1. The Bible knows of a First Adam and a Second Adam. Let’s, with due respect for the Second Adam. call them A-I and A-II.

The First and Second Adam together form an axis about which both the Bible and the whole of human history, as interpreted by the Bible, revolve.

The Second Adam is, of course, our Lord Jesus Christ. He is a distinct and individual person.

The First Adam is. according to the Scripture, no less definite a person. He is so much an individual that St. Paul speaks of A-I as a “type” of A-II (Rom. 5:14). Because this is so, what is revealed in the Scripture about the Christ sheds light upon A-I. There are, indeed, theologians who believe that the Genesis account of A-I can be rightly understood only as confirmed and illumined by the Gospel accounts of A-II. The unique individuality. then, of the Christ requires the unique individuality of the First Adam. Together, as we have said, A-1 and A-II form the poles of human history.

The Bible, in a word, obliges us to acknowledge the unique and individual person-hood of both the First and the Second Adam.

2. It is serious business to deal disobediently with the First Adam.

Our Lord even warns that those who do not believe the writings of Moses are unable to believe His words, “for he wrote of me” (John 5:46). Where did Moses write of the Christ? St. Paul teaches us (or better, the Holy Spirit says through Paul) that when Moses wrote of A-I he was describing “a type of the one who was to come” (Rom. 5:14). Moses could hardly write more specifically about the Christ than when he writes about His ante-type. “He wrote of me,” Jesus says if you would hear Me, listen to Moses!

Could, then, the “type” (A-I) be ignored, or set aside, or blurred in a mist of evolutionary or cultural speculation without affecting our ability to hear the One typified?

“How can you believe,” the Lord asks our generation no less than He asked the Jews, “who receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (John 5:44). That’s a very exact description of how the evolutionary theorists of our times scratch each other’s backs as they spin out their speculative webs. “But,” the Lord goes on to say, regarding Moses, “if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” (John 5:47). And nowhere, as we have said, does Moses write more particularly about the Second Adam than in the Genesis account of the First Adam, as St. Paul makes clear not only as quoted from Romans but elsewhere—as we shall see.

Casting doubt on the Genesis account of the First Adam has, I repeat, momentous implications for the Church. These are, it seems, mostly ignored in the mad theological rush to board the latest evolutionary bandwagon to go riding wildly imagined ribbons of time into a dark and baffling past.

3. In our era, the emergence of the dogma of evolution has clouded the teaching of Genesis 1–3 in a haze of murky speculation. And the definite portrayal of A-I provided by Moses, and assumed by the Bible, vanishes in the mist. In its place have arisen a host of competing guesses. While some brazenly deny in the very face of Christ’s warning—that Moses wrote the Pentatuch at all! This is to be expected, of course, of unbelief, but it can be heard among those who in the same breath claim undivided loyalty to the Christ and His Scripture.

     

It might be supposed that at least among ourselves in the CRC there would be stalwart refusal to bow the knee of Genesis to the Baals of evolutionary fancy. We would gladly, one might suppose, in order to hear the Lord, give ear to Moses. It may be that firm commitments to the literal authenticity of Genesis do indeed sound clearly from the academic ramparts school, college and seminary-sustained by the CRC to confront the world. It may be so, but if such affirmations there be, they seem to be lost amidst a crowd of trendy evolutionary fashions—woven out of limitless strands of time on the looms of undisciplined imagination.

There seem to be those among us who want it both ways: 1) to join the “in” crowd uncritically committed to evolutionary dogma as to the origins of man, while 2) professing an undivided allegiance to the Scripture as God’s inspired Word. It is obvious that anyone who thus tries to run in two directions at once will add little strength to the legions of the Lord.

What never comes quite clear in scenarios substituted for Genesis is precisely how A-I, and his correspondence to A-II, fit into an evolutionary scheme. Nor is this clarified when evolution is cautiously sprinkled with presumably holy water from a fount labeled “theistic!”

No doubt you too, reader, have wondered just how those who profess obedience to the Scripture do in fact bow in their theorizing to the Moses’ account of Adam and the Biblical parallelism between A-I and A-II.

Moses’ account is vivid, precise, clear—and grows the more instructive the more one subjects himself to it. Evolutionary hypotheses are breezy, belligerent, cocky and sterile—and hint of their hollow pretensions on first acquaintance. Moses for the childlike; evolutionism for the childish!

Yet, one may suspect, if one does not know, that among us, too, in practice it is often Genesis which is quietly being subordinated to evolution-ism rather than the other way around. Some theorists will blandly admit not knowing how to harmonize Genesis with their -ism while none–the-less giving their allegiance rather to the -ism than to Moses. Such indifference to the authority of Scripture is all the more distressing if one discovers that so it seems to be in his children’s classrooms.

4. This essay is focused on the question: how do those who embrace evolutionary theories harmonize these with the biblical teaching regarding A-1 and A-II? Or, if such harmony cannot be achieved, when will they openly choose between the -ism and the Word?

The issue is indeed momentous, but not complex. Adam and Eve had a clear choice: the Word of God or the word of the serpent. So do we: the Word of God or the word of the -ism.

Let’s hear that choice made!

5. Some try to avoid making a decision, at least in public, by arguing that divine revelation appears in two “books,” the Bible and Nature. We must, it is said, be equally attentive to both.

This has a pious ring to it, but it is a dead-end evasion! Books come to us in words—with a difference! The words of the Bible are divinely inspired. The words read out of, or into, the “book” of Nature are always fallible and human. Thus the two “books” are not on a par; they by no means enjoy equal authority. Therefore, one can’t get away with talking of man’s account of divine ” revelation” in nature as of equal authority with the divinely inspired Scripture. Not at all! If the Christian is sure of anything, he is sure that nothing of human composition can speak with the certainty of the Holy Word.

The choice, as regards A-I and his relation to A-II, and their place in some evolutionary scheme, is always absolute: God’s Word or man’s?

When will those who entertain, in public or in private, on podium or in classroom, evolutionary hypotheses, make that choice openly before us all?

It requires no particular genius to mouth the latest evolutionary speculations, and to reel off millions or billions of years as if anyone knew what such words mean. The evolutionary theorist bedazzles himself with pompous sounds to which neither he nor anyone else can attach any content. He fills up his vacuums with zeroes, childishly supposing that adding nothing to nothing produces something! But what meaningful difference is there between, say, one million or one billion years? Adding zeroes tells us nothing—which is what zero stands for, after all.

The parent who recklessly wants his child victimized by such verbal bamboozlement has the whole range of secular schools to choose from—if only the time—bank numbers game were confined to these! California has just required its public schools to pour even more evolutionism down helpless throats, while efforts to add creation to schoolroom diets are viciously denounced as bigotry—by those who thus betray themselves as bigots!

What the believer expects, however, is that those to whom he entrusts the training of his children and the future of his denomination—dare to hear Moses along with the Second Adam and thus, if need be, take up the cross of academic derision to rise above the crowd in solemn affirmation of the authority of the Genesis account of A-I. Not, indeed, as their own discovery, but as Truth breathed into the Scripture, and confirmed in the Scripture by the Holy Spirit.

The believer rightly expects those who teach and speak for him to take the Bible’s rather than the evolutionist’s view of the First Adam. And mindful of endless biblical warnings against cowardly dis obedience, the believer anticipates no ultimate blessing upon the work of those who prefer the words of man over those of the Scripture.

What, then, is the Bible’s view of the First Adam?

6. The Bible takes the First Adam very literally. Indeed, the Bible establishes a parallel relationship between A-I and A-II in which the literal Second Adam vindicates and confirms what is said of the First.

The Bible views the First Adam—and Eve—as historical, as individual and as brought into existence by immediate acts of God in very specific ways. Just as the Bible reveals very specifically how God brought the Second Adam into history.

Evolutionary theorists, on the other hand, seem to have only the fuzziest guesses as to how the biblical Adam and Eve can be fitted into their speculations. And many, of course, relegate the Genesis account to the realm of myth or saga or “teaching model” linguistic tricks for concealing the fact that the Word’s control of their speculations is minimal or non-existent.

While a discrepancy between the vivid teaching of Genesis and the hazy theorizing of the -ism does not seem to bother those evolutionary theorists whom I have encountered, the issue is, I repeat, exceedingly crucial and relevant. Not only because it forces a clear choice of momentous consequences between the Word of God and the words of man, but also because the whole history of man, and the divine economy of salvation, both take their point of departure from the intimate relationship biblically established between A-I and A-II. The approach of the Church to the reality of sin and evil, to salvation and the life of obedience, and to culture and the world at large moves within fields of force drawn between the twin poles of A-I and A-II. The disastrous effects upon society and upon persons and upon the Church, of ideologies which ignore the A-I –A-II tension is obvious.

Playing games with Adam is for far higher stakes than evolutionists seem aware of.

That is why the believer has every right to ask the evolutionary theorist—if he professes loyalty to the Scriptures—to explain in language no less clear and specific than that of the Word just how the events of Genesis 1–3 are accommodated in his theorizing. If ever you do, try to keep him from buying you off with checks drawn upon his fanciful and limitless bank of time. Such checks bounce. What you want is a simple explanation of how the events recorded in Genesis 1–3 harmonize with his evolutionary hypothesis, or, lacking that, his candid admission that for him the -ism comes first and Genesis had better make do. Then at least we all know where we are. But, alas, don’t, as they say, hold your breath until you get a satisfying answer.

7. Let’s sketchily observe how the Bible itself views Genesis 1–3. I say sketchily because the events related in Genesis 1–3, and what happened to man, to history, and to the world as consequence of those events, everywhere underlie the Word. Mystify the relationship between A-I and A–II by beclouding Genesis 1–3 in speculative vapors and for you the Bible goes adrift, anchors do not hold, and the bridge from time into eternity loses its footing in history. 8. Let it be said at once that to authenticate Genesis 1–3 for the believer it is enough to remind ourselves that, like the rest of the Bible, Genesis too is Spirit-breathed. What the Word says, God says.

Unhappily, the believer is sometimes beguiled by those who ask, with seeming innocence, “Yes, this is what Genesis says, but what does it mean?”

Much as the child tries to evade parental instructions through the same maneuver—“this is what you said, Mom, but I thought you meant . . . !”

Taking license from the same subterfuge, speculation pays lip service to Genesis and real service to whatever -ism flies high at the moment.

The Bible simply understands Genesis to mean what the Spirit through Moses says. This the Spirit re-emphasizes elsewhere in the Scripture. He not only inspired the Genesis account but has chosen to verify it beyond doubt elsewhere in the Word.

9. Having described in Genesis, for example, the creation of man, the Spirit chooses to confirm that account by writing to us through St. Paul: “For Adam was formed first, then Eve . . .” (I Tim. 2:13). Two things here: 1) God’s forming Adam (of the dust of the earth), and 2) God’s forming Eve (from Adam’s side)—confirmed as recounted in Genesis. First Adam; then Eve out of Adam.

This account of Eve’s arrival on the scene is not likely to be a popular view these days, but is a God-breathed one none-the-less.

Let’s invite the evolutionist to show how his theory accounts for this subtle distinction in the order of appearance of this first human pair on the stage of history: First the man, and then the woman from the man!

(To be continued next month.)

Lester De Koster. former Calvin College professor and editor of The Banner, lives at Grand Rapids. Michigan.