The Hump of the Camel

I’m glad that penman’s double blog has gained approbation from regular readers. We’ve been tossing such ideas around for a year or two now – in my case since I first toyed with the concept of MRCA. The take home message was the possibility of taking the spiritual creation of mankind as a historical event more or less in the time-frame of the Genesis account. Penman refines that a bit, taking Adam and Eve as chosen members of a Homo divinus race recently endowed with the imago dei. He sees that endowment as a kind of species-wide spiritual awakening.

I note that John H Walton has recently been thinking along similar lines – Genesis 1 dealing with the creation of mankind in God’s image, and Genesis 2-3 dealing with the priestly representative of the race who failed. Note that these kinds of ideas essentially defuse many of the evolutionary problems associated with a historical Adam and Eve, making them valuable for Christians wanting to resolve science and Biblical issues. They may be considered less valuable to Christian natural scientists wanting to keep human origins within their own domain!

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I had reason to dig around in some of the Patristic literature recently, and came across Irenaeus’ (late 2nd century) teaching on Adam and sin whilst looking for something else. It reminded me that I haven’t yet recorded in this blog what Irenaeus actually teaches, which is an oversight as many modern writers in the evolution/theology field, and outside it, question the traditional teaching on original sin, most often by attributing it to Augustine in the west. The Eastern Church, they say, never taught the idea of hereditary sin. Even John H Walton, much of whose excellent work I have been reading of late, mentions this as a plain fact in order to defend the concept that Adam need not be regarded as the physical ancestor of the entire human race.

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