Re: [asa] Original Sin and Genesis 3

 Seems to me to be fairly obvious that the Fall of man depicts the rise of reason in humans.? Animals have basically their instincts upon which they base their behavior with the conditioned response being almost completely ancillary to instinct.? They do what they feel they must and live or die by their instincts.? They obey their feelings first and their conditioning only after it has long proven itself and modified their feelings.? There is no center of intent that can operate independently of the instinct or feeling of survival "rightness."?

After the conditioned response became massively developed and perceptively dominant in humans over our instinct, reason emerged.? We could either act on our feelings or suppress them based on what we "knew" would happen from prior conditioning.? We could forget our feelings of collective survival wrongness in harming one of our own species and rob them of their food for our own individual survival interests (evil).? Or we could give somebody some food who needed it and promote our feelings of rightness of the collective survival imperative (good).? Reason marks the ability to decide whether or not to honor our instincts, the ability to decide between our individual survival interests as served most comprehensively by reason and our eternal species survival ambitions as served most comprehensively by our instincts (love, forgiveness, tolerance, humility, charity, honor, faith, etc. etc. etc.)

It is our reason that must die as the primary criteria for our personal survival and be reborn as a servant of our instinct for God. (www,thegodofreason.com)

-Mike (Friend of ASA)

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-----Original Message-----
From: philtill@aol.com
To: asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Sat, 8 Dec 2007 4:55 pm
Subject: [asa] Original Sin and Genesis 3

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

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Received on Sun Dec 9 16:34:08 2007