Peter Ruest wrote:
................
> 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.
I have not been making simply an abstract argument that the work of Christ is
effectaul and therefore the work of Adam is as well. It is rather that (1) Paul uses
language implying that what Adam did has a causal role in bringing about the sinful
condition is which humanity finds itself and (2) this sense is reinforced because Paul
draws a parallel (though not precise in all details) between the work of Christ, which
is the cause of justification, and the sin of Adam. In order to make your purely
representative understanding of Adam plausible, you have to get rid of any actual
effects that the sin of the first human or humans had.
> 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.
That the sin of the first humans was _a_ cause of the sinful condition of later
humanity of course doesn't require that it was the _first_ cause of that condition.
Scripture gives only hints about the traditional idea that the first human sin was
brought about by the influences of Satan &c. Within limits that idea is a helpful
reminder of the cosmic scope & depth of evil, but it doesn't solve the problem of the
ultimate origin of evil. & it doesn't change the fact that what the first humans did
(for whatever reason) played a causal role for later humans.
Your last sentence is a bit too strong. WE can make at least some reasonable
guesses about this causal role - see below.
> 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.
Yes, there are various possibilities for translation & other versions - e.g.,
NEB & Goodspeed - have something similar to NIV. Note though that NIV goes on in vv.19,
"For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners ..."
which again makes my point quite clearly.
What is the "one trespass" in v.18? /paraptomata/ means is a specific act of
trespassing or sinning. In the Lord's Prayer (Mt.6:14-15) its plural refers to specific
sins of others & ourselves, not general categories of sins. Thus the "one tresspass" is
not some one general type of sin like Adam's (e.g., disobeying God) but the one sinful
action.
It seems to me that with your interpretation the whole discussion of Ch.5 adds
little or nothing to that of Chs.1-3. Paul already concluded there that all people
without exception are sinners and that Christ is God's answer to the problem of sin.
What more do we learn from 5:12-21 if Adam simply represents this general sinful
condition?
> 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?
What we have been talking about here is understanding what Paul was saying in
Romans 5. He was of course working with a traditional understanding of Gen.2 & 3
according to which "Adam" was a single human - the first - who committed the first sin &
whose sin had the result of putting his descendants in a sinful condition.
I think that there was a group of humans small enough (in space and time) that
we could pinpoint them as the "first" humans, at least in a theological sense. But as
you point out, it does not seem possible to picture that group as smaller than perhaps a
few hundred. This group of first humans played the theological role of Adam & Eve.
To say that they were the 1st humans "in a theological sense" means that they were able
somehow to be aware of God's communication to them, & to obey - or disobey.
Some may want to jump on me here & say, "You've been arguing for a _single_
historical Adam & now you're making him a vague group." But I have been arguing not
a single historical Adam but for the fact that Paul understood the sin of humanity in
its origin, which he described in terms of a literal Genesis picture of Adam, as
affecting the condition of his descendants.
OK, how did this "work." I have given a sketch of this in my contribution to
Keith Miller's book & also in Ch.8 of my _Cosmos in the Light of the Cross_. It is of
course speculative but I think not implausible. I pursue the idea of Irenaeus that
humanity was created in a relatively immature state, and that of Athamasius that
humanity was created at the beginning of a path that would lead them to final union with
God. Briefly, the effect of humanity's 1st disobedience was that it got humanity off
the right path, and this misdirection gradually moved humanity farther and farther from
God, so that eventually all humans would be born in an atmosphere in which sinning was
inevitable (though not logically necessary.)
As to when & where this took place, I don't know. I'm willing to go with the
paleoanthropologists on that.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
Received on Fri Mar 5 20:48:05 2004
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Fri Mar 05 2004 - 20:48:06 EST