A Creation Without Grace: The Brutal Armstrongist Concept of Pre-adamic Man

 

Homo Naledi 

A Creation Without Grace

The Brutal Armstrongist Concept of Pre-adamic Man

By Scout

"A person's a person, no matter how small" – Dr. Seuss

 

Decades ago, Herman Hoeh mounted the stage in the Field House in Big Sandy and delivered a startling message.  I sat in the middle of a large audience and listened spellbound.  He explained that ancient man was not only pre-Flood but pre-adamic.  Up to that point, Armstrongist history maintained that ancient humans, such as Neanderthal, were descended from Adam but lived before the Noachian Flood and within the boundaries of the 6,000-year period.  Hoeh further stated that the pyramids of Egypt were not built by our “Israelite” ancestors in Egyptian slavery but were built by pre-Flood peoples.  Later on, I don’t know when or where I first heard it, this understanding included the idea that pre-adamic man was not really a true human and that salvation was not applicable to him.  God, then, was a great being who created sentient or near-sentient beings throughout hundreds of thousands of years and discarded them.  It was unsettling. It was not a picture of grace. 

(Note: Oddly, while there was a published Armstrongist article based on the Young Earth Creationist idea that all ancient men were descended from Adam, there was never an official publication asserting Hoeh’s profound revision of Armstrongist history presented that day in the Field House.  I searched an archive of WCG literature and could not find the term “pre-adamic man” or its variant spellings. Any downstream theological implications of Hoeh’s idea were halted by neglect.  I have no explanation for this.) 

Hoeh’s presentation was unsettling because it was a view of God that one would need to process. If there is anything that we can learn from the anthropomorphic portrayal of God in the Bible, it is that the creation reflects the creator.  The corollary proposition is that your understanding of the creation informs your view of God.  I paint using watercolor or acrylic and sometimes mixed media.  What I create in a work of art reflects my aesthetics, interests and viewpoints.  My work is unsurprisingly not perfect because I am not perfect.  I would like my art to be perfect but it never will be.  God works in the medium of reality.  He is perfect and, when he is finished with it, so will be his creation.  The question is how does pre-adamic man fit into this picture. 

Redemption of the Cosmos by Renewal

God created the Cosmos and the Cosmos reflects who he is.  That is why he is going to fix it, restore it and in its final perfect disposition it will be beautiful, shining, new, at peace and redeemed.   There is the creation, then the Cross and finally the renewal of all things or the Apokatastasis.  Joh 3:16 reads in Greek, “For God so loved the Cosmos that he gave his only begotten son…”.  We find in Romans 8, “that the creation itself will be set free from its enslavement to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.”  

Jesus spoke of the Apokatastasis when he stated, “Truly I tell you, at the renewal (Greek, palingenesia from the words for “again” and “generation”) of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory …”.    In Acts 3:21, Peter refers to it as the “restitution of all things (Greek, apokatastasis).” Paul sees in this restitution later that all Israel will be saved, not just those who become Christians during the present era but all Israel for all time. Restitution is a time-spanning principle. It covers not only the living but also the dead.   God created all things from the beginning and what he created he will restore in the Eschaton.  If this line or reasoning yet seems tenuous, consider the explicit statement in Revelation 21:5, “"He who was seated on the throne said, 'Behold, I am making all things new’”.   Nowhere does scripture suggest that God created things blithely.  Nowhere does it suggest that he regards any of what he created to be discardable.  This would include ancient man such as, say, Homo Naledi.

Homo Naledi

They were a different species of hominid genus.  They lived 300,000 years ago and they were small. They stood at about 4’9” and weighed around 100 pounds.  Their brain volume was about a third of ours.  Their brain size was only slightly larger than that of a chimpanzee.   The archaeology indicates that they were around about 100,000 years and then went extinct about 236,000 YA.  They co-existed with early modern humans who appeared on earth around 300,000 YA.  In fact, God made all kinds of hominids.  The more scientists sift through the strata the more types they find. 

The Homo Naledi were not just animals that God created nonchalantly.  They had human characteristics.  At the Rising Star Cave in South Africa there is a rich deposit of Homo Naledi fossils and artifacts.  It has been startling to paleo-archaeologists that these ancients were in some ways so human-like.  They had reverence for the treatment of their dead.  They were driven by emotion to sequester away their loved ones so their dead bodies would not undergo visible decay or destruction by animals. They went way out of their way, over difficult descents, to bury their dead in a deep chamber of the cave.  This has a ceremonial quality to it. They illuminated the way with fires.  At one point in the descent, they had to engage in teamwork to get the body of the deceased across a deep chasm.  Someone had to jump to the other side of the chasm so the body could be passed over.  In the cemetery chamber, there were markings on the wall.  The conjecture is that it identified who was buried there.  Finally, in one of the excavated graves, the interred person seems to have a tool in his hand.  The tool might have been a graver for making marks on the cave walls.  

So, we have a group of human-like beings who were to some degree sentient.  The complexity of their burial ritual indicates they must have had some form of communication, probably speech, to coordinate team efforts.  They revered the dead in a way that is ceremonial: considerate burial in a cave requiring difficult passages to accomplish.  The tool in the hand of one of the deceased may indicate a belief in the continuation of life beyond death.   Animals don’t do any of this.  And the profound conclusion that we must acknowledge is that they were created by God.  Does God create anything as a lark?

The Armstrongist Version of Evolution

I believe that evolution happened.  It was a tool that God used to order the biological creation on earth.  I do not, however, believe that evolution was wholly random.  I believe it was directed by God.  Evolution is theistic. Yet, some literalist interpreters reject evolution as omitting God from the creation picture.  I believe Armstrongists fall into this category. 

In considering the case of Homo Naledi as an archetypical pre-adamic human, it is important to recognize that evolution asserts a continuity between us and ancient humans.  We are not descended from Homo Naledi but we are descended from similar hominids and probably had an ancient common ancestor with the Naledi.  Armstrongism rejects biological evolution and also, along with this, rejects any continuity between humans and what Armstrongism considers to be pre-adamic humans.  But it is ironic that Armstrongists believe in another form of evolution – one that diminishes God. They believe in the progressive development of God.  They believe that God undergoes development and that we may become God-as-God-is-God by also following a line of progressive development.  Progressive development, aka evolution, is the pathway to Godhood. 

So, Armstrongists believe in an unusual form of evolution. I cannot furnish documentary evidence of this. Like the topic of pre-adamic man, there is nothing officially published on this that I know of.  What I found to support this were notes from in a file in the Ambassador College Big Sandy library.  The unpublished notes were from a WCG Ministerial Conference held in Pasadena where Herman Hoeh was one of the speakers.  I have since misplaced these notes.  They are probably somewhere in a box in the garage.  I’ll probably die without ever seeing them again. 

Hoeh explained at the Conference that God functions just like a human engineer.  He must make models and then test the models to see if they will work. He would then evaluate the results of testing and make improvements.  And this experimentation by God is what generated the fossil humanoids (I believe Hoeh used that word) we find preserved in the geologic strata.  (After all, someone has to explain why there is the progressive development of hominids in the fossil record without recourse to evolution.)  So, there is no continuity between modern humans and, say, Neanderthals.  Neanderthal apparently was a failed experiment and is now extinct. The complication in this case is that almost all non-Africans (There were no Neanderthals in Africa but there was some later back-migration.) are part Neanderthal.  Get yourself a genetic test.  So, there is some biological continuity between modern humans and some ancient humans.  Other ancient hominids may be reflected in our genome.  The jury still out.  

What the Armstrongist view means is that evolution did not take place at the biological level but took place in the mind of God.  God had to learn to make man.  He had to start with a simple understanding and through experimentation progressively develop a more sophisticated understanding.  So, Armstrongists see God as evolving.  As you might guess, I think this is malarkey.  God is absolute.  He creates reality.  He makes things exist.  He does not evolve. He is not a Gnostic demiurge. He is not like us and we will never, ever rise to his level as created beings.  And in this view of God evolving there is a brutalness and gracelessness that becomes an inherent part of the creation.

The Brutality of the Armstrongist Pre-adamic Man Belief

In the view of God as engineer, making and discarding progressively more sophisticated hominid models, there is a hierarchy of the results of experimentation.  The failed and unacceptable occupy the lower tiers and at the pinnacle is modern man. The hominids in the lower tiers can then be discarded. There is no grace for them. They are not salvable or redeemable.  They were just experimental biobots or “crash dummies”, a means to an end, that we need not be concerned about no matter how close they might have been to us.  In the case of Homo Naledi, God let them live and propagate for 100,000 years and then cavalierly discarded them, supposedly.  They had emotion, families, care for one another, reverence for a lived life, marked the loss of life, used symbols and tools and all this was simply trash-canned.  Some local sage may kick-back in his armchair and wax philosophical and say “That’s the way life is.  Its harsh.”  Yet, a major theme of both the OT and NT is that “life in the fallen world is not the way it’s supposed to be.”  So, how Homo Naledi, et al, is viewed makes a difference. 

What Difference Does It Make?

The way we think that God treats his creation forms our view of the nature of God. It tells us who God is. It forms our view as to what is acceptable for us to do with the creation.  If influences how we treat other people. The God who is a God of grace and cares for his creation is a different God from the God who values hominids according to a hierarchy and discards the ones that don’t meet expectations.  A church that follows the latter God just might value people in its congregations according to some hierarchy with some people being more important that others and maybe with some people being just a nameless resource.   The topic of ancient man may seem like just another subject for nerds but it is profound spiritually and shapes one’s view of God and denominational social practice.

C.S. Lewis said that nobody would deduce that there is a benevolent God based on observing Nature.  Nature is brutal and competitive.  Lewis instead deduced that the understanding of a God of grace must then be revealed knowledge.  And, as most Christians see it, the present state of Nature is a cross-sectional – just for the present.  It is the final disposition, wrought by God in grace, that is telling. And it is my view, that in the last analysis, Homo Naledi will be restored and will have a role.  When Jesus said “all things” I believe he meant “all things."

Summation

God has no reason to experiment.  He transcends us.  Hoeh conjectured that God learns and makes like humans.  That is not so.. The Cosmos is not a sandbox where God builds sandcastles and destroys them as he tries to figure out what to do next.  I do not know the destiny of Homo Naledi.  But I do know that the God of grace certainly does not discard beings who are at some stage of sentience.  He may not discard anything – including even your pet cat.   Theories that posit such a God are in error and besmirch God’s character of grace.  Extinction is counteracted by restoration.  In the short term it may seem that all is in disarray but in the long term all is ordered.  God created Homo Naledi and I look forward to seeing what God will do for them.  One day we will arrive at the New Earth and New Heavens and all will be restored and beautiful and right.  All things shining. 

Reference

A good summary of the research on Homo Naledi is the Netflix documentary titled “Cave of Bones,” part of the Unknown series.