Must a Genealogical Adam be a Sequential Genesis Reading?

@Guy_Coe:

Because of the brevity of your sentence, I can’t tell why you even think I’m discussing Mark’s position in some way that over-sells what Mark is saying.

How about this:
Invoking Jesus as “blah blah something something” with Adam should be pretty generic. And it still qualifies as fairly mystical. Most Christians don’t attempt any unification of the two personalities. Adam is the archetype of flawed humanity, while Jesus is the archetype of perfected humanity.

But as any good historian of medieval Catholicism knows, there’s always room for some additional nuance when it comes to Jesus!

Because Mark is not speaking of the unification of the personalities of Adam and Christ, but the establishment of the Logos in some form that becomes the template for humanity.
That’s my best understanding of him. I’m sure he’ll clarify.
I can see how you might read him the way you’re proposing, but (to use Mark’s words) “the man that appears in the garden,” whom Mark is referring to, appears alongside Adam (who is entirely physical --not angelic). This is the Malak Elohim, The Angel of the LORD, Who “walks with Adam in the cool of the evenings,” among other things.

My mistake, I used the term “unification” when I quite certainly meant to limit my discussion to

This is exactly what he said - - and it’s pretty mystical!

Clarified a bit more above, while you were still writing your reply. Hope the new stuff helps. BTW, his proposal is, to my tastes, not unorthodox, just a bit late and, again, in my view, textually contrived. The same problem he finds with my “visionary dream instead of miraculous manufacture” proposal.

I think maybe you 2 just like to argue. All I was trying to say is that you both are inclined to the mystical.
His description of the Logos with Adam, is a mystical presentation. Your presentation of Adam having visions is mystical.

I don’t think there is any need to deny it.

A unification of two personalities would be mystical, which you have since demurred from. Assuming human form is more spiritual than mystical, as is having a vision regarding the importance of something, again , in my opinion. Your are free to use “mystical,” if that’s what you think you see.
Cheers!

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BTW, given this topic’s (new?) title, even this stubborn avocate for a sequential reading will agree that a GA approach doesn’t rise and fall with it. As long as those humans outside the garden are conceived of as “created in God’s image,” as well, there’s no necessity to link the two as inseperable. I just find that the sequential view makes better sense of the entire picture, so to speak, than a recapitulatory view. The recapitulatory view does not address the question of “those outside the garden” definitively enough to rule out a kind of dehumanizing utilitarianism from creeping in, from where I sit. In a sequential reading, the Christian warrant for positing a universal human monogenism is established, despite the often mosaic nature of the evidence of how we got here from paleoanthropology.

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Thought experiment: simply try reading the two accounts as entirely separate, casting aside the arguments about whether or not Adam and Eve are “specially created” --obviously, someone was, right? – and ask what happens to the model if they don’t come on the scene until well after the seventh day has begun (that is, after the “conclusion” of the first pericope). That means 1:27 is also about people who predate Adam and Eve.
Even Mark has admitted that the Fall couldn’t have taken place prior to the end of day six, because God sums up the work up to that point as all being “very good.”
God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. - Genesis 1:31 NASB
That means that, at most, only chapter 2:4b through to the end of chapter two, can even be conceived as taking place during “day six” --and it could have taken place well after that, even. There’s nothing the text that would prohibit this, even if Adam’s “de novo creation” is asserted, along with Eve’s, as taking place well after the second pericope begins.

This is my interpretation as well (with, naturally, de novo Adam/Eve in chapter 2, to prevent religious war).

i just going to sit hear in the corner and wait for something being discussed that can remotely be called scientific investigation.

@Patrick

You could get “tuned up” on the studies showing how quickly “genealogical co-option” occurs even without a God pushing buttons. That’s really the only NOVEL science PeacefulScience.Org is pitching.

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Theology was once understood as the “queen of the sciences,” and the scientific method in a Western context, post-Enlightenment, actually owes its source to the methods developed for Biblical exploration. Ask the secular philosophers of history, and they’ll tell you why science arose much more rapidly among people “exposed to the book.”
That said, I’d be surprised if this territory was completely unknown to you.

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The reason science arose more rapidly amongst those exposed to the book is well documented:

parents taught their children to read from a very young age… in order to read the bible.
All that literacy allowed protestant countries a critical mass of adaptability and education that was undeniably to the advantage of the whole country.

I would agree with you @Patrick. These details are extraneous to science and debatable within theology. @gbrooks9 is right that we do look at interesting science, but that is not what we are finding here.

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Josh is right; we’re just trying figure out what our various interpretive models would predict. This is how one forms a testable hypothesis in theology, as well as in science.

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How do you falsify a testable hypothesis in theology?

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@Patrick By comparing Scripture with Scripture in a theological framework. At that point, if the proposal is coherent, and it can be expected be in evidence in the scientific record, an investigation can be launched using responsible methods of scientific inquiry and tentative thinking as regards the model’s fit with the record of nature. That is part of the theological enterprise, so no worries --I am not positing some “theological method” of doing science. I am, however, describing the means by which claims of “harmony” or even “concordance” with science are discovered and evaluated.

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