo existed hundreds of thousands of years before the New Stone Age? Yes. Homo sapiens (modern) is usually traced back to about 100,000 years ago, and homo sapiens (archaic) to about half a million years ago, homo erectus to about 1.8 million years ago, and homo habilis even to two million years ago. Moreover, homo habilis was already making stone tools in East and South Africa; homo erectus was making wooden tools as well and living in caves and camps, while homo sapiens (especially the European Stone Age sub-species Neanderthal man), although still a hunter-gatherer, was beginning to paint, carve and sculpt, and even to care for the sick and bury the dead. But were these species of homo ‘human’ in the biblical sense, created in the image of God, endowed with rational, moral and spiritual faculties which enabled them to know and love their Creator? Ancient skeletons cannot answer this question; the evidence they supply is anatomical rather than behavioural. Even signs of cultural development do not prove that those involved were authentically human, that is, God-like. The likelihood is that they were all pre-Adamic hominids, still homo sapiens and not yet homo divinus, if we may so style Adam.
Adam, then, was a special creation of God, whether God formed him literally ‘from the dust of the ground’ and then ‘breathed into his nostrils the breath of life’, or whether this is the biblical way of saying that he was created out of an already existing hominid. The vital truth we cannot surrender is that, though our bodies are related to the primates, we ourselves in our fundamental identity are related to God.
What then about those pre-Adamic hominids which had survived natural calamity and disaster (as large numbers did not), had dispersed to other continents, and were now Adam’s contemporaries? How did Adam’s special creation and subsequent fall relate to them? Derek Kidner suggests that, once it became clear that there was ‘no natural bridge from animal to man, God may have now conferred his image on Adam’s collaterals, to bring them into the same realm of being. Adam’s “federal” headship of humanity extended, if that was the case, outwards to his contemporaries as well as onwards to his offspring, and his disobedience disinherited both alike.’
Stott, J. R. W. (2001, c1994).
The message of Romans: God's good news for the world. The Bible speaks today (163-164). Leicester, England; Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press.
Here we have someone who, in the same breath, vehemently defends the historicity of Adam while accepting his biological evolution as a distinct possibility. How confusing was that?
As such it is a widely held position, and personally I would think it is a fine enough position to hold.
