PROLOGUE
INTRODUCTION: Our Common Ancestor
CHAPTER ONE: First Man or First Jew? The Mysterious Patriarch of
the Tribe of Israel
CHAPTER TWO: The Two Essential Adams of the Apostle Paul
CHAPTER THREE: The Devil Made Them Do It: Adam’s Free Choice, and
Ours
CHAPTER FOUR: The Original Sinner: Augustine’s Attack on Adam as
Everyman
CHAPTER FIVE: The Late Middle Ages: Adam Everywhere
CHAPTER SIX: The Origin of Mrs. Cain (and the Posse That Chased Her
Husband)
CHAPTER SEVEN: The First Man and The First Minutes: Adam and the
Age of the Earth
CHAPTER EIGHT: Too Many Adams? Or None at All?
CHAPTER NINE: Mark of Cain, Curse of Ham: Is God a Racist?
CHAPTER TEN: The Creationist Über-Adam: Why the First Son Could
Marry His Sister
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Science, Antiscience, and the Extinction of
Adam
CONCLUSION: Wishful Thinking? We Are All Original Sinners
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A WORD ABOUT BIBLICAL TRANSLATIONS
NOTES
INDEX
Karl Giberson teaches science and religion at Stonehill College and is a leading voice in America’s creation/evolution controversy. He is the author of ten books, including Saving Darwin, a Washington Post “Best Book of 2008,” and The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, with Randall Stephens. He lives in Hingham, Massachusetts. He lives on the web at www.karlgiberson.com.
“An erudite exploration of the Bible’s first man.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“What is the future of a Christian faith that requires an untenable
self-destructive original sin/salvation theology? Honest, candid,
enlightening, and disruptive, Giberson establishes a long-overdue
foundation for viable faith and challenges Christians to rediscover
the wonder, mystery, and reality of their God.”
—Richard G. Colling, retired professor of Biology, Olivet Nazarene
University. Professor Colling departed Olivet after thirty
years of teaching because of criticism of his support of evolution
in his book Random Designer
“Was Adam the first human being and was his poor choice to eat the
forbidden fruit the ‘original sin’ that ruined things for the rest
of us? That’s the question that just won’t go away, and for many
fundamentalist and evangelical Christians today it is the hill to
die on—and the hill on which to sacrifice those who disagree.
Through surveying the history of Adam from ancient Israel to the
current crisis, and rooted in his own extensive experience,
Giberson gives us a compelling, engaging, and accessibly
written exposé of this troubling trend—and points us
toward a better way of embracing this foundational biblical
story.”
—Peter Enns is Abram S. Clemens professor of Biblical Studies at
Eastern University, and author of The Bible Tells Me So: Why
Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It. Professor Enns
was forced to leave Westminster Theological Seminary after 14 years
of teaching and administration because of his book Inspiration and
Incarnation: Evangelicals and The Problem of the Old Testament.
“Saving the Original Sinner chronicles Christianity's long struggle
to understand the meaning of Adam and his Fall into sin, even as it
became clear that Adam never existed. Giberson pays homage to those
souls bold enough to wrestle with this reality—and who often paid a
heavy price for their efforts to integrate the findings of science
with the Christian faith. I join those scholars in gratitude
for this wise, informative, eloquent, and yet troubling book. The
intellectual viability of evangelicalism may well depend on whether
its institutions act with the courage that Giberson commends
to them.”
—John Schneider teaches philosophy at Grand Valley State University
and is publishing actively on the implications of evolutionary
science for Christian Faith. Long a leading evangelical theologian,
Professor Schneider was forced to leave Calvin College after 25
years of teaching for publishing a paper suggesting that Adam and
Eve were not historical figures.
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