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Adam and Eve: Did They Really Exist? |
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BILL HOLDRIDGE: As we get started I'd like to have a word of prayer and ask the Lord to be glorified through the things that are said this evening. Lord, we thank you so much for being able to dialogue concerning things that matter most. And we do pray that, as your word says, your counsel would stand and you would fulfill all of your pleasure. Do that in this place as the issues are raised. We pray that you would be glorified through all that is said and all that is done. We ask it in the name of Jesus. Amen. The format for tonight will be opening statements by each participant. And then following those opening statements, counter responses to each of those statements. And then kind of a free-flowing bantering back and forth like we had last time. And then there will be a love offering received with a short intermission. And then we'll go right into questions and answers from the floor. So that's what we have to look forward to this evening. And so without any further ado I'd like to introduce the first speaker this evening, John Rankin, the president of the Theological Education Institute located in Hartford, Connecticut. Many of you know him. If you were here at the last forum you remember his presentation concerning the subject that was discussed that evening. Would you please welcome John Rankin. [applause] JOHN RANKIN: Good evening. When I talked with Bill about doing this forum and then called Father Hansen, the interest was actually brought up by Father Hansen in his opening comments in our last forum, when he said that, when we look at the issue of homosexuality, the deeper issue is how do we regard the Bible and its inspiration and its authority. And so I called Carl and said, would you like to do this on the inspiration of Scripture. And what happened was, I don't want to steal your thunder yet, but I know that Carl is going to argue not that the Bible's not inspired, but he's going to argue I believe a different perspective of its inspiration. And so it wasn't like is it inspired yes or no. Because Father Hansen didn't want to say no. When we were talking I mentioned in passing my belief that Adam and Eve really existed. And when Father Hansen felt otherwise, I knew we had a forum. So the question is, did Adam and Eve really exist? Perhaps a secondary question is, why does it matter if they really existed? Well let me go through a number of observations. First of all, regardless of our perspective, if we're conservative and evangelical or if we are liberal in our theology, if we're going to look at the Bible we must respect it on its own terms. And to respect it on its own terms is to understand that the Bible interprets itself, the entire canon of Scripture on the assumptions of what is introduced in Genesis chapters 1 through 3. In those chapters we have the doctrines of creation, sin and redemption, namely, that God created the world according to a certain moral order. He gave us freedom to accept or reject that. In rejecting it we sinned and reversed the order of creation. And his redeeming agenda that begins in Genesis, and is fulfilled in Jesus Christ, is to reverse the reversal. Now what this means is that we cannot grasp Jesus as the redeemer without knowing what sin is, and we don't know what sin is without knowing the sin of Adam and Eve back in the garden of Eden. So we can't get away from Genesis 1 through 3 on its own terms, in terms of understanding the rest of the Bible. Because if we get rid of it we get rid of the entire Bible itself. Not only that but we have a certain moral order in Genesis. And I describe this often as the subjects of God, life, choice, and sex. The first subject in Genesis chapter 1 is God. The whole trajectory, the crown of God's creation is human life in his image. The height of what it is to be a human is moral and aesthetic choice. And the most important choice we ever make is whom we marry. Because in the covenant of one man, one woman, one lifetime -- the goal of marriage in the order of creation -- we have the power to pass on the gifts of life, choice, and sex to our offspring. I argued last time that those who would allow for homosexuality, or those who don't start with the Bible on its own terms, reverse it and have sex, choice, life, God. That becomes the basis for sexual promiscuity and to me the brokenness of human relationships ultimately. So the way we understand Genesis chapters 1 through 3 is crucial if we're going to respect the Bible on its own terms. Now having said that, someone can agree with that and still not share my assumption about the full inspiration of Scripture, that every word is inspired by God the way we have it for his instructive purposes. But I will move through and make the argument that if we do take it on its own terms, we need to understand the historicity, the reality of Adam and Eve. In Genesis chapters 1 and 2, there are ten positive ethical dimensions set forth that are not to be found in any pagan origin text, any source apart from the Bible. And I'll go through them very quickly and focus on two in particular. Only Genesis has a positive view of God's nature. He gives and doesn't destroy. Number two. Only Genesis has a positive view of communication that's meant to serve openness in relationships and not domination. Number three. Only Genesis has a positive view of human nature. We are the image of God and not a cosmic byproduct of chance evolution, or the destructive agenda of petty gods and goddesses. Number four. Only Genesis has a positive view of human freedom. Only Genesis gives moral freedom. All the pagan texts put us into slavery when it comes to making choices. The consequences also come with that freedom. Number five. Only Genesis has a positive view of human sexuality and women. All the pagan origin texts treat women as dirt, demons, second class. Number six. Only Genesis has a ... that was number six. Number five is only Genesis has a positive view of hard questions. The embrace of tough questions. I reversed the order there slightly. Number seven. Only Genesis has a positive view of verifiable history. I'm going to focus on this in a minute. Number eight. Only Genesis has a positive view of science and the scientific method. I'll also focus on this in a minute. Number nine. Only Genesis has a positive view of covenantal law, where those in government are meant to serve and not to dominate. Number ten. Only Genesis has a positive view of the First Amendment and the basis for religious liberty. Now, on the positives of verifiable history and science, I make the observation that every religious origin text in all of human history, begins with mythology apart from Genesis. You go back to Romulus and the foundation of Rome, you get back into quasi-mythology and then back into mythology, whether you look at the history of the Mayan people or the Hindu people or the Babylonian people or the Egyptian people, you name it. Apart from the history of the Jews and those that came before the Jews from Adam on forward, you have mythology in every context, and Genesis stands very powerfully against that. It has a view of history. For example, you have in the Garden of Eden, let's just take a look at Genesis 2 verses 10 and following. "A river watering the garden flowed from Eden." This is just after the creation of Adam. "From there it separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there. The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of the Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates." Now Moses is writing the final text that we have here in the Pentateuch, the book of Genesis. And so you have people circa 1446 B.C. that are reading this. And Moses in writing this text is identifying for those people the exact location of the Garden of Eden. Two rivers we know and two rivers we don't know from antiquity from our perspective. But the point being, that when this was written, all the people, some 8000 years as best I can figure it after the creation of Adam, people knew the exact, historical time and place. So you see the assumption from the word go was not mythology, but a real place, a real time, a real man, and a real woman that were created. Also, in terms of science we have the understanding that only Genesis has a view of the scientific inquiry and of checking reality and testing it all the way through. Every religious origin text apart from Genesis, starts with the assumption that the sun, the moon and the stars are deities, gods and goddesses that fatalistically control our lives. There are variations on that theme, but you go back to Babylon, you go back to Egypt, you go back to their origin texts and they view the celestial objects as what: gods and goddesses. That's not the basis for science. That's not the basis for astronomy. That's the basis for astrology. Genesis is unique. It treats the sun, the moon and the stars as inanimate, celestial objects, exactly what they are, that give heat and light. And so you go from there to the scientific method, based on the principle of falsification to determine reality. If you want to test a hypothesis, you test it under the same circumstance repeatedly, and it must have the same results. And if it's different one time out of a thousand, your hypothesis is proved false. Only the Bible is willing to submit its prophets to a 1000 batting average, a hundred percent accuracy. If a prophet is wrong one out of a hundred times he's a false prophet. And Jesus said if you prove me false once you've proved me false. And so the very ethics as well as the assumptions, of how you look at the sun, the moon and the stars, give the evidence that Genesis on its own terms from the beginning, has the only basis for reality among all the religious origin texts. The only basis for history, the only basis for science. Now, another very powerful element here is genealogies. Adam is named. His sons are named. His daughters are mentioned. Their descendants are traced all the way to Noah, from Noah all the way to Abraham, from Abraham all the way to David, and from David all the way to Jesus. Every name all the way through down. And you can come up with an understanding of a genealogy that started somewhere around nine and a half thousand B.C. No pagan origin text even has a concept of that. The Bible views itself as real. Not only that, but when you get to the genealogies in Matthew and Luke, they work backwards. And they come back to Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God. Jesus himself in Matthew chapter 19, when he was asked about the question of divorce, he says it's not to be so, and he appeals back to the order of creation and roots himself in the reality of a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife. And he roots himself in the order of creation. Then you look at the understanding of Paul in Romans 5. In fact, let's turn to Romans 5 and look at this language. We'll look at Romans 5, 12 through 14: "Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men because all sinned, for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. 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 was a pattern of the one to come." You follow the rest of the text. Jesus Christ is the second Adam, specifically the second man. He is real. He comes to die for the sins that a real historical figure, Adam, and his wife Eve committed. But notice the historical assumption. "...from the time of Adam to the time of Moses..." And many people who dispute the historicity of Adam and Eve -- in fact, I don't know anyone who would not say that Abraham is historical. That Abraham lived circa 1800 B.C. And yet right here you see that history from the biblical perspective doesn't start with Abraham, it doesn't start with Moses, it starts with Adam. Moses is just as historical as Adam is, and Jesus is just as historical as Adam is. And therefore, what we have all the way through is that the Bible on its own terms assumes the historicity of Adam and Eve. Now, there are many questions why people may dispute those and I will let Father Hansen bring up some of those questions, or perhaps some of you as well. But let me take this very simple structure and bring to a concluding observation. The Bible on its own terms starts with a real man and a real woman made by divine fiat. Now the exact timetable is not certain, but I'll guess about nine and a half thousand B.C. It traces all the people who descended from Adam and Eve all the way up to the present. And it doesn't miss a beat in its own understanding of tracing that lineage. No other religious origin text does. Therefore, if we say in any capacity that we believe in God, or we believe in Jesus Christ as the redeemer, and yet we do not accept Adam and Eve, we have undercut the very basis upon which Jesus assumed when he addressed the Jewish people. In other words, if Adam and Eve are not historical, then Jesus did not die for real sin. Because it says that real people, Adam and Eve, sinned against God and against one another. And as it says in 1 Corinthians 15, in a slightly different context but a related one, if Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead, then we are still in our sins. We are in futility. We are the most of all people to be pitied. And the resurrection is historically linked into why Jesus rose from the dead, to pay the price for the sin of Adam and Eve. And therefore, if we don't believe that there was sin that our physical forebearers did, and we all have inherited that propensity, then we have the most futile and pitiable faith of all. And so the final question that I have for Father Hansen and for the rest of us, is, if we do not take the Bible on its own terms, or if we try to say Adam and Eve are mythological and impose upon the Bible a mythos it doesn't view of itself, then what we're doing is we are appealing to a higher or different source than the Bible. We then need to identify what that higher or different source is and why it can select certain portions of the Bible and get rid of other portions. Not only that, if we don't believe the Bible is inspired fully on its own terms in terms of the historicity of its assumptions for Adam and Eve, then why even call ourselves Christian or Jewish. Why not just call ourselves some other religion, or invent a religion, and on that basis say how we can use the Bible for the sake of that religion. My argument is, to be biblical and to respect it on its own terms, we know that Adam and Eve were directly made by God, and we are all their descendants. Thank you. 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