No doubt to me that he did. He was a man of his time, and while I think his writings were “God breathed” he also wrote a lot from his earthly perspective and knowledge. That intersects with the discussion on inerrancy and “high view of scripture,” but I have no problem with it.
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It definitely ties in with inerrancy but once does not need to be an inerrancy advocate to accept what a few passages of scripture seem to imply or a very important doctrine in the history of the Church. If it wasn’t for Roman 5 and 1 Cor 15 this wouldn’t really be an issue to be honest. But dispensing with inerrancy is certainly not a license to dump whatever we want. We all need to have some sort of hermeneutic in place for how we understand what we think God is trying to teach in scripture and what may be negotiable and non-negotiable in Christianity. I also find we often do not understand the full nuances of many doctrines–not necessarily our fault. There is simply a lot to read though that means we often comment on caricatures of what some people believe.
My current thinking from the 18 page document (and growing lol) going on may website soon…
Even if it has errors. We should approach it with a hermeneutic of trust and treat it with reverence the same way the individual we Christians worship and are named after did. I have similar feelings about wide-spread Church tradition and Creeds as I believe Jesus handpicked his closest followers and the Holy Spirit came to assist the Church. Any modern church or armchair theologian could potentially disagree with a non-central (and not lettered red) part of scripture or the testimony of the ancient church on some particular issue, but I believe that should only ever occur after we have pushed and pushed and exhausted all possible alternatives. Never should this task be performed lightly and the Church should not be turned to and fro with the ever-changing intellectual climates of each age (Eph 4:14).
Obviously I think taking Genesis 1-11 as a literal reporting of exactly what God did and what happened and when fits the bill of something we can doubt or even view as nailed in the coffin dead. But that doesn’t necessitate removing a literal Adam and Eve in my book. I know a lot of scholars feel the same way. A genealogical one at least fits the evidence as I think I hinted at in another thread, it could even salvage a universal flood (with respect to full metaphysical, ensouled humans) flood. I am not a hardliner on any of this but if there is a viable way to make what numerous scriptural authors assume to be true, actually true, including those specially appointed by Jesus himself and given the Holy Spirit (Peter and Paul), I am going in that direction. I think many TE Christians have already (in their mind) definitely pronounced A&E as impossible and have not really considered the genealogical alternative in much depth. You can tell how little some spend thinking about the issue when they reject A&E on the basis of Genesius 1-11 being mythological. I mean, okay, but for those of us non-fundamentalists, we don’t actually accept A&E because we think Genesis 1-11 is historical. Not even by a long shot.
Vinnie
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Something interesting to me is that Paul was quite aware of the Table of Nations and what those corresponded to in his known world, and certainly knew that there were peoples around who couldn’t be traced to or fit into that Table, specifically barbarians to the north of Rome’s borders. It will be interesting to hear where he regarded them as fitting in.
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FWIW a number of church Fathers noted that there were humans created per Genesis 1 that were not in the Table of Nations and not descended from Adam and Eve. IIRC Tertullian noted this yet had no problem with all humans being affected by Adam’s sin. Irenaeus did the same, and I think it was either Origen or Augustine who applied a “royal representative” model where Adam’s – as king-priest for all humans – sin thus affected all humans.
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I was thinking about Cain and all those other people the other day. A thought hit me. What if, when the Garden story was originally written, it was done by monolatrists who were only writing Israel’s history? Is that feasible? I suspect the second creation account is earlier than the first one—possibly by half a millennium.
Vinnie
Interesting. I think the core of the Garden story goes back very early, but that’s just a gut feeling without any rational argument behind it; it could almost as well come from the period of the Exile as from earlier.
I presume that by invoking monolatrists you are suggesting that the Garden story is a foundation myth on par with the Romulus & Remus story for Rome? I suppose that’s not unreasonable, but I’m up against the fact that I haven’t really studied the literary aspects of the Garden accounts so I don’t know what literary genre it fits – is it myhtologized/theologized history?
I regard the core of the first Creation account as being from Moses given how well it fits the Exodus circumstances. Something about the second account feels almost Sumerian to me, which would indeed make it much older; I wouldn’t be surprised if it went back to Terah’s family.
It occurs to me that the Genesis 2 portion of the Garden story could be far older, with the next portion coming later, and then the whole sequence up through the Table of Nations being edited together by monolatrists interested primarily in Israel’s origins. But at the moment I’m not much into checking the whole JEDP thing to see if that idea fits that schema.
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If A&E were real historical persons, when and where they lived becomes important for the interpretations.
There are many interpretations about Eden. I take the last one I read (written by Carol Hill) as an example. She (CH) located the site of Eden to Mesopotamia, close to the ancient city of Eridu, based on the information about the four rivers in the Genesis text. She also interpreted that the Garden was only a small garden area within a region called Eden.
Then she interpreted that A&E lived crudely 5500 years BCE. That would put Adam to the era of the first king of Eridu (the start of the archeological period Ubaid). Although Eridu was not the first city in the world, Mesopotamian tradition ranks it as the oldest. According to that interpretation, it might even be that Adam was the first king of Eridu, called Alulem in Sumerian.
If that interpretation would be true and Adam was the first king (Alulem) of the city that the Mesopotamian tradition lists as the oldest one and as the place where the kingship was lowered from heaven, what would that mean to the interpretations about Eden and A&E?
Adam would not be the biological ancestor of all humans.
Could he be the royal representative of the humankind? Depends from whom you ask. People living elsewhere would probably not have accepted that claim but the local people might have accepted it because Alulem was their king and the kingship was believed to have been lowered from heaven.
Could Adam (Alulem) have been the ancestor of the family that lead to Abraham, David and Jesus? I do not know. Assuming that Noah’s flood was a regional flood, it may have happened in that region (Mesopotamia is the most credible guess). Genesis tells that Abram (future Abraham) came from Ur that was a city relatively close to Eridu. So, the people mentioned in Genesis may have had roots coming from the area where Eridu was located. This is all just speculation but who knows, maybe there is something historical there?
How much of the traditional interpretations can be preserved in this scenario is a matter of opinion. If an interpretation has been declared as a necessity, that ‘tribe’ (church) would need to find an alternative that saves their fundamental interpretation. Correct or not, that would be their choice. Some others might disagree.
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We’ve had a couple of reviews on “Four Views On the Historical Adam,” with regard to representative, etc, here
Besides the genealogical Adam 
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My view is that Genesis 1-11 is largely ancient mythology. That does not mean there is not history or actual people embedded within. But I would not try to reconstruct where Eden is from the text. I think you can possibly try to reconstruct where the ancient authors might have envisioned it assuming they took it literally.
I approach from the New Testament. @Christy mentioned this in a thread just linked by @Randy
For me, the issue of the historicity of Adam and why we should care is so tied up in other issues (inerrancy, the best hermeneutic approach to ancient Scripture, original sin/the Fall, whether or not a sinful nature is transmitted somehow generationally through biology) that when people talk about Adam, they are often arguing from assumed premises about those related issues that have never actually been established and sometimes aren’t even alluded to. There were very few shared premises in the Counterpoints book on the related issues I think, which led to the talking past one another.
To me that is the crux of the issue. Remove Paul, remove the genealogies, and remove Church teaching and tradition on original sin and I would view Adam largely as an archetype of humanity.
A lot of people talk past one another on this issue. Where I am coming from on the issue is made quite explicit up front.
Vinnie
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But if he was the divinely created priest-king, there is no conflict.
We’re a bunch of long-winded folks. I’m in the same boat.
Yep. The more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know, and the more room for doubt to creep in between the cracks.
The stories in Genesis 1-11 only became literal once their mythological roots were forgotten. The original readers (most likely also scribes trained to write in cuneiform) would’ve immediately recognized the allusions to ANE mythology and would’ve noted the alterations to the originals, which is where the theological truths appear. For example, the king isn’t the image of God; every human being, from male to female (a merism: from A to Z), is the image of God. That alone is world-changing.
I don’t think it’s a modernist mindset. It’s simply a modern mind grappling with modern evidence and trying to reconcile it with an ancient text. Although it’s interesting that at the end of polytheism in the Roman empire, the traditionalists were arguing for the literal truth of Homer and other myths. That was a losing battle even in the 4th century.
I’ll try to catch up with the rest of the convo.
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The other way to read that being that every human being is king or queen.
Both are very subversive thoughts!
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Everyone agrees that God is presently hidden from us, and I would agree that God was “more present” with us prior to humanity reaching moral maturity. The key idea there is “way more clearly present and available.” What does that mean? Did God have to speak to them? Did he “walk and talk with them” in the Garden? I don’t see any reason why God’s “presence” with early humanity (and all throughout human evolution and Creation itself) couldn’t be a “felt” presence beyond words. Even among Christians, who are “indwelt” by the Holy Spirit, God’s presence is felt rather than heard or seen. Unless you’re Paul. haha
Great question! The only way to answer is by analogy. A vocation is a “calling” from God. Suppose you’re a 16-yr-old who feels a calling from God to become a physician. That doesn’t immediately make you qualified to practice medicine. You still face years of education, training and experience to take up that calling, and at any step along the way, you could screw it up and fail to fulfill your destiny.
The same thing happened to humanity, but the “call” was much simpler. What is the human vocation? What does it mean to represent God on Earth? Easy. To choose the good. That applies to humans across the globe even today when they reach maturity. Do they choose to listen to their conscience and do what they know is right, or do they rationalize a way to choose self-interest? They (we) knew what to do. We just chose the wrong path, both individually and collectively.
It wasn’t a trick or even a test. We simply grew up and chose selfish interests.
I’ve already said I’ve had no luck convincing Thomists to change, but think about what you’re saying here. A baby can have a “rational soul” because it has the potential to develop abstract thought. Okay. But early humans didn’t have a brain advanced enough to have the potential for abstract thought? On what basis do you claim this? I can cite plenty of evidence for brain/language co-evolution that proves a long “on-ramp” to symbolic and abstract thought. It didn’t emerge overnight. The potential was there long before the behaviors emerged, just like children have the potential for abstract thought long before the behavior appears. Humans had the potential for abstract thought, and thus the possibility of having “rational souls,” at least a million years ago.
Exactly.
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This is a helpful reminder of the dangers of certainty based on knowledge. There’s always more to know, there’s always dissenting opinions, there’s always gonna be paradoxes and mysteries.
As I noted above that even the ANE mythology at face value, it’s amazing the insight you receive if, for example you see the polemic being used in the Garden of Eden narrative (as you were saying lol). It’s amazing a story that is making a statement about the uniqueness of Yahweh and a much favorable relationship of between the divine and humanity than other ANE mythologies. And the crazy thing is even in that contextual polemic, the A&E story still speaks timeless truths that will still be relevant for generations to come. I’ve learned to appreciate that the ANE context to the Hebrew Scriptures is such a boon to our understanding and we live in a incredibly fortunate time that we have started to recover that ancient context. I’m very thankful to the various teachers that has opened my eyes to it.
I don’t think (obviously) that we’ll ever get an answer to this. It brings up an interesting side point though of how generally the presence of God might have been more noticeable regardless of sin and its effects. It’s intriguing in the modern times with all the “noise” and distractions we have that some of the techniques that people describe to be able to listen to God requires silence and avoidance of all sorts of noise. I think of the centuries and centuries of the monastic and mystic traditions in Christianity and other religions where communing with God seems to rely on meditation and silence and other techniques like that to “avoid the noise”. Or even how 3rd world countries seem much more attuned to the spiritual realm than Western culture, maybe also due to lack of “noise”? Interesting stuff to consider because I believe that it probably would have been easier for them to feel the Divine Presence regardless ( and probably one reason why religious and spiritual expierences were ubiquitous in culture for millennia). So in what magnitude of difference in the Divine Presence would those with the first contact have compared even to ancient and then modern people is quite interesting but unanswerable.
I appreciate this response. A call isn’t a thing you immediately become. It’s a thing you work towards and gain progress over time. I totally think God wasn’t inviting them to immediately become “royal priests” but learning to reflect the Divine nature given that they have the mental capacity to fall away from the Divine and reflect their own fleshy “animal” nature. Which is interesting because you could even suggest in a evolutionary framework is that the “flesh” we are overcoming is our “animalistic instinct”. That we can’t give ourselves over to those instincts and use them for unnatural purposes. Though there’s a whole argument whether or not we should accept that part of our humanity and our evolutionary development or that we supposed to overcome that nature given the minds we were granted by God to chose between good and evil.
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Sure. Paul uses “flesh” in a different sense, almost as a synonym for what John calls “the world,” but I would agree that as a whole the human evolutionary journey has been away from selfish individualism and toward social cooperation.
The key step, according to Sarah Hrdy in “Mothers and Others,” was “alloparenting,” which is another word for other female relatives pitching in to raise infants and children. Among chimps, mothers won’t let go of infants or let them out of their sight until they’re past two years old for fear of infanticide and cannibalism by males or kidnapping by childless females. The mother is solely responsible for the feeding and care of a child. As a result, chimp females only reproduce every three or four years. Our ancient human relations learned to share the burden of feeding and caring for children, with even males eventually becoming domesticated, so we reproduced twice as fast by sharing the burden. Evolution in action.
I don’t believe in a “selfish gene,” but self-preservation is a real instinct in every living creature, and it can’t be doubted that toddlers must be taught to overcome their base instincts: obey your elders, don’t bite, don’t hit, don’t steal, don’t lie. Take away the first four commandments that are specific to worship of YHWH, and that’s the Ten Commandments in a nutshell (nevermind the last, which even Paul had trouble with).
Addendum: Forgot to answer your last sentence.
The God-guided human evolutionary journey has granted us with choice. Before we reached maturity – both collectively as humanity and individually as humans – we experienced both good and evil examples. When the time came, we failed to overcome evil with good. In the ANE myths, all the catastrophes that befall humanity are due to the capriciousness of the gods. In Genesis 1-11, the disasters are due to human choice.
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This is what I mean by abstract thought and the fullness of its description is beyond materialism regardless of how you connect the dots you do.
Feser: The telltale mark of the difference between a rational animal and a non-rational animal is language . Here some distinctions need to be made, because the term “language” is often used indiscriminately to refer to very different sorts of phenomena. Karl Popper distinguished four functions of language: the expressive function, which involves the outward expression of an inner state; the signaling function, which adds to the expressive function the generation of a reaction in others; the descriptive function, which involves the statement of a complete thought of the sort that might be expressed in a declarative sentence; and the argumentative function, which involves the statement of an inference from one thought to another. Some non-human animals are capable of the first two functions, and in that sense might be said to have “language.” But the latter two functions involve the grasp of concepts, and human beings alone posses language of the sort which expresses concepts, thoughts, and arguments.
My view is that God, on his own time, decided when to put a soul in two humans. Could he have done so earlier? Maybe. That’s all your objection amounts to. It doesn’t change anything or what many of us feel scripture teaches about a first couple and original sin.
Vinnie
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It seems more appropriate to say that we failed to grow up: as a number of church Fathers noted, the recorded behavior of Adam and Eve is that of immature adolescents.
It would not surprise me if you are using different meanings of “potential”, one being heavily dependent on Aristotle.
Which doesn’t really jump out at us because we are imbued with the modern enlightenment worldview. Spend a few weeks reading ANE mythology (most of every day) and the difference becomes stark.
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I’m pretty sure @Jay313 and I are using terms differently and approaching from different directions on some things and also since I am not professional philosopher, I’m probably bobbling the ball a little bit in some areas.
As far as human babies or embryos, Feser says this in his book on Immortal Souls…
Nor is it correct to say that, until all this happens, we are dealing only with a potential rational animal. Rather, we are dealing with an actual rational animal that has not yet realized all its potentials. A human embryo is, after all, a human embryo, and not a dog or bird embryo or a thing of some indeterminate nature. It is a substance whose teleology or final cause is to manifest all the properties and powers distinctive of rational animals, even if this end is realized only gradually. Thus it must have from the beginning a substantial form appropriate to a substance with such a teleology, which entails that it has a soul.
Vinnie
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Nice distinction.
I can handle a claim that the soul comes into the picture at the embryo stage; if at fertilization then the majority of humans never actually experience being human. But I still lean towards the ancient view that the unborn is “ensouled” at quickening, which we now know corresponds to a significant stage of brain development – after all, if the brain is the interface between soul/spirit and body, there’s little sense in having a soul before it can interface. Indeed – to indulge in a bit of my own science fiction, I would venture that the soul appears as a result of the brain reaching the point where the unborn can have dreams.
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The fullness of language isn’t beyond a scientific explanation, which you insist on calling “materialism.” There’s no need to jump to a metaphysical explanation for language. It’s a category mistake to conflate a natural phenomenon like “language” with a supernatural claim that humans possess an immortal soul created by God.
Feser is right to focus on language as the key difference between human (“rational animal”) and the animal kingdom (non-rational animal). He’s also right that people use the term “language” indiscriminately. But he’s wrong to rely on Popper. Karl Popper was a philosopher, not a linguist, and his description of “language” is inadequate.
What Popper fails to recognize is that all modern languages contain the full range of modern grammar, and there are “stages” along the way from animal communication to human language called “proto-language.” The stages of language acquisition are gesture/one-word, two-word stage, hierarchical structure but lacking subordinate clauses and embedding, flexibility/recursivity and fully modern grammar. Children pass through these stages by the age of 5. Human language evolution also had to pass through these stages.
Proto-languages are fully capable of expressing a complete thought in a declarative sentence. 3- and 4-yr-olds do it all the time. A kid the same age can say something like, “You’re not tricking me!”, which involves inferring what another is thinking. A 4-yr-old will also try to argue a case with you, even though they’re incapable of metaphoric thinking. They’re not quite capable of abstract thinking, but they’re more than capable of meeting Feser’s qualifications.
Neanderthal possessed at least proto-language; they created flutes from bone to make music and exhibited a few symbolic behaviors (such as wearing eagle feathers around their neck). It’s hubris to say they couldn’t possess a “rational soul” on the same basis that a modern 4-yr-old child has a soul, if the criteria is “language”. So were early humans.
Way earlier, and not just two.
It opens the door to a group of people who “fell” away from God, a pattern replicated by everyone afterward (“original sin”), rather than requiring a “first couple” who passed on their flawed nature by physical generation.
Scripture is amenable to both interpretations. I advocate for the one that upholds science, scripture, reason and experience.
Right on the behavior of A&E being adolescent. But all of us cross the fuzzy line between innocent child and guilty adult at some point. When does it happen? When the child begins to question the “rightness” of the rules and the motives of the rule-giver, all in the name of choosing self-interest. It’s not much different than when a child crosses the line where they can be charged with a crime as a “juvenile.” The first question the judge asks is whether they understood the consequences of their actions. A 4-yr-old can point a gun and shoot a sibling in the head yet not be “guilty” because they had no concept of the consequence of their action. A 12-yr-old? Not so much.
I’m looking at what ancient humans actually accomplished and the archaeological evidence they left behind. They were as human as we are.
Sure. Same for me.
Okay. Between 30-50 percent of embryos are miscarried. And until modern times, more than a third of live births didn’t live to adolescence, not to mention all the children born with birth defects that caused them not to manifest the properties distinctive of rational animals. All of them had the teleology, but they didn’t achieve it in their lifetimes.
The first word on human creation says, “Let us make adam (humanity) in our image…” That’s a statement of teleology, of purpose. It doesn’t require a literal first pair or a recent creation to fulfill that purpose. In fact, all of creation reflects a process, so I see no reason why God wouldn’t achieve his purpose through the process of evolution. It makes absolute sense with both scripture and science that the first humans weren’t yet able to fulfill that teleos, but they lived and died as steps long the way, not reaching the goal, but advancing the ball on behalf of those who followed. I expect to see them in the afterlife as much as I expect to see children who died before their time.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
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