Re: Drawing Lines
J. McKiness (jmckines@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu)
Fri, 12 Jun 1998 17:45:59 -0500 (CDT)
On Fri, 12 Jun 1998 RDehaan237@aol.com wrote:
[snip]
>
> Dick has it right, IMHO. The hypothesis that Adam was the head of the
> biological human race poses such intractible problems that it needs to be
> ruled out. Here's just one. If Adam is placed among the Australopithicines
> as the head of humanity, how could he have named the animals that God
> presented to him, as described in Gen. 2, given A.'s lack of sophisticated
> language and the intellectual capacity required for the task? Any placement of
> Adam in the human genealogy is purely arbitrary.
>
> There is an answer to the biological head of the human race, that is given in
> the first chapter of Genesis. Here God consults within the godhead to create
> human
> beings in his image-- "male and female created he them". This is the
> beginning of the lineage that developed into the human race. This lineage is
> what Glenn has argued was becoming human long before most Christians thought
> they were. It was far down in this lineage, having become morally
> deteriorated, that Adam was inserted as a real historical person, as the first
> bearer of the covenant, the first to have a real relationship with God. Adam
> was created into a peopled world, as Dick has emphasized.
I also believe that Adam was the first man who could sin as he is the
first who was given the choice to disobey God. So I have a problem with
the idea that the human line was "morally deteriorated" prior to Adam.
Pre-Adam humans could have been just as nasty as we are but not sin just
as slugs are incapable of sin. Remember that the first charge given to humanity in the 1st chapter of
Genesis was to be fruitfully and multiply, which was the same as the
charge given to all other organisms.
> The covenant was
> initiated in Adam, and realized via the Jewish nation and eventually in
> Christ, the Second Adam. In Christ the human race became one, no Jew or
> Greek, slave or free, male or female.
>
> Bob
>
I believe that Adam was not just the ancestor of the Hebrews, but of
many other peoples in the geneology lists of Genesis. Where my celtic and
german ancestors fit into this line I have no idea.
John