Re: Are there guidelines for accommodational interpretation?

Jack wrote,
<<I cannot accept as an interpretation of this text [Rom 5]that Paul was
mistaken that Adam was an historical figure. How would the people he was
writing
this letter interpret this? The point of this text is to contrast Adam the
ONE MAN through which condemnation came to all with Christ the ONE MAN
through which righteousness comes to all. ONE act of transgression,
compared to ONE act of righteousness. The people reading this epistle would
understand it as referring to Adam, the Adam of the Garden of Eden. To make
the claim that "well Paul just got it wrong" undermines the entire message,
maybe even the entire Gospel.

Certainly Paul did not understand that at the same time that Adam was making
this transgression there were other hominids scattered through out the
globe, and that Adam was the ancestor of thousands of years of hominid
evolution before him.>>

I agree that Paul thought of Adam as a historical figure, and his readers
would think of the Adam in the Garden of Eden. The scientific problem here
is that if this is literal history, Adam's culture dates him to c. 5000 BC,
which is at least some 30 to 50,000 years after homo sapiens sapiens
appeared on earth, and lots of these humans existed around the earth at that
time. Fischer and McIntyre recognize this problem and have devised
concordist explanations as to how Adam could still be literal in spite of
the Pre-Adamites.

The problem I and most biblical scholars have with the Pre-Adamite solution
is that the Bible does not really allow for Pre-Adamites. Adam is THE first
genuine human being in Scripture. I sympathize with Fischer and McIntyre (at
least they are recognizing the scientific data), but virtually no scholarly
commentary on Genesis (or any other book of the Bible) accepts
pre-Adamitism. Neither does Paul (cf Acts 17:26). I conclude that the
literal Adam in both the OT and the NT is an accommodation to the
anthropology of the times at least in Jewish culture.

I do not think this means that each of us does not go back to some first
parents who sinned the first sin, and no matter how we see it, we are all
still sinners so the truth of the gospel is not imperiled if Adam is not a
literal historical figure. Also, please be aware that some capable
conservative theologians quite apart from following accommodationalism have
seen the Adam story as not literal, but conveying theological truth. See
James Orr, The Christian View of God and the World, 1897, p185, Clark
Pinnock, The Scripture Principle, 1985, p116-117,
 John J. Davis' paper on Adam in Inerrancy and Common Sense (Grand Rapids,
Baker, 1980) and Donald Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology, 1982,
Vol. 1, p106.

Paul

PS Paul's parallel of Adam with Christ is not strictly literal. In the
biblical account, sin did not come into the world through one man (Rom
5:12), but through one woman (Gen 3:6).

 
Received on Mon Jun 12 16:36:56 2006