{"id":2361,"date":"2012-01-31T13:38:45","date_gmt":"2012-01-31T20:38:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tgdarkly.com\/blog\/?p=2361"},"modified":"2012-01-31T13:38:45","modified_gmt":"2012-01-31T20:38:45","slug":"behold-the-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2012\/01\/31\/behold-the-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Behold, the Man"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a new post up on the BioLogos blog<\/a>.\u00a0 Here it is:<\/p>\n

Anyone interested in the faith and science conversation knows that there currently is considerable, heated debate over the problem of \u201cAdam.\u201d Genetic studies conclude that the modern human population could not have arisen from only one primal couple. Excellent Biblical scholars and theologians from various perspectives argue over whether \u201cAdam\u201d should be thought of as part of a population of early humans, or as an entirely non-historical figure. And of course, many Christians continue to insist that scientific data that appears to contradict a particular Biblical \/ theological interpretation of human origins should be rejected out of hand.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d like to suggest that this argument is in significant ways misplaced. The participants in this debate all seem to agree that what makes us \u201chuman\u201d can be defined by genes and population studies. There is a pressing need for them to conform theology to population genetics, or to conform population genetics to theology, because the story of our genes is implicitly equated with the story of what it means to be \u201chuman.\u201d The hypothesis that there was a \u201cfirst human\u201d \u2013 a capital-A \u201cAdam\u201d<\/em> \u2013 can be tested in our genes.<\/p>\n

But \u201cgenes\u201d do not make us \u201chuman.\u201d What makes us \u201chuman\u201d is the irreducible phenomena of all of our material and immaterial being as persons.<\/p>\n

Nothing we observe in the universe is flat. By \u201cflat\u201d I mean having only one aspect or \u201clayer.\u201d Consider, for example, an apple. What is<\/em> it? Is it the fruit of an apple tree? The seed-carrier \u2013 the potentiality \u2013 of new apple trees? Beautiful and delicious? Skin, flesh, and core? Water and organic molecules? Caloric energy and roughage? Hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon? Physical laws? All of these things comprise some of what we mean by \u201capple,\u201d but none of them are what an \u201capple\u201d is<\/em>. The reality that is \u201capple\u201d cannot be reduced to any one of its aspects or layers.<\/p>\n

It is possible to think of these aspects or layers hierarchically, with \u201chigher\u201d layers that emerge from \u201clower\u201d ones. Physical laws emerge from quantum probabilities; molecules emerge from physical laws; seeds, skin, flesh and core emerge from complex arrangements of molecules; beauty and delight emerge from the connection of skin, flesh and core to human sense perception;1<\/sup> \u201capple\u201d emerges from all of this (and more) combined with the human cultural experience of this thing we call \u201capple.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notice that some \u201clayers\u201d can impinge or \u201csupervene\u201d on lower ones \u2013 for example, human sense perception and cultural experience do something<\/em> to this thing confronting the subject in order for it to become<\/em> \u201capple.\u201d But notice also that \u201capple\u201d is not merely a cultural construction. The word or signifier \u201capple,\u201d of course, could be arbitrary, but there is an objective reality to the thing signified. The layer of human sense perception and cultural experience supervenes upon, but does not create, the lower-order reality from which it emerges.<\/p>\n

Sociologist Christian Smith draws these strands together in a critical realist framework in his excellent book What Is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up<\/a>\"\". In a critically realist approach to culture and human personhood, Smith suggests, \u201c[h]uman beings do have an identifiable nature that is rooted in the natural world, although the character of human nature is such that it gives rise to capacities to construct variable meanings and identities\u2026.\u201d Culture is a social construction, but it is not merely<\/em> a social construction. Human beings are social, but they are not subsumed<\/em> by the social. The reality we inhabit is \u201cstratified\u201d: it includes both the reality of individual conscious human agents and the reality of the social structures that emerge from the cultures created by those agents. These \u201cpersonal\u201d and \u201ccultural\u201d layers of the world interact with each other dynamically, each continually informing and changing the other.<\/p>\n

Smith\u2019s approach is helpful, but perhaps it does not go far enough. For Smith, as for critical realists in general, the phenomena of human culture remain subject to some degree of granular disaggregation, at least analytically. A phenomenological approach suggests that no \u201cthing\u201d can be broken into components and still comprise that \u201cthing\u201d \u2013 the genes that encode for apple trees are not apple seeds, apple seeds are not apple trees, and apple trees are not apples. The critical realist framework of stratification, emergence, and supervenience functions as a very useful heuristic device, but to describe what an apple is, we must approach the phenomenon of \u201capple\u201d in its fullness. To know whether something falls into the kind \u201capple,\u201d we must hold an ideal of everything an apple is, and compare the subject to the ideal.<\/p>\n

And because of the transcendence of the ideal concept of \u201capple,\u201d we can begin to speak of the relative excellence of particular instantiations of apples. What is an \u201cexcellent\u201d apple? What distinguishes the excellent apple from a poor one? We can only ask such questions if \u201capple\u201d means something more than the particular physical specimen in hand, whether firm, sweet and tart, or bruised and sour.<\/p>\n

The same is true of human \u201cpersons.\u201d We can say almost nothing about a \u201cperson\u201d merely by observing genes, because genes are not \u201cpersons.\u201d Populations genetics studies can provide models of the dispersion of genes through groups of biological entities, but they can tell us nothing whatsoever about when the first \u201chuman person\u201d emerged. Indeed, for population genetics qua<\/em> population genetics, there simply are no \u201cpersons\u201d \u2013 for this is a science of the movement of genes, not a philosophical, sociological, or theological description of \u201cpersons.\u201d<\/p>\n

So what of \u201cAdam?\u201d It is often suggested that in Romans 5:12 Adam is a type of Christ. But, in fact, in Paul\u2019s thought, as well as for the early Church Fathers, Christ<\/em> is the type, the typos<\/em>, a notion derived from the \u201cstamp\u201d or \u201cseal\u201d on an official document. There is a hint in Romans 5 of a truth that would only become clarified later in Christian theology \u2013 that the pre-incarnate Christ, the second person of the Trinity, always was<\/em>. Whereas Arius declared that \u201cthere was a time when he [Christ] was not,\u201d Nicea established the orthodox Christology of Christ\u2019s eternal sonship. Thus Christ is and was the Redeemer, the one for whom creation was made and in whose death and resurrection creation always finds its fulfillment. Adam\u2019s failure was that he went against type \u2013 he did not conform to Christ but rather tried to become something else, and thereby the true nature of humanity was broken.<\/p>\n

Is the typos<\/em> of Christ reducible to a set of genes? Surely not. It resides not in genes or in any other created thing but rather in the Triune life of God Himself. We might speak, in a roughly analogical way, of ideas we hold in our minds \u2013 say, the idea of a perfect Bordeaux, ruby-red, silky, smoky, plummy, luxurious. We could labor to instantiate that idea, combining genes and terroir<\/em> and water and light and care, and perhaps we might achieve it, to the point where upon taking a sip we exclaim, \u201cthis \u2013 this<\/em> \u2013 is Bordeaux. Nothing else is worthy of that name.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is what God said of Adam, when he gave him breath and a name. It is not something that God said of any other creature, even apparently some creatures that a modern population geneticist or paleoanthropologist might designate as ancestrally human based on genes or bones. Yet that<\/em> Adam, and each of us in<\/em> that Adam, fail to participate fully and unreservedly in the true nature of the true human, the nature of Christ. And so Pontius Pilot, an unwitting prophet, said of Christ: \u201cbehold, the man\u201d (John 19:5, KJV). And so also Paul invites us to see: the sinful man, the broken seal, the first created Adam; and the true type, the seal of humanity\u2019s future, the perfect Adam, the Christ. None of this is about the definitions and categories of modern science, as helpful and important as they may be for the progress of scientific thought. It is, rather, about the fullness of what it means to be human.<\/p>\n

Notes<\/h3>\n

1. Human sense perception, of course, is an emergent property of an even more complex set of relations that give rise to the human \u201cperson.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a new post up on the BioLogos blog.\u00a0 Here it is: Anyone interested in the faith and science conversation knows that there currently is considerable, heated debate over the problem of \u201cAdam.\u201d Genetic studies conclude that the modern human population could not have arisen from only one primal couple. Excellent Biblical scholars and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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}},"categories":[19,70,50,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical-theology","category-patristics","category-science-and-religion","category-theology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-C5","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361","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=2361"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2361\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}