The First Parents

With all the understandable brouhaha over Peter Enns' recent book, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins (Brazos, 2012) in which Enns decisively rejects the historicity of Adam and Eve, it is good to be reminded why the church has historically viewed the historicity of the first parents as theologically important and even crucial.  The consistently thoughtful Kevin DeYoung has helpfully summarized the matter over on the Gospel Coalition site here, and the piece has been picked up by the AquilaReport.

In my judgment, the latest Enns book is unfortunate on a host of levels.  For example, the author buys into a now quite tattered diachronic critical position on matters of authorship and Pentateuchal textual development, he hopelessly conflates the phenomenological/conventional views of the cosmos evident in the OT (and long recognized by a variety of Reformed scholars and theologians) with the pagan mythical explanations of that cosmology, and he undercuts the church's historic doctrine of biblical authority.  But those are issues for another time and venue.