Glad you enjoyed it! It’s a draft of two sections of a chapter of a book I hope to someday publish, but it’s nowhere near done. I’m a very slow writer, and it’s a side project rather than my main gig.
Yeah, it’s only about halfway done. I don’t want to even try to get it published until I’m much closer. Even then, I’ll likely self-publish, both due to the long odds at traditional publishers and because I have some background in publishing. My main job for decades was graphic design, so when writing isn’t progressing I like dolling up the text in a pretty new draft so I can admire the look of the words and hopefully be inspired to add more of them. It sometimes works.
Yes, partly due to your advocacy of that view here!
Yes, though the chapter that deals with it most extensively is only disjointed notes so far. An earlier chapter that’s mostly done also deals with different understandings of the fall.
In that chapter, I start with two traditions about Adam: the historical Adam who we all come from, and the prophetic Adam that shows us who we are. I trace how both continued through Augustine, though he united them by showing how we were really in Adam (as invisible seeds in his loins) and that is why we descend from Adam. In later times various parts of the church ditched Augustine’s synthesis and lost the prophetic Adam. Everything came to focus on how Adam changed human nature; Adam’s sin was real, and due to him we’re sinners even before we really sin.
Because of how those views normalized sin and evil, there were a series of reactions where different people and groups insisted that Christians needed to take sin more seriously. Often they overcorrected, such as Pelagius or some Anabaptists or some of the Wesleyan Holiness movement. Perhaps the clearest expression came out in Germany in the 1930s. While the established church, both Catholic and Protestant, followed modifications of Augustine that proved limp in the face of encroaching evil, the confessing church held a different anthropology. Bonhoeffer was especially influential. He didn’t take the Eden story as literal history, but he recaptured its prophetic voice. He wrote, “I myself am Adam – am ‘I’ and ‘humanity’ at the same time. In me humanity falls.” Rather than pushing the blame for our sinfulness back on Adam and seeing even Christians as powerless to resist sin, he saw the church’s complicity with evil as a stain on each Christian and called for more active resistance.
My main point is that churches who reduce Adam to history tend to preach a salvation of no earthly consequence. Sanctification becomes something God does for us after we die, fixing the problem we inherited from Adam. When the prophetic Adam is brought back into the mix, we get a church that can actually be yeast in dough and a light in the dark. Not perfectly, but not zero. It’s also the case that when we see both dimensions, we’re less likely to force the historical Adam into conceptions that don’t fit reality.
Anyway, I got a bit more into some of these things in book reviews here and here. I also dealt more directly with Paul in posts here and here, though since one is replying to you, you’ve probably already seen it.