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

Part 20. For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

Welcome to Defenders. We're so glad that you could join us on this podcast. Today, I'd like to say a few

brief remarks by way of evaluation of the doctrine of the fall before we turn to a new subsection

dealing with the nature of sin. Now, on the one hand, there's clearly truth in the modern interpretation of the fall of

Adam and Eve. As their very names indicate, Adam and Eve do have a symbolic significance in the

story. Adam is just the Hebrew word for man. So Genesis 1 is speaking in

universal terms. In the beginning, God created man, Adam. This, I think, shows clearly that

Adam is a sort of symbol of mankind.

Moreover, as we've seen, the narrative of the fall is filled with all sorts of symbolic

or figurative elements, like the tree of life, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the serpent in the garden

who deceives the woman, an anthropomorphic deity who is physically walking in the garden,

and so forth.

Nevertheless, in spite of the figurative language and the obvious symbolic function of the narrative,

we've also seen good biblical grounds for thinking that Adam was an actual historical person.

Thus, it seems to me that despite their symbolic function in the generative narrative,

Adam and Eve are regarded by the biblical writers as genuine historical persons.

I think what we can say is that the creation and fall of man are historical events that actually happened, though they are told in a dramatic

literary form involving figurative speech. The story of Adam and Eve has been called a historical

drama, is a dramatized or figurative story telling of an actual

historical event. I've argued previously that a more sensitive genre analysis of Genesis

1 to 11 would classify the stories of the

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