The Westminster California types who see themselves as defenders of Reformed orthodoxy are adamant in making the view that the Mosaic law is “a republication of the covenant of works” a sine qua non of orthodoxy on justification.
Now, it so happens that I absolutely agree that there is a close relationship between Adam and Moses, although I think it’s wrongheaded to label this in terms of “covenant of works.” Biblically, these folks simply don’t “get” the nature of either the Adamic covenant or the Mosaic.
Nonetheless, Romans 5 teaches that Torah intensifies the Sin and death state brought on by the fall. The problem for West-Cal and their allies is that the primary Israel-fall depicted in Romans is the stumbling over Christ worked out from the end of Romans 9 and on into the first part of Romans 11. And of course, that won’t do, since the whole point is to posit a contrast to the new covenant, not a parallel (what I call a relational typology between the covenants that shows a fundamental shared structure).
In the midst of all of this, there is a genuine Adam issue that is getting snowed under by the avalanche of rhetoric: many of these “defenders of orthodoxy” have completely abandoned the biblical doctrine of six day creation and a young earth. If you want to ask where to locate the continental divide that threatens to throw not only Reformed niceties, but the whole Christian enterprise into the Pacific (what a coincidence), it is right here.
Why? Because denial of the biblical chronology is an attack on the coherence of a biblical view of Adam. Just ask any evolutionist Christian to talk about Adam and Eve. There are basically three choices: deny their historicity altogether; generalize them out of existence; or arbitrarily claim that humanoids evolved and that at some point God placed His image in a sufficiently evolved pair. But even such a concession as the latter cannot satisfy anyone if we were are going to take the New Testament’s Last Adam Christology seriously – much less if we are going to take Genesis seriously. Moreover, it’s not possible for such a view to stand the test of time – it’s leaning too far down a greased slope, and carries no weight exegetically or “scientifically.” (And yes, I place “scientifically” in quotation marks quite advisedly. When science claims to arbitrate authoritatively about the distant past, it is well beyond its bounds. It is no longer science but conjecture, and ultimately faith – sans revelation.)
The bottom line is that the growing cave-in to macro-evolution is an attack on the very foundations of Christianity. If the R. Scott Clarks of the Church want us to take them seriously as defenders of orthodoxy, they could at least start with hermeneutical principles that support rather than undermine orthodox Christology. You can’t have a covenant with an ahistorical person.
Get Genesis right, and then maybe we can talk.
Meanwhile, please excuse us if we laugh at your ranting while you try to strain out gnats and force us to swallow camels.
