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As far as I know, chimpanzees didn't share in the sin of Adam.
True, but they ARE part of the Creation, which has been (I'm told) messed up.
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Matthew 25:34
"Then the King will say to those on his right, `Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.
Mark 16:15
He said to them, "Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.
John 17:24
"Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.
Romans 8:18-25
18. I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.
19. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed.
20. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope
21. that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
22. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
23. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.
24. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?
25. But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently. |
Romans 8:38-39
38. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,
39. neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Ephesians 1:4
For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.
Hebrews 4:3
Now we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said, "So I declared on oath in my anger, `They shall never enter my rest.'" And yet his work has been finished since the creation of the world. (Kinda hard for us "C" folks to think that a continuing creation is part of God's plan.)
1 Peter 1:20
He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake.
2 Peter 3:3-7
3. First of all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires.
4. They will say, "Where is this `coming' he promised? Ever since our fathers died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation."
5. But they deliberately forget that long ago by God's word the heavens existed and the earth was formed out of water and by water.
6. By these waters also the world of that time was deluged and destroyed.
7. By the same word the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men.
Within limits, I suppose, you could take the story of the Fall as an allegory of the corruption of good by evil. The problem is that if you pin it on Man, you have to ignore the genetic evidence that retrotransposons (evil little buggers that they are) entered the human line long before we diverged from the apes; the same goes for much of the other nonsense in the genome. Unless you ascribe to Satan powers of time travel, or unless you say all of the scientifc evidence was put there to fool us, the timeline doesn't work.
The passage from Hebrews you quote - that the creation was completed long ago - would seem to be consistent with the beliefs of Christian evolutionists who hypothesize that God set up the right initial conditions for the Universe, and everything imply ran deterministically from there. On the other hand, you have to wonder - what's the difference between a highly detached deity creating the right set of initial conditions and stepping back, and a near infinite set of universes, one of which has the same physical laws by accident, which we happen to inhabit? In one case the Universe was created for us; in the other this happens to be the only one of an incomprehenisibly large number in which we could possibly have evolved, and thus, in a sense, it was created for us.