The Blue Parakeet, 2nd

by Scot McKnight

  4. Those two sinned, died, and brought death into the world (fallen Adam and Eve).

  5. Those two passed on their sin natures (according to many) to all human beings (sin-nature Adam and Eve).

  6. Without their sinning and passing on that sin nature to all human beings, not all human beings would be in need of salvation.

  7. Therefore, if one denies the historical Adam, one denies the gospel of salvation.6

  This is the more or less official tradition of much of the church, and for that reason alone it deserves both our respect and our attention. However, there are more than a couple weaknesses here. While some may want to dispute how it is that the original Adam and Eve of Genesis “passed on” their sin nature (original sin) to all subsequent humans, there is a larger problem lurking. I want to explain it in light of what was said about concordism. This theory of the historical Adam, which again omits Eve almost every time it is mentioned, is rooted in concordist theories of science and faith. No one questioned the possibility of Adam and Eve somehow passing on original sin to their descendants as long as most everyone believed Genesis 1–2 was scientific. That is, as long as everyone believed Adam and Eve were plain and simply the first two human beings alongside no other similar hominins or individuals like them, no one worried about the possibility of passing on a sinful nature. The need to look again at the Bible in its ancient Near East context was not as important because there was a stubborn and untroubled theory at work: Adam and Eve were alone in the garden of Eden with no others around them.

  Then came Darwin, but Darwin was at first mostly ignored and only over time did the accumulation of data and facts and hypotheses and theories complicate that stubborn conviction. But when the genome theory came along, demonstrating scientifically and mathematically7 that the DNA characteristic of humans today could not have come from anything less than a population of humans/individuals around the number of 10,000, then the stubborn conviction became more stubborn than fact. It is not concordist now to say, “Let’s go back to Genesis and read it in its context.” It is in fact the wisdom of the church to listen to science and to let it open up new questions for us as we return to the Bible to read it in its ancient context.

  A conclusion of a number of evangelical scholars, from John Walton to Tremper Longman to J. Richard Middleton and dozens of others, is that Adam and Eve in Genesis can be read as theologically informative without necessarily thinking they had to be the figure in the historical Adam (and Eve) theory above. Adam and Eve are humans in a narrative, so they are minimally a literary Adam and Eve; they represent all humans, so they are archetypal, paradigmatic, and representative. But if we push the “historical” Adam in the direction of two and only two solitary humans—and no others before them or like them in existence—then we have made the Bible wrong because of our demand of a concordist theory. I don’t know how to say this softly: we are courting with making the Bible what it is not in order to protect our theory of what the Bible ought to be. It is true that this theory of Adam and Eve fits into every narrative Bible readers sketch of the Bible’s big story, whether it is the main plot (creation, fall, redemption) or, as I prefer to see it, as the redemptive benefits of the main plot (the King and His Kingdom). This theory has what we call “explanatory power.” That doesn’t make it right, and it in fact skirts on thin ice because it is shaped too much by the concordist theory of science and faith. There’s hope for a better way.

  This realization (by reading Dennis Venema and other scientists, like RJS who posts regularly at my blog, Jesus Creed at Patheos blogs) led me to investigate Genesis in its historical context, and it led me to investigate Adam (“and Eve” was often dropped) in the Jewish tradition between the Bible and the New Testament’s own texts about Adam and Eve. My fourth point is this: Adam and Eve in the Jewish tradition were very flexible human beings, and each author used Adam and Eve in differing ways because each author saw the literary Adam and Eve as archetypal or representative humans. They were in many ways not so much particular humans but Everyone, Every Man and Every Woman. The most important theme in the Jewish texts was that they were moral archetypes: Adam and Eve were charged by God to be Eikons—worshiping God, sub-governing God’s creation—and they were given moral capacities to obey or disobey. They disobeyed, and that theme in the literary Adam and Eve becomes the dominant theme in Judaism: Each of us too is summoned by God to obey, but we can choose to disobey. The Jewish tradition assumes but does not explain why each human is like Adam and Eve in that each human sins. In the King and His Kingdom Story, then, everyone is in need of redemption (cracked Eikons becoming whole Eikons).

  This all leads me to my fifth point: when the apostle Paul writes Romans 5:12–21, he is both assuming the literary and archetypal Adam and Eve of Genesis but also how that Adam and Eve were interpreted in the Jewish tradition before him and in his own context. Paul’s basic understanding of Adam and Eve is that they were moral exemplars who failed, while Jesus is the redeemer because he did not fail. Adam was the First Adam, but Jesus is the Second Adam. In my chapter on Romans 5 in Adam and the Genome, I argue that Paul’s presentation of Adam is schematic, with Adam being a tragic hero and Jesus a redeemer hero, and in this point Paul’s Adam is not identical to anything we’ve seen in the Jewish traditions.8 Notice these analogies between Adam and Christ:

  Adam Christ

  Sin Obedience

  Death Life

  Condemnation Justification

  Union with others Union with others9

  Paul’s only “explanation” of how Adam and Eve pass on their sinfulness is found in Romans 5:12, and it needs to be read carefully and briefly explained: “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.” Paul pins Adam to the wall for his sin; he pins him again to the wall because his sin unleashed sinfulness in the world. But he also pins each of us because Paul’s only explanation is found in these words: “because all sinned.” Paul does not say we sinned in Adam; nor does he say Adam’s sinfulness was passed on to us; and he doesn’t say he passed a sin nature on to each of us by way of procreation. Perhaps Paul believed each of those claims, and surely the church’s Great Tradition more or less believes that. But the Bible does not say that.

  Why is this important? Because if we make this “historical Adam” map of the church’s tradition inflexible in our faith, then we have the problem of serious tension with science. Does that matter? Yes it does. Why? Because this church tradition happens to be anchored in a concordist reading of the Bible. How so? It believes that only Adam and Eve existed all alone in the garden of Eden; it believes they sinned and their natures got corrupted (sin nature, original sin); and it believes they passed on their sin nature to every descendant through the procreative process. Two problems: not only does science show this to be very, very unlikely, if not impossible, but no one in the Bible or in the Jewish tradition taught this historical Adam theory as the church tradition teaches it.

  Both the Bible’s General Plot—the King and His Kingdom—and the Bible’s redemptive benefits story fit into other approaches to understanding what the Bible actually says about Adam and Eve. Jesus is King and he summons all humans into His Kingdom whether or not this historical Adam theory is accurate. But more importantly, the approach to Adam and Eve detailed above—as personally responsible for their sin and we are responsible for our sin (“because all sinned”)—is all we need for us to believe the gospel’s saving benefits: that Jesus died for our sins and was raised for our justification (Romans 4:25).

  NOTES

  Chapter 1: The Book and I

  1. Of course, I know many scholars have defended our current Christian practice; some of these are ingenious and profound and the like, but the implications we draw from some New Testament texts are not what the earliest Christians drew from them (as far as we know). The early Christians, especially the earliest Jewish Christians, continued to practice Sabbath al
ongside Sunday worship. For some New Testament references to Sabbath practice, see Acts 16:13; 18:4; 20:7; 1 Corinthians 16:2. Paul tolerated gentile difference (Colossians 2:16), but Sabbath was not abandoned probably until the time of Constantine.

  2. William D. Mounce, Pastoral Epistles, Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word, 2000), 289.

  Chapter 2: The Birds and I

  1. I swiped this from this website: www-personal.umich.edu/~bbowman/birds/humor/birdrif6.html.

  2. Tokunboh Adeyemo, ed., Africa Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006).

  3. C. C. Kroeger, M. J. Evans, and E. K. Elliott, eds., The IVP Women’s Bible Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002).

  4. Christopher Smith, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2011), provides a multitude of examples illustrating this problem. Smith’s solution to this “every reader for themselves” was to turn to the Roman Catholic tradition, illustrating the point of this paragraph.

  5. T. Oden, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2003); J. I. Packer and T. Oden, One Faith: The Evangelical Consensus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004); see also C. Colson, The Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2008).

  6. There are two series of commentaries under way designed to do just this for Bible readers: The Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture from InterVarsity Press and The Church’s Bible from Eerdmans. Of course, there are oodles of options here, but one can use the Ante-Nicene Fathers and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers from Eerdmans, and then read Augustine and Aquinas and Luther and Calvin and Wesley and various others up to the modern day. One cannot read each of these for each sitting with the Bible, but it is our ongoing exposure to the past that creates in us a serious respect.

  Chapter 3: Inkblots and Puzzles

  1. Edith Humphrey, Ecstasy and Intimacy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 41.

  2. A pastor friend of mine, John Frye, wrote a novel explaining this very thing. It is called Out of Print (Grand Rapids: Credo House, 2007).

  3. In my text in Appendix 2, there are no right answers; the score correlates similarities between how we view Jesus and how we view ourselves. For the studies, see L. J. Francis and J. Astley, “The Quest for the Psychological Jesus: Influences of Personality on Images of Jesus,” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 16 (1997): 247–59; J. Astley and L. J. Francis, “A Level Gospel Study and Adolescents’ Images of Jesus,” in L. J. Francis, W. K. Kay, and W. S. Campbell, Research in Religious Education (Herefordshire, England: Gracewing, 1996), 239–47. Available online at: http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=n4Pmb9ik3GgC&dq=research+in+religious+education+leslie+j+francis& printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=CvRMG4mvpX&sig=bhado HLZcAHuZtdtFCt0ev27sCc#PPP2,M1.

  4. Mark Twain, The Bible according to Mark Twain, ed. H. G. Baetzhold and J. B. McCullough (New York: Simon & Schuster [Touchstone], 1996), 139.

  5. Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2006), 66.

  Chapter 4: It’s a Story with Power!

  1. Robert Webber, The Divine Embrace (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 128.

  2. John Goldingay, Old Testament Theology, vol. 1, Israel’s Gospel (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2003), 31.

  3. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, ed. S. Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1996), 12–13 (emphasis original).

  4. See Alister McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea (New York: HarperOne, 2007).

  5. For Tyndale, I have relied on David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). Quotations and allusions are from pp. 1, 141, 148, 182, 279, 319, 381, 383.

  6. Goldingay, Old Testament Theology, 1:24.

  Chapter 5: The Plot of the Wiki-Stories

  1. It is impossible to know how many “authors” are involved in the composing of the thirty-nine Old Testament books. Since it is likely that one author wrote more than one book (say 1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings and 1–2 Chronicles), I have simply said there are at least thirty authors.

  2. Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2013).

  3. I am summarizing the work I have done in The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016), 152–58; Kingdom Conspiracy: Returning to the Radical Mission of the Local Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2014), 21–42.

  4. Irenaeus, On the Apostolic Preaching, trans. J. Behr (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1997).

  5. In a section below I will discuss the Genesis, Adam and Eve, and Christian evolutionary theories.

  6. The Hebrew word translated “image” is tselem and the one translated “likeness” is demut. The word tselem was translated into Greek as Eikon, and because Jesus is the Perfect Eikon in the New Testament and because the expression “image of God” has endured constant battles over its precise meanings, I have been using Eikon instead of “image of God.”

  7. Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed. C. Neider (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 277.

  8. For more than a hundred years, too many have divorced “kingdom” from Israel and from church. To keep those connected, I wrote Kingdom Conspiracy.

  Chapter 7: God Speaks, We Listen

  1. Dave Isay, Listening Is an Act of Love (New York: Penguin, 2007). I’ve not read this book.

  2. Alan Jacobs, A Theology of Reading: The Hermeneutics of Love (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001).

  3. Ibid., 13.

  4. Klyne Snodgrass, “Reading to Hear: A Hermeneutics of Hearing,” Horizons in Biblical Theology 24 (2002): 1–32.

  Chapter 8: The Boring Chapter (on Missional Listening)

  1. Scholars think he began this work late in the fourth century and finished in AD 427.

  2. This is the title of Gordon Fee and Douglas Stuart’s book, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003).

  3. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. and intro. by D. W. Robertson Jr. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997), 30–31. Later in this work Augustine defines “charity” as “the motion of the soul toward the enjoyment of God for His own sake, and the enjoyment of one’s self and one’s neighbor for the sake of God” (88).

  4. P. H. Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 581.

  5. See Scot McKnight, Open to the Spirit: God in Us, God with Us, God Transforming Us (Colorado Springs: WaterBrook, 2018), ch. 4.

  6. This translation seeks to show the chiasm of 2 Timothy 3:16. There are four elements. The first and the fourth are together, and the second and third are together. Thus:

  A Inform (didaskalia)

  B Rebuke (elegmon)

  B’ Restore (epanorthosis)

  A’ Instruct (paideia in dikaiosune)

  7. The TNIV has a note after “so that all God’s people” that reads, “Or that the servant of God.” The Greek text, in a more literal rendering, reads “so that the man of God may be . . .” Rendering this “all God’s people,” which I think is correct, recognizes that Paul’s comments were intended to apply to more than just Timothy but also to Timothy’s churches—both males and females, both laity and clergy.

  Chapter 9: The Year of Living Jesus-ly

  1. A. J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007).

  2. Ibid., 4.

  3. Ibid., 6–7.

  4. Ibid., 8.

  5. Ibid., 328.

  6. See my piece online: www.christianvisionproject.com/2008/03/the_8_marks_of_a_robust_gospel.html. The paper copy can be found at Christianity Today (March 2008), 36–39.

  Chapter 10: Finding the Pattern of Discernment

  1. For an excellent study, see David Instone-Brewer, Divorce and
Remarriage in the Bible: The Social and Literary Context (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002); see also his online piece at www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/october/20.26.html.

  2. For commentary on this passage, see Scot McKnight, The Sermon on the Mount, Story of God Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013), 94–109.

  3. There is serious dispute if this “exception” was granted by Jesus explicitly or if Matthew, knowing what Jesus meant, clarified it later. I consider the exception clause to be accurate for what Jesus meant.

  4. See Scot McKnight, It Takes a Church to Baptize: What the Bible Says about Infant Baptism (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2018).

  5. See Appendix 7.

  6. Many manuscripts do not include this text, but most experts think it records an actual event in Jesus’s life.

  7. Gordon Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 423.

  Chapter 11: Slaves in the King and His Kingdom Redemption Story

  1. I am grateful to my Northern Seminary colleague Claude Marriotini for sharing with me a manuscript he is working on about slavery in the Old Testament. I made use of some of his work in what follows.

  2. In this section I draw from Scot McKnight, The Letter to Philemon, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017).

  3. The New Testament scholar is N. T. Wright. See his The Kingdom New Testament (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 440–41.

  Chapter 12: Atonement in the King and His Kingdom Redemption Story

  1. For discussions, Scot McKnight, A Community Called Atonement (Nashville: Abingdon, 2007); Scot McKnight, Jesus and His Death: Historiography, the Historical Jesus, and Atonement Theory (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2005); N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2016). For a more general survey, Henri A. G. Blocher, “Atonement,” in Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005), 72–76. I draw in this chapter from my A Community Called Atonement, 110–14.