Steve Bishop wrote:
>If such a 'reliable' source as A. D. White is to be believed then the
>theory of Pre-Adamites was around in the seventeenth century:
David Livingstone wrote a paper for the American Philosophical Society
(http://www.amphilsoc.org/), and traced the beginning of Preadamite theory
to Julian the Apostate, emperor of Rome in the 4th Century AD. Julian was
concerned about the rise of Christianity in Rome and sought to guide them
back to paganism.
>Isaac La Peyrere's (c. 1596-1676) books were _Men before Adam_ (1656) and
>_Prae-Adamitae_ (1655). He is often credited with being the first person
>to (fully?) develop this theory.
Isaac de la Peyrére was a Catholic priest who knew some of the Westminster
divines who were charged with the Westminster Confession. Peyrére I find
specially interesting because he reasoned his entire case from New
Testament Scripture.
He argued eloquently in Men Before Adam that a literal interpretation of
Romans 5:12-14 indicated the world was populated before Adam. The key was
verse 13: "For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed
when there is no law." Peyrére reasoned that the law was given to Adam
shortly after his creation, and if there was "sin in the world" at that
time, there must have been people to do it:
... it must be held that sin was in the world before Adam and
until Adam: but that sin was
not imputed before Adam; Therefore other men were to be allowed
before Adam who had
indeed sinn'd, but without imputation; because before the law sins
wer [sic] not imputed.
Although men and sin were in the world before Adam, the manner of sin was
in the form of offenses against nature, violations of "natural law," and
all died a natural death. It was not until God imposed moral law, with
Adam the first to be subject to it, that men were capable of "legal sin,"
trespasses against God's law. Beginning with Adam's Fall, human beings
die both a natural death and a "legal" or spiritual death.
Ten years before Peyrére wrote Men Before Adam, the Westminster Divines
penned their Confession of Faith. They sought to avoid any implications
that all of humanity did not commence with Adam by putting the law on
Moses. But if Mosaic law, and not Adamic law, was intended by Romans 5:13,
it could mean that sin was not charged before Moses! No, the interpreters
were not stepping into that trap. The Divines clearly recognized that the
moral law, the "covenant of works," was given to Adam and said so:
The rule of obedience revealed to Adam in the estate of innocence, and to
all mankind in him ... was the moral law.
If moral law was given to Adam, and already "sin was in the world," then
wouldn't this involve people? The Westminster Divines were unwilling to
entertain that possibility. They believed humanity started with Adam, and
sin was passed to his posterity by "natural generation." The harmonizing
device employed (although not mentioned specifically in the Westminster
Confession) was to maintain that imputation of sin was through the law of
Moses, but that it somehow applied retroactively to Adam and his
descendants. This made no sense, of course, but they were torn between the
illogical and the unthinkable. So, according to the Divines, the moral law
was not "comprehended" until the Ten Commandments were delivered by God to
Moses.
Peyrére railed against the position taken by the Divines and their
insistence that "the law" was the law of Moses:
The Interpreters being between two such inconveniences, were at a stand,
nor did know which way to turn themselves; But because it seemed less
prejudicial to affirm, that sins were not imputed before Moses, and until
Moses, than to affirm that there were any men before Adam! Therefore they
preferred the first inconvenience before the second.
In Peyrére's mind, since the law transgressed was the law given to Adam of
Genesis, the sin was perpetrated by those who co-existed and pre-existed
Adam. Sin was not imputed to those forerunners, however, until Adam
disobeyed God's law.
Before the Law of God, or till that Law of God was violated by
Adam, sin and death were
in the world, yet had gained no power over it : they had got no
lawful possession, they had
got no absolute power. The reason is, because before that time
there was no Law given by God.
Clearly, sin was imputed from Adam to Moses. What brought the flood? Was
the flood not judgment for sin? Or for that matter, what about the
destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah? And if the subject of Romans 5:13 was
Adamic law, the sin that "was in the world" was committed by men other than
Adam.
Quotes from: Isaac de la Peyrére, Men Before Adam. Or a Discourse upon the
twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth Verses of the Fifth Chapter of the
Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Romans. By which are prov'd, That the
first Men were created before Adam. (London: 1656).
Dick Fischer - The Origins Solution - www.orisol.com
"The answer we should have known about 150 years ago"
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