777 BIBLE.COM SERMON, COMMENTARY, ARTICLE THEOLOGY, CHRISTIAN BOOK

I have long since stopped using this email address and happened to just spot this as I cleared old emails.

Thank you for your response. I remember answering your questions with reasons for my conclusions but again, your ‘response’ here did not engage with my thoughts. I can only conclude that you are not really serious about an intelligent and mutually respectful engagement among fellow believers but rather, seek a name-calling polemic. Unfortunately, as a missionary, I have to be accountable to the time I spend on such encounters.

You have followed my seminars for years now with the same questions to which I have always answered in a civil fashion. This is then followed by public writings denouncing my conclusions. If by copying Tim Keller and Terry Gyger, you hope to draw their attention to my views, I can save you a lot of trouble. All my views about Adam and Eve have been published for more than 10 years and Redeemer as a church as well as Dr Keller as a minister have never had any objections to my non-doctrinal interpretations. This means that while I hold to a certain view of who Adam might mean, no church doctrine in the history of the church has ever made this a litmus test of faith. No one should get their knickers in a twist over whether Adam was a collective or a singularity. We simply have no idea, so we go with evidence from as broad a compass as possible. To cite ‘biblical evidence’ is naive. The Bible does not offer evidence. It offers trustworthy ‘accounts’ by those who believe and should not be degenerated to become ‘evidence. This cheapens the high view of scriptures that we ought to hold. Ironically, to make the bible proof of God is to reduce its status to that of mere historical or scientific values.

This is an unworthy and feeble attempt at apologetics. Both historical analyses and scientific inferences are second-order cognitive operations that we are learning to use as we decipher God’s general revelation to us. Spiritual accounts need not bow down to any adjudication by either history or the sciences. Rather, these fields of inquiry are useful in helping us weed our our false premises and biased judgments.

For me, that Adam is a collective name is so satisfying because it explains a great deal about the loving God whose mightiness science is only just beginning to appreciate. I hope one day, you too will marvel at the greatness and goodness of God.

Indeed, anyone who has attended any seminary will soon learn that no creedal statements about the specific identity of Adam exists. The name is not mentioned in any ancient creed and Paul uses the word metaphorically (it is a good idea to do some real, reputable reading of the NT commentaries).

Since you have already made this a public statement in your copies to others, I can only assume that it is not in fact, a pre-publication invitation to respond.

Let me close by assuring you that the reason I remain a very committed biblical christian because – science in itself is merely an explanatory evidence of data, it has no competence to adjudicate the existence of God. The Bible, on the other hand, is a marvelous account of God’s encounter with human ancestors and gives us so much data that it draws us to the sciences to explain much of that data. Science cannot add data. It only explains data we receive from our 5 senses.

E.g., the telescope did not invent the size of the universe to undermine our early beliefs that the stars are attached to a fixed cloth ‘above’ a flat Earth and the microscope did not invent germs to undermine many of our beliefs that all illnesses were caused by demons. They change our understanding of what we already observe with our eyes. So evolutionary by natural selection did not create the specific shapes of the tortoise shells on the Galapagos Islands. The animals were already there long before Darwin saw and measured them.

Like philosophy, Christians should not avoid science, but rather do good science because there is so much bad science around – as when Richard Dawkins use his incredible talents to force biology to make a theological statement.

We should also beware not to do this ourselves, i.e., by using theology to make scientific statements.

Daniel, my brother in the Lord, I wish you well in your endeavors for the Lord.

God bless,

Ron