LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) – Recent comments by a Southern Baptist seminary president that belief in a literal Adam and Eve is necessary to correctly understand Christ’s saving work continues to prompt debate.
Brian McLaren
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Brian McLaren, author of A New Kind of Christianity, linked recently in his blog to an Associated Baptist Press article headlined “SBC leader says much at stake in debate over Adam and Eve.” McLaren described quotes attributed to Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary as “recycling of the Scopes Monkey Trials in Christian higher education.”
Mohler said in the story that without a literal Adam and Eve “we will have to come up with an entirely new understanding of the gospel meta-narrative and the Bible’s storyline.”
“I firmly agree (in an ironic sort of way) with the good Dr. Mohler,” McLaren commented. “I think the conventional Constantinian ‘understanding of the gospel meta-narrative and the Bible's storyline’ is wrong, misguided, and dangerous. We do in fact need ‘an entirely new understanding’ — new, that is, compared to the status quo, but actually more ancient and primary than the conventional approach. In the process we'd better learn what a meta-narrative actually is and realize that it's not actually a great label to apply to the gospel. ‘The Bible's storyline’ is much better. That's what I've been writing and speaking about for the last decade, and hope to keep advocating for and contributing to for the next.”
Mohler rejoined in his own blog Aug. 31: “Indeed, McLaren has been writing about and calling for just such a theological revolution. In his 2010 book, A New Kind of Christianity, McLaren explicitly denies that the Bible reveals Adam as a historical figure. He also denies that we should believe in a Fall into sin that leads to a divine verdict against sinful humanity.”
Al Mohler
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Mohler said debate over whether Adam and Eve were historical figures has served to “clarify, once again, what is at stake.”
“The denial of a historical Adam and Eve as the first parents of all humanity and the solitary first human pair severs the link between Adam and Christ which is so crucial to the gospel,” Mohler concluded. “If we do not know how the story of the gospel begins, then we do not know what that story means. Make no mistake: a false start to the story produces a false grasp of the gospel.”
Mohler is a conservative theologian often quoted in media to counterbalance more progressive views. McLaren is a leader in the “emergent” church, which claims Christians need to become culturally relevant in order to be successful in their witness.
The two men have traded barbs before. In 2010 Mohler labeled McLaren’s just-published A New Kind of Christianity a “straightforward rejection … of the Christian meta-narrative” and a “false gospel.” He later described “postmodernism,” a catch-phrase used by the emergent church, as being just as dangerous yet “more seductive” than classical liberalism.
In March McLaren defended author Rob Bell against attacks by Mohler on Bell’s newest book, Love Wins, which questioned the traditional view of a literal and eternal hell. McLaren said he decided to speak out because “it’s not the attacks of your critics but the silence of friends that hurts the most.”
“If some like Dr. Mohler want to reserve the terms evangelical, orthodox and even Christian for those who hold fast to the traditional view of hell, they seem to have the power and moxy to do so,” McLaren wrote. “Those of us who can’t in good conscience defend that view any longer are certainly not condemning people who can’t in good conscience stop defending it. But we are hoping at least to be given the courtesy of a fair hearing.
“To impugn our motives (that we are selling out the Bible for the pottage of popularity), to reduce our concerns about love and justice to sentimentality, to dismiss us with the ‘L’ word and a questionable narrative surrounding it, and to demean as ‘secularized’ our attempt to articulate a fresh vision of the gospel probably won’t pass muster as a fair hearing.”
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Bob Allen is managing editor of Associated Baptist Press.