Kids’ Books & The Historicity of Adam

This week, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary will entertain a panel discussion on the historicity of Adam.  I came across this tidbit of news recently through a blog post by Jim Hamilton, Professor of Biblical Theology there.  The Southern Baptists aren’t the only ones grappling with this issue either.  Another blog post from a PCA pastor (Is Pete Enns Descended from Adam?) shows that the PCA is already in some furor over the issue as well.  Both of these articles focus on one man, Peter Enns, but of course the issue is much bigger than him.  Some form of evolution, we are told by pollsters, is assumed by most thinking people in our culture.  Even Tim Keller has weighed in on the debate at TGC’s website.

Christians who approach this issue often focus on biological or Biblical evidence.  Many don’t realize that evolutionary theory permeates the humanities, including the way literature is interpreted in universities as well as the books our kids’ are reading.  In fact, I would say that most of my studies in the English department of Ole Miss consisted of digesting, debating, and sorting out evolutionary theories.

I doubt that the SBTS will call any Christian literature professors in their panel discussion.  Which is a shame.  If Adam is not historical, then we are told by Peter Enns and others that he is merely symbolic.  He is either “myth” or a “type” of Israel.  And if we want to know the implications of such a view, we ought to ask those folks most familiar with myths and their interpretations–literary critics and Christians working in the humanities.

I don’t mean to oversimplify the debate or to imply that I or other myth-keepers of our culture have all the answers.  But we have a perspective that might be helpful.  For instance, I suspect that men and women who turn to mythology as a savior in the face of evolutionary evidence really don’t know much about mythology at all.  They certainly seem to be unaware of the disastrous affect evolution has had on the study of myth itself in literary circles.  They don’t seem to realize that the loss of the Biblical account of history for the humanities has largely meant the loss of history and the concept of Truth en toto for literary people.  They don’t seem to take seriously the chaos that the study of literature, and through it life, was thrown into by the loss of an historical Adam.  If Adam truly is a myth or a type, then Christians are foolish to claim otherwise, and such a claim does have a cost.  But what is the cost on the other side?  What has been the impact of evolution on our literature and through it, the pathos of our culture?

Since I’ve got about 10 minutes to wrap this up, here’s one small point that I think we desperately need to grapple with: Mythology and typology without history is meaningless.  It is a hall of mirrors with nothing to reflect.

And it isn’t just something your kids will face in religion or biology class, by the way.  I believe it’s woven into the warp and woof of modern storytelling.  Here is a list of kids’ books that deal directly with evolution and Charles Darwin.  The love story Charles and Emma is particularly noteworthy among them.  But that’s just the beginning.  Beautifully illustrated books like We Gather Together take our cultural focus off of Thanksgiving and give us a laundry list of cultures and how they–with their gods–celebrate harvest time.  In this view, the biology of harvest time is real, and cultures all have their own myths about it.  Christianity and Thanksgiving is just another in a long line of myths.

On more conservative shelves, we find books like William Bennett’s The Children’s Book of Faith, which sets the story of Jesus’s healing of the paralytic next to The Angel of the Battlefield, Ben Franklin’s wisdom stories, and The Story of Hanukkah.  When evolution strips Bible stories of their proper history, then they become just another myth among many.

I’m out of time, but not ideas….What do you think?  Can you think of other ways evolution has impacted books for kids?

For more on this topic, see my Behind the Bookcase series or my Christ in Literature series.  Or check out Janie’s series on The Abolition of Man.  Plus, check back over the next couple of weeks for more on “creative” interpretations of the Bible.

COMMENTS

Stay Up to Date!

Get the information you need to make wise choices about books for your children and teens.

Our weekly newsletter includes our latest reviews, related links from around the web, a featured book list, book trivia, and more. We never sell your information. You may unsubscribe at any time.

Something went wrong. Please check your entries and try again.

Support our writers and help keep Redeemed Reader ad-free by joining the Redeemed Reader Fellowship.

Stay Up to Date!

Get the information you need to make wise choices about books for your children and teens.

Our weekly newsletter includes our latest reviews, related links from around the web, a featured book list, book trivia, and more. We never sell your information. You may unsubscribe at any time.

Something went wrong. Please check your entries and try again.

FREE Bible Guide!

Get a guide to the Best Bibles for Children and Teens. Perfect for an Easter gift.

emily

We'd love to hear from you!

Our comments are now limited to our members (both Silver and Golden Key). Members, you just need to log in with your normal log-in credentials!

Not a member yet? You can join the Silver Key ($2.99/month) for a free 2-week trial. Cancel at any time. Find out more about membership here.

4 Comments

  1. Janie Cheaney on November 7, 2011 at 10:28 am

    This is an important subject–I think we’re only now realizing how much worldview evolution (as opposed to limited, scientific evolution) has penetrated our psyche. IF humans are a product of biological chance, THEN there is no human ideal whatsoever and we can make of them what we wish. One completely, socially-acceptable human, coming right up. Except that our ideal of socially acceptable shifts a bit in every generation.

  2. emily on November 8, 2011 at 9:04 pm

    Yep. Good point, Janie. And not just “no human ideal.” No ideal anything.

    I probably should have been more clear that it’s not mythology or typology in Biblical hermenuetics that I object to. (I would agree, for instance, with C.S. Lewis who wrote in The Pilgrim’s Regress that Christianity is the one true myth.) My concern is when these things are unhinged totally from history.

  3. George on November 20, 2011 at 11:30 pm

    If one buys into macro-evolution’s hypotheses of vestigial organs, of chaos organizing itself into higher forms and lesser degrees of randomness, and of mutations that must have resulted in lots of dead-end branches in the ancestral tree, then –-

    It’s fine to write plots assembled from a grab-bag of the author’s latest interests and shoehorn them into a theme too broad to be called a plot;

    It’s alright to have flaws in the story;

    It’s okay if the secret identity of Rose’s mother promises to be more significant than it turns out to be in ‘WonderStruck’; In fact, it’s imperfectly normal for a promising event to turn out to be pointless;

    It’s no grounds for criticism that the book develops three or four story-lines but fails to weave them together in the end;

    It’s acceptable if only two of the story-lines are brought to resolution and the others are dropped with no fruition;

    It’s just fine to portray characters, events, and objects as bearing some significance early in the story, but for them to turn out to signify nothing.

    It’s impossible for events to be “too coincidental,” since the whole of reality has been coincidental; The story, like our biological world, only has an appearance of authorship.

    But it’s not OK if book sales remain limited to enlightened purchases by public library systems. That’s why stories that evolutionists write retain some vestige of a plot.

    Of course, evolutionists would never have come up with the notion of a vestigial organ if they hadn’t believed that a now (allegedly) useless organ signifies something that used to be useful.

    When evolutionists evolve to the next level, they will realize that Signs signify nothing significant except to the signer who invented the signs to create his own reality.

  4. Miscellaneous Musings on Monday | Afterthoughts on January 8, 2015 at 6:12 pm

    […] one last link. I found this an interesting read: Kids’ Books and the Historicity of Adam. I firmly believe in the historicity of Adam. I also believe that real life people have […]

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.