Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Man, Part 13.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org.

Welcome to Defenders. Happy Palm Sunday. I have to confess I could get pretty used to teaching defenders this way from the safety of my home office. This is pretty comfortable. Of course, the big disadvantages we don't have the benefit of class discussion, but I'd encourage you to leave your comments or questions on our

Reasonable Faith Facebook page.

Well, before we talk about man as sinner, there is one more facet of the doctrine of man

as created in God's image that we cannot avoid. Indeed it is a matter of great

controversy today among Christians and has been the focus of my study for the

past two years. That is the question of the historical Adam and Eve, which for

convenience sake I'll refer to simply as the question of the historical Adam and Eve, which for convenience sake I'll refer to simply as the

question of the historical atom.

Now we've already dealt with this question extensively under the doctrine of creation, so I'll

be able to simply summarize a great deal here. If I had it to do over again, I would move

much of the material dealing with the creation of man from the doctrine of creation to this

locus. As a result of my studies, this section of the Defender's course is significantly revised from the lessons I gave

in Defenders series two. The first question we need to deal with is whether the Bible commits

us to a historical Adam.

Traditionally, the church has understood Adam and Eve to be historical people,

from whom the entire human population is descended.

By contrast, the modern view of Adam is that the stories of Adam and Eve and their fall

into sin are purely mythological or symbolic, a story told in figurative language to describe

the universal plight of mankind. Adam is every man, not someone who lived and died in the prehistoric past.

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