B. Humanity.
One topic that troubled my soul was Walton's take on man - on humanity. With relatively scant attention given, he proposes that man was not specially formed originally; that man was little different than any other beast of the earth. Over time, this creature evolved, and then one week God made everything "functional." Before that, "pre-man," I would call him - with this body that was "fearfully and wonderfully made" (or maybe it wasn't yet), with a mind that surely was no different materially before Genesis 1 - was just perhaps a "prehuman hominid" evolving. That did not set well at all with my spirit, especially considering all the other passages of Scripture that deal with us, our bodies, our being, and how we were originally fashioned in the image of God. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them" (Gen.1:27).
Please contemplate the consequences of such claims, and some of the unanswerable questions such propositions raise. Considering God and His justice that He loves, how could He justly judge Adam and Eve, but yet their parents or siblings or neighbors were not "assessed morally" (p.168)? Is God not eternally just? So were our pre-Genesis 1 ancestral creatures without souls? If so, how did Adam and Eve relate to these beings? Would Adam share what God had done for them? Why are these others not mentioned in the Scriptures? Though Walton never states his position clearly, doesn't his view logically demand that Adam and Eve were not historical individuals? Consider the ramifications of affirming such teaching, for much Christian doctrine crumbles if Adam and Eve were not the first two created human beings and/or they never truly existed as individuals. Maybe that is the hope of some?
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