Tuesday, June 26, 2007

No Adam, No Jesus

A letter in the May issue of Christianity Today responds to Stan Guthrie's March article "Living with the Darwin Fish," which discussed the willingness of some Christians to accept the validity of Darwinian evolution:

Stan Guthrie's "welcome aboard" to evolution reminds me of how a landlubber bails water out of a boat: by drilling a hole below the waterline. Along with evolution presumably comes a denial of a literal Adam and Eve as the fallen father and mother of the human race. But a historical Adam is as necessary to our salvation as a historical Jesus.

Paul writes, "For if, by the trespass of the one man [Adam], death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God's abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ" (Rom. 5:17).

No first Adam, no second Adam. No death, no life. Sir, your vessel sinks.

DEAN BRUCKNER
Commander, U.S. Coast Guard (Ret.)
Athens, Ohio

4 comments:

WorldbyStorm said...

Hmmmm... I'm not sure I find that argument entirely convincing. There have been armies of theologians employed by the Vatican since evolution achieved critical mass who have found it quite unnecessary to concieve of a literal Adam.

But then we're into metaphor which is as unamenable to reason as a literalist reading of the Bible.

John said...

Really? I'm amazed at your scepticism. It seems like a watertight argument to me.

Frank Partisan said...

The ship entered a brand new world.

WorldbyStorm said...

Yeah, I know, I know john, but it's the problem with fundamentalists. They always have to reinvent the wheel from their own perspective forgetting that they're not the first to do so... although in fairness if they think the history of the world is only 4000 years old...