This project began over coffee—actually, many coffees—with my friend Pete Enns, an Old Testament scholar and leading voice in the controversy about Adam raging within evangelical Christianity. Enns had recently been forced out of Westminster Theological Seminary by fundamentalist gatekeepers, upset that he was asking tough questions in print about the Old Testament—questions to which many were paying attention.
We spent a lot of time talking about Adam and Eve. It seemed to both of us that this was the single most important issue driving evangelical Christianity’s strong opposition to science. This opposition spills over into Catholicism and into moderate and liberal Christianity to a degree. It has taken up residence in the Republican Party and plays a significant role in America’s declining global leadership in science. It plays into a general distrust of science in America that nurtures the rejection of modern cosmology, climate science, and vaccinations.
Pete and I had been in this conversation for much of our careers, and we were particularly struck by the creativity of Christians in coming up with ways to deflect the emerging scientific evidence that Adam and Eve could not have been historical characters. This creativity included all kinds of imaginative new Adams bearing little resemblance to the one in Genesis, but always with a clear place somewhere in history.
These conversations got me thinking more broadly about how Adam and Eve became what some have called the central myth of Western culture, and why so many Christians cannot part with them. Saving the Original Sinner is my contribution to this animated conversation.
I want to thank my agent, David Patterson of Foundry Literary + Media, for getting behind this project and securing me contracts with both Beacon Press in Boston and Audible Books. Thanks to my editor at Beacon, Amy Caldwell, for helping me navigate the many unfamiliar waters I encountered in this project, making many helpful suggestions. And thanks to my copy editor, Andrea Lee, for a host of valuable improvements. Good editors are a writer’s best friend and mine saved me from a host of literary embarrassments.
My friend John Schneider, who is a part of the story told in this book, read the entire manuscript and made many helpful suggestions. The chapter on Augustine and original sin was completely rewritten at his urging.
I have always thrived intellectually in an academic community, and during the writing of this book, I made a difficult professional transition from Eastern Nazarene College, where these topics are uncomfortably controversial, to Stonehill College, which is more open. I could not be happier in my new position and want to express appreciation to my provost, Joe Favazza, for his creative efforts in bringing me to Stonehill.
Finally, I want to thank my wife, Myrna, for providing encouragement and stability through the course of this project. This is my tenth book, and she has put up with far too many piles of paper, random piles of books, and endless boxes filled with “research materials” arriving from Amazon. I dedicate this book to her and thank her from the bottom of my heart for almost four decades of marriage.