Enns on Adam

That God does not hesitate to participate in the human drama, to encounter humanity within the limits of the human experience. That means that biblical writers wrote about the God they encountered as they understood him within their cultural limitations.

True encounter with God, expressed in truly human, cultural, terms.

That’s why I have no problem reading the Adam story as a story of origins like other stories of the ancient world, or understanding Paul’s take on Adam as an outworking of his Jewish world (where biblical texts are molded to fit an argument), and calling this kind of writing “God’s word.”

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/peterenns/2012/04/you-and-i-have-a-different-god-i-think

i) Of course, this isn’t the real reason that Peter Enns rejects the historicity of Adam. That's an ex post facto rationalization.

Peter Enns rejects the historical of Adam because he thinks science has invalidated Gen 2. It’s that simple.

ii) By the same token, it’s deceptive for him to say he reads the “the Adam story as a story of origins like other stories of the ancient world.” For he’s not reading the Adam story from the same perspective as an ancient reader. Rather, he’s reading the Adam story from the standpoint of a modern reader with modern assumptions. He’s not putting himself in the place of the ancient reader. He comes to the Adam story with the prior assumption that the story is fictitious. But was that the default assumption of an ancient Jew?