Tag Archives: Adam and Eve

October 9, 2020

Does Science Make the Biblical Doctrine of Original Sin Obsolete? … (Glenn Morton’s Last Stand)

By Clarke Morledge

Neo-orthodox theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once famously said that original sin is “the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.” But what was once “empirically verifiable” is now questioned, and even science is being enlisted as its primary foe.

As the story goes, modern science indicates that it is impossible for the breadth of humanity today to have been derived from a single human pair. If there was no single human pair, there was no Adam and Eve, as the fountainhead of all of humanity. If there was no Adam and Eve, there was no cosmic Fall. Without a cosmic Fall, there was no original sin.1

The conclusion? If the core element of Christian teaching is that Jesus saves us from our sin, then without original sin, the entire Christian story regarding salvation falls flat. Therefore, science has made original sin obsolete. … To continue holding to an obsolete doctrine means that the Bible can not be trusted… The Christian story of sin and salvation implodes…. POOF!!

This is a narrative that has become increasingly popular in the West, as seen from different angles. Many former Christians and other agnostics/atheists point to this as one of the primary reasons why Christian faith must be rejected. Liberal-minded Christians will tend to look the other way and ignore such difficulties. Others from a Christian background will use this objection as a means of rewriting the whole of Christian theology to build a completely different worldview.

Glenn Morton (1950-2020). A maverick creationist(?), who defied labeling, finished his final book, Eden Was Here: New Evidence for the Historicity of Genesis, within days before his death. Morton makes the case for an historical Adam and Eve, thereby linking the Fall of humanity, and its association with original sin, to a specific event in the very ancient past.

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August 25, 2020

Who Was Lilith? Did Adam Have a First Wife Prior to Eve?

By Clarke Morledge

Readers of the Book of Genesis will know that Adam’s first wife was Eve. But some have suggested that the story of Genesis was deliberately changed by the Christian church to hide the fact that Adam had a wife prior to Eve, and her name was Lilith. Is there any truth to this conspiracy claim?

It is true that according to medieval Jewish folklore, that there is a story about a Lilith, who was Adam’s first wife. The most obvious problem with the conspiracy claim is that one of the first Jewish writings to definitively tie Lilith to Adam was a mystical text, the Alphabet of Sirach, composed somewhere between the years 700 C.E. to 1000 C.E.  This is several hundred of years after the New Testament was already completed, and well over a thousand years after the story of Adam and Eve made its way into the Bible.

Lilith (1887) by John Collier in Atkinson Art Gallery, Merseyside, England (credit: Wikipedia)

What gives a little bit of life to the conspiracy claim is that a legend about a female demon, Lilith, did originate in Sumerian and Babylonian writings, centuries before Christ. Tales about Lilith crept into later Jewish writings. But the Alphabet of Sirach was one of the first written works to have made any serious connection between Adam and Lilith, and the Christian church had already been in existence for several centuries.

Dr. Michael Heiser has a 13-minute video explaining the full story about Lilith, including why medieval Jewish scribes invested in the Lilith story, and why the conspiracy theory about her existence as Adam’s first wife being suppressed can be easily dismissed.

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September 7, 2015

Your Desire Shall Be For Your Husband

By Clarke Morledge
Katharine Bushnell (1855-1946). Missionary to China and activist for women's equality, spent a lot time studying the original Hebrew meaning of Genesis 3:16 (photo credit: Boston University)

Katharine Bushnell (1855-1946). Missionary to China and activist for women’s equality. Bushnell spent a lot time studying the original Hebrew meaning of Genesis 3:16 (photo credit: Boston University)

To the woman he [God] said,

“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;
    in pain you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be for your husband,
    and he shall rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16 ESV)

The beauty and simplicity of the early chapters of Genesis ironically leads to a pitfall when reading these chapters. The story of Adam and Eve is very terse and yet captivating. The details are sparse, but the narrative is engaging, as well as being foundational to Christian theology and practice. The story invites the reader to explore the imagination, going deeper in trying to figure out what it all means. But sometimes, the imagination can take you far away from the text itself, and thereby importing an alien sense of meaning that does not belong there.

For years, I have wrestled with the meaning of the curse given to Eve in Genesis 3:16, subsequent to the Fall. In contemporary Western culture, where concerns about women’s rights flourish, many readers bristle over the idea that Eve might somehow be the one to blame for the Fall of Humanity. After all, she interacted with the serpent and then offered the forbidden fruit to Adam. Does Genesis teach that Eve was truly at fault?

More specifically, by asserting herself so forwardly in her dialogue with the serpent, was she subverting her role as a supportive helpmate to Adam? If one reads the Apostle Paul in one of his letters to Timothy,  you might get the idea that Paul really believes that it was all Eve’s fault (1 Timothy 2:13-15).

But even when reading Paul, such a neat conclusion is not so simple. In fact, such a conclusion would be wrong. In his most profound work of theology in his letter to the Romans, Paul squarely places the responsibility for the Fall on Adam’s shoulders (Romans 5:12-17). Eve is not even mentioned.

So, perhaps the wisest conclusion to make is that both Adam and Eve share in the downfall of humanity, though in different ways. You can not pin it all on Eve.

But then there is the whole matter of the curse placed on Eve, specifically, that “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” What is that all about?

This past summer, our church held a Summer Bible Study on Genesis 1-11, and this very question came up. Here is a TableTalk session where Tommy Vereb, our worship leader, poses the question to our lead pastor, Travis Simone:

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January 27, 2014

An Evolutionary Creation: Oxymoron?

By Clarke Morledge
How good a pool player is the The Lord of all Creation? Does God sink all of the balls in one shot, or does He take multiple shots to demonstrate His Glory?

How good a pool player is the The Lord of all Creation? Does God sink all of the balls in one shot, or does He take multiple shots to demonstrate His Glory?

When most Christians think about “evolution” and “creation”, they think of things that simply do not mix: Oil and water. Vinegar and milk. The Red Sox and the Yankees. Dallas Cowboys and Washington Redskins. Me and mornings. Forget it.

When I was a young Christian studying science in college, I was repeatedly told that I had to choose between what evolutionary scientists have to say with what the Bible says about creation. Now, if the choice was between what atheists like Richard Dawkins have to say and what the Scriptures teach, well OK then, I would have to clearly agree that there is a serious conflict here.  Atheism masquerading as science is clearly incompatible with the Bible.

The problem is that while outspoken atheists like Richard Dawkins tend to hijack the public discourse on evolution, they represent only a small slice of the debate. Most practicing biologists are not terribly interested in atheistic ideologies (at least in my experience). They just want to study plants and animals and they happen to do it within the context of Darwinian evolutionary theory.

So, the question remains:  is modern evolutionary science today completely opposed to the God of the Bible?
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January 21, 2014

Four Views on the Historical Adam

By Clarke Morledge

How are we to understand the teaching of Genesis regarding Adam as an historical person? What is your view?

Want to know more about the debate? Get a copy of Four Views on the Historical Adam, part of the Zondervan Counterpoint series of debates within the Christian community among scientists, Old Testament scholars, New Testament scholars, Ancient Near East literary scholars, church leaders/pastors and others in-between about how we are understand the message of the Bible.

Introduction #1 — Matthew Barrett, California Baptist University:

Introduction #2 — Ardel Caneday, Northwestern College:

Young-Earth — William D. Barrick, The Master’s Seminary:

Ancient Near East Literature/Archetypal View — John Walton, Wheaton College:

UPDATE: For a summary of each view discussed in the book, BibleGateway has a succinct description of each perspective. Extended audio talks given by each one of the four main contributors from the 2013 Evangelical Theological Society have just been made available.

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