It's hard to beat William Lane Craig for conservative evangelical credentials.
This influential author and philosophy professor teaches at Houston Baptist University, where faculty members "must" believe in the Bible's divine inspiration and "that man was directly created by God." He's simultaneously a visiting scholar at California's Talbot School of Theology, where teachers commit to the beliefs that the Bible is "without error or misstatement" in its "record of historical facts" and that Adam was created by God and "not from living ancestors."
Craig is also a longtime member in good standing of the Evangelical Theological Society, whose members are required to affirm that the entire Bible is "the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant" as originally written. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he formerly taught, likewise proclaims that the Bible is "without error."
But exactly how do those vows apply to the early chapters of the Bible's Book of Genesis?
Debates about this issue are frequently hooks for news stories, energized over and over again. Evolution and the creation of Adam and Eve have been allergic issues among evangelical Protestants in the 162 years since Darwin published "On the Origin of Species"?
So there's eye-opening stuff in Craig's article titled "The Historical Adam" in the current First Things magazine.
In Genesis 1-11, he asserts, those "fantastic lifespans" of primeval humans starting with Adam indicate "we are not dealing here with straightforward history."
Yet it's not simple fiction either, but rather an amalgam he calls "mytho-history, not to be taken literally," though there could be some overlap between the "the literary Adam of Genesis" over against the "historical Adam." He further explains that in the New Testament, Jesus and Paul were talking about that non-literal "literary Adam."
Given current science, Craig figures Adam and Eve lived 750,000 to a million years ago at the point of separation between Neanderthals and our own species of homo sapiens, with the latter endowed by God to surpass human-like animals that lacked rational thought. On that understanding, "the mythic history of Genesis is fully consistent with current scientific evidence concerning human origins."
All this seems different from what J.I. Packer, a noted evangelical exponent of the Bible's inerrancy, meant in 1958 when he wrote that "there is nothing inconsistent in recognizing that real events may be recorded in a highly symbolic manner, and evangelicals do in fact recognize this." Obviously it totally rejects evangelicalism's "Young Earth" faction, which says the Bible tells us Earth is perhaps 10,000 years old.
Reporters will want to check out the online conservative rejoinder to Craig's proposal posted by First Things, written by Peter Leithart, president of the Theopolis Institute. He says Craig "sneaks into the head of the author of Genesis" but then offers no coherent method by which to distinguish supposed myth from history.
Craig's primordial Adam scenario is only the latest round in a running debate that could change — or split — evangelicalism. A primary figure is Francis Collins, who is stepping down as director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the world's biggest sponsor of biological research.
The Religion Guy called Collins "one of the most eminent scientists ever to identify as an evangelical Christian" in the 2011 Christianity Today cover story "The Search for the Historical Adam," which sought to be even-handed in depicting this debate. Collins, an eminent geneticist, insists humanity could not have originated with two individuals but rather a population of several thousand beings who lived 100,000 to 150,000 years ago. Collins founded biologos.org to promote harmonization of biblical faith with Darwin's theory of evolution.
Then came "The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate" (InterVarsity Press,2015) by John H. Walton, Old Testament professor at Wheaton College of Illinois. The Guy tipped journalists to the importance of this book here. Walton sees Adam and Eve as "real people involved in real events in a real past." But as with Collins, they were not necessarily "the first human beings, the only human beings, or the universal ancestors of all human beings" biologically, as opposed to a spiritual sense. The folks at creation.com found this "egregious mishandling of Scripture."
Also, Catholics might want to take another look at Humani Generis ("On Human Origin"), a 1950 encyclical of Pope Pius XII. He stated that faithful Catholics are to reject claims that Adam was not "the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents."
By the way, Leithart will be speaking on creation and evolution November 12-13 at All Saints Presbyterian Church, Fort Worth. Contacts for him: info@theopolisinstitute or 205-530-9608. Contacts for Craig: wcraig@hbu.edu or 281-649-3600 or 404-348-6301.
FIRST IMAGE: Orthodox Christian icon of Adam and Eve in Paradise.