Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins

Written by David N. Livingstone Reviewed By Hans Madueme

Prior to the seventeenth century, church and society widely assumed the historicity of Adam and Eve, a young earth, a global flood, etc. But as new data emerged from sources like the voyages of discovery and pagan historiographies, their chronologies conflicting starkly with the Bible, bold thinkers proposed a pre-adamite theory to make sense of the new world. The thesis: Adam was not the first human being; there was a whole race of pre-adamites who populated the earth before God created Adam. David Livingstone tells the fascinating story of this theory with its many twists and turns. The account is rich, brimming with a wealth of primary source material and forgotten protagonists in the history of science and religion. Livingstone’s main thesis is that the pre-adamite theory was unusually flexible; depending on the scientific, theological, political, or ideological contexts, the pre-adamite strategy was used for different purposes and in different ways. In nine chapters, Livingstone discusses the origins of the doctrine in early history and how it received its most sustained defense by Isaac La Peyrère in the seventeenth century (on La Peyrère, see also Richard Popkin’s work). At the time, it was judged a monumental heresy. From there, pre-adamism remained contested but, like a coat with many colors, others later used it to harmonize Scripture with the emerging sciences; it featured in the early science of ethnology; conservative Christians like B. B. Warfield and R. A. Torrey used it in their encounter with Darwin’s theory of evolution; and others wielded the doctrine for racist, white supremacist purposes. Readers of this journal will not find compelling answers to the most important theological questions raised by this story, but nonetheless we are all in Livingstone’s debt—he has taken a wide array of complex, often confusing, historical material and turned it into a very interesting and learned historical account.


Hans Madueme

Hans Madueme is associate professor of theological studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia.

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