Re: How to interpret Adam (was: Re: Kerkut)

George Murphy wrote (28 Feb 2004):
> Peter Ruest wrote:...
> > Paul compares the "one man's" trespass resulting in sin and death for "all
> > men" with Christ's righteous act resulting in grace and life for "all men".
> > But there is no perfect parallelism. We know that not all men are saved (as
> > many refuse the offer of grace), and that many living before Christ were
> > also saved through him. We would say that _not all but many_, before and
> > after Christ, were saved, namely _just those_ who accepted his offer of
> > grace. But _all_, before and after Adam, fell into sin, as _all_ of them
> > were disobedient to God's law, which was at least written in their hearts.
> > This is as much as we can draw from this parallelism, as far as the fall and
> > its cause is concerned.
> >
> > That "the many died by the trespass of the one man" (v.15) refers back to
> > "just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and
> > in this way death came to all men, because all sinned" (v.12): "in this way"
> > (houtos) = "in the same way", i.e. by also sinning _themselves_, and not
> > because of someone else's (e.g. a first man's) trespass. Paul explicitely
> > emphasizes this. Similarly, "just as the result of one trespass was
> > condemnation for all men" (v.18, NIV, di'henos paraptomatos) must be
> > interpreted on the basis of what Paul had specified initially in v.12:
> > although different people may sin in many different ways, the _type_ of
> > their trespass is always the same, namely turning away from trusting God, it
> > is _one trespass_ by all, and as a result of this there is condemnation for
> > all. I think this is the "condition of 'original sin'" you mention, but it
> > is not "original" in the sense of being caused by some first man. The
> > unbiblical term "original" is really misleading. Nothing changes
> > theologically if the type-man illustrating this view is not the temporally
> > first man................
>
> This is simply an attempt to evade the thrust of Paul's argument. The
> statement that "one man's trespass led to condemnation for all [people]" (di' henos
> paraptomatos eis pantas anthropous eis katakrima) clearly means that that "one man's
> trespass" had some kind of causal role in bringing about a condition deserving of
> condemnation for all. It cannot be reduced to the statement that all people "just
> happened" to sin in the same way that one arbitrarily chosen representative or exemplar
> sinned. That is reinforced by the continuation of v.18, "so one man's [of course
> Christ's] act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all." Christ is, of
> course, the real cause of justification and life, not simply a representative that
> people may emulate in order to be justified. (& that is not to say that there is "exact
> parallelism" but that Paul meant there to be some logical connection - houtos- between
> the 2 parts of his sentence.)
> & this is in no contradiction with the correct translation of v.12. Each person
> does, indeed, sin as Adam/the 1st humans did - but why? People are not simply imitating
> the sin of Adam because most have never heard of him. Why are all people "born in the
> natural manner without true fear of God and true faith in God"? v.12 is not the sum
> total of what Paul says in Rom.5 about the sinful condition of humanity. Without
> presenting any "genetic" answer to the question, he says that what happened with Adam
> has resulted in a sinful condition which merits condemnation for all people.

I concede that here, although your interpretation may not be watertight, it
may be more straightforward than mine. I just tried to find a reasonable
interpretation of Rom.5:12-21, without assuming that Paul said that Adam was
the first human being, living a few thousand years ago. Of course, even if
that's what Paul erroneously thought (and naturally God knows that he
created humans much earlier than 5000 BC), this doesn't exclude the
possibility that God guided Paul to formulate the text in such a way as to
leave open both interpretations.

Your presentation of the supposedly fatal implications of preadamites is
biased if not misleading. Even with a preadamite scenario, there is no need
to claim all of them just "happened" to sin, or were imitating some first
sinner, or that all could be saved by emulating Christ's righteousness. And
there is nothing arbitrary about God electing Adam as a representative human
out of an older human race, just as it was God's sovereign choice to elect
Abraham to start his chosen people, rather than, say Shem or Terah. That
"Christ is the real cause of justification and life" is not, in any way,
forfeited by the lack of causal force in Adam's fall, because "Christ [is]
the power of God and the wisdom of God" (1 Cor. 1:24), whereas creatures are
weak. Nothing is changed if Adam's fall is just typical, not an efficient
cause.

You say that Rom. 5:15 implies that Adam (or the first man) had "some kind
of causal role in bringing about a condition deserving of condemnation for
all", a general "sinful condition of humanity" from the start, and that
therefore there must be an unique first man. But Eph. 6:11-12 talks about
"the devil's schemes ... the rulers, ... the authorities, ... the powers of
this dark world and ... the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly
realms". It seems clear that these are the moving force behind the fall into
sinfulness of every human individual - without eliminating human guilt and
responsibility for this fall. This creates a paradox, as responsibility
implies freedom of choice, yet there is a seemingly overwhelming force of
evil around, resulting in a "sinful condition" in each human. I don't think
the bible gives us an explicit explanation of the origin of sin (or of evil,
for that matter). Maybe the apparent contradiction between "through one
trespass was condemnation for all men" (v.18) and "death came to all men,
because all sinned" (v.12) falls into the same paradox. It seems clear that
we all are unable to describe the claimed "causal role" of Adam in an
understandable way.

Now this brings us to the problems of _your_ interpretation. "Di'henos
paraptomatos" in v.18 may be translated either "through one man's trespass"
(NKJ) or "through one trespass" (NIV). You argue that the former variant is
correct because of the parallel to the second half of the verse, "even so
through one Man's righteous act the free gift came to all men", which
undisputably refers to the one man, Christ, - even though "di'henos
dikaiomatos" may also be translated "through one righteous act". Above, you
agree that there is no exact parallelism. Now, to specify the exact extent
of the parallelism may be a matter of dispute. The logical connection
conveyed by v.18 is that there is one and the same plight for all, the
trespass of turning away from God, resulting in condemnation and death, and
thus there is just one and the same remedy for all, justification on the
basis of Christ's death, and as a result, salvation and life.

If I understand correctly, you don't consider Adam to be an actual
historical individual, but you still claim that theology requires an
individual first human enacting the first fall. To what time or period do
you date that event? 7000 years ago? I don't think you would go for that,
knowing about the early predecessors of native Africans, Australians, and
Americans, who could hardly descend from some inhabitants of Mesopotamia as
late as 5000 BC - or even 9000 BC, for that matter, when agriculture
originated. How about 100,000 or 150,000 years ago? A human population of
those times may very well be ancestral to all living humans. But how do we
fit that with the cultural picture given in Gen.2-4? You probably say that
these chapters are not historical anyway. So when does history begin? In
Gen.12? Can this be justified? And how about the arbitrariness of such an
incision separating myth from history in an apparently continuous narrative?

Another problem is the anthropological transitional field between modern
Homo sapiens and his precursors (at whatever time you consider creation of
humans to have happened). Of course there were population bottlenecks, which
can, to a certain degree, be delineated by genetics, population dynamics,
biogeography, etc. But the narrowness of such bottlenecks is hardly ever
conceived to have been any smaller than about 10^4 individuals. But even if
there were just 100: was a single one of these the "first man"? Or how do
you save your theological postulate of a causal effect of a first human sin?

Peter

-- 
Dr. Peter Ruest, CH-3148 Lanzenhaeusern, Switzerland
<pruest@dplanet.ch> - Biochemistry - Creation and evolution
"..the work which God created to evolve it" (Genesis 2:3)