Do I hear right? --
Adam is not the progenitor of the human race, but is the first to be
"In His Image" by virtue of a covenant -- this covenant bears resemblance
to Abraham's and Christ's in some way (not at all clear). It entitles
Adam to "represent God" on the earth.
Is this really what everyone else means by "in the Image?" This sounds less
like a harmonization with science and more like a new "revelation" -- one
I'm not inclined to follow. In particular -- and this seems true for the
earlier Adam picture too -- there is such a selectivity about what to treat
as literal and what to interpret figuratively. Not a literal 6-day creation,
but a literal Adam and covenant, for example. I don't mean to offend,
but this seems very contrived. Why not just interpret all of early Genesis as
what it is -- an early Creation myth. The parable of Adam and Eve is likely
to have been created during countless re-tellings of stories, perhaps
originally about a real Adam character. That doesn't make it history, but
it makes it a psycho-spiritual tale about the development of moral conscience.
Surely this moral conscience has been 10's of thousands of years in the
making (at least) and didn't spring fully developed from one individual.
Isn't this the "simplest" hypothesis?
-- Dave