Re: [asa] Historical Theology and Current Theology re: Original Sin & Monogenism

-----Original Message-----

From: David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com>

Mike said:? What does it matter that there is a difference
between the Bible's account of the Eden and science's estimate where
what we call modern humans first evolved?? What difference would it
make to your faith?

It is important to me because it impacts?the doctrine of
scripture.? As a North American evangelical, the doctrine of scripture
is significant to my "spiritual DNA," as well as to the
sociological-local-church settings I find myself in.?

Every new scientific discovery impacts the
doctrine of the scripture.? And just like scientists will find that
there is more to their doctrine every time somebody finds more
evolutionary magic (like epigenetics) behind the human DNA. you too may have to face the prospect that there was more to your spiritual DNA than you thought ?
Guys 1000 years ago had very little such pressures on the individual
stones in the castle of their doctrine, and guys 1000 years hence will
be sorely challenged if Christ does not return.? What will they do??
Sure, the smart money says He will return before then, but you can bet
that when he does there will be another huge, dramatic evolution in the
doctrine and change it will, just like last time He came.? At a certain
point you gotta ask yourself, what is most essential in doctrine and
what will happen to your faith if any particular part of doctrine has
to change?

 Setting aside any detailed discussion of what
"inerrancy" means and whether it is even a correct way to describe
scripture, at the very least, starting with Genesis 2 there are
difficult questions of genre, history, authorial intent, and authority
that IMHO?can't just be dismissed with a waive of the hand.? The
theological importance of "Adam" in New Testament theology renders such
hand waiving even more inappropriate.

Authority.? That's the key isn't it?? Just what
if the Bible is one day discovered to have been written by men.? Just
men doing the best they could to deliver the words of God to their
fellow men.? Just men who believed in what they were saying and did the
best they could.? What if it were discovered that some of the stuff
that was written was translated wrong.? What if it was discovered that
about half of all doctrine was actually misrepresented to some degree
or another.? Would that effect your faith?? And if so, why?? Do you
have Jesus in your heart to stay,? no matter what is discovered about
the words in the Bible. or do you have a doctrine driven belief
structure that is vulnerable to interpretation?? Does God permeate your
life and color every breath and action no matter what, or is God a
function of a steady state doctrine???? I know it's a hard question and
I know It sounds like a trick question, but what is doctrine exactly in
terms of your faith?? Is having doctrine be the biggest part of your
faith a weakness or a strength?

?

Perhaps at the end of the day?there will arise?a synthesis in
which all the scientific, historical, theological and doctrinal issues
have been sufficiently hashed out such that a purely "symbolic"
understanding of Adam is a mainstream position.? IMHO, there are good
reasons to say we aren't there yet, and further to say that it might
never be quite that simple.

?

Having said all that, I
would agree that the center of our faith must be Christological.? We
start with Christ as God's perfect revelation and then work towards
understanding the nature and purpose of?his written revelation --
though even here we usually must have some sense of the scriptures as
represented in the Gospels in order to gain some understanding of
Christ (though I think Christ is also revealed through personal
encounters through the Holy Spirit).?
If a consensus were to develop that Adam is primarily a symbol, that
would disturb me, but I am coming to see that it wouldn't change my
faith in Christ.? Yet, recognizing this Christological focus, IMHO,
doesn't excuse us from working hard on a coherent doctrine of scripture.

Now you're talking!? I say that scripture leads
you to Christ and Christ leads you to the Spirit and the Father, but
once you're there, doesn't it step it up a notch?.? Doesn't having a
personal relationship with Jesus/God/the Holy Spirit remove for you to
some degree the need for any particular aspect of scripture to be
technically accurate and chronically stable??

I
challenge you, all of you, does God almighty become resident in your
hearts
at some juncture in you lives independent of any an all earthly
criteria or not?? Once you receive the Spirit isn't that an end to
which the Bible is a means?? I mean what's so utterly indispensable
about any particular rational
specific of the Bible that if it didn't turn out to be how you thought
if was, could you still have faith?? I challenge you to decide in your
hearts how real God is beyond any interpretation of doctrine.? Could
you do without any single aspect of Biblical doctrine and still live
your life just like you would have anyway.? If it somehow turned out
that Jesus was misquoted and we didn't get to go to heaven would you
still love God??

I know it's kind of blasphemous to play "what if" with doctrine, but
that's pretty much the challenge "in here."? What if evolution is flat
out true and Adam and Eve were metaphorical.? What if it's worse than
that?? What if they were just parables for a much more difficult to
understand truth behind the human condition than we humans are up for
yet?? How much is your belief in God tied to an interpretation of the
Bible and how much of it is unassailable by any challenge to the
prevailing doctrine you happen to be baptized under?? Because, in the
end, that's what it all is.? Men wrote it and men translated it and men
interpreted it and any every doctrine you care to mention is in some
aspect flatly refuted by another interpretation of doctrine by another church.? One look
at the ASA statement of faith shows how few bedrock presumptions of
faith are common to all Christians.? To me all it says is how little
doctrine is truly necessary to know God more than it says anything.?

?

It is also important, IMHO, because it realtes to our
epistemology.? I remain uncomfortable with the notion that the
conclusions of science should be taken as normative for
interpreting scripture.? Clearly, conclusions of science must bear on
how we understand scripture.? Yet, as Christians, it seems to me that
our epistemology must be rooted in revelation prior to reason.? Reason
is a good gift from God, but it is subject to corruption, and is a
servant rather than a master of revelation.? Reason helps us understand
revelation, but it doesn't supersede revelation.? "Faith seeking
understanding" means that there is a presupposition of faith.? This
includes faith in the veracity of revelation, including the written
revelation of scripture.? Such faith doesn't necesarily determine in
advance what scripture means, but it does suggest, I think, that the question of what scripture means is always important.

I don't necessarily think that science needs to be considered at all in
interpreting scripture, To me scripture is all about how I need to
relate to my feelings and my compulsions, and instincts and emotions in my daily life
than it is about how many days God took to create the universe.? I
don't think about it.? I read Genesis to decide how to feel about my
spiritual origins, not my evolutionary origins.

As for reason being subject to corruption, I can't agree with that in
the way you present it.? If you're talking about one man's reason,
you're absolutely right.? But if you are talking about science, then
you are not as right.? It is difficult to corrupt the scientific
understanding of a subject once it has been established and tested over
a significant period of time.? Rationally, I am convinced that there
was no single man called Adam that was the patriarch of humankind.? My
faith in no way relies on Genesis being literal to that degree.? But
more importantly my faith is perfectly intact if it turns out that
science is a total goof and Adam was my sole evolutionary benefactor.?
I suggest that the more ways you can find to sustain your faith that do
not rely on specific interpretations of the Bible the better off you
are in both practical and spiritual terms.?

-Mike (Friend of ASA)

On Nov 24, 2007 2:25 PM, <mlucid@aol.com> wrote:

What does it matter that there is a difference between the Bible's account of the Eden and science
's estimate where what we call modern humans first evolved?? What difference would it make to your faith?? Of what possible importance
is the discrepancy between specific location of?our modern scientific assessment of human
evolutionary migration and the book of Genesis' depiction of the dawn of man?? It is of ZERO importance to the purpose of the Book of Genesis or the study of science.

It is not the immanence of God that the Bible lends us.? We have Creation to give us that.? The Bible is to tell us how to honor and think (reason) about our most evolv
ed instincts, emotions, feelings, and faith, which the rise of reason has nearly obliterated in modern man.? The Bible's purpose is not how to figure out
 precisely where the first humans that might have had the capacity to reason came from any more than science's purpose is to make evident the transcendence glory of God almighty as manifest in our faith.
 

-Mike (Friend of ASA www.thegodofreason.com)

-----Original Message-----

From: David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com>

To: philtill@aol.com

Cc: gbrown@colorado.edu;
asa@calvin.edu

Sent: Sat, 24 Nov 2007 12:42 pm

Subject: Re: [asa] Historical Theology and Current Theology re: Original Sin & Monogenism

Phil said:? However else can we understand that the original
humans were in Mesopotamia, when we know through genetics that they
were actually in Africa?

?

I'm not sure I want to concede this so readily.? First, the
mitochondrial DNA studies this is based on aren't calibrated with
laser-like precision.? Second, it doesn't seem impossible that humans
originated in Mesopotamia, dispersed (or were dispersed by God after
the fall or flood / Babel) into Africa, and then migrated back through
Mesopotamia and Europe.? If a small number of humans had remained in
Mesopotamia, maybe we'd still see a similar mitochondrial DNA pattern
after they became homogonized with the "returning" African population,
particularly given the very limited sample sizes on which the current
out of Africa theories are based (I think you're talking a sample size
of only hundreds or thousands of presently living people).

?

But, ok, all of the above does seem to be grasping.? From the
perspective of harmonizing these things, it would be easier, if we are
retaining Adam as a real person (which to me is still important), to
take him as a representative whose choices had the possibility of
affecting the nascent human race for good or ill.? Perhaps that small
group of early human progenitors that first migrated out of Africa
wasn't "Bibliological" man -- not yet possessing God's image in a way
that put them into the possibility of a covenant relationship with
God.? Adam was the first "Bibliological" man, and his breaking of the
first covenant between man and God affected us all, including, somehow,
his contemporaries.? (This is a view John Stott tentatively advances in
his commentary on Romans).?

?

Maybe.? I'd like to study how all this can be developed within the stream of historical theology.

On Nov 24, 2007 1:09 PM, <philtill@aol.com> wrote:

I
don't know exactly how this would relate to a theology of the imago Dei
and original sin, but it seems to suggest that biological descent alone
doesn't determine one's spiritual status.?

As I've discussed (partially) with David off-line, my personal favorite
hypothesis is that the Fall of Man was something that can only be
comprehended outside of spacetime.? It would be somewhat analogous to
the Atonement in that Christ took the sins of God's people from both
before and after the event -- it was not limited to the sins already
committed.? If the Fall is also outside spacetime, then it needn't have
occurred in a single event by a single human at any particular location
in spacetime.? It may have been that "Adam"=mankind partook of the Fall
in some way as a community outside of time, neither before nor after
the universe (so it is not a question of pre-existence of the soul).
?If so, then we as a race are inherently fallen, possessing original
sin, and so from the very start God created just the sort of universe
that would be fitting for our redemption and projected humanity into
it.? The universe therefore never "fell".? It was created "fallen"
(with pain, etc.) from the Big Bang onward because it was made for us.?
The account of the garden would therefore be understood as a metaphor
written into the setting of spacetime so that we could comprehend what
the Fall entails, even though we cannot comprehend it in its fullness
any more than we can comprehend Christ's payment on the cross in its
fullness.? We are dealing with infinities of sin and culpability and
holiness and grace, and so the best we can do is to extrapolate what we
do know, project it into comprehensible symbols, create analogies to
communicate how we should see our relationship with the Eternal God.?
The account of the garden may be one such analogy -- and a divinely
inspired one at that -- written in the well-known mythopoeic genre of
the time so that the original audience would understand the message
without being confused by the form of the analogy.

However else can we understand that the original humans?were in
Mesopotamia, when we know through genetics that they were actually in
Africa?? The text goes to some detail in describing the four rivers
that were clearly Mesopotamian.? I have tried to no avail to find a way
around that.? So it's not just a question of monogenism versus
polygenism that keeps us from taking the account as entirely literal
with a universal Adam.? It's also a question of the setting and the
timing.? Because of its setting and timing, either we must take the
garden to be a literal event that was well after the origin of humanity
and well outside of the region of mankind's first appearance (Dick's
view), or we must take it to be at least partially non-literal.? If we
wish to believe Adam (or "Adam") was the universal progenitor, then it
becomes a question of _how_ non-literal the account was.? Is only the
Mesopotamian setting non-literal?? Well, there's also the snake, which
was non-literal.? (It wasn't merely a snake, the most crafty beast of
the field, as the text says.)? Was a piece of fruit that gives you the
knowledge of good and evil also entirely literal, or was that
figurative of a spiritual transaction more profound than simply biting
into food?? Let's face it -- the account is written pretty closely to
expectations as something intended by its author to be understood
within the mythopoeic genre.? How could we ever fail to see that?

This doesn't mean that there wasn't a literal, universal Adam way back
in Africa, represented by the Mesopotamian "Adam" of the account.?
Maybe there was, maybe there wasn't, as far as this text interpreted
according to that genre is concerned.? So it becomes a matter of
science and of systematic theology, but not biblical theology.? What
does systematic theology require us to believe about Adam?

If my view is truly heretical for some reason I have not seen yet, then
I will abandon it.? But this is what I've been considering as a
possibility for a year or two, now.

Phil

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Received on Sun Nov 25 01:00:32 2007