Because of my peculiar line of research, I have read over 40 books on creation, EC, and intelligent design. That gives me a pretty good background from which to comment on Denis Lamoureux’s EC. He makes some excellent points. I really appreciate his examples of the many ways in which the biblical writers employed the understanding of nature at the time of writing to illustrate immutable truths about the kingdom of God. However, as “jasonbourne4” mentioned a couple days ago, I do take issue with Denis saying that Paul was simply wrong about Paul’s understanding of Adam. I also believe it is premature to say that genetics now makes Adam & Eve impossible. I wrote a PSCF article in 2015 that was a thought experiment on whether it is possible for modern genetics to be correct AND there to still be an actual Adam (spoiler: my answer is yes). The article also addresses issues of human evolution and the presence of a soul.
Davidson, G. (2015) Genetics, the Nephilim, and the Historicity of Adam, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith, 67(1):24-34. http://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2015/PSCF3-15Davidson.pdf
Just skimming the article, looks very interesting, and I need to go back and read it carefully to do it justice. Thanks for sharing.
I am reminded of the saying “have your cake and eat it too” when looking at ideas like this, and wonder if sometimes we contrive things to fit our mold, or if perhaps that is indeed how things took place. In this case, perhaps it is, but even if it is not, is interesting to contemplate. One consideration is whether it changes anything in our relationship with God if one view or the other is true. My thought is that it probably does not, but we may well come away with new insights.
Indeed. Your reflections are why I describe the article as a “thought experiment” as opposed to declaring that it IS what happened. I think what I describe is very possible, but I don’t hang my proverbial theological hat on it.
I assert that it does not unless we make it so. For me this has has the lesser goal of reconciling the scientific data with the Bible convincingly so that we don’t needlessly put barriers between seekers and Jesus.
Yes, I think the image of God requires the action of God. Whether it is by directly “intervening” in the natural development of humans and creating something unique in them or whether it is recognizing their capacity to fulfill a unique role and then calling them and commissioning them, God has to act in human history to make humans his image bearers. It’s not like he just looked down on creation one day as it was happily evolving away and said, “Well, look over there, Homo sapiens have arrived! They are my image now!” At least that is not how I see it,
Where do you find that definition of sin? I can’t find it in any Bible or theological dictionary. Under that definition, many people besides Jesus have lived sinless lives. It doesn’t matter how generically immoral or even “evil” they were in their behavior or thoughts; all that is required is that they were ignorant of God’s commands.
Even people who are ignorant of God and his commands can sin, and they do so whenever they violate their own conscience and community standards of what is “good” and “evil.” While God’s standards are absolute, it is not necessary for human beings to be aware of those standards to be judged by them, just as “ignorance of the law is no excuse” even within human societies.
Moreover, it is not necessary for God to judge ignorant human beings by an absolute “law” of which they may or may not be aware. As Jesus says several times in his parables, “I will judge you by your own words, you wicked servant …” The same principle of “relativism” in God’s judgments is also found in his rewards: “For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
In short, a person ignorant of God’s commands who commits “generic immorality” has sinned against conscience and community, and they fall under God’s judgment just as surely as one who covets his neighbor’s wife. Otherwise, how could God judge the world? (Rom. 3:6).
Isn’t that the whole question between active and passive evolutionary creation, though? It’s almost a question of ID, isn’t it, regarding moral code? I agree that God wouldn’t be surprised. But I don’t at all know what the definition of an image of God is, and wonder if we don’t make too much out of it. I don’t really agree with Collins’ and Lewis’ impression of a universal, God given moral code; it is much less black and white to me, and more naturalistic. It seems to me that the code itself carries evolutionary advantages too, as in Justin Barrett’s cognitive science of religion. So, as with @Jay313, there are degrees of awareness and responsibility.
Je suis comme vous–je decouvre.
This looks like a good topic for a whole new thread
It’s my understanding of Romans 4:15 (where there is no law, there is no sin), James 4:17 (If you know the good you ought to do, and fail to do it, you sin), 1 John 3:4 (sin is breaking God’s law).
The cognitive metaphor given in Scripture for sin is missing a target (Romans 3:23). Judges 20:16 uses the same expression as the Hebrew expression for sin in the context of soldiers with slingshots who never “missed.” And the Bible makes clear it is God’s target, not a community target, or a personal conscience target.
When I say sin did not exist until God revealed his standard, I’m talking in a human history sense, in a “sin enters the world” sense, not in a personal history sense. Yes, obviously there are and have been many sinful people unaware of God’s standard. I was talking in the context of a historical Fall. The fact that sinful and yet ignorant people exist is to be expected within the concept of a fallen world.
I think that for a historical Fall to have happened, God had to have revealed his will for humans to rebel against (I’m not opposed to the idea of a representative Adam, minimally as a mental construct for understanding sin and Christ’s redemption), and it doesn’t make sense to me to talk about the evolution of moral awareness as something conflated with the entry of sin into the world. If someone doesn’t care about or believe in a historical Fall, then obviously they would have different questions and different answers.
I guess mainly I am reacting to the idea I see around here sometimes that hominims evolved moral awareness and the image of God and therefore could sin and so God was compelled to interact with them. I think that is wrong-headed. I don’t think anything the human race did or any capacity they developed forced God’s hand in terms of how he chose to reveal himself or relate. I think God chose to interact with humans according to his will and time frame not according to the human evolution trajectory. God chose to call humans to bear his image when he desired to, not when or because humans deserved the calling based on their newly developed capacities. I think the narrative of Genesis describes a recent history and humans had the capacity to interact with God and make moral choices long before the event recorded in our Scriptures. Did they interact in ways we don’t know about? Maybe. But I’m most interested in understanding the revelation we have, not in speculating about the eternal destinies of early hominims that we don’t have any revelation about.
It’s one of my all-time favorite BioLogos blog series: What Does “Image of God” Mean? - BioLogos
Sounds like a good idea. There’s certainly a lot of knowledge to be mined out of these papers.
Well, for Pete’s sake! (pun intended )looks like a very good one. Thanks.
I particularly liked this section!:
"J. Richard Middleton (Roberts Wesleyan College) puts it well in The Liberating Image. He offers that the image of God describes “the royal office or calling of human beings as God’s representatives and agents in the world.” Image of God means that humans have been given “power to share in God’s rule or administration of the earth’s resources and creatures.”
“When one reads Genesis 1:26-27 with this in mind, the point becomes fairly obvious: “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish…birds…cattle…wild animals…creeping things” (NRSV).”
“Humankind, created on the sixth day, has been given the authority to rule over the other creatures God had made on the fourth and fifth days. They have that authority because humankind is made in God’s image.”
“There is nothing here about a soul, the ability to reason, being conscious of God or any other psychological or spiritual trait. As John Walton points out, as important as these qualities are for making us human, they do not define what image of God means in Genesis. Rather, those qualities are tools that serve humans in their image-bearing role.”
Here’s an angle that maybe someone here has thought of before:
As you will recall from the New Testament account of the Transfiguration, Jesus joins Moses and Elijah as glowing figures, reflecting the “glory” that was associated with Things Divine during that time.
What many Westerners might not be too familiar with is that Moses and Elijah were treated in the writings of that day as people who were conveyed into the presence of God (Enoch-like) . So they glowed with divine light, either constantly or temporarily. And Jesus began to glow to demonstrate his spiritual communion with these two heroes of Jewish mysticism!
In the Wiki article, we read this brief sentence:
“In Christian eschatology, Eternal Life is said to be the transfiguration of all of humanity.”
If being an Image Bearer doesn’t make one into a literal angel … it at least seems to be part of the equipment of the “best of the best” image bearers!
And if by being human we all merit the potential of Eternal Life, as the “transformation” of all humans … then I think the author of the article, Pete Enns, is on to something (even if I am not an Open Theist!).
Gregg, just read your article. Though I tend to favor a historic Adam as our representative, your proposal for the possibility of a historic Adam as progenitor is elegantly presented. I also appreciate your statements below, which are relevant to the current discussion:
'[The] physiological structure that facilitates awareness cannot generate that awareness without the actual possession of a nonmaterially constrained soul. I would argue that the gift of a soul to a previously soulless, yet biologically equipped hominid, had the potential to impart a quantum, bigger-than-biology shift in the emotional and relational awareness of Adam and his bride that set them apart from their contemporaries."
And in contrast to the “soulish” higher animals, you write:
“A soul-bearing creature—what we think of today as a human—has mental and relational capacities that go well beyond soulishness, such as a cognitive understanding of justice and mercy, the ability to create and appreciate art, the desire to understand why things are the way they are, the ability to ponder and communicate abstract ideas, the desire to know truth, and the sense that there is a realm or existence that is beyond the physical. When the Bible speaks of creation in the image of God, it is not a physical appearance, but possession of such characteristics that allow human beings to be God’s relational representatives on this earth.”
I suspect we could contemplate ad infinitum what it means to be created in God’s image, and perhaps more importantly what it means to image him.
“What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?”
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet.
(Psalm 8:4-6)
@Davidson I agree this is elegant. However, in primary care I see the disintegration of such characteristics piecemeal when the brain is exposed to toxins like opioids, insults like frontotemporal and Alzheimers dementia (neurofibrillary tangles), and affected by organic causes in other ways. I therefore personally baulk at assigning characteristics to a human soul or element. I feels like a “God of the gaps” argument to me (at least, potentially). I’d like to read more, for example, on evolutionary psychology and cognitive science of religion from Justin Barrett, the Christian researcher from Cambridge and Fuller. It makes me wonder even more what “consciousness” is–even if we go to Heaven, etc, what that would mean, when I “meet” my father again (who passed 7 years ago from mesothelioma). I just have faith that there is such a thing as a soul and God and afterlife. I’m not confident of assigning uniqueness, as a result, to any particular portion of our ancestry–Adam or not.
I agree, Jason, with your quote from Psalm 8:4-6. (I can’t get the quote function to add it on).Amen.
Randy, I completely hear you on this. I would argue that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a “soul” or the “image of God” through scientific inquiry (although that depends on the precise definitions that are being used).
I also have patients that appear to lack the “mental and relational capacities” as well as “characteristics that allow human beings to be God’s relational representatives on this earth” in the more immediately accessible senses. We see that Christ infuses dignity into all of humanity in various texts, such as when he teaches that we are actually loving him by caring for “the least of these.” I think of that passage in Matthew 25 when I encounter a patient that is either miserable and difficult to love or incapable of responding to love in discernible ways.
Absolutely. Great point.
Obviously, we’re not going to develop a complete theology of sin here, but I’ll attempt to plow through a little of this, starting with the last point. Romans 2:12-16 pretty clearly spells out that conscience serves the same function as the Mosaic law in rendering the Gentiles guilty before God, even though they did not possess the law or have any awareness of God’s revealed will:
12 All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. 13 For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. 14 (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.) 16 This will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.
The primary metaphor for sin is missing a target, but just as the legal metaphor of “justification” does not exhaust every aspect of what God has done for us in this “so great a salvation,” the metaphor of missing the target does not exhaust every aspect of “sin.”
For instance, what God-given absolute is missed in James 4:17? “If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.” Is “the good” we ought to do only that which God has directly commanded, such as visiting the prisoner, or is “the good” dependent upon the situation, according to what our conscience tells us? (Hint: “it is sin for them,” not an absolute standard for everyone.) In this case, “the good” we ought to do is something that we have deduced for ourselves, and once we have reached that place of decision, the Lord holds us responsible for acting upon what reason and conscience have told us we should do. Thus, “the good we ought to do” is not exhausted by the specific “oughts” that God has revealed in Scripture; we also use our own judgment to recognize those times when we ought to do good, and when we choose to do something other than that, we have sinned. This applies equally to believers and unbelievers.
To illustrate, let’s take another statement about sin: “whatever is not from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23). Douglas Moo’s commentary on this verse states, "What (Paul) here labels ‘sin’ … is any act that does not match our sincerely held convictions about what our Christian faith allows us to do and prohibits us from doing. … Violation of the dictates of the conscience, even when the conscience does not conform perfectly with God’s will, is sinful." This, again, is sin based upon a violation of conscience, even when the act in question (eating meat offered to idols) is not sinful in itself (i.e. prohibited by God), yet because the person involved believes the action is sinful, it actually is sinful for him or her.
In short, “sin” appears in a myriad of forms. It can’t be limited only to willful violations of God’s revealed standards.
I understand that, but this conception of the “late” entrance of sin creates a host of problems. First and foremost, if sin did not enter the world until God revealed his standards, then Christ is the solution to a “sin problem” that God himself created.
Second, it is incoherent to speak of humanity making moral choices prior to “the event recorded in our Scriptures,” since “moral choices” require the abstract moral categories of “good” and “evil” in order for such choices to qualify as “moral.” In effect, you’re asserting that mankind already possessed the knowledge of good and evil long before Eve ate the fruit. In that case, what knowledge was actually gained in the garden?
Third, if we take seriously the fact that ha’adam, “the man,” is an archetype, then we cannot apply one rule for his sin (“God had to have revealed his will for humans to rebel against”) and another rule for the sins of everyone else who has ever lived. Without question, billions of people have been born, lived, and died in complete ignorance of God’s revealed will. Were they not sinners in need of Christ’s forgiveness? God did not have to reveal his will to each and every one of them individually in order to convict them of sin, so why was it necessary in the case of “Adam”?
Moral awareness, whether in Adam and Eve or in children today, is logically prior to awareness of sin. We see this in childhood development and in the universal human concept of an “age of accountability,” when children are held legally responsible for their actions. This goes back to “the man” as an archetype. Just as children must first learn the difference between good and evil actions before they are held responsible, so “the man” had to learn the difference before God could hold him responsible, no matter where you believe “Adam” might fall in the historical timeline.
Yes, I see that tendency, too, and I feel the same way about it. Gen. 1:26 is a statement of purpose: “Let us create adam/mankind in our image…” This, alone, is reason enough to reject that line of thinking. In my view, the human evolutionary trajectory was planned and guided by God.
Okay. But how could sin exist outside of potential relationship with God? All of the teaching about sin in the Bible presumes God has already initiated a relationship with some representatives of humanity. We don’t have any revelation about humanity before the Garden, before God establishes a relationship.
I’m not following. God initiated a relationship with humans. So yes, in some ways he created the context for sin to exist. The relationship had terms and he made himself vulnerable to disobedience. But isn’t this the same scenario Christians have always wrestled with? What scenario can you propose in which human immorality matters to God but God has no relationship with humans? Humans sinned (violated the terms of the relationship, which God revealed at least to some humans) and compromised the relationship. By whatever calculus God uses, the potential for relationship with all humans was affected by that violation. We need Christ primarily to restore the potential for relationship with God, not for other secondary benefits like peace on earth and freedom from personal guilt and shame.
The God of the Bible is a relational God. He’s not some impersonal decreer of moral absolutes or setter of platonic ideals of goodness. As humans, our highest calling is not to arrive at some self-actualized pinnacle of moral awareness and rectitude. All of the metaphors are relational: We’re to be the spotless bride, the heirs, the faithful servants, the beloved children, the rescued sheep, the redeemed slaves, the ransomed captives. Our fulfillment as humans is always defined by our relationship to God who is always an essential entity in the metaphors. You can’t have a bride without a bridegroom, or heirs without a parent, or domesticated sheep without a shepherd, or slaves without a master.
Is it though? You can make moral choices without accountability. Very young children who are not considered morally accountable have concepts of good and bad, right and wrong, kind and mean. Even dogs know when they have been bad dogs. Maybe we are using “moral” differently. But I imagine very early humans living in social communities had some kind of agreed on moral code where the group exerted pressure on individuals to behave in “good” ways and expect social punishment for being “bad.”
Good question. I guess I would say “the knowledge of good and evil” is different than general moral awareness or the capacity for moral decision making and has something to do with accountability in relationship with God. I think the capacity existed long before the accountability. Clearly God expected obedience from Adam and Eve before they had “the knowledge of good and evil.” He expected them to know that disobeying him was wrong. And they did know, that’s why Eve had to be convinced to take the fruit. I think the Garden story is a rebellion story about rejecting God’s rule in favor of autonomy more than it is a story of the first immoral choice.
Right. I didn’t write Romans, I’m just trying to understand it. It sure seems clear to me that all humanity is counted sinful because of their identification with the sinners that came before them and their birth into sinful human community. Adam and Eve, or whoever they represent were chosen and God initiated a unique relationship with them, like he initiated a unique relationship with Abraham and with Israel and with the church after Pentecost.