I have zero personal interest in Josh’s Adam and Eve model and zero expertise relevant to assessing the science behind it.
Steve, I am assuming that you (like me) are committed to the teaching of Jesus Christ and to the data of evolutionary science.
If I am right in this assumption (please correct me otherwise), then you (like me) should treat as historical those passages of Genesis that Jesus Christ treats as historical in his teaching.
I would be thankful to know whether or not you agree to this conclusion.
Correct.
For me, that conclusion does not follow. I do not think that Jesus was teaching the historical character of the early chapters of Genesis.
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No problem. “Josh’s Adam and Eve model” is neither a main concern for me in the discussion we are leading. By contrast I am very interested in your idea that “original sin” affects “humanity in corporate”, and the reason why.
In this respect I am keen to know what you think about the following @MOls’ post:
Thanks in advance for your answer!
It doesn’t have to be disproved by science. Science just nods and smiles, says thank you even, and gets on with reality. Ooh, and what’s revelation? In this context?
Revelation in this context is the Christian Bible and the interpretation of the Christian Bible that has been accepted as Christian orthodoxy over the course of church history.
I think original sin is a theological construct that helps us understand the corporate human condition. I am interested in understanding the current corporate human condition and I think that is primarily what the biblical narratives and expositions are seeking to illuminate. I am not so interested in mapping the construct of original sin onto hypothetical historical events or human anthropological history. That is a speculative enterprise and I don’t find that the proposed answers deal with my personal questions about humanity.
Very clever.
I completely share your interest!
I think that “the current corporate human condition” you refer to, is the condition in which God created humankind in the beginning.
Am I interpreting you correctly?
If YES, is this “corporate human condition” related to the fact that in the beginning God ordered and called humanity to share in God’s love and reach eternal life?
I don’t think “the condition God created humankind in the beginning” is knowable. I don’t think we will ever know exactly when “the beginning” is or the extent or mode of God’s involvement in “creating” humanity from animals. I’m fine not knowing. What matters is how we understand our own humanity and that our response to our human condition is turning to God for salvation and the transformative power to live righteously as new human creations today.
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Here you are acknowledging that our “corporate human condition” comes from the fact that God has ordered and called humanity to share in God’s love and reach eternal life.
Aren’t you?
If I may. That is an extreme privileged minority, yet constrained model that I have to deconstruct and reconstruct.
In my knowing there is nothing exact, no beginning, no supernatural involvement above possible grounding - until we get to Jesus of course, the only positable warrant for the possible. That is part of what matters, in how we understand our own humanity. That it - being - appears not to matter at all. As the Greeks realised, how then are we to live? As you say, righteously. For each other when our tendency is to live unenlightenedly and mainly unwittingly just for ourselves. The pivot of that for European civilization is the call of Jesus. A reach beyond our grasp. As it was for Him of course.
Nonetheless it’s the only salvation we can know. And if He was Salvation, as He says on the tin, all will be well grasped.
The following passages (selected among others) clearly support that “Jesus was teaching the historical character of the early chapters of Genesis”:
Matthew 19:4-8
4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’[a] 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’[b]? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” 7 “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?” 8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning.
Matthew 23:35-36
35 And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. 36 Truly I tell you, all this will come on this generation.
Matthew 24:37-44
37 As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; 39 and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. […] 44 So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.
You asked my opinion and I gave it. I now gather that what you actually wanted was for me to agree with your opinion. I don´t, and I´m not particularly interested in debating it.
I was using human condition in the sense of all humanity being broken and in need of a savior. God calling humanity to share in his love and accept his offer of eternal life is God’s response to the human condition, not part of it, at least in my mind.
You are conflating the historical nature of the entire Hebrew Scriptures with the early chapters of Genesis.The only reference to the early chapters of Genesis in what you have cited is the reference to the creation of two sexes and the institution of marriage. Mentioning an essentially theological point of doctrine (God created humans as men and women and ordained marriage) is not a clear reference to a historical fact. The doctrine is true based on God being the Creator and Lawgiver, not based on the literal historicity of Genesis 2-3.
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I think both views are compatible with each other:
The first human sinful choice drops “all humanity” into the state of “being broken and in need of a savior” precisely because of the “corporate character” of our human condition. “Our corporate human condition” precedes the first human sinful choice.
“God calling humanity to share in his love and accept his offer of eternal life” founds always the corporate human condition. But after the first sinful choice, “God calling humanity to share in his love and accept his offer of eternal life” becomes God’s response to the “broken corporate human condition” as well.
Steve, I thank you again for your valuable opinion that computational population genetics discards the hypothesis of a bottleneck back to 8 persons in the Neolithic.
My point is not at all that “you agree with my opinion” but rather to signal an incoherence in your position :
On the one hand, you admit to be committed to the teaching of Jesus Christ.
On the other hand, you claim that “treating anything in the early chapters of Genesis as historical in anyway” is not “reasonable”.
I provide quotes evidencing that Jesus Christ (in his teaching about the coming of the Son of Man in the End Times) treats as historical the Genesis narrative according to wich only Noah and his family did not perish in the flood catastrophe.
If you as a scientist can live with this incoherence “I am not particularly interested in debating it” either.
My point is that I am well aware of everything you’ve just written. I have thought about these matters for decades and have come to views that I do not think are incoherent. As I said, I am not interested in convincing you of my beliefs or of their coherence.
Thanks for this comment, which leads me to formulate more accurately what I mean by stating that “Jesus was teaching the historical character of the early chapters of Genesis”.
My view is that we have to establish what is historical in Genesis 1-11 on the basis of the teaching of Jesus.
Accordingly, as Christians we are not required to believe that God created the world in 6 days, or formed Adam’s body from the dust of the ground like a ceramist sculptor models a clay pot: Indeed, there is no passage in the New Testament stating that this was taught by Jesus.
By contrast on the basis of Jesus’ words in Matthew 19:4-8 we should acknowledge as a historical fact that:
God intervenes in evolutionary history to make humankind in the image of God, create humans as men and women, proclaim the sanctity of marriage, and ordain the prohibition of divorce as a primeval commandment.
I would be thankful to know whether you may agree to this statement.
I wouldn’t use the word intervene with confidence. All of evolutionary history was participating in God’s telos and the result of God’s creative work. At some point in history God initiated a special relationship with humans, called them to bear his image, and ordained marriage and the creation of new family units.
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