B. B. Warfield's Essay "On the Antiquity and the Unity of the Human Race"

In 1911, B. B. Warfield addressed the theological significance of a growing challenge to the Christian faith. New geological data appeared to demonstrate that the earth was quite old, and this was becoming hugely problematic for those who accepted that the biblical date for the creation of the universe was 4004 BCE. This date was calculated from the biblical chronologies and is often attributed to Archbishop Ussher.

Warfield’s essay, entitled “On the Antiquity and the Unity of the Human Race”, was his effort to demonstrate that the importance of the biblical chronologies was to be found in their demonstration of the unity of the human race as descendants of Adam and Eve, not in their value for dating the creation of the earth. As Warfield explains, the genealogies given us in Scripture are not comprehensive—they are selective. It is wrong-headed to use them to attempt to determine the precise date of creation. Warfield devoted a significant portion of his essay to explain why such is the case.

The scientific evidence Warfield marshals throughout his 1911 essay is now badly outdated, which should be no surprise given how rapidly scientific data from the hard sciences, coupled with human DNA research, has changed the way we now understand human origins. All those cheek swabs and spit sent to DNA ancestry companies from those of us seeking to find out if we descend from royalty, coupled with significant DNA extraction from the skeletal remains collected for the last four centuries across Europe (and to a lesser degree elsewhere) and stored in university repositories are now being tested. These tests have generated a tidal wave of new DNA data. As this data is examined and correlated, it will, no doubt, impact our understanding of the age of the human race and may present a significant challenge to the biblical account of the creation of Adam. But as always, Christians will capably respond, since the two books of general and special revelation will not remain in conflict when all is said and done.

Despite the outdated scientific evidence he presents, Warfield does provide us with substantial help in dealing with the biblical account of human origins. He is right when he contends that the questions surrounding the age of the earth are matters of science, not theology. He is equally correct when he asserts that theology retains its supreme interest in the origin and unity of the human race. The Bible everywhere presupposes and requires that the human race is descended from Adam as seen in the doctrines of the imago Dei (the basis for the unity of our race), the fall of our race in the historical fact of Adam’s act of rebellion in Eden (including original sin and guilt), as well as our redemption from Adam’s treason in the person and work of Christ—all of which are necessary to Christianity as a religion of redemption.

The following are excerpts from Warfield’s essay, which challenges the dating of creation through the biblical genealogies, while at the same time defending the unity of the human race—all people are descended from Adam, and are therefore fallen, and in need of redemption—which is the Bible’s focus.

Warfield’s thesis statement is clear and direct. Note: page numbers from the original essay are supplied.

The fundamental assertion of the Biblical doctrine of the origin of man is that he owes his being to a creative act of God. Subsidiary questions growing out of this fundamental assertion, however, have been thrown from time to time into great prominence, as the changing forms of anthropological speculation have seemed to press on this or that element in, or corollary from, the Biblical teaching. (1)

The question of the antiquity of man has of itself no theological significance. It is to theology, as such, a matter of entire indifference how long man has existed on earth. (1)

Warfield points out how and why the questions about the date of creation, the origin of the human race and its antiquity have arisen as direct challenges to the Christian faith.

It is only because of the contrast which has been drawn between the short period which seems to be allotted to human history in the Biblical narrative, and the tremendously long period which certain schools of scientific speculation have assigned to the duration of human life on earth, that theology has become interested in the topic at all. There was thus created the appearance of a conflict between the Biblical statements and the findings of the scientific investigators, and it became the duty of the theologians to investigate the matter. The asserted conflict proves, however, to be entirely factitious. The Bible does not assign a brief span to human history: this is done only by a particular mode of interpreting the Biblical data, which is found on examination to rest on no solid basis. (2)

Warfield concedes that at first glace the Bible appears to teach that human origins are very recent (within Ussher’s date of 4004 BCE).

It must be confessed, indeed, that the impression is readily taken from a prima facie view of the Biblical record of the course of human history, that the human race is of comparatively recent origin. It has been the usual supposition of simple Bible readers, therefore, that the Biblical data allow for the duration of the life of the human race on earth only a paltry six thousand years or so: and this supposition has become fixed in formal chronological schemes which have become traditional and have even been given a place in the margins of our Bibles to supply the chronological framework of the Scriptural narrative. (2)

But this may not be the case since the chronologies are not given us for that purpose.

The general fact that the genealogies of Scripture were not constructed for a chronological purpose and lend themselves ill to employment as a basis for chronological calculations has been repeatedly shown very fully; but perhaps by no one more thoroughly than by Dr. William Henry Green in an illuminating article published in the Bibliotheca Sacra for April, 1890. These genealogies must be esteemed trustworthy for the purposes for which they are recorded; but they cannot safely be pressed into use for other purposes for which they were not intended, and for which they are not adapted. In particular, it is clear that the genealogical purposes for which the genealogies were given, did not require a complete record of all the generations through which the descent of the persons to whom they are assigned runs; but only an adequate indication of the particular line through which the descent in question comes. (3-4)

What matters is not a precise chronology, but the sequence and significance of those names listed in the chronologies.

The conclusion which we thus reach is greatly strengthened when we observe another fact with regard to these items of information. This is that the appearance that we have in them of a chronological scheme does not reside in the nature of the items themselves, but purely in their sequence. If we read the items of information attached to each name, apart from their fellows attached to succeeding names, we shall have simply a set of facts about each name, which in their combination make a strong impression of the vigor and greatness of humanity in those days, and which suggest no chronological inference. It is only when the names, with the accompanying comments, are put together, one after the other, that a chronological inference is suggested. The chronological suggestion is thus purely the effect of the arrangement of the names in immediate sequence; and is not intrinsically resident in the items of information themselves. (9)

There are different roles for science and for theology in this discussion. Here, Warfield also affirms the recent origin of the human race.

The question of the antiquity of man is accordingly a purely scientific one, in which the theologian as such has no concern. As an interested spectator, however, he looks on as the various schools of scientific speculation debate the question among themselves; and he can scarcely fail to take away as the result of his observation two well-grounded convictions. The first is that science has yet in its hands no solid data for a definite estimate of the time during which the human race has existed on earth. The second is that the tremendous drafts of time which were accustomed to be made by the geologists about the middle of the last century and which continue to be made by one school of speculative biology to-day have been definitively set aside, and it is becoming very generally understood that man cannot have existed on the earth more than some ten thousand to twenty thousand years. (11-12)

Warfield points out that science is fluid on this matter—presenting a moving target if you will.

The effect of these revised estimates of geological time has been greatly increased by growing uncertainty among the biologists themselves, as to the soundness of the assumptions upon which was founded their demand for long periods of time. These assumptions were briefly those which underlie the doctrine of evolution in its specifically Darwinian form; in the form, that is to say, in which the evolution is supposed to be accomplished by the fixing through the pressure of the environment of minute favorable variations, arising accidentally in the midst of minute variations in every direction indifferently. But in the progress of biological research, the sufficiency of this "natural selection" to account for the development of organic forms has come first to be questioned, and then in large circles to be denied. (18)

Warfield contends that the unity of the human race, which is essential to Christian theology, is the critical biblical issue.

If the controversy upon the antiquity of man is thus rapidly losing all but a historical interest, that which once so violently raged upon the unity of the race may be said already to have reached this stage. The question of the unity of the human race differs from the question of its antiquity in that it is of indubitable theological importance. It is not merely that the Bible teaches it, while, as we have sought to show, it has no teaching upon the antiquity of the race. It is also the postulate of the entire body of the Bible's teaching — of its doctrine of Sin and Redemption alike: so that the whole structure of the Bible's teaching, including all that we know as its doctrine of salvation, rests on it and implicates it. (18-19)

Warfield—a Kentuckian whose paternal family opposed slavery—finds the solution to the key problem raised by Darwinianism, which is understanding humanity evolution as involving “races” when Scripture clearly teaches a unified humanity.

In our natural satisfaction over this agreement between Scripture and modern science with respect to the unity of humanity, we must not permit ourselves to forget that there has always nevertheless existed among men a strong tendency to deny this unity in the interests of racial pride. Outside of the influence of the Biblical revelation, indeed, the sense of human unity has never been strong and has ordinarily been non-existent.(20)

The evolutionary hypothesis is for Warfield, nothing but speculative science, in which physical variation among humans is used to deny the unity of the race—its main theological flaw.

It is, however, only for its universal allowance at the hands of speculative science that the fact of the unity of the human race has to thank the evolutionary hypothesis. The evidence by which it is solidly established is of course independent of all such hypotheses. The evidence is drawn almost equally from every department of human manifestation, physiological, psychological, philological, and even historical. The physiological unity of the race is illustrated by the nice gradations by which the several so-called races into which it is divided pass into one another; and by their undiminished natural fertility when intercrossed . . . (21-22)

The unity of the race manifests itself in various ways according to Warfield—but especially in human speech and common cultural traditions. No doubt, he would add humanity’s unique self-consciousness to the discussion if asked.

Among the manifestations of the psycho-logical peculiarities of mankind, as distinguished from all other animate existences, is the great gift of speech which he shares with no other being: if all human languages cannot be reduced to a single root, they all exhibit a uniquely human faculty working under similar laws, and bear the most striking testimony to the unity of the race which alone has language at its command. The possession of common traditions by numerous widely separated peoples is only a single one of many indications of a historical intercommunion between the several peoples through which their essential unity is evinced, and by which the Biblical account of the origination of the various families of man in a single center from which they have spread out in all directions is powerfully supported. (23-24)

The unity of the race—a unit with common need, and in need of redemption—is essential to biblical teaching and Christian theology.

The assertion of the unity of the human race is imbedded in the very structure of the Biblical narrative. The Biblical account of the origin of man (Gen. i. 26-28) is an account of his origination in a single pair, who constituted humanity in its germ, and from whose fruitfulness and multiplication all the earth has been replenished. Therefore the first man was called Adam, Man, and the first woman, Eve, "because she was the mother of all living" (Gen. iii. 20); and all men are currently spoken of as the "sons of Adam" or "Man" (Deut. xxxii. 8; Ps. xi. 4; I Sam. xxvi. 19; I Kings viii. 39; Ps. cxlv. 12; etc.). The absolute restriction of the human race within the descendants of this single pair is emphasized by the history of the Flood in which all flesh is destroyed, and the race given a new beginning in its second father, Noah, by whose descendants again "the whole earth was overspread" (Gen. ix. 9), as illustrated in detail by the table of nations recorded in Genesis x. A profound religious-ethical significance is given to the differentiations of the peoples, in the story of the tower of Babel in the eleventh chapter of Genesis, in which the divergences and separations which divide mankind are represented as the product of sin: what God had joined together men themselves pulled asunder. Throughout the Scriptures therefore all mankind is treated as, from the divine point of view, a unit, and shared not only in a common need but in a common redemption. (23-24)

The biblical evidence for the unity of the race is clear and compelling and Warfield now summarizes it.

Accordingly, although Israel was taught to glory in its exaltation by the choice of the Lord to be His peculiar people, Israel was not permitted to believe there was anything in itself which differentiated it from other peoples; and by the laws concerning aliens and slaves was required to recognize the common humanity of all sorts and conditions of men; what they had to distinguish them from others was not of nature but of the free gift of God, in the mysterious working out of His purpose of good not only to Israel but to the whole world. This universalism in the divine purposes of mercy, already inherent in the Old Covenant and often proclaimed in it, and made the very keynote of the New — for which the Old was the preparation — is the most emphatic possible assertion of the unity of the race. Accordingly, not only do we find our Lord Himself setting His seal upon the origination of the race in a single pair, and drawing from that fact the law of life for men at large (Matt. xix. 4); and Paul explicitly declaring that "God has made of one every nation of men" and having for His own good ends appointed to each its separate habitation, is now dealing with them all alike in offering them a common salvation (Acts xvii. 26ff.); but the whole New Testament is instinct with the brotherhood of mankind as one in origin and in nature, one in need and one in the provision of redemption. The fact of racial sin is basal to the whole Pauline system (Rom. v. 12 ff.; I Cor. xv. 21 f.), and beneath the fact of racial sin lies the fact of racial unity. It is only because all men were in Adam as their first head that all men share in Adam's sin and with his sin in his punishment. And it is only because the sin of man is thus one in origin and therefore of the same nature and quality, that the redemption which is suitable and and may be made available for one is equally suitable and may be made available for all. It is because the race is one and its need one, Jew and Gentile are alike under sin, that there is no difference between Jew and Gentile in the matter of salvation either, but as the same God is Lord of all, so He is rich in Christ Jesus unto all that call upon Him, and will justify the uncircumcision only by faith (Rom. ix. 22-24, 28ff.; x. 12). Jesus Christ therefore, as the last Adam, is the Saviour not of the Jews only but of the world (John iv. 42; I Tim. iv. 10; I Jno. iv. 14), having been given to this His great work only by the love of the Father for the world (John iii. 16). The unity of the human race is therefore made in Scripture not merely the basis of a demand that we shall recognize the dignity of humanity in all its representatives, of however lowly estate or family, since all bear alike the image of God in which man was created and the image of God is deeper than sin and cannot be eradicated by sin (Gen. v. 3; ix. 6; I Cor. xi. 7; Heb. ii. 5ff.); but the basis also of the entire scheme of restoration devised by the divine love for the salvation of a lost race. (25-26)

Concludes Warfield, Scripture directs us to focus upon this: “The unity of the old man in Adam is the postulate of the unity of the new man in Christ.” The Bible does not focus upon the age of the earth, but on the unity of the race.

So far is it from being of no concern to theology, therefore, that it would be truer to say that the whole doctrinal structure of the Bible account of redemption is founded on its assumption that the race of man is one organic whole, and may be dealt with as such. It is because all are one in Adam that in the matter of sin there is no difference, but all have fallen short of the glory of God (Rom. ii. 22 f.), and as well that in the new man there cannot be Greek and Jew, circumcision and uncircumcision, barbarian, Scythian, bondman, freeman; but Christ is all and in all (Col. iii. 11). The unity of the old man in Adam is the postulate of the unity of the new man in Christ. (26)