John H. Walton

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On the news budget once again: New Evangelical debates about Adam and Eve

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On the news budget once again: New Evangelical debates about Adam and Eve

It's hard to beat William Lane Craig for conservative evangelical credentials.

This influential author and philosophy professor teaches at Houston Baptist University, where faculty members "must" believe in the Bible's divine inspiration and "that man was directly created by God." He's simultaneously a visiting scholar at California's Talbot School of Theology, where teachers commit to the beliefs that the Bible is "without error or misstatement" in its "record of historical facts" and that Adam was created by God and "not from living ancestors."

Craig is also a longtime member in good standing of the Evangelical Theological Society, whose members are required to affirm that the entire Bible is "the Word of God written and is therefore inerrant" as originally written. Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, where he formerly taught, likewise proclaims that the Bible is "without error."

But exactly how do those vows apply to the early chapters of the Bible's Book of Genesis?

Debates about this issue are frequently hooks for news stories, energized over and over again. Evolution and the creation of Adam and Eve have been allergic issues among evangelical Protestants in the 162 years since Darwin published "On the Origin of Species"?

So there's eye-opening stuff in Craig's article titled "The Historical Adam" in the current First Things magazine.

In Genesis 1-11, he asserts, those "fantastic lifespans" of primeval humans starting with Adam indicate "we are not dealing here with straightforward history."

Yet it's not simple fiction either, but rather an amalgam he calls "mytho-history, not to be taken literally," though there could be some overlap between the "the literary Adam of Genesis" over against the "historical Adam." He further explains that in the New Testament, Jesus and Paul were talking about that non-literal "literary Adam."

Given current science, Craig figures Adam and Eve lived 750,000 to a million years ago at the point of separation between Neanderthals and our own species of homo sapiens, with the latter endowed by God to surpass human-like animals that lacked rational thought. On that understanding, "the mythic history of Genesis is fully consistent with current scientific evidence concerning human origins."


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No 'proof texts': Wheaton College scholar seeks to shelve Old Testament moral rules (updated)  

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No 'proof texts': Wheaton College scholar seeks to shelve Old Testament moral rules (updated)  

The unending debate over the Bible and same-sex relationships is the most troublesome one for U.S. Protestantism since the Civil War.

It first broke into the news agenda big-time 47 years ago at a conference of the large United Methodist Church.  As religion specialists well know, an emergency Methodist conference that opens Saturday in St. Louis is to weigh whether the UMC will split over this.   

Simultaneously, a book on sale next week has potentially explosive relevance: “The Lost World of the Torah: Law as Covenant and Wisdom in Ancient Context.” Of course, “Torah” in the title refers to the Old Testament’s first five books and also the material therein normally called biblical law.   

The book – nota bene -- does not emanate from liberal “mainline” Protestantism. The publisher, InterVarsity Press, is evangelical, and the authors are veteran Wheaton College (Illinois) Old Testament professor John H. Walton along with son J. Harvey, a University of St. Andrews doctoral student. 

“We cannot reconstruct a moral system from the Torah or any part of it,” they contend. “That is not what it [the Torah] is designed to do.” Rather, “order in society was the goal, and it was achieved through wisdom,” not biblical  “legislation” or “rules.”  The Old Testament God was simply not “imposing morality or social ideals on Israel through the stipulations of the Torah.” 

Writers should, of course, read the complete book to fairly grasp the argument, but chapter titles well summarize the key points.

“We cannot gain moral knowledge or build a system of ethics based on reading the Torah in context and deriving principles from it.”

“The ancient Israelites would not have understood the Torah as providing divine moral instruction.”

“Torah cannot provide proof texts for solving issues today.”

The Waltons specify that this holds for the venerated Ten Commandments, and for Leviticus 18, where God’s “statutes” abominate homosexual acts as well as adultery, incest and bestiality. Regarding same-sex activity and gender identity, the authors warn against extracting “biblical principles” to “substantiate a particular position today as if that position is thereby built on moral absolutes.”

That should provoke hot responses from traditionalists, Jews included. The book follows the shelving of Old Testament dictates proposed last year by another prominent evangelical, megachurch preacher Andy Stanley.


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So they are back in the news (yet again): Adam and Eve and all that

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On the religion beat, the news often consists of new books about old texts with old stories, and the oldest old story of them all is the Genesis portrayal of Adam and Eve. Their status as the first humans and parents of the entire human race is a big biblical deal, especially for evangelical Protestants. 

Since no evangelical school outranks Wheaton College (Illinois) in prestige and influence, journalists should get ready for an incendiary device about to explode in March. 

A book by Wheaton Old Testament Professor John H. Walton will upend many traditional -- or certainly "evangelical" -- ideas about Adam and Eve.  Moreover, “The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate” comes from the certifiably evangelical InterVarsity Press. Click here for the online press kit (.pdf).

Walton (Ph.D., Hebrew Union College) formerly taught at the Moody Bible Institute, which professes that “the first human beings were a special and unique creation by God as contrasted to being derived from any pre-existing life forms. Further, God created everything ‘after its kind,’ which excludes any position that allows for any evolutionary process between kinds.” As a Wheaton professor since 2001, he’s required to reaffirm each year the “biblical doctrine” that “God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the entire human race,” who were “distinct from all other living creatures.” 


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