{"id":2079,"date":"2011-06-06T11:22:23","date_gmt":"2011-06-06T18:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=2079"},"modified":"2011-06-06T11:22:23","modified_gmt":"2011-06-06T18:22:23","slug":"christianity-today-on-adam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2011\/06\/06\/christianity-today-on-adam\/","title":{"rendered":"Christianity Today on Adam"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christianity Today ran an article<\/a> and an editorial<\/a> this month on the problems with the historical Adam.\u00a0 On the whole, I thought the article did a nice job of summarizing the issues.\u00a0 I’m very glad CT is introducing this for discussion by the evangelical community.\u00a0 I commend the article.<\/p>\n

The editorial — not as much.\u00a0 Yes, I am glad they are putting a “representative” model out there for the broader evangelical public.\u00a0 That is good.\u00a0 But it is not good to tie this to “the gospel,” as the title of the editorial seems to do, and it is not good to draw lines in the sand, as the editorial does.<\/p>\n

Obviously, there are ways of thinking about the Christian gospel in which Adam and Eve could be symbolic.\u00a0 It is unwise in the extreme for CT to stake \u201cthe gospel\u201d to this hermeneutical question.<\/p>\n

This statement by the CT editors is particularly troubling:\u00a0 “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.” <\/em>Well — yes and no.\u00a0 The “entire story of what is wrong with the world” surely includes each of our individual and willful sins — right?\u00a0 And it also includes the evil that was present in creation prior to Adam’s sin — the serpent — right?\u00a0 So the primoridal human sin is an important part of the story of what is wrong with the world, but it is not by any means the whole story.<\/p>\n

Equally troubling, the editors say \u201cChristians have drawn a line\u201d as though anyone who thinks otherwise is not a \u201cChristian.\u201d But most Christian theologians and Biblical scholars today take Adam and Eve to be symbolic.\u00a0 In this regard, the editors misconstrue Catholic theology for support for this idea that \u201cChristians\u201d have drawn a line in the sand. I\u2019m really getting tired of conservative evangelicals citing Papal statements as if they understand how Catholic theologians think about these things. And they completely ignore Eastern Orthodox theology, which generally is unconcerned if Adam and Eve are symbolic (see, e.g., the Orthodox Church in America website<\/a>).<\/p>\n

At the end of the day I agree with the CT editors that Adam and Eve were \u201creal people,\u201d or at least are literary figures that represent real people and real events.\u00a0 This seems to me the best way to pull together the important theological and heremeneutical principles we need to integrate.\u00a0 But why this continual insistence that all real \u201cChristians\u201d think like editors of CT? It still strikes me as a kinder, gentler fundamentalism, despite the expressed desire to achieve distance from fundamentalism.\u00a0 There still is work to do on this front.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christianity Today ran an article and an editorial this month on the problems with the historical Adam.\u00a0 On the whole, I thought the article did a nice job of summarizing the issues.\u00a0 I’m very glad CT is introducing this for discussion by the evangelical community.\u00a0 I commend the article. The editorial — not as much.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[32,50,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hermeneutics","category-science-and-religion","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-xx","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2079"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2079\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}