Chicken and Egg
or The Invention of non-Adamites
“But your dad will not
know about that,”
Said the cat.
“He will never find out,”
Laughed the Cat in the Hat.
A popular argument among theistic evolutionists and hyperpreterists (and theistic evolutionary hyperpreterists) is that Adam wasn’t the first actual man, just the first man “in Covenant” with God. [1]
This is a means of keeping Genesis 1 as some sort of history (not a physical Creation, but a Delegation of “Temple purpose” to the physical Creation already in existence) and also maintaining the long ages asserted by modern naturalists. However, what this boils down to is simply a game of “kick the can.” The problem isn’t resolved. Rather, like the ring around the bath in The Cat-in-the-Hat Comes Back, it simply moves the problem elsewhere. In fact, it spreads its mess through the rest of the Bible.
Oh, the things that they did!
And they did them so hard,
It was all one big spot now
All over the yard.
For the separation of Adam from other “now-evolved” humans to occur, it had to be Covenantal. Most theistic evolutionists are too compromised to believe anything before Genesis 12, so they see no Covenants before Abraham (I mean, the actual word Covenant isn’t mentioned until Genesis 6, so the fact that all the preceding history has the same shape at many levels can’t possibly be significant in any way!) At least the hyperpreterists see Genesis 1 as Covenantal, but this poses a few conundrums for their theory.
Firstly, if an “Adamite” Adam (a genealogy divided by Covenant before Abram) was the first man in Covenant, then salvation is only of the Adamites. All the other people supposedly living at the time were not considered “human” by God. They were just part of a Creation that had known suffering and death for millions of years already, and God could somehow call this process “good.” [2] That’s an old Creationist argument, but there is also a Covenantal aspect to it. These non-Adamites died without hope under the Sanctions of a Covenant they were never given.
This assertion doesn’t follow the processes in the Bible at all. God chose Israel and then whittled Israel down to Christ. Each “new Covenant” in the Old Testament was founded within the previous one (Noah within Adam, Abram within Noah, etc.) God cut into Adam until He got to the foundation for the Bride. [3] At each point there was a division, a disinheriting of the unfaithful from the faithful.
For there to have been a Covenantal “disinheriting” of the non-Adamites at the beginning of the Adamic Covenant, then the previous race must have been under some sort of Covenant from their physical Creation that has not been recorded for us. Unless this first era was nothing like any later era, why were they disinherited? Were they “not-quite-human-enough”? If this were the case, they would have been physically close enough to Adam (in evolutionary terms), yet we are not told anything about them. We don’t need to invent non-Adamites to have an intermarriage between Covenant people and people outside the Covenant. The “daughters of men” in Genesis 6 were descendants of Cain, [1] who was cursed, but shown mercy, because he was unfaithful under Covenant.
This is a chicken-and-egg dilemma for the compromisers. An actual, physical, historical “Construction of Creation” Covenant can’t be escaped, any more than the special creation of the first chicken, so they might as well settle for Adam being the first actual man. Any other view violates the universal Covenant process, which originates in the Trinity.
And it removes the need for such highbrow primeval fiction. All of this discussion is merely an accommodation to people who do not respect the actual text of the Bible. Genesis 1 is certainly “Temple-structured,” but it’s not merely an inauguration service, and Adam is not chosen from among his brothers. The text says he was created from the dust in a Creation unmarred by sin. There’s not a non-Adamite to be seen anywhere. We are all Adamites. They ride roughshod over the text to accommodate the biggest flaw in modern science.
“Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man,
and death through sin,
and so death spread to all men because all sinned…” (Romans 5:12)
“For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” (1 Cor 15:22)
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[1] See BioLogos’ Jenga Bible.
[2] See Hugh Ross and a Shotgun.
[3] See my diagram in The Covenant Key, p. 236.
