Southern Seminary Magazine (Vol 90.1) The Light of Truth: Apologetics in the 21st Century

seeking the historical adam
that forfeiting this belief would result in compromise to
several important doctrinal convictions of the Christian
faith. Among Christians committed to belief in the
historicity of Adam and Eve, there are many interpretive
approaches to the opening chapters of Genesis. These approaches
will be summarized briefly along with an assessment
of the potential strengths and weaknesses of each. In
the end, it will be shown that reading the opening chapters
of Genesis as historical narrative is the most consistent
way to maintain the tremendously important belief in a
historical Adam and Eve.
Historical Adam and Eve: What’s at Stake?
Genesis 1:26–31 states that God created humanity in his
image on the sixth day of creation. He made them male
and female; he commanded them to reproduce, filling the
earth with their progeny; he gave them dominion over the
earth and all life thereon. Genesis 2 describes the creation
of the very first man (named Adam, a Hebrew word meaning
mankind) out of the dust of the ground and the very
first woman (later named Eve) out of Adam’s side. The man
and the woman are joined together as one flesh in what
Scripture presents as the very first marriage union, which
is described as paradigmatic for all future marital relations.
In Genesis 3, the story of Adam and Eve takes a tragic
turn as the first man and woman rebel against God
through disobedience. God subsequently rebukes them
and a curse is pronounced on creation. The consequence
of their sin will be the regularity of human death, pain and
agony (including high mortality rates) for women and
their babies in childbirth, extreme difficulty in farming
the land for sustenance, and the punitive removal from the
life-giving covenant presence of God as represented by the
Tree of Life in the middle of the Garden of Eden.
Amid God’s declaration of judgment in the form of a
curse, he also announces a promise of future salvation,
stating that the seed of the woman will one day crush the
head of the serpent who deceived Adam and Eve (Gen.
3:15). Indeed, the rest of the storyline of Scripture can be
understood as a development of the conflict between the
seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent in anticipation
of the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ who will finally
fulfill the promise of Genesis 3:15. The personal story of
Adam is concluded in Genesis 5:1 where he is described as
the father of Seth, his third son, whose future lineage will
eventually give rise to the fulfillment of the promise.
While some may wonder whether Christians need to
take the personal story of Adam and Eve as historical, attention
to later Scripture confirms that a historical reading
is the right reading of the earliest chapters of Genesis.
Furthermore, forfeiting the historicity of Adam and Eve as
real people undermines a number of important Christian
theological commitments.
Unlike the personal story of Adam’s life, the prominence
of Adam in Scripture does not end with the opening
chapters of Genesis. Rather, the accounts given there
are viewed by later biblical authors as both historical and
theologically consequential.
After Genesis 5, Adam is not mentioned again until 1
Chronicles 1:1. There, his name appears at the head of a
genealogy that takes readers from Adam, through Abraham,
all the way to the kings of Israel and Judah as descended
from David. Thus, for the chronicler, the historical
reality of Israel’s history under the Davidic dynasty is
of the same kind as the historical reality of Adam, Seth,
Enosh, and so on (see the genealogy of Adam and his posterity
in Genesis 5).
Later, the prophet Hosea likens the faithlessness of Israel
(Ephraim) and Judah to the sin of Adam (Hosea 6:7),
a likeness that is most naturally understood as historical
correspondence. What Hosea makes explicit is an implicit
biblical pattern of typology that many interpreters have
recognized. After Adam, many others emerge like him,
bearing the status of a kind of new Adam, tested as Adam
was. Noah as an individual, Israel as a nation, David as
representative of the nation—each of these is presented
as a new Adam, given the opportunity to succeed where
Adam failed. As Hosea observes, though, these all failed
in the same way Adam failed—covenant unfaithfulness to
the LORD. Hosea laments:
What shall I do with you, O Ephraim? What shall I
do with you, O Judah? Your love is like a morning
cloud, like the dew that goes early away. Therefore, I
have hewn them by the prophets; I have slain them
by the words of my mouth, and my judgment goes
forth as the light. For I desire steadfast love and not
sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt
offerings. But like Adam they transgressed the covenant;
there they dealt faithlessly with me (Hosea 6:4–
7, emphasis added).
Fundamental to Christian theology is the happy conviction
that this typological pattern of new Adam-like figures
did not end with the failure of the Davidic dynasty
12 the southern baptist theological seminary