Here is the continuation of my previous blog. I’ve tried to quote every place I’ve taken exactly what he said, but as the conference was a week ago, I’m sure there are parts here that I wrote down verbatim. All the thinking in this was done by Hans Madueme, thank you very much for walking us through some background to this very important issue.

Hans Madueme who further explored the historical Adam and Eve did the second part of the theology conference. He gave some very helpful background information to this question, as well as some practical questions to ask for us today.

Hans talked in great detail about Charles Darwin not being the first person to push for an old earth view.

Over 50 years prior to Darwmin’s Origin of the Species, many theologians agreed with geologists who said the earth was older than Bishop Ussher’s date of 4004 B.C.  Darwin was not the only “bad guy” in our history. One of the key figures who began questioning the historical Adam and Eve was Isaac La Peyrère (1596-1676).

Isaac La Peyrère was a controversial figure in his day, born in France to a Calvanist family. He had many questions about the beginning chapters of Genesis. People at his time had begun to ask some very important questions regarding the history of the world. They had become aware of ancient histories (Chinese, Egyptian, etc) who went further back than the Bible’s histories. Columbus had also discovered the “New World” and where did those people come from? There had also been myths about giants, Cyclops and other mythical creatures. How did they fit into the creation story? It was in the midst of these questions that he wrote a two-part magnum opus in 1642-1643 defending the theory that Adam was not the first human. His proof text for this theory was Romans 5:12-14. He was labeled as a heretic and was forced to recant his heresy and fake a conversion to the Roman Catholic Church where he blamed those “Calvinists” who had brainwashed him.

This then leads us to Darwin, who we now know wasn’t the first to ask the questions about the origins of the world. The questions about the historical Adam and Eve are not new to us today, but have been asked many times before. As Hans said in his lecture, “People had doubts about the traditional picture of Adam before 1859, but Darwin made it much harder to believe in Adam and Eve as the first human beings who later fell.” Many liberal scholars today have come to the conclusion that Christian theology needs to be done without a historical Adam and Eve. Now, “it is possible to have “Christian Theology” without a historical Adam and Eve, but it’s not the theology our Church Fathers would recognize.”

Hans then went on to discuss the question, “How should Christians relate science and theology?” Ian Barbour, who published Issues in Science and Religion in 1966 was helpful in the emergence of this study. Hans continued by saying, ‘Regarding the controversy over Adam and Eve, the authority of Scripture is the hinge on which it all turns.” Barbour developed a typology of how Christians are to relate science and theology. Christians can view them: in conflict, as independents, in dialogue with each other, on in integration with each other. Barbour recommends the dialogue position (avoid conflict at all cost) he wanted to show the “reasonableness” of the Christian faith. However, sometimes there are real conflicts between science and theology (e.g. the traditional doctrine of the fall and mainstream evolutionary theory).

**Following are the exact notes I took during the conference, there are a lot of definitions with my explanation next to them that I thought would be helpful for you to see as opposed to me trying to write it out in paragraph form**

Scriptural realism is the proposal for how to relate science and theology. It tries to address a concern that theology keeps being revised because of new scientific data.

• Canonical Epistemology – Scripture is inerrant. It is true and without error. Scripture in their original content is infallible. Everything we know from the Bible is true in an absolute sense.
• Critical Fideism – We do not always understand the true parts of Scripture because of human error in understanding. We are sinful, fallible interpreters of Scripture. These things are supernaturally affirmed by the Holy Spirit. We are certain of these things, because and only because we receive them from the living God.
• Christian Eclecticism – there is no one-size fits all method of approaching scientific theories. Warranted theological agnosticism-when a scientific belief is in conflict with a scientific theory.

How would scriptural realism help us in the debate over evolution and the historicity of Adam and Ever?

• The doctrine of the fall is a central doctrine (and presupposed in all of Scripture).
• All major church traditions affirm these doctrines despite differences in detail.
• Christians can be theologically agnostic about conflicting evidence from scientific data (a warranted agnosticism).

Difference Evangelical Positions

• Traditional Young Earth Theology
• Creationist Preadamism (Old Earth Creationists)
• Evolutionary Preadamism (fully embraces theistic evolution, Adam and Eve share a common ancestry with other animals)
• Federal Headship Preadamism (there were many pre-adamite creatures who existed before Adam and Eve, the world was full of pre-adamites before Adam and Eve were placed in the garden who became the first human beings)

The final question, then, is how should churches, seminaries and us as Christians deal with the questions of science and theology? Hans suggested 3 things for us to think through as we continue to grow in wisdom with both God and men.

1. They should set dogmatic boundaries on these sort of questions.
2. We need more scientists who are confessional and who are wrestling with the most difficult questions in science and theology.
3. We need to think about how we can best create “intellectual space” for our best theologians and scientist to explore tentative, non-binding hypotheses (from a scriptural realist perspective)

Hans did a great job of helping us think through some of the modern implications of these very old questions. It’s a good reminder that it’s all been done before, there’s nothing new under the sun. Praise God for his Word which is timeless!

This past week I had the privilege of attending the 2012 EFCA Theology Conference at Trinity in Deerfield, IL. Dr. Bob Yarbrough and Dr. D.A. Carson were the speakers for the topic of ‘Understanding the Complimentarian Position.’ It was a very helpful conference and took a look at what the Bible says about gender roles and how that affects us today. Over the next couple weeks (if I can get it done) I’ll be putting up some summaries from the different sessions up here.

The first pre-conference session was about the “hot topic” of the historicity of Adam and Eve. This presentation was given by my “dear old dad” Greg Strand and Hans Madueme.

The purpose of this preconference was to discuss this debate with the issues of inerrancy and the authority of the Word of God. The goal was to not become minimalists or maximalists, but instead major on the majors and minor on the minors. In light of that, how are we to think about the historical Adam and Eve, as under attack from the modern liberal views of them being a group of people?

At the core of this denial of Adam’s historicity were listed 3 groups or individuals: Francis Collins, BioLogos, and Peter Enns.

Francis Collins was a part of the Human Genome Project and has written a couple books about science and God, specifically in relation to creation. In his first book The Language of God, he claims that humans emerged from primates about 100,000 years ago, and in his later book The Language of Science and Faith, says that Adam and Ever “do not fit the evidence” that science has presented.

BioLogos was launched in 2007 by Francis Collins, the “atheist turned Christian” to promote theistic evolution. Many people look to BioLogos as the authority in this scientific discussion, and while there are many good Christian scientist who are a part of this organization, we need to be careful of their theological view.

BioLogos group does affirm that the Bible is the inspired and authoritative Word of God. They have not yet adopted a statement of faith, but affirm 1 Corinthians 15:1-5 and the ancient creeds of the early church. While those are good and necessary to affirm, they aren’t the only things that need to be affirmed. The Bible as a whole is God’s inspired Word given to us. There is no realm that isn’t affected by Scripture. Many people at BioLogos are seeking to make the Bible fit into their science instead of seeing how science ultimately points us to Christ (Romans 1).

The final person that was addressed was Peter Enns who wrote Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament. In this, Enns suggests that we read the Bible incarnationally. We must avoid the error of Docetism (that Christ only appeared to be human). The final conclusion he comes to is that because the Bible was written by humans, we must accept errors because of their ignorance, i.e. the biblical writers weren’t as scientifically advanced as us and therefore wouldn’t have written what they did if they knew the whole story. He therefore suggests that Adam is not the beginning of humanity, but the beginning of the nation of Israel. This leads him to say that a strictly literal reading of the Adam story no longer fits with what we know from secular science.

It seems that at the root of the previous 3 arguments is the questioning of the validity and authority of Scripture. This is exactly why point 3 of the new EFCA Statement of Faith states “We believe that God created Adam and Eve in His image, but they sinned when tempted by Satan.” For more information about the EFCA’s position on these issues, see Evangelical Convictions, pages 34-35 and75-77.