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Was Adam an Historical Person? And What Difference Does It
Make?
Robert B. Strimple, Ph.D.
(Originally published in Christian Renewal June 20, 1989) Does
the Bible present Adam as an historical person, a man who
actually lived at a certain point in history, the very first man
and the father of all the members of the human race who followed
after him? And if so, what is the theological significance of
that fact? Or, to put it another way, what would be the
theological consequences of denying the historicity of Adam?
It has been popular among many 20th century theologians,
particularly those usually labeled "Neo-orthodox," to deny the
historicity of Adam. Emil Brunner spoke of Adam as mythical, not
historical. What Genesis 3 gives us, Brunner said, is story but
not history.
Karl Barth, the father of Neo-orthodoxy, taught that what we
have in Gen. 3 is not history but saga, a term he preferred to
the term "myth" because he felt that "myth" still suggested,
perhaps, some connection with history, nebulous though it might
be; and he wanted to emphasize that Adam is not at all to be
thought of as an historical person but rather as a symbol which
stands for every person who has ever lived. "We are all Adam,"
Barth said, which simply means that we are all sinners. In fact,
there was never a time when man was not a sinner and therefore
guiltless before God.
Bringing matters a bit closer to home, H. M. Kuitert, successor
to G. C. Berkouwer as professor of systematic theology at the
Free University of Amsterdam, in a little book entitled, Do
You Understand What You Read? (1),
put forward the same interpretation but used the term "teaching
model" rather than myth or saga. When the apostle Paul speaks of
Adam, Kuitert says, he is not speaking of that one who was
literally the first man, a man who really lived – no, the first
humans were the primitive savages pictured in the textbooks of
evolution. "Adam" is simply a story, an illustration, which
served Paul by helping him preach Jesus. Jesus is Paul's real
interest, and Adam simply illuminates the meaning of Jesus
Christ. In Romans 5, Kuitert says, in order to help his readers
understand their relationship to Christ, Paul brings in the
contrasting story of the relation of sinners to Adam, but it is
only that, only a story.
THE FIRST MAN
Before dealing with Romans 5, I want first to cut right to the
bottom line and examine the theological consequences of denying
the historicity of Adam. The issue is not, "Well, who was the
first man? Was his name really Adam?" or anything like that. The
question is whether there really was a first man specially
created by God, morally perfect in knowledge, righteousness, and
holiness, as the apostle Paul teaches us, who by his own free
act, for which he alone was responsible (not God, not Satan)
sinned against his Maker and brought sin and death upon all his
posterity.
When we speak of the Fall, we are speaking of the first sin of
the first man – and the consequences of that first sin for all
that race of men and women who are viewed by God as in that
first man – in him because he was ordained by God to be their
Representative, their Covenant Head, so that (1) the guilt of
that first sin was imputed to their account, and (2) its
punishment, death, was conveyed to them, as well as (3) a
corrupted, depraved nature, or heart, from which all their
thoughts, words, and actions flow, so that all are defiled by
sin.
The question “Was Adam an historical person?” is really the
question “Was the Fall a real event in human history?” For if
Adam is simply which stands for the truth about every person who
ever lived, from the very beginning of that person's life, what
does that mean? That means that sin is simply a part of what it
means to be human!
SIN: PART OF MAN'S BEING?
J. P. Versteeg wrote, in a small book criticizing Kuitert,
entitled Is Adam a "Teaching Model" in the New Testament?
(2), "If Adam only lets us see what is
characteristic of every man, because Adam is man in general so
that ... Adam may no longer be regarded as the one man through
whom sin has come into the world, it is apparent that in a
certain sense sin (then) belongs to man as such. Sin has thus
become a given ‘next to’ creation. (Not following creation but
along with man's coming into being, RBS) ... In essence, then,
one may no longer speak of the guilt of sin."
If sin is simply one aspect of what it means to be human, how
can we speak of the guilt of sin? If it is the case that “to err
is (simply) human,” there is nothing for which to be forgiven.
Is God to “forgive” me for being what he created me to be – a
human being?
Now, I should warn you that many who actually deny the
historicity of Adam and the Biblical account of his special,
direct creation by God and his subsequent fall into sin,
continue to speak about a “Fall.” But because their evolutionary
presuppositions make it impossible for them to believe that
there was a first man created perfect morally by God and in
fellowship with God, that historic Christian term, "Fall,"
simply becomes for them a symbol of the fact that mankind is not
morally perfect, and never was. But that is to deny that there
was a real Fall in history at all.
NO FALL, NO REDEMPTION
The Bible, both Old Testament and New Testament, teaches us that
man was created “very good” (Gen. 1:31) – and that expression as
applied to a rational, moral, religious being like man must mean
very good rationally, morally, and religiously – and that's
exactly what Paul says by implication in Ephesians 4:24 and
Colossians 3:10 in speaking of the new man in Christ: that man
was originally created as the image of God, characterized by
knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness. If Adam never
really lived as pure and perfect man, God's unblemished image,
then Ecclesiastes 7:29 is not true in teaching that God made man
morally upright but they have sought out many evil devices.
But, mark it well, without a doctrine of the Fall there is no
hope of Redemption. There is no “Good News!” There is no
Biblical Christianity! That's what is at stake here, nothing
less than that.
You see, biblical Christianity, over against all other world and
life views, is unique in viewing human sinfulness as the result
of a Fall. Other religions and philosophies – and myths – look
to sin's origin elsewhere; e.g., in the very constitution of man
as composed of a lower as well as a higher nature, or in man's
evolutionary past and his natural tendency to revert to a more
primitive stage, or in the fact that he has not yet evolved
beyond such a stage in certain respects. (And it is evolutionary
theory regarding man's origin, of course, which has caused many
to deny the biblical teaching regarding man's creation as a holy
being whose sin is the result of his own mysterious free act of
transgressing God's law.)
Biblical Christianity, on the other hand, views human sinfulness
as a Fall – an unnatural development, a lapse from man's proper
state – and thereby asserts that to find sin's "explanation" in
the original constitution of man is to slander the holy Creator
– and thereby also assures man that there is hope: hope for
restoration, hope for redemption, hope for Paradise Restored.
On other views of the origin and nature of sin, human sinfulness
must be seen as really inevitable (Adam = all men = sinner; to
be human is to be sinner); and therefore how can sin ever be
remedied or removed? The Bible, on the other hand, gives grounds
for hope because, as another has written, the Bible “represents
the ills in which man is involved not as the necessary faults of
a being low, earthy, and animal by his constitution but as (the)
effects from the fall of a being made in the image of God.”
(3)
The biblical pictures of fallen human nature are painted with
very dark colors, speaking, e.g., of man's heart as “deceitful
above all things, and desperately corrupt” (Jer. 17:9 RSV). But
we must never forget that what is so pictured is not man but
fallen man – not man as God created him but man as he has turned
his back on God – not man the co-laborer with God but man the
rebel. And the hope of the Gospel is that through the
accomplishment of the Second Adam and the power of the Creative
Spirit, man may be all that he was meant to be.
A PARADISE REGAINED?
In recent years so-called “theologies of hope” have received a
lot of attention, ranging from Roman Catholics like Teilhard de
Chardin to Protestants like Jurgen Moltmann. Tragically,
however, because these theologies reject the biblical revelation
of the Paradise man lost by his Fall, they can have no solid
basis for faith in a true Paradise to be regained for man by the
Second Adam by God's grace.
Most of those “theologians of hope” were trained, in seminary,
in Neo-orthodoxy, in Barthianism. Karl Barth taught that we must
not view the Fall as an historical event by which man passed
from a original state of righteousness to a state of depravity,
because “in the matter of human disobedience and depravity there
is no ‘earlier’ in which man was not yet a transgressor and as
such innocent.” Human history “constantly re-enacts the little
scene in the Garden of Eden. There never was a golden age. There
is no point in looking back to one. The first man was
immediately the first sinner.” Barth insists that “it is the
Word of God which forbids us to dream of any golden age in the
past or any real progress within Adamic mankind and history or
any future state of historical perfection.”
(4)
And as I say, one like Jurgen Moltmann or H. M. Kuitert, by
continuing with Barth to deny the historical Adam (which is just
to say, to deny the historical Fall) have no Biblical basis for
a true theology of hope.
I want us to read Romans 5 now. We won't be able here to read
any other texts that speak of Adam. But let me simply say that I
don't think it can be questioned that the careful and unbiased
reader will find that wherever Adam is mentioned in the Bible,
he is presented as an historical person.
Please read Romans 5:12-19. Note that when Paul says in verse 12
“because all sinned,” he means that they sinned in that one man,
as the rest of the passage makes clear.
Notice how very interesting verse 14 is as refuting Kuitert's or
Barth's interpretation. Paul emphasizes concerning whole
generations of men that they did not sin in the way that Adam
did, by willfully breaking a known law, and that is exactly
contrary to what is claimed by the mythical or symbolical
interpretation, which says that Adam simply represents the truth
about all men. Here Paul carefully underscores the difference
but nevertheless the connection between men in two historical
periods: (1) Adam, (2) those between Adam and Moses.
And notice also how Adam is described as a “type” (Greek, typos)
of the one to come, i.e., Christ. In the Bible a type is always
an historical person, action, or event appointed by God to be a
foreshadowing, a pointer, to the fulfillment, yet to come in
history in Christ. To speak of a type is to speak in terms of
redemptive history. A type is not merely an allegory but an
historical reality.
At verse 18 many have stumbled at the apostle's use of the word
“all” there to speak of those who receive justification and life
as a result of Christ's one righteous act, without qualifying
the “all” by a reference to the fact that only believers receive
these blessings in Christ. Certainly it is clear from the
overall teaching of Paul in his letters that he does not affirm
universal salvation. We must therefore see that Paul's interest
in this passage is not in the question of how many will be
saved, nor even, at this point, to emphasize again the clear
need for faith in Christ; but his interest now is to focus upon
the analogy between God's modus operandi in the two covenant
heads, Adam and Christ. Just as the disobedience of the one man,
Adam, resulted in condemnation and death for all those in
covenantal union with him, so also the obedience of the one man,
Jesus Christ, results in justification and life for all those in
covenantal union with Him.
It is important to notice where Romans 5:12-19 comes in the
argument of Paul's letter to the Romans. This passage comes as
the conclusion of Paul's extended presentation of the good news
of justification by faith in Christ, by faith alone and not by
works, just before he enters into the truth of sanctification in
Christ – and indeed this passage comes as the climax, the
“clincher” of his argument for the justification of sinners on
the ground of the righteous obedience of Christ imputed to them
who trust in Him. Thus this passage is in no way a strange
intrusion into the flow of the letter, as some have suggested,
but really is the heart and center of the letter. Kuitert is
quite correct is saying that Paul's interest is in Jesus Christ
and the good news of justification in Him, and in saying that
Paul brings Adam into the picture in order to teach us the truth
about Christ and our salvation in Him. Adam and Christ are not
placed next to each other on the same level, so to speak, as
equals. Christ as “the one” towers far above Adam as “the one.”
(5)
But to say that is one thing. To say that therefore Adam is to
be understood as nothing more than a preacher's illustration, a
story which conveys its message whether or not it is
historically true, is to say quite another thing. The fact is,
as I have already stressed, that unless we really stand guilty,
condemned to death on the basis of the disobedience of Adam,
there is no reason to believe that we are justified, declared to
be righteous, on the basis of the obedience of the Second Adam,
Christ.
Despite the great difference between Adam and Christ, Paul
points to the all-important redemptive-historical analogy
between them. Paul sums up all of God's dealings with men under
two great Representative Heads: Adam and Christ. As he says in I
Corinthians 15, there is none before Adam, for Adam is the first
man. And in terms of covenantal Headship there is none between
Adam and Christ, for Christ is the second man. And there is none
after Christ, for Christ is the last man. Adam and Christ
sustain unique relationships to men. In each case the covenant
response of the Representative Head, whether of disobedience or
of obedience, is not merely illustrative of the condition of
those in union with him but determinative of the condition of
those in union with him.
If Adam is merely a symbol that stands for the truth about us,
then perhaps Christ is merely another symbol that stands for
another truth about us.
And lest you think that my saying that is merely a “scare
tactic” on the part of a cranky conservative Christian, let me
point out that that is precisely the conclusion reached by Karl
Barth. I have said that for one like Barth, Adam is merely the
symbol we use for the truth about all men, that they are
sinners. The more we study Barth, however, the more clear it
becomes that Christ is the symbol we use for that which is also
true for all men. For just as sin in Barth's theology is
“built-in” sin, and goes along with our humanity, just so is
grace “built-in” grace. And as such it is the final truth about
all men who have ever lived.
Now that may be called a doctrine of Universal Salvation and
that can sound great; but is it a doctrine of salvation at all?
There is no true guilt in that theology, but there is no true
forgiveness either. The reality of eternal death in Adam may be
suppressed in that theology, but the glorious reality of
resurrection life fades in the mists of allegory as well.
And don't think that that is the conclusion of Barth alone. I
submit that that is the ultimate direction of contemporary
theology in general in our day, both Protestant and Roman
Catholic.
If we deny the historicity of Adam, “then the question will
never allow itself to be finally suppressed: Is not Christ in
his resurrection also a ‘teaching model’...?"
(6) If the historicity of the first
Adam is considered irrelevant to us, why then should the
historicity of the second Adam not also be irrelevant to us?
To conclude: Our understanding of the reality of Adam affects
our understanding of sin, of redemption, and of the Redeemer.
The one who rejects the Biblical teaching regarding the
historical Adam and the historical Fall will find no firm basis
for accepting the Biblical teaching regarding the historical,
Incarnate Redeemer. Ó2005
Westminster Seminary California All rights reserved
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Ó
[date] Westminster Seminary California. Website: www.wscal.edu.
E-mail: info@wscal.edu. Phone: 888/480.8474 Footnotes
1 Translated by Lewis B. Smedes,
Eerdmans, 1970, pp. 36f. 2
Translated by Richard B. Gaffin, Jr., Presbyterian and Reformed,
1978, p. 61. 3 John Laidlaw, The Bible
Doctrine of Man, T. & T. Clark, 1879, p. 141.
4 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics vol. IVA,
trans. by G. W. Bromiley, T. & T. Clark, 1956, pp. 551, 508,
511. 5 Versteeg, p. 16.
6 Versteeg, p. 57, quoting J. Kamphuis.
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S. M. Baugh
R. Scott Clark
Iain M. Duguid
Bryan D. Estelle
W. Robert Godfrey
Michael S. Horton
Dennis E. Johnson
Hywel R. Jones
Peter R. Jones
Joel E. Kim
Julius J. Kim
George C. Scipione
Robert B. Strimple
David M. VanDrunen
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