No Adam, No Eve, No Gospel - Wingnuts Continue to Freak Out

I've noted before the semi-hysteria that is going on largely behind the scenes and outside the view of the mainstream media among the Christianists and far right Christians over the growing scientific evidence that Adam and Eve of the Bible did not exist. As Bob Felton notes in response to the latest lunacy of Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Convention, the stakes are extremely high:

It’s bad for business, of course. No Adam and Eve means no Fall, which means no Original Sin, which means Jesus doesn’t save us from the horrible fact that we’re living human beings, i.e., cesspools of foulness, et cetera, et cetera; he merely gives ethical advice. Oh … and Holy Men like Albert Mohler don’t have special cosmic insights after all. You can see the problem.

Bob's right, the non-existence of Adam and Eve is VERY, VERY bad for business for institutional Christianity and those who make a living peddling the Christian story. Indeed, the whole story line collapses. And church finances with it. Frankly, I DO find amusement and entertainment it the matter. The anti-gay forces in the last resort only have the Bible as a justification for their anti-gay animus. Obviously, if Genesis is false, then what else in the Bible is false. Perhaps Leviticus, the principal font of anti-gay bigotry/justification? A piece in Christianity Today illustrates some of the varying efforts to dance around this potentially very fatal problem. Here are some highlights:

Now we come to another great moment of tension between Christian readings of Scripture and science. This issue's cover story, "The Search for the Historical Adam," reports the claims of recent genetic research that the human race did not emerge from pre-human animals as a single pair, as an "Adam" and an "Eve." The complexity of the human genome, we are told, requires an original population of around 10,000.

Christians have already drawn the line: there must be an original pair of humans endowed with souls—that is, the spiritual capacity to relate to God in the special way Genesis describes.

What is at stake? First, the entire story of what is wrong with the world hinges on the disobedient exercise of the will by the first humans. The problem with the human race is not its dearth of insight but its misshapen will.

Second, the entire story of salvation hinges on the obedience of the Second Adam. The apostle Paul, the earliest Christian writer to interpret Jesus' work, called Adam "a type of the one who was to come" (Rom. 5:14, ESV), and wrote that "[j]ust as we have borne the image of the man of dust [Adam], we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven [Jesus]" (1 Cor. 15:49, ESV). He elaborated an "Adam Christology" that described a fallen humanity, headed by Adam, and a new, redeemed humanity with Christ as its head.

This understanding, that Christ's obedience undoes Adam's disobedience, is not some late development, but is integrated with the earliest interpretations of what God did and is doing in Christ. This conceptual framework is almost impossible without a first human couple.

[S]ome have suggested—as does John Collins in Did Adam and Eve Really Exist? (Crossway, 2011)—that if both biblical and scientific clues suggest a larger population contemporary with Adam and Eve (Whom did Cain marry? Whom did God protect him from?), we can still conceive of Adam and Eve as leaders of that original population. That suggestion has the virtue of embracing both a prehistoric couple and a prehistoric population.

At this juncture, we counsel patience. We don't need another fundamentalist reaction against science. We need instead a positive interdisciplinary engagement that recognizes the good will of all involved and that creative thinking takes time. In the long run, it may be the humility of our scholars as much as their technical expertise that will bring us to deeper knowledge of the truth.

The reality is that the adherents of Biblical literalism are facing a crisis of enormous proportions. Their whole ball of wax may be about to melt absent some way to use smoke and mirrors to dodge facing the reality that a great deal of the Old Testament simply is either not true at all or has been grossly re-written to meet the needs of revisers over the centuries. I believe that those who believe in rationalism and logic keep up the pressure on far right Christians who may be about to be undone by their own decision to embrace ignorance and reject objective fact and scientific knowledge.