Tim Keller on Original Sin, Atonement, and Evolution (Part 1) | The BioLogos Forum

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We had earlier agreed that the bride of christ is indeed historical, but it is a metaphorical term referring to the people of God. We are not “in the bride” as much as we are “in Christ”… as the church (people of God) we are actually the bride, married to Christ. But it is symbolic language… we are also brothers and sisters of Christ, and we are also his friends, and we are his children.

Since Paul was not discussing Adam as merely figurative, but only our relationship with Adam is partly figurative and partly obviously real; we are actually descendants of Adam as he is the progenitor of the entire human race. We are connected in a real sense.

Most importantly, as you said, Paul does talk of sin entering through one man. The consequence of that was death. Paul was indicating that real death entered because of sin. “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—…” No one escaped this sin, and no one escapes the death, both of which came through Adam. You cannot separate this. “in this way death came to all people”. In what way? In the way of sin entering thru Adam. Death came after sin, all sinned, and all will die. Unless you can demonstrate that someone else besides Christ did not sin, you know that sin entered and spread to all. Entered through the one man, Adam, and spread to every human being, all people.

“For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” Just as Christ was a real person, so we know that Adam was a real person. As we are all affected by Adam, so we can all be affected by Christ, in his redeeming sacrifice of love on the cross, and his victory over sin and death in the resurrection.

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[quote=“johnZ, post:24, topic:644”]
We had earlier agreed that the bride of christ is indeed historical, but it is a metaphorical term referring to the people of God. We are not “in the bride” as much as we are “in Christ”… as the church (people of God) we are actually the bride, married to Christ. But it is symbolic language… we are also brothers and sisters of Christ, and we are also his friends, and we are his children.[/quote]
You can’t call the bride historical if there never was such historical person. It is a metaphorical picture which describes a real group of people, the church. I agree there differences with being ‘in Christ’ because that is also talking about our relationship with a real historical and living individual, but there is a large area of overlap when ‘in Christ’ is used talking in metaphor of our relationship with him, we are part of the body of Christ.

No I don’t think that follows. Even if you think Adam was historical and the father of the human race, it doesn’t follow that Paul thought so too, as I have pointed out, other 1st century Jews though the story of Adam and Eve was written as an allegory. And even if Paul did think of Adam as historical, what he wrote about Adam could be entirely figurative.

[quote]You cannot separate this. “in this way death came to all people”. In what way? In the way of sin entering thru Adam. Death came after sin, all sinned, and all will die. Unless you can demonstrate that someone else besides Christ did not sin, you know that sin entered and spread to all. Entered through the one man, Adam, and spread to every human being, all people.[/quote]In what way did death come to all people? In the same way it came to Adam - death is the consequence of disobeying God. Ezek 18:4 the soul who sins shall die. Rom 6:23 the wages of sin is death. Not sure what your point is about someone else not sinning. We are each responsible for our own sin, the bible never says we got our sin from Adam.

No, Christ being a real person doesn’t mean Adam must have been too. We know that Paul compared Adam and Christ figuratively (Rom 5:14), well that verse in 1Cor 15 is comparing Adam and Christ too. It makes perfect sense as a figurative comparison between Adam symbolising the human race, who all sin and die, with the promise we have of resurrection in Christ. Notice Paul’s use of the present tense to describe us as part of Adam, ‘in Adam all die’. Paul isn’t describing an event that happened long ago when Adam ate some fruit. It is ongoing, we are still in Adam and people die, as Paul did in Rom 7:9, when they first sin.

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[quote=“aleo, post:19, topic:644”]But we cannot count on the effectiveness of the wisdom of Ancient People unless it does make sense to modern youth who are humanity’s future. Viva BioLogos!
[/quote]I wonder who would be more upset, atheists or conservatives, if we started describing the transforming power of the word as the Meme of God.

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You can’t call the bride historical if there never was such historical person

Barach, I’m sorry, I do not understand your way of speaking. If the bride is a metaphorical term describing God’s people, and if God’s people were historical (as well as existing today), then I do not separate “bride” from historical. If bride is metaphorical, then it is meaningless to say that a literal bride of Christ is not historical or real. It is clearly meant to be a comparison, like a similie. Besides, it is not really a term found in scripture anyway, other than in a parable. If you don’t like using the term “bride of Christ” (which scripture does not use, although it hints at the comparison in the passages you cited in Corinthians and Ephesians) as representative of God’s people, then simply avoid it (like scripture avoids it)) and just say the people of God who belong to Christ. They were historical. They were historically God’s people; we should not get lost in the semantics.

Even if you think Adam was historical and the father of the human race, it doesn’t follow that Paul thought so too,

It makes most sense to take Paul at his word, rather than trying to second guess what he thought contrary to what he said. Paul did not refer to Adam in figurative language. He implied a real impact from our relationship with Adam, and a real impact from our relationship with Christ. Could what Paul wrote about Adam be entirely figurative? I doubt it. If we were not affected by the sin and death of Adam, then we would expect there to be many exceptions to people needing the salvation provided by Christ. We would expect that people could earn their own way to heaven, rather than needing the second Adam. But the evidence does not meet this possible expectation. Scripture does not agree with this possible expectation either. “All have sinned and fallen short…” Scripture is clear this is because sin is part of our human nature since Adam and Eve.

We are each responsible for our own sin, the bible never says we got our sin from Adam.

Yes, I agree with this, partly. But our tendency to sin that is part of our human nature has come from the time of Adam and Eve. We have not been able to separate ourselves from this at any time in human history. No one has been able, except Christ. But yes, that does not mean that we can absolve ourselves by blaming Adam and Eve. We are indeed responsible for our own sin. It is for this reason that Christ saves us individually, and does not just save Adam.

14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come. (Romans 5:14)

This is not a figurative comparison of Adam and Christ. It is clearly “from the time of Adam” death reigned, even over those who did not sin … Adam who sinned, is a pattern (of Christ). The following verse makes it clear, referring to the one man “For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ” So he is certainly describing the fall of Adam, by which sin and death entered the world.

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[quote=“johnZ, post:27, topic:644”]I’m sorry, I do not understand your way of speaking. If the bride is a metaphorical term describing God’s people, and if God’s people were historical (as well as existing today), then I do not separate “bride” from historical. If bride is metaphorical, then it is meaningless to say that a literal bride of Christ is not historical or real.
[/quote]
If you want to understand metaphor in the bible, the first thing you need to deal with is the fear of metaphor and figurative interpretation. Jesus chose to speak in parables and metaphors so they can’t be that bad. The terms literal and metaphor only refer to the descriptions and how the words are used, not the reality-or not of what is being described. Lamb of God in John 1 was a metaphorical description Jesus’ death on the cross. John 19:23-30 is literal description of the crucifixion. Both describe the real historical events outside Jerusalem. But the crucifixion being historical doesn’t change how the words in the description work, one describing it literally the other metaphorically.

The Bride of Christ is an image used throughout the NT. Why should we avoid it? Each time it is used in different ways, The nearest to the phrase ‘Bride of Christ’ is Rev 21:9 "Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb. But there the title is simple ‘the Bride’, the rest is description. We need commonly understood indication of what we are talking about when we say the Bride. Why should we avoid the beauty of biblical imagery? I can only imagine (and am happy to be corrected) that it is fear of stepping beyond the seeming security of literalism that holds Christians back from the poetic beauty of imagery in the bible.

The problem is, figurative language doesn’t necessarily look any different from literal. How many Christians in the world take the words ‘this is my body’ literally? But we have the advantage that Paul told us he interpreted Adam and a figurative picture of Christ. We also have the example of allegorical and figurative interpretation of OT passages in other epistles 1Cor 10 & Gal 4:24. Is it taking Paul at his word to treat him as a literalist? He was a rabbinically trained 1st century Rabbi, and they loved allegory and allegorical interpretation.

When you talk of people not needing redemption, you are assuming Adam and Eve could have lived sinless lives, that the gospel was God’s plan B in case we failed. But the bible never says anything like that. It portrays the cross and our redemption as God’s mystery plan, his purpose from before the foundation of the world.

[quote]But our tendency to sin that is part of our human nature has come from the time of Adam and Eve.[/quote]If our tendency to sin is the result of the fall, why did Adam and Eve fail. They didn’t the vast range of temptations and moral dilemmas of the modern world, or the detailed prohibition upon prohibition of the Levitical Law. They just had one simple rule and they couldn’t get that right. This is not the portrait of humanity created in moral perfection, it is showing us how humans always fail even if only given the simplest command. The point is that our human desire (not fallen sin nature) keep us from following God and we need his mercy.

[quote]This is not a figurative comparison of Adam and Christ. It is clearly “from the time of Adam” death reigned, even over those who did not sin.[/quote]The word ‘time’ has been added in by the NIV translators. Paul is talking about the period before the Mosaic law was given, but this is the very passage where Paul tells us interpret Adam figuratively. The NIV used ‘pattern’ to translate the Greek tupos or type. This is the word Paul uses in 1Cor 10 to interpret crossing the Red Sea as a figure of baptism and the rock Moses struck for water as a picture of Christ.

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I think you are missing the point or contradicting what you just said in the paragraphs above about how one can use a fictional person or a historical person allegorically or figuratively for rhetorical purposes. Just pointing out that Paul was using Adam in metaphorical/allegorical sense does not show one way or another whether Paul believed Adam was a historical person. What reason would he have had for doubting that Adam was a historical person?

I could speak of how we all need to find the Frodo Baggins within ourselves and rise to the occasion when duty calls, and you would obviously interpret my words as figurative language, but your knowing I was talking about Frodo figuratively in that instance would not tell you whether I believe Frodo existed in history or not. Maybe I do believe Middle Earth actually existed. When people talk about someone meeting their Waterloo, they are speaking figuratively about Napoleon, but we don’t assume that just because they are using the facts of Napoleon’s life in a metaphor, somehow his actual historical existence is now nullified.

Maybe I’m not understanding and this isn’t even what you are arguing about, but I don’t think you can deny the fact that Paul most certainly believed Adam was historical, even though he appropriated him as a rhetorical tool more than anything else. We can argue about whether there is any significance in the fact that Paul thought Adam was historical, but it is going to be an important issue for more theologically conservative people who hold to some form of inerrancy.

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Similar reason to Philo or Josephus who also believed the story was written as an allegory. They don’t explain their reason either… At a guess it was familiarity with Jewish apocalyptic literature and the personification of Israel and the nations in story from the song of Jeshurun in Deut to Jerusalem and her sisters in Ezekiel. We also find God highly anthropomorphised, planting trees, forming Adam like a potter mould clay, walking in the garden. Adam’s name fits the allegorical reading beautifully too, meaning not just ‘man’ but ‘mankind’.

No I completely agree we cannot tell from an allegorical interpretation if the interpreter thinks the story or character is historical or written as allegory/parable. My point to JohnZ was that if you naturally assume literalism you may mistake allegorical interpretation for factual historical discussion. Figurative interpretation taken literally can sound bizarre, calling a loaf of bread your body, but it depends on how much bizarre you are willing to ascribe to the power of God or the nature of reality. It gets even harder to tell them apart when these interpretations feed into our traditional theology and form the basis of our understanding of human nature and why the world is the way it is.

I think showing Paul consistently interpreted Adam and Eve figuratively should deal with the problem of inerrancy. If his interpretation of the story didn’t depend on Adam being historical or Paul thinking he was historical if he actually did, then it has no affect on the inspiration of his interpretation.

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But I think the historical Adam folks have a point when they point out that putting Adam in an analogy with Christ, who is obviously presented as a historical figure who accomplished real things in history, seems to imply that Paul assumed Adam was a historical person too. The atonement was a historical event accomplished by a flesh and blood human. It seems weird to me to put it in a direct analogy with a purely symbolic, allegorical event played out by mythological/metaphorical characters.

There aren’t just two options: interpreting everything in the account of Adam and Eve as “literal history” and assuming Adam and Eve were purely mythological, fictitious, or allegorical figures. It seems likely to me that Paul thought of Adam as historical (analogous to Christ) even if he presented/used the account of Adam symbolically in his arguments. And if he believed Adam was historical then either you have to take the Enns/Sparks approach that it doesn’t matter because obviously the biblical writers were products of their time and culture and were mistaken about some things (which is a place many people who hold to inerrancy are not prepared to go), or you believe that Adam’s historicity is part of our special revelation and needs to be taken seriously.

I keep going back to stuff John Walton has said about how just because Adam primarily functions as an archetype doesn’t mean he never existed as a real person.

I’m no Calvinist, and my theology can get along just fine without real fruit being eaten in a real garden and tainting human seed forever, but I have a harder time dismissing the idea that Adam and Eve were real people with a real covenantal relationship with God that is part of the story of how God has worked in real human history, no matter how symbolically or allegorically or non-literally that history may be presented.

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Quite a few I think, but that would depend on who you would consider to be a Christian.

Darach, did you mean to say that Paul thought of Adam as figurative and not historical?

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Sorry, typo. The ‘and’ should be ‘as’. Paul explained he interpreted Adam figuratively. But you can give a figurative interpretations of figurative stories like the Prodigal Son or Daniel’s beasts; you can also give figurative interpretations of historical events like the Passover lamb like John The Baptist did, or Hagar and Sarah as Paul did in Galatians. So you can’t actually tell from a figurative interpretation if the writer thought the characters involved were real or not. All you can tell, if they keep interpreting the passage figuratively, is that it is the figurative meaning is what they think is important to teach rather than any historicity.

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What if the story of Adam and Eve were a picture that God painted in order to tell us about something that happened in the invisible realm before he created the universe… What if a large number of spirits, angels, souls, whatever you call them, betrayed God. What if, in order to make a way to bring these souls back to him, he created the universe to be the theater of their salvation. Adam may have been the name of the leader of the rebellion, or the name given to the entire group. Then there is no question about our being in Adam if all humans were a part of that group. Would this satisfy your feeling that Adam must be a historical figure?

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No, that is not satisfying at all, because the idea of pre-existing souls who are given earthly bodies was condemned as heresy by the Second Council of Constantinople.

It makes much more sense to me to think of Adam and Eve as God’s chosen leaders/representatives of the people group that would become Israel.

I agree (I think) with Darach in that being “in Adam” is figurative language about belonging to humanity, and I don’t have any theological need to trace my actual historical/biological lineage to Adam.

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But the Second Council of Constantinople doesn’t determine the truth, reality does. The Second Council was not universally accepted; and it’s purpose was to settle the matter of Christ’s nature. Origen was a sort of add-on. The pre-existence of the human soul is a very big area of thought. Not a good idea to just exclude it without some investigation.

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I am going to accept the historic Councils and Creeds as God’s leading of his church through his Spirit and as authoritative and truthful unless there is a preponderance of evidence that their conclusions need to be re-evaluated. If you don’t draw some boundaries around what constitutes orthodox Christianity then you just end up with a bunch of people and their opinions and hypotheses, which I don’t think gets you any closer to truth.

There is absolutely no way to examine the “reality” or “truth” of the pre-existence of souls outside of special revelation. Nothing in general revelation is going to speak to the issue. The concept was rejected as conflicting with the special revelation we have been given, in Scriptures and in the Spirit-led discernment of the church. That settles it for me. There is nothing more to investigate. It really isn’t a big area of thought within Christianity, though it may be in other religious traditions, or non-traditional sects of Christianity like Latter Day Saints.

As I understand it, the point of BioLogos is to foster discussion of the general revelation of nature/science in light of the special revelation of Scripture and orthodox Christian teaching. I don’t see how pre-existence fits in, since it isn’t scientific and it isn’t taught by Scripture.

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Darach, the “bride” is a metaphorical term referring to a real existing entity. So the term is metaphorical, but the entity is real. It is not a term referring to a metaphorical thing. I hope not to say anything more about that analogy.

I have no fear of metaphors. I have a fear of metaphors being misunderstood and misused. I totally understand the purpose of parables… although even the parables took on additional meaning if/when they alluded to a real incident. Even the miracles themselves often became parables, such as the feeding of the five thousand becoming a parable for Jesus feeding his flock with his word, and Jesus responding to Satan by saying that we shall live not by bread alone, but by the word of God. The beauty of the language transitioning in mid-sentence from literal to metaphorical, and yet no less real… and this often happens in scripture.

I don’t treat Paul as a literalist. I take Paul at his word. Sometimes his metaphorical use of words brings across the literal message. Sometimes there is no metaphor. Sometimes the words are both literal, and metaphorical at the same time. Romans 5 - sin entered the world through one man. I Cor. 15 - death came through a man… These are not metaphorical expressions. These are explanations of why Christ had to come, and why Christ accomplished what he did. Any other understanding of the words does not make sense, nor fulfill the purpose of the words. In a metaphor, the metaphor makes the idea more clear, not less clear. In this case, trying to metaphoricalize the words “one man” or “a man”, ends up contradicting the words, and reducing the meaning to rubbish.

“As in Adam all die, so in Christ all are made alive.” Metaphorical? Literal? both? Both. True first in the literal sense, that Adam was our agent or beginning of death, of separation from God, and that Christ is our agent of life, of union with God. But a lesser and additional metaphorical understanding could also include that death comes through our human nature, while life comes through our spiritual nature. Death comes through our earthly nature(son of earth), while life comes through our heavenly nature(son of God). However, the metaphor for this second meaning does not work, does not make sense, if the literal meaning is not real. The metaphor depends on the reality of the first meaning; otherwise it is incomprehensible.

Why did Adam and Eve fail? Good question. Not sure I have an answer that wouldn’t be conjecture. God gave them a real choice, obviously, or they could not have failed. But beyond that… don’t know. But they did fail. And because they failed, we also fail.

No real difference between human desire and fallen sin nature, until our desire changes to please only God. As Paul has said in one epistle, “I don’t do what I want to do, and I do what I don’t want to do. Who will relieve me from this dilemma? …”

“Death reigned from Adam to Moses…” even without the word “time”, the meaning is the same. 1 Corinthians 15:45 --> So it is written: “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam, a life-giving spirit.

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I think, in the wake of the Fall spiritual death came into the world. God told the man: "17 except the tree that gives knowledge of what is good and what is bad.[f] You must not eat the fruit of that tree; if you do, you will die the same day.”'
Does the man died that day? - No, he’s not.
Did you know that what is death? Yes because they surrounded him (them) death due to the food chain. So, relationship with God is dead.

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