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.

Biblical Literalism or "Is That Really What It Says?"

Daniel Harlow wrote a paper a bit back called Creation According to Genesis: Literary Genre, Cultural Context, Theological Truth. The paper emanated from an origins symposium in 2006 at Calvin College. Initially, he asks the question of why the age of the earth, creation and evolution are such contentious subjects. His answer?

Religious and philosophical worldviews influence cultural values, which in turn shape both political policies and social behaviors. The value we place on human beings; the way we treat both the unborn and the born; the dignity we grant the elderly, the infirm, and the disabled; the stand we take against racism and sexism and other forms of social injustice; the steps we take to preserve endangered species and otherwise protect the environment; the positions we hold on stem-cell research, genetic engineering, and cloning––all these issues and others besides are connected deeply with how we think at the most basic theological level about the creation and the place of the human creature within it.

For many people, this is not a scientific issue, it is a moral one. Even when having conversations with my wife, it is not uncommon for her to say that she understands the evidence and accepts it but that the ramifications make her uncomfortable. Indeed, both the ID side and the new atheists write that "Darwinism" is dangerous. The reasons are similar but the motives are different. Both argue that it leads one away from faith.

Here, Harlow does not tackle the modern manifestations of science and their implications but, rather, the problems inherent in a literal (mis)reading of the creation accounts in Genesis. In so doing, he says something at once profoundly true and profoundly incendiary:

God did not write Genesis. He inspired ancient Israelites to write it, and they did not do so in a cultural vacuum. Following from this, if we take divine accommodation seriously, then Genesis must not be made to say anything that would have been unintelligible or irrelevant to the ancient author and his audience. Modern concerns and concepts must not be foisted anachronistically onto the biblical text. Genesis is God’s word to us, but it was not written to us.

This is the start of the "slippery slope" argument that is soundly resisted by most purveyors of the YEC model—Genesis must be read literally or else there is no barometer for how we should read scripture at all. Troy Lacey writes in AiG:

Of course, it is no surprise that Genesis 1–11 is denigrated by the secular scientific community. But these chapters are the foundational truths of the revealed Word of God, and if the foundation can be destroyed, then the rest of the Bible can also be discarded as a collection of nice stories with no practical value or moral authority.

Many OT historians and theologians have stated that a completely literal read of the creation accounts is facile at best and leads to serious misinterpretations of scripture. That this warning has been around since the time of Augustine and perhaps earlier has very little traction among the recent earth supporters. Ken Ham famously asks "were you there?" when confronted by skeptics. (Of course, neither was he but that is not the point.) Ham replies that God was and he left us his Word, which is clearly understandable. Hmmm. Just what did God leave behind, exactly? According to Daniel Harlow, it is this:

If we were to insist that the Bible gives an accurate picture of the physical cosmos, then to do so with integrity, we would have to believe that the earth is flat, immobile, and resting on pillars; that the sky is solid and has windows in it; that the sun, moon, and stars are set in the sky and move along it like light bulbs along a track; that the sun literally rises, moves, and sets; that there is an ocean of water surrounding the earth; and that beyond the waters above the sky is the very heaven of God. That’s what the Bible says.

Clearly, this is not what your average young earth creationist thinks. In fact, it is not clear to me that anyone within the western or Judeo-Christian perspective thinks this. They probably did around the time that this was written down but we simply know more now than we did then. As time progresses and our understanding of the world increases, hanging onto the literal, YEC viewpoint becomes increasingly difficult. As Conrad Hyers points out:

The literalist, instead of opening up the treasurehouse of symbolic imagination, digresses into more and more ingenious and fantastic attempts at defending literalism itself. Again and again the real issue turns out to be not belief in divine creativity but belief in a particular theory of Scripture, not faith but security. The divine word and work ought to have better handles!

Instead of a different way of interpreting scripture, it is now the only way to do so—with Gary Parker, among others, arguing that such a reading is a salvation issue. That such a one-dimensional read of the scripture has become the de rigueur one for the evangelical community is unfortunate.

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