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This is the third post of a discussion (which began on Wednesday) of a couple of quotes on this issue: Does the New Testament teach that Adam existed as a historical person, and was the ancestor of all humans? We’re aiming at growth in our ability to discuss these things with both fellow believers and nonbelievers. Yesterday we looked at the first couple of points.

We continue today with the rest of David Wenham’s quote:

“I suspect that Paul would have shared many of the views of his day. He may well have believed in a flat earth. But, his theology does not depend on his science. His theology of Adam has mainly, I think, to do with his understanding of humanity and how it was created, rather than in any way being a scientific statement.”

This is so good for us to begin to notice: we have here the same kind of “splitting” that we looked at by Alistair McGrath yesterday. Wenham claims Paul had an understanding of how humanity was created, but that it wasn’t a “scientific statement.” By using this term I assume that Wenham doesn’t mean that Paul’s theology of Adam was not stated in modern scientific terms, since that would seem too obvious for him to state here. No one would claim that Paul would have used modern scientific terms that didn’t exist in his day. So I have to conclude that Wenham means something like: “Paul’s concept of how humanity began was a theological one, and didn’t describe how humanity actually began. ” The split to notice here is the assumed division between things that are “theological” and things that are “actual.” In other words, he assumes that Paul would have seen some merit to an idea that claimed to be theologically true, but wasn’t based on anything that happened in the material world. 

But as we saw yesterday, this is exactly the kind of assumption we can’t make, if we want to do justice to Paul’s thinking. Paul seems to assume that only things that have actually happened can be objects of faith in the sense that matters to God.

Which leads us to the end of Wenham’s quote:

“I do think we mustn’t underestimate the sophistication of people like Paul. He was highly trained. He will have known and did know aspects of Greek philosophy where they discussed questions of creation and so on. He will have understood the Old Testament with a very sharp eye, and I think he will have understood that the stories of creation are not scientific descriptions, but are theological affirmations about God’s truth and about how God created the world.” (David Wenham)

The same split in thinking is assumed here. Wenham claims that Paul understood that the Old Testament stories of creation are not scientific descriptions. But let’s think here…isn’t the burden of Wenham’s point that Paul didn’t think in modern scientific terms? That those types of thought forms weren’t available to him? So how, then, could Paul have understood that the Old Testament stories were not something he didn’t know existed? Why would he have worried about a category he wasn’t aware of? The answer is that he wouldn’t have. It is only our generation, with it’s preoccupation with this very specific kind inquiry into the nature of the universe that has this dilemma.

So I think the point to see here is that, in discussing these things, it doesn’t help us get closer to the truth of what Paul believed to try “back in” to the conversation by saying what he “wouldn’t” have believed. The question to answer is, “What did Paul believe?” Would he have agreed that the Old Testament stories “are not scientific descriptions, but are theological affirmations about God’s truth and about how God created the world”? Would he have agreed that you could affirm that a story in the Bible was theologically true, but not actually true? Would he have asked us to base our faith on something that didn’t happen? I don’t think a positive answer to any of those questions does justice to Paul’s writings, or the way the writers of the other books of the Bible seem to think.

It is as if Wenham wants to argue that that Bible contains “God’s truth about how God created the world” which is not, actually, a description about how God created the world. Do we have any indication in the scripture that God communicates this way? I hope it’s becoming clear that we can get to the point where we’re simply dealing in absurdities.

The crucial point to make here is that all of scripture takes it for granted that God acts in our material, historical world, and that He then holds up those events for us to remember and trust Him. Specifically, we are asked to remember things like Creation, the Exodus, the Flood, and the miracles of Christ, and the death and resurrection of Christ, as instances where God demonstrated Himself to be true.  Interestingly, He seems to want us to remember the kinds of events that demonstrate His Godhood–including His lordship over nature–and those are precisely the kinds of events that modern scientific thinking must rule out because of its commitment to Naturalism. Now, if we live in a time where the prevailing climate of thought disallows any belief in the kinds of events God says we must remember in order to believe in Him, why should we think we are beholden to this current way of thinking?

A few months ago I posted some information about a book that deals at length with the issue of historical events as the basis for faith. Check it out here.

Soon I hope to write one more post to supplement these observations with one more essential thing to remember in all of this, and one that we haven’t even mentioned yet: the fact of revelation.

Yesterday I introduced a couple quotes from another blog which represent some current ways of talking about this issue: Does the New Testament teach that Adam existed as a historical person, and was the ancestor of all humans?

Today I want to begin responding to the two quotes point by point. The point of all this is for us in the Young Adults fellowship to grow, both in our ability to preach the gospel faithfully to nonbelievers, and in our ability to discuss these things with brothers and sisters in Christ.

The scriptures in discussion here are Romans 5:6-21 and 1 Corinthians 15:12-58. I recommend you grab a bible and read them over before diving in to this…

First here’s the quote from Alistair McGrath:

“Now the key question, and it won’t go away, is whether Paul is seeing Adam as a representative figure—in some way, here is a figurehead of humanity as a whole—or whether Paul is seeing him as a specific historical figure who in some way gave rise to the human race as we now know it.”

I am familiar with, but still puzzled by, the idea McGrath alludes to here–that for Paul, there could be some some difference between “a representative figure” and a “historical figure.” The idea of headship which runs throughout the entire Bible is that a person can be a figurehead for others because of a familial relationship, whether it’s genetic or adoptive. For instance, Abraham and Jacob can be representative figureheads of the later nation of Israel because the individuals in the nation were related to them genetically, or through conversion (which amounts to being adopted into the family). But the idea that you could have a representative figurehead of a family who didn’t actually exist seems to miss the whole point of what headship entails–namely, relationship. And do we have any indication in scripture that any of the writers believed that we could have a relationship with a non-existent person?

So, in discussing this idea, we might grant that there could be such a thing as a fictional character who could represent a larger group of people (like, say “Uncle Sam” for the U.S.A.), but could that person be called a figurehead in the sense that what Uncle Sam did affects all of us? And even if we thought that way in our culture, we’d still have to check to see if the Biblical writers wrote that way.

This leads into the next quote, by David Wenham:

“What was Paul’s view exactly about how the world was created? What was his scientific point of view? Now, Paul was somebody who lived in the first century, and Paul did not understand modern science. When he thought about creation, he wasn’t thinking in terms of modern science. It wasn’t the question he was asking.”

I’m always interested when someone asks a question like, “what was Paul’s scientific view?” because it usually comes from someone who will want to stress that Paul didn’t think in scientific terms. So it seems to muddy the issue.

Regardless, to say that Paul “wasn’t thinking in terms of modern science” seems to me to be nothing more than a language move to change the terms of the discussion. Nobody claims that Paul would have thought or spoke in the technical terms of modern scientific theory. (And really, couldn’t the same be said for people who lived just a few hundred years ago, like say…the Founding Fathers?)

But doesn’t this miss the point? I think it’s crucial for all of us to be able to navigate these kinds of thoughts–The issue isn’t what terms Paul used or what paradigms he ascribed to, the issue is, did he think in terms of an actual physical world which existed in some definite, discoverable, describable way? In other words, when Paul spoke, did he think his words referred to the actual world we live in, or only that they referred to the realm of ideas? The answer, especially if you read the Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 passages, is that he insisted that everything he preached referred not only to the “spiritual” but also the material, historical, world–or it was meaningless.

Take, for instance, 1 Corinthians 15:12-14, which ends this way: “If Christ is not risen [that is, if He did not actually rise in history, and if these words don’t refer to that historical, material event], then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty.” He goes on to say that he himself would be nothing more than a liar if he said “Christ is risen” and it did not refer to an actual event.

Now, do we have any reason to think Paul would have thought differently about any other truth he preached? Would he have said that Christ’s life and resurrection must have happened, but not Adam’s sin? It seems clear to me that the answer is no–his thinking is consistent across the board.

So I think we can conclude that the question “Did Paul think in scientific terms?” is unhelpful in thinking through this issue. The relevant question would be something more like, “Did Paul think his message referred to the actual world of physicality and history, or only the world of ideas?” (Interestingly enough, if we grant that Science shares this concern with Paul–to describe the world that truly is–we can see that, regardless of the terms they used, they actually did have very similar concerns, even if we grant that often their focus is different.)

Tomorrow I’ll finish looking at the rest of the quote.

I read these quotes in an article on another blog the other day:

“Now the key question, and it won’t go away, is whether Paul is seeing Adam as a representative figure—in some way, here is a figurehead of humanity as a whole—or whether Paul is seeing him as a specific historical figure who in some way gave rise to the human race as we now know it….

“What was Paul’s view exactly about how the world was created? What was his scientific point of view? Now, Paul was somebody who lived in the first century, and Paul did not understand modern science. When he thought about creation, he wasn’t thinking in terms of modern science. It wasn’t the question he was asking. I suspect that Paul would have shared many of the views of his day. He may well have believed in a flat earth. But, his theology does not depend on his science. His theology of Adam has mainly, I think, to do with his understanding of humanity and how it was created, rather than in any way being a scientific statement. I do think we mustn’t underestimate the sophistication of people like Paul. He was highly trained. He will have known and did know aspects of Greek philosophy where they discussed questions of creation and so on. He will have understood the Old Testament with a very sharp eye, and I think he will have understood that the stories of creation are not scientific descriptions, but are theological affirmations about God’s truth and about how God created the world.”

Now, you may not be aware of it, but there’s some ongoing discussion of this topic. (Just this month there was a rather lengthy piece on NPR over this very issue.) Regardless of what a Christian believes about the relationship between Science and the Bible, it seems to me this is a key issue. Do we, or do we not, see the New Testament as teaching that Adam was a historical person, and that the events of Genesis 3 actually happened?

And there are really two angles on the discussion. First there is the perspective that begins with modern scientific research, and tries to investigate what, if any, relationship there might be between a typical account of human origins based on the current thinking in biology, and the account of human origins given in the opening chapters of Genesis. The quotes above, however, come from the second angle, which is to examine the Biblical texts to see if they actually teach what many believe they do–namely, that Adam and Eve truly existed, and were the actual, biological ancestors of the whole human race.

Starting tomorrow, I’d like to engage these quotes point by point, and offer some thoughts on the kind of thinking they represent.