NPR on the Literal Adam and Eve

In the wake of the resignation of John Schneider at Calvin College, NPR has an article on their web site on the latest Christian controversy, the literal Adam and Eve debate. Barbara Bradley Hagerty writes:

[Dennis] Venema is a senior fellow at BioLogos Foundation, a Christian group that tries to reconcile faith and science. The group was founded by Francis Collins, an evangelical and the current head of the National Institutes of Health, who, because of his position, declined an interview.
And Venema is part of a growing cadre of Christian scholars who say they want their faith to come into the 21st century. Another one is John Schneider, who taught theology at Calvin College in Michigan until recently. He says it's time to face facts: There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence.
"Evolution makes it pretty clear that in nature, and in the moral experience of human beings, there never was any such paradise to be lost," Schneider says. "So Christians, I think, have a challenge, have a job on their hands to reformulate some of their tradition about human beginnings." To many evangelicals, this is heresy.

The evangelical community certainly has its back against the wall on this one. Once upon a time, it was okay to take pot shots at young earth creationism because scientific support for that position is not well-founded. This is different. For many, an acceptance of Christianity does not hinge on how old the earth is or how the creation narratives are interpreted. Whether or not Adam and Eve exist, however, calls into question the very notion of salvation in Christ. That strikes a chord. Schneider resigned and even Daniel Harlow, who also writes in this area stated that he now has a cloud hanging over him:

"Evangelicalism has a tendency to devour its young," says Daniel Harlow, a religion professor at Calvin College, a Christian Reformed school that subscribes to the fall of Adam and Eve as a central part of its faith.
"You get evangelicals who push the envelope, maybe; they get the courage to work in sensitive, difficult areas," Harlow says. "And they get slapped down. They get fired or dismissed or pressured out."

This is the scandal of the evangelical mind of which Mark Noll wrote. As I wrote the other day, this will probably get worse before it gets better and, as the national spotlight shines down on it, it may reveal a cavernous divide in modern Christianity.  I pray that this is not the case.

Trouble At Calvin College

A report is coming out of Calvin College, in Michigan that a professor has left after a controversy surrounding his position on a literal Adam and Eve. Will Pavia writes:

Professor John Schneider is the latest Christian scholar to leave his post amid a controversy that is gripping America’s evangelical community. In a country where surveys suggest that four in ten people believe in the biblical account of the origins of Man, some are calling this a “Galileo moment”, akin to the agonies suffered by the Roman Catholic Church over the suggestion in the 17th century that the Earth revolved around the Sun.Professor Schneider and a colleague, Professor Daniel Harlow, had published papers noting that it was becoming ever harder to maintain that all humans were descended from Adam and Eve. He suggested that Christians needed to abandon the idea that the Fall was an historical event.

Uproar ensued. Readers and influential evangelicals all over America called for both men to be fired. Professor Schneider left his job. The college said that he had sought early retirement but Professor Harlow, in an interview with a Christian newspaper, said: “John was pressured to leave.”

Professor Harlow then announced that he would be taking a sabbatical and would no longer write on so controversial a subject. “At this point in Calvin College’s history, it cannot handle that,” he said. “I cannot handle that. It’s taken a heavy physical and emotional toll on me.”

The Christian community needs to get a grip on this because the evidence is not going to go away. It is only going to get better. Christians that take a strict literal approach to Adam and Eve are going to find themselves increasingly cornered and distrustful of modern science and its efforts to understand the history of humanity. I have used Daniel Harlow's articles in research and quoted from them in this blog before. It is sad that he is leaving this discussion because he has much to bring to the table and his absence will only hurt the dialogue.

There are a number of different viewpoints on how to tackle the literal Adam and Eve question, which was covered in Christianity Today and of which I wrote in a post for CFSI. As Darrel Falk points out, it is possible that there were two people that were hand-picked by God to begin his relationship with the human race. This is not much different than God's covenant with Abraham, although it does not address the issue of the soul. If there were other people around at the time of Adam and Eve, did they have souls? Could they see Heaven? It is difficult to reconcile the idea that there were anatomically modern human beings around that were not part of God's plan for humanity.

I do not know where this discussion is going to go. Like the case of Bruce Waltke, though, there is obviously a sizable reluctance to address the possibility that Adam and Eve were not real people but part of an allegorical tale meant to teach us what our relationship to God is, what sin is, and why we were created in the first place. This controversy will get worse before it gets better.

Uko Zylstra on Christianity and Evolution

Dr. Zylstra is the Dean of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at Calvin College, the eternal hotbed of progressive Christian thought, from which the writings of Davis Young, Howard van Till, Clarence Menninga and Terry Gray emanated in the 1970s and 1980s to shape the lives of theistic evolutionists everywhere. He has an editorial in Michigan Live on what it means to believe in God and yet also accept the evidence for evolution. He writes:

Often, as Christians and as scientists, we simply fall to our knees in gratitude for what God has revealed in nature and in his word, and in humility because of all we do not know. Yet as Christian scientists, we affirm the essential truth, revealed in the Scriptures and perceived through the eyes of faith, that God is the creator and sustainer of all things.

And we know that the created world is a form of God’s revelation to humankind.

For a biologist, this means the fossil record is a revelation that God has brought about a pattern of change throughout the history of God’s creation of living beings. Certainly, one basic feature God reveals in the fossil record is the world God created is a dynamic one with change (evolution) as a fundamental feature. This pattern of change is one of the basic meanings of evolution.

If I read my John Polkinghorne right, this is similar to his concept of a self-sustaining, evolving creation. This kind of thinking is in sharp contrast to that of people like creationist Todd Wood, who argues that a true walk with Jesus Christ renders the evidence of the natural world irrelevant. To my way of thinking (along with Polkinghorne, Kenneth Miller, Francis Collins and a whole host of other TEs) the evidence is almost as important as the walk with Christ because, as Miller put it, it reflects the mind of God. We can hardly walk with Christ and ignore his creation.

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