Re: [asa] sin or Sin?

Hi David,

I'm not missing Paul's point.? His point is that the law does not communicate the ability to?be good.??Only Christ does that.? The law condemns because it shows us that we don't have the ability to be good.? What I'm doing is generalizing this to the case of Adam, who unlike you and me did not have sin prior to the coming of moral law.? I'm making that generalization by saying that nothing is meant to be independent of God.? (That independence is?the idolatry George is talking about.)? I am saying that the goodness to obey the law is a communicable grace that is a part of spiritual life, and without it a species can be either neutral (not knowing good or evil), or sinful, but not positively good.? But the coming of the law (knowing good & evil) takes away the opportunity to be neutral.? The law comes, and neutrality ends.? Then, if the species?does not have the communicable grace to be good, the law makes it spiritually die.? Not having eaten of the Tree of Life, the knowledg
 e of good and evil took away the option of innocence and we died.

In Paul's view, the opening of our eyes via the Mosaic law is never negative.? He says:

"What shall we say then? Is the Law sin? May it never be! On the contrary, I would not have come to know sin except through the Law; for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, "YOU SHALL NOT COVET." But sin, taking opportunity through the commandment, produced in me coveting of every kind; for apart from the Law sin is dead." (Rom.7:7-8)

The "coming to know sin" is considered a positive thing, as indicated by his "on the contrary" to the charge that the law is sin!

I agree that Adam (or "Adam") introduced sin into the world.? He sinned by disobeying God and eating that fruit.? I was emphasizing another aspect of the act in order to make my point more clearly, but still he did disobey.? But in what way did that disobedience become communicable to you and me?? There's the rub!? Does an act of eating a fruit somehow cause Adam to become inherently sinful in his spiritual DNA?? Or maybe he just didn't have Life to communicate to us because he never ate of the Tree of Life, and so the natural urges of the body are now sin, whereas before they were innocent??

Actually, I need to admit that I'm arguing for a position I haven't really adopted or completely believe.? I am exploring this, but I think it has merits and deserves further study.

Phil

-----Original Message-----
From: David Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com>
To: philtill@aol.com
Cc: gmurphy@raex.com; asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Thu, 21 Feb 2008 11:52 pm
Subject: Re: [asa] sin or Sin?

Very interesting.? I'm not quite persuaded though.?

?

First, I'm not convinced those three phrases are parallelisms.? OTOH, I don't claim any expertise in Hebrew grammar, etc.? So, I need to see some expert evidence there.

?

Second, I hear you echoing Paul's discussion of the Law here.? But if that's so, I think you're missing Paul's point.? I don't think Paul says the Law makes those who know it guilty of sin per se.? Rather, the Law condemns because it clearly articulates the standards people inevitably fail to reach.? As Paul makes clear in Romans, however, even those who don't have the Law are condemned by what they know from general revelation -- i.e., by what they can discern?about natural law without revelation.?

?

In fact, I wonder if Paul's discussion of the Mosaic Law and the natural law undermines your very interesting word study on eyes being opened.? In Paul's view, the Mosaic Law is an instance where God opened people's eyes in a way that was "negative" in that it revealed their inability to be holy.

?

I also think you need to account for Paul's understanding that sin entered the world through Adam.? Paul doesn't say Adam became aware of a law that he couldn't keep; he says Adam introduced sin to the world.? This seems to me to strongly imply that Adam could have chosen otherwise, and that his choice was the problem.

?

I guess you want to take this sort of developmental view because it seems to comport more with human evolution?? I don't really see a huge problem with the "sin-as-choice" idea, whether "Adam" is an individual representative, or a group of first humans with the image of God, or both.? Regardless, it seems to me that the humanity, represented in "Adam," made a culpable choice to reject God's provision, and that we have been suffering from the resulting loss of immediate fellowship with God ever since.? It seems to me that it's just beyond the competence of "science" to determine when "humanity" would have been capable of making that kind of culpable choice.

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Received on Fri Feb 22 00:32:57 2008