That is really excellent news. Keep posting links to articles here, with relevant quotes. This is really good news.
The new article is really excellent: Religion before Adam | The Hump of the Camel
Religion Before Adam
These three dramatic “scenes”, into which one may place the entire content of the Bible, are the Eden narrative with the consequences of Adam’s failure and exile ending at Babel (Genesis 2:4-11), the story of Israel leading to its failure and exile in Babylon (the rest of the Old Testament), and the story of Christ leading to the defeat of Satan (here, here, and here), the victory over sin, and the final fulfilment of God’s new creation (the prophetic New Covenant teaching after the Exile and the New Testament itself).
On this framework, the narrative function of the creation narrative in Gen 1:1-2:3 is to provide the backdrop to this drama (it does many other things too, but I’m concerned here with its role in story). If, in this way, the creation story is simply to show us the kind of world in which God began to intervene decisively to inaugurate a new creation and a glorified human race, it is less surprising that it tells us nothing of its history.
But when man comes on the scene, he comes as a rational being both by deduction from theology and by simply looking at the remains he has left behind. It follows that in God’s good natural creation, mankind would worship naturally, but more rationally than the beasts. We would expect, under Genealogical Adam, to find man as a worshipping creature, because the universe is a worshipping universe.
And @jongarvey makes a tentative proposal on pre-Adam Religion:
My conclusion, then – tentative, as all these things must be at present – is that primitive religion was natural theology. They worshipped whom they did not know, but that was sufficient for the nature they had been given. My own impression is that they did not hanker after either intimacy with God, nor life eternal, for those things were only revealed to Adam – and they matter to us because we are all Adamic, and not primitive men and women (and it has to be said that even amongst Adam’s children there are those with little curiosity about realtionship with God or the hereafter).
I also approve the use of our negotiated language: Adam and adams, not Adamites - #18 by anon46279830. I thinking carefully settling that could bring larger coherence to the work we are doing. Great job.
Any how, that is an excellent article @jongarvey. Curious to see how your imagination develops this further.