Ah Nola (which is short for New Orleans La.). It is a city of many faces and flavors. It is one of the birth places of classic jazz, and the place where Cajun meets Creole meets ole Southern cooking and creates an amazing gumbo. Me personally, I’m partial to the charbroiled oysters and the red snapper lightly breaded, not to mention the crawfish poboys etc. I was in Nola for the next to the last Greer-Heard forums, for a friendly... Read more

Q.  In the wake of this book, where would you hope the conversation goes from here in the Evangelical world? A. I hope more and more will plumb the depth of the theology of Genesis and ponder how Jewish traditions about Adam can help us comprehend both Jesus and Paul on Adam and Eve. And I hope more will give Eve more attention! She’s nearly always ignored in this discussion. Dat’s All Folks. Hope you enjoyed this series. Read more

Q. I suspect that some folk in our Evangelical world will suggest that you have attempted to conform what the Bible says about origins, to what genetics says about origins, rather than some sort of symbiotic back and forth, or mutual critique, and that the net outcome is that traditional views of Adam and the historical substance of human origins are called into question.   How would you respond? A. Yes, I know they will. So here’s what happened to... Read more

Q.  How do you view the relationship between history and theology when it comes to Adam’s existence, his sin, the Fall etc.?  A. I am purposefully ambiguous if not agnostic because I can’t make up my mind on the basis of the Bible. There are elements in the Bible –the genealogies for instance — that suggest a real man and historical person. There are other elements in Gen 1-3, like a talking snake, a man named “Dusty” and a woman... Read more

Q.  At one point you lay out 6-7 things you take the phrase ‘the historical Adam’ to mean, and the proceed to suggest that at least most of them were not in the mind of Paul or other early Jewish writers when they refer to Adam.  Why this kind of approach?  Are you simply trying to deconstruct some of the fundamentalist views of Adam and creation? A. Yes, Ben, I am trying to show that what many believe is so... Read more

Q.  What promoted you to do this co-authored book? A. While I never made the sciences anything central to my own intellectual interests over the years science pops up as important to some biblical discussion I am engaged in, not least when I was teaching undergraduates at North Park. Many of them were science majors and many of them had some solid commitments to science and it made them wonder how solid their faith could be. Over the years I... Read more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBklQN2vjGc Read more

The Afterword does not need to be reviewed as it offers nothing to the argument, it simply cavalierly says ‘don’t worry, be happy’ it doesn’t matter if there was a historical Adam and a historical origin to human fallenness. Yes it does matter, it matters if the Biblical authors think and say it matters. It even mattered to Jesus who said that marriage is an idea that God came up with ‘from the beginning’ and involved the first couple, Adam... Read more

More helpful is Thesis 4 (p. 183) which involves the proposition that we do not have original sin understood as original guilt and damnation for the whole race on the basis of Adam’s sin in Paul. Perhaps that is deducing too much from Paul. But it is not a helpful either/or to say “the issue however is not whether the historical Adam is important to soteriology but what kind of Adam Paul has in mind in Romans 5.12-21. Does Paul... Read more

In the last main chapter of the book (pp. 171ff), Scot addresses the issue of what Paul says about Adam and Eve. He is correct that Paul does not say in Rom. 5.12-21 that all have sinned ‘in Adam’. He says all are condemned because all have sinned like Adam. But one has to ask— why would that be universally true if there was not a universal bent to sinning? And if there is such an inclination— Where did it... Read more