Pastor John, as you know there's an ongoing debate about the historicity of Adam. Did Adam really exist or not? And of course if Adam existed and if he was created from the dust, that creates all sorts of tensions in this world. Before we get into the theological implications for pastors and for missionaries, explain more about why there's so much debate over the historicity of Adam.

Well first of all, it is in fact ironically what two days or three days before you called, I got a letter from a scholar who has been asked to write for a new book that's coming out on the four views of the historical Adam and he just wanted to get my take on the pastoral implications.

So there's a just an off-the-front-burner example of how pressing it is. Before you called, just on a lark, I called up Wikipedia and typed in humanity or something like that and here's a sentence, "The splitting date between human and chimpanzee lineages is placed around 4.8 million years ago during the late Miocene epoch." Okay so this state is a pure fact right there in the article on Wikipedia that number one, human beings are the present, not the final, capstone on a millions or billions of year evolutionary process from inanimate raw matter to what we have as human beings today and the emergence of what we call human happened millions of years ago.

So there's part of the origin for why it's a debate. When you go to the Bible, the picture you have is of an Adam and Eve created especially by God. I don't think from preceding forms of human or of animal life and created a good bit more recently than millions of years ago.

You might stretch the genealogical tables out you know 10,000 years if there's some missing links but not much further than that. So there's this contrast between what the Bible presents as Adam and Eve created in a special way directly by God more recently and then there's the world's view of God either not or being involved in an evolutionary process that goes over millions of years.

Pastor John, so what would you say to the pastor of a local church who says, "You know I really don't care about how humanity started, I'm just called to preach the gospel to the people in my church right now." What would you say to him? Well where would I start?

I think I'd probably start by asking him how important the Bible is in his ministry. If you tend to minister with a kind of canon within a canon, like you pick out a center that you love and you just make that your Bible rather than the whole of the Bible, then I probably am going to have a hard time answering you.

But if you care about the whole Bible as God's inspired word and believe that whatever center you believe is there is centered in the whole of Revelation because God thought it wise to give us the whole book in order to protect the center, then I think I would say you have to care about the way human beings are characterized and human beings are originating.

And the Bible presents a view that if you deny the historical Adam, you're probably going to set your people on a trajectory of understanding the Bible or how to read the Bible that could undo things that you think are more central. So the first answer is going to be hermeneutical.

What are you doing to the Bible when you neglect or when you disregard the teachings of the Bible that Jesus in Luke 3 is traced back as a descendant all the way back to Adam, not just to Abraham? What are you going to do when the prophets themselves refer, like Hosea, to the covenant with Adam?

What are you going to do when Jude refers to Enoch as the seventh from Adam? What are you going to do with Genesis 2 and 3 where the foundational nature of our problem in sin is drawn from the disobedience of our original father? And then I think the most important thing I'd say to him is that when you get to Romans 5 verses 12 to 21, the way Paul sets up the whole problem with humanity and the whole resolution of the problem in Jesus is by saying that Adam disobeyed God and in him we all were counted as sinners and Jesus obeyed God perfectly and all who are in him are counted as righteous.

So the whole structure of salvation, particularly justification, in Paul's mind is rooted in the way humanity relates to a single father, Adam, and the way the new humanity relates to a single father, Jesus. So I think hermeneutically it is going to be damaging for his people and they will not learn how to read their Bibles and they will start undermining teachings of the Bible, and then as far as salvation goes, justification goes, you're going to undo the Pauline structure of biblical theology if you do away with this historical Adam.

Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. If you have a question for Pastor John, please send it to us via email. Send those questions to askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org. Please include your first name and your hometown. You can find thousands of other resources from Pastor John online at desiringgod.org.

I'm your host Tony Ranke, thanks for listening.