I love the title of this blog post, though I can’t take credit for it. Richard Hess is an Old Testament Scholar and professor of Semitic languages at Denver Seminary who wrote a paper called Splitting the Adam: The Usage of ʾĀadām In Genesis 1-5. In this paper, which is part of the Vetus Testmentum Supplements (you can see them here) he talks about how the word used for Adam is used 34 times in Genesis 1-5, yet in only 5 of those occurrences does it reflect a personal name. The other times it is used it refers to mankind in general (a reading like this tends to freak people about who look at Genesis 1 with ONLY an ontological purpose).

Now you may be wondering why I start a blog in the new year with words you don’t understand and talking about a book you will never read by an author you have never heard of…the answer is: Because we need to learn to be a people who trust the bible, but also understand the context in which it is written. When we do this well, we will encounter lots of people that may make us think outside of the box that we have placed God within…this is what the article I mentioned above did for me. Though I may not agree with all of his points, I do not think it is heretical in any way.

When I have a couple of weeks off, as I just did, my brain starts to think about lots of stuff (sometimes these are things other people don’t care about). I started thinking about how a couple of years ago I was personally cornered at one of our connect parties by someone who had just started attending Element for a couple of weeks. They asked me a question about origins from the book of Genesis and I replied that we have to be careful because Genesis wasn’t written in a 21^st century scientific mindset, it was written from a Hebrew perspective. When we look at days and times we must understand that no Hebrew at the time would have been trying to figure out the day and time creation began by looking at the genealogies, their view of Genesis 1-5 would be one of functional origins.

What I mean by that is their questions would have been: Who made it all? The answer laid out clearly in Genesis is: God. The next question would be: Why did He make it? The obvious answer is: His glory. Today we ask questions like, “Was it ten thousand years ago or ten billion years ago?” The answer of the Genesis account is that THOSE questions really don’t matter because that’s not the point of Genesis. What we should be asking is, “Why were humans placed into this creation,” because the answer to that is what Genesis concerns itself with…and the answer to that question is: to be God’s image bearers, partnering with Him on His behalf to order creation in ways that glorify God and bring fulfillment.

The person at the connect party didn’t like my answer and said that Genesis was a psychological, scientific, philosophical, and religious text and that anyone who said different wasn’t reading the bible correctly. I was accused of not taking the bible literally (meaning her personal interpretation of what “literal” meant) and therefore I was teaching heresy and was wrong. The only saving grace out of this exchange is that they were one of the few who didn’t immediately go out and write a Google or Yelp review about how terrible Element is as a church.

If you didn’t guess, no, they never came back to Element.

I recently finished a book by John Walton titled The Lost World of Adam and Eve which covers in detail a biblical view of human origins that may be hard for some people to even consider. Again, I do not agree with everything in this book, but I do not think the author is heretical, at some points he is quite brilliant in thinking outside the standard theological box. In the end his main thrust is that we must do better in allowing conversation and debate about human origins because it is often cited as one of the major reasons people leave the church or feel unwelcomed. For some reason the view that science stands against the scriptures is one that many a misguided Sunday school teacher has told students under them...and they are wrong, nature and the bible do not contradict.

What if there was a way to enter into a dialog with people who sincerely want to trust Jesus, but they look at Christians with suspicions because they think believers in the Bible are afraid of “science.” I believe that as Christians we need to be able to tell people what the scriptures are truly about before our personal opinions, no matter how great we think our opinions are, but in the end don’t have much bearing on the message of salvation. We need to explain that whatever or wherever people find themselves God has never abandoned them, that He seeks relationship with us, and that He is about the restoration of our lives into what we were originally meant to be: image bearers of Him. In Romans 8:19 the Apostle Paul says it like this: For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. That’s us!!!

All creation waits for God’s promised rescue and restoration. This is the point of the Scriptures: God’s work in the person of Jesus to restore and redeem. This is what runs through the Bible, all the way from Genesis 1 through Revelation 22, that Jesus is what matters and we can be in relationship with Him. If we are going to fight for a truth, let us be a people who understand that truth and passionately present it to the world.