Re: [asa] Original Sin and Genesis 3

At 05:55 PM 12/8/2007, philtill@aol.com wrote:
>I suspect there that the Catholic and Protestant theological
>tradition has misinterpreted the Genesis account of the Fall,
>because we are operating with pre-conceived notions rather than
>listening to the text. Genesis 3 says the tree is named the "Tree
>of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." The focus is on "knowledge" of
>good & evil, rather than "doing" evil. After they sin, God says,
>"now they have become like Us, knowing good and evil." So "knowing"
>evil was intended to mean something that God Himself does, and
>therefore it couldn't have been a reference to something sinful. It
>can't mean experiential knowing of sin that comes through doing
>sin. Also, it is not the tree of the knowledge of evil alone. It
>is knowledge of both good AND evil.
>
>It seems the idea in this is that man was like the other animals and
>like infants and little children, not having a moral code prior to
>eating of this tree. Yet it seems that the traditional
>interpretation always under-emphasize this and try to make it out
>that Adam and Eve were already moral beings prior to the Fall. To
>reconcile this pre-conception with the text, the tradition claims
>that the essense of the "knowing" was to assert independence from
>God, as though Adam and Eve already recognized good from evil but
>were submissive to God's determination of good & evil. The the
>tradition says that after the Fall Adam and Eve were asserting their
>will to determine good and evil for themselves. But really this
>idea is foreign to the text. There is no distinction between
>different codes of good & evil in the text. When God says they have
>become like Him in knowing good & evil, it is not saying that there
>are mult iple codes of good & evil, or that the humans were now able
>to invent a different moral code, but rather it says that they are
>able to know the moral code that God Himself already knew. There is
>no hint of any idea about different codes of good & evil.
>
>I think that if we carry this idea through, then it puts a different
>spin on the Fall of Man. It also raises a different way of thinking
>about non-human animals and infants. Plants, animals, and infants
>are all inherently selfish. This is not sin for them, but when an
>infant grows up and recognizes that selfishness is wrong, then that
>child begins to see himself as a sinner because of his inherent
>selfishness. Could it be that early man, like all animals, was
>inherently selfish, and that the essence of the Fall was simply that
>he began to know good from evil? In other words, early man might
>never have been unselfish prior to the Fall, but only sinless. And
>it was only in the addition of _knowing_ good & evil that man became
>a sinner by being able to judge his own inherent selfishness and its outcomes.
>
>It seems Paul was reflecting this idea in Rom 7:9 where he says, "I
>was once alive apart from the Law; but when the commandment came,
>sin became alive and I died." There is much more to be said about
>Paul's discussion in Romans 7, but much of what he said was speaking
>about modern man, not pre-Fall humanity.
>
>Has anybody thought about this, and does anybody have any resource
>that discusses it?
>
>Phil

@ It's mentioned here:

Gen. 3:22 "And the LORD God said, 'The man has now become like one of
us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his
hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.'"
Smith considers this verse programmatic for establishing the Bible's
anti-reason stance. Had he investigated the use of the word "know"
here (yada), however, he would have found that it means "knowing" in
the sense of familiarity -- not critical or intellectual apprehension.

http://www.tektonics.org/qt/smithg01.html

~ Janice

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Received on Sat Dec 8 18:46:14 2007