I posted this article because I also started a thread here on FR about a "Christian" music group called Grungor...recently the founders of that group (by the same last name) announced they no longer believe the Bible in regard to the Genesis account.
Sad.
News?
We live in space-time. There is an order to time, driving forward.
Originally there was no man. Hell, there was no earth.
Obviously now we have man, a being capable of moral reason, and with free will that allows him to make the wrong choices, for self-serving reasons.
At some point in the sands of time, about 150,000 years ago, those humans, beings with those characteristics, started populating the earth. And if you look closely at that event horizon, there is a leading edge to it: there is a first.
As with all things in time, there is always a first.
“it is not necessary that Adam be a historical individual for [Genesis 1–2] to be without error in what it intends to teach.”
Yeah, ok.
And we are free to buy into 3 core elements of Teaching that in no way manner or form even begin to stretch credulity. Cool.
AN invisible man in the sky says he spoke creation into being and further promises He will raise the dead back to Life but the question of weather His Adam actually lived...well don’t freak me out or anything.
Sigh. Looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong sigh....
Or was he a hysterical person?
The Adamic Hero. I earned my degree in English literature studying this figure. That was the 1970s although Herman Melville cut his teeth on this in his brilliant novella “Billy Budd” in the 19th Century. Today, English literature students study Alice Walker. (Or why I never went on to a Master’s Degree.)
In the Hebrew understanding, it is not so easy, because Adam was originally not self-defining, but based on God’s description. So there is a different name for Adam meaning “the first”, then as God later defined him, as “the above”, that is above plants and animals.
Even further along, God defined Adam further as *not* the creator of reality, but the describer of reality. And this is important, because in doing so, God retains the creation of all things; but it is up to man to apply descriptive abstract labels on things. This is a dog, and that is an apple.
And this opened the door to man’s greatest failing of vanity. That is the endless human assumption that because man can use abstracts to describe reality, our abstracts *create* reality.
But one abstract apple, plus another abstract apple, does *not* make two *real* apples.
So the bottom line is that we can describe Adam, but we cannot create Adam. So can we truthfully say there ever was Adam? We can only imagine an abstract of his existence.
Did I hear the term, "ensouled"? '-)