A quotation…

The most divine [one] … we should consider equal to the Beginning of all things … for when everything was falling [into disorder] and tending towards dissolution, he restored it once more and gave to the whole world a new aspect; [He is] the common good fortune of all … the beginning of life and vitality … all the cities unanimously adopt [his birthday] as the new beginning of the year … the Providence which has regulated our whole existence … has brought our life to the climax of perfection in giving to us [him], whom it filled with virtue for the welfare of men, and who, being sent to us and our descendants as a saviour, has put an end to war and has set all things in order and, having become manifest, [he] has fulfilled all the hopes of earlier times … the birthday of [this divine one] has been for the whole world the beginning of the gospel concerning him. First surprise, the date: 9BC… Second surprise, the subject: Caesar Augustus… (Source: the inscription of the decree of the Provincial Assembly of Asia, OGIS 2, 458, quoted in Horsley, The Liberation of Christmas, p....

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Can you Adam-and-Eve it?

[For non-UK readers, ‘Adam-and-Eve’ is traditional London Cockney rhyming slang for ‘believe’.] Various sources, print and online, highlight a debate that has taken off in the States on the question of the historicity of Adam and Eve as the two parents of the human race. At least one tenured scholar at Calvin College has apparently lost his job over the question. (Google will get you to lots of sources on the question; I couldn’t find one that summed up both the issues and the recent events in an even-handed way, so I decided not to post a link – if someone else knows of a good one, by all means put it in a comment.) On the one hand, we have a claim that the sequencing of human genomes has provided a body of data that is incompatible with an account of human origins from a single couple; on the other, a claim that belief in a historic Adam and Eve is necessary to the gospel. My scientific expertise, such as it is (an undistinguished performance in a physics degree from Cambridge in the fairly distant past), and my knowledge of journalistic reports of academic research (which is rather more expert and recent) both lead me to suppose that reports asserting scientific certainty are unlikely to be accurate (particularly on an issue where repeated and controlled experiments are impossible; I presume the scientific consensus is more like ‘every plausible model we’ve proposed for the data we have demands multiple ancestor-pairs, and we’ve proposed a lot of models,’ which is certainly a significant claim, but falls some distance from proof, even in the weakened and imprecise sense that word usually carries in science). My topic in this blog, however, is theology, and so the other side of the debate is the one I will discuss. On what basis might we propose that it is important that Adam and Eve were historical figures? Two seem possible: a theological basis; and an exegetical basis. It might be that we can’t make sense of the gospel unless humanity shares a common ancestor; or it might be that the point is incidental to the gospel, but clearly taught in Scripture, and so should be believed (that Jesus was born of a woman is central to the gospel; that his mother’s name was Mary is incidental, but nonetheless to be held to be true). Are there plausible arguments in either direction? Theologically, the best candidate seems to be that some explanation needs to be given for universal falleness/sinfulness, in the face of the necessary teaching that God’s initial creation was good; it seems that some are therefore suggesting that it is necessary to postulate a single ancestor, who sinned, and whose guilt and brokenness was then transmitted through processes of biological reproduction to the rest of the human race. This argument, however, is implausible on a number of grounds. First, the biological transmission of guilt and sinfulness is not a necessary claim. Within the Reformed tradition, federal Calvinism more-or-less denies the point in terms. Adam is established head of the human race by divine decree, not by biological priority: our fates are bound up with his fate because God has determined it to be so, not because of any process of genetics. (Of course, most classical federal Calvinists happened to believe in the biological priority of Adam and Eve, but this was in a sense incidental to their argument, as was the sinfulness of Eve: Adam alone was the federal head. Had it been the case that Eve surrendered to the serpent’s blandishments but failed to convince Adam to follow her, she would presumably have been held guilty of her sin, but her children would have been free of taint, as they were ‘in Adam’ and Adam had not fallen.) Second, the biological transmission of guilt and sinfulness is not just not a necessary claim, but a rather difficult one. To put the point bluntly, moral standing is not encoded in genetic material. More pointedly, Christian anthropology has classically, rightly or wrongly, supposed a human being to be composed of body and soul (or body, soul, and spirit); the body, on this account, is the product of sexual union; the soul either created directly by God and infused into the body, or pre-existing in heaven and joined to the body in utero. But the soul is the primary seat, at least, of moral standing, and so to assume that the biological generation of the body somehow necessarily infects the directly-created, or other-sourced, soul seems difficult. (Even Augustine, so brilliant a mind, struggled and probably failed on this point: he suggested...

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