Now that the dust has settled over universal salvation, it seems Evangelicals are going to war over “the historical Adam.” Here’s Christianity Today’s cover story on the matter. It seems faculty at Calvin College are under investigation for having publicly questioned whether Adam ever existed; scholars elsewhere have lost their jobs. For those of us on the outside, the question whether Adam and Eve once lived and were the progenitors of all of humanity may seem a bit silly. The scientific evidence is clear–the human genome is virtually identical with the genome of Chimpanzees and it seems that we are descended from a community of at least several thousand hominids, not two.

But it’s not just the historical (and scientific) accuracy of Genesis at stake. If Adam never existed then Pauline theology is in trouble, and if Pauline theology goes, then what remains of the whole Reformed edifice? If Adam never existed, then humans didn’t inherit sin from him, and our shared fallenness can’t be redeemed, needn’t be redeemed by Jesus Christ

Much of the work trying to flesh out the theological implications of contemporary science for Evangelicalism is followed on the BioLogos website, founded by Francis Collins. Their take on this controversy is here:  http://biologos.org/blog/biologos-and-the-june-2011-christianity-today-cover-story/.

We might be tempted to laugh at this controversy, just as many of us laughed at the Rapture theology of Harold Camping, but there are significant implications for traditional theology and to the extent that contemporary Christian theology, and churches, like the Episcopal Church, claim continuity with the past, there are implications for us as well.

One of the reasons I am so fascinated by scientific advances in the understanding human beings, especially neuroscience, is that it challenges traditional notions of human nature-the body/soul dichotomy, for example. It is incumbent on us to develop a robust theology that remains faithful to the tradition, but also takes into account these scientific discoveries. If we can’t make our imagery and symbolism meaningful for the twenty-first century, we will no longer be able to help people orient themselves in the world and in their own lives. We will sound like we are speaking in a foreign language, describing a fantasy world.