Re: [asa] Adam and the Fall

 George,

thank you for the very thoughtful reply.  Obviously my thoughts aren't anywhere as nearly developed as yours and won't be even if I spend the rest of my life thinking about this!  :)

I am one of those people who struggled for years in despair and fear that I could never be justified because I was too sinful.  I had not done anything really that "bad" by society's standards to cause me to go into
despair.  I was despairing because I had a very deep view of my very real culpability in turning from God, and yet only a faltering belief in Christ's faithfulness to his promises.  For example, to try to give a sense of what I mean in just one sentence, I used to beg God for hours to at least let me feel sorry for my sins, so that while I would be in Hell eternally I would at least be a little comforted by that sorrow.  I was in that despairing state for about 12 years or more.  One of my greatest comforts was when I discovered "Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners" by John Bunyan, because Bunyan was the only person I had ever found who was worse off than me, and it gave me some hope to think that if he found justification then maybe even someone as culpable and Hell-bound as me might find it, even though I knew that it would be an almost incomprehensible miracle to be forgiven.  Bunyan also turned me on to Luther's commentary on Romans, which became a source of comfort.  I think it was a result of that long p
eriod of my life that I gained a persisting conviction that sin really is deep and awful, much deeper and more awful than we usually allow ourselves to see, but that Christ's grace is high and wonderful, much higher and more wonderful than our impoverished view of sin permits us to see.  I have no hesitation accepting Luther's judgments about the nature of sin, which you cited.  Those statements seem obvious.  So I have to admit that my theology of the Fall is informed largely by personal experience.  I know directly from my own heart some of the culpability that is the coin of our daily commerce.  And the depth of our culpability has at times seemed a mystery to me as it touches on the universal and the infinite.  (By the way, my life has been revolutionized in the many years since God helped me to stop doubting Christ, but that's another story...)

Now I don't know how to reconcile that personal experience with Genesis, because the Scripture in the OT seems to present a much weaker concept of the Fall.  It strikes me (now) that nothing intrinsically negative was added to Adam (per the text as we have it) at the Fall.  It seems that the negative things added to Adam are all causally after the Fall and secondary to what was the primary occurrence.  For example, God added the curse after the Fall, and He sent us out of the garden because He did not want man to eat of the tree of life, etc.  There is a chain of causality in those things.0 They cannot be identical to what happened in the eating of the fruit, itself.  The text never describes the fruit as being anything other than an opening of the eyes.  Even the death that was threatened appears to be a secondary effect, not primary.  This is seen in the name of the tree, which is not the tree of death, and more so by God's summary of what had actually changed in Adam.  God did not say, "Behold, the man has become bound in his will and incapable of willing not to sin," or, "He has become dead," or, "He has become one that is dying."  He merely said, "He has become like Us..."  In fact, the text nowhere says that anything intrinsically evil or bad came to be a part of our nature or that we were altered in any way other than that our eyes were opened to know good and evil.  And the meaning of the verb "to know" good and evil is affirmed by the text as being the exact same way that God knows good and evil, which because God cannot sin, cannot be intrinsically bad.

This is all very compatible with an evolutionary view of mankind.  But then what is this deeply ingrained "choosing" to turn away from God that I find within me, which has been with me all my life, from my earliest memories of knowing good from evil?  I don't think it can be explained as mere biological proclivity, can it?  I think the biological proclivity is what I am choosing "for", not choosing "with", when I turn from God.

I have some furthe
r ideas about this, but they are so undeveloped I'm not sure it would be worth trying to describe them at the present.

Phil

Original Message-----
From: George Murphy <GMURPHY10@neo.rr.com>
To: asa@calvin.edu; philtill@aol.com
Sent: Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:10 am
Subject: Re: [asa] Adam and the Fall

Phil -

Thank you for bringing this to the fore.  As I
noted in another post, too much of the comment & criticism of my paper has
focused on the "historical Adam" and too little on the deeper issue of just what
our sin of origin does to human capabilities.

I should say to begin with that my 2006 paper is
part of an ongoing project, a work in progress.  I hope that doesn't sound
like a cop-out but I'm not completely satisfied myself with where I ended up
there, even though I think I'm going in the right direction.  Some of the
unease that I feel is for reasons very similar to those you suggest.  My
Lutheran confessional tradition has a very strong view of original sin, to some
extent stronger even than what you suggest.  I want as much as possible to
be faithful to that while at the same time avoiding its aspects that
stemmed from an unrealistic understanding of the world - & all that without
weaseling!

The traditional Augustinian view is that humans
before the fall could avoid sin (but also could sin), while after the fall it is
not possible not to=2
0sin (non posse non peccare).

When I said that the unregenerate are not
"compelled" to sin I meant that it is possible for them to avoid any particular
sin on a given occasion.  No one is forced against her/his will to commit a
given sin.  But it's precisely the will that's the deeper problem. 

It's tempting to say that we don't sin because we
have to, we sin because we want to.  But what Luther referred to as the
bondage of the will means that it goes deeper than that.  "We sin because
we have to want to" would be a way of putting it.  We have to remember than
sin doesn't involve just specific acts.  We begin our lives in a sinful
condition - as I quoted Tillich in the article, "Before sin is an act it is a
state."  That state of alienation from God involves a will that is not
in accord with God's will and thus eventuates in sinful thoughts and
deeds.

There's probably a tendency to think that a
corruption that is somehow inherited biologically, a la Augustine, has got to be
stronger than one produced by a social environment - nature is stronger than
nurture.  That would imply that the Augustinian model expresses better the
"not possible not to sin" condition.  But I question the basic
assumption.  It may be true for physical performance - whether or not
someone can play in the NBA is more a matter of biology than education, though
the latter is not irr
elevant.  But we're not talking here about
physical abilities - or really even mental ones.

You'll note that I've spoken about what "we" do,
and that points to one of the ways in which I think the sin of origin is an even
more serious problem than you suggest.  The regenerate also sin - cf.
Luther's characterization of the Christian as "at the same time justified and
sinner."  He would say even stronger things - even the good works of the
saints are not without sin, &c.  & that really gets into other
controversial issues between Lutherans & Calvinists on the one hand and
Roman Catholics on the other, that present tricky problems for my approach -
& I think any other that takes evolution seriously.  But I think at
this point that I'll restrain myself from any further thinking out
loud.

Again, thanks for
the challenge.  My response here may not seem completely satisfactory
but continuing to think through these matters is halpful for me.

Shalom
George
http://home.neo.rr.com/scitheologyglm

  
----- Original Message -----

  
From:
  philtill@aol.com
  

  
To: GMURPHY10@neo.rr.com ; dopderbeck@gmail.com

  
Cc: steven.dale.martin@gmail.com ;
  bsollereder@gmail.com ; asa@calvin.edu

  
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2008 5:39
  PM

  
Subject: Re: [asa] Adam and the
Fall

  
George,

can you
  explain a=2
0little more what you mean by "not compelled to sin"?  Do you
  mean that even the unregenerate
  have the power within themselves to actually avoid all
  sins, even though practically it is
  a matter of time and statistics that people will eventually sin?  Or do
  you mean something weaker or stronger than this?

It seems to me that Paul's
  discussion of sin and law in Romans 7 is that we cannot help but sin unless (a
  la Romans 8) we have God's Spirit graciously working in us.  My reading
  of the symbolism of the two trees in Genesis 3 is that mankind became
  knowledgeable of God's law before become partakers of God's life (in the sense
  of having God's Spirit working graciously in us) and thus it was henceforth
  inevitable that we would fail to keep the law we now knew, and in that sense
  mankind died.

I had thought that this view of Genesis 3 was compatible
  with your own view, but now I'm not sure, because in my view we are indeed all
  compelled to sin apart from regeneration.  I see sin as not being a
  positive "thing" but rather the absence of a "thing".  The true "thing"
  is obeying God's law because we love him and people, and that only comes when
  w e have his life in us.  Anything else is "sin" by virtue of falling
  short.  So in that view the unregenerate are indeed compelled to sin in
  the sense that they are unab
le to do the positive thing, a thing that is
  uniquely characteristic of the life they don't have until God comes into
  them.

I didn't think this view is Pelagian because it agrees that we
  are all dead until regenerate, so I don't know why the need to say sinners
  aren't strictly compelled to sin.  If sin isn't a "thing" but only the
  absence of a "thing", then why the need for this
  distinction?

thanks,
Phil

Original
  Message-----
From: George Murphy <GMURPHY10@neo.rr.com>
To: David
  Opderbeck <dopderbeck@gmail.com>
Cc: Steve Martin
  <steven.dale.martin@gmail.com>; Bethany Sollereder
  <bsollereder@gmail.com>; asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 9:13
  am
Subject: Re: [asa] Adam and the Fall

  
David -

  
That's the point of my emphasis on "sin of
  origin" as a claim about the universality of sin from the beginning of
  life.  The basic problem with Pelagianism isn't what it says about
  Adam but what it says about us.  Quoting from my 2006
  article:

  
Neither strict Augustinians nor
  determined Pelagians will be satisfied with this formulation. 
  Unregenerate people are not compelled to sin but all people are sinners
  and would need grace even if they could theoretically avoid “actual sins.”
  This approach does preserve the essence of what the western
  church has insisted upon without theories abo
ut human history and the
  transmission of sin which are now seen to be
  untenable. 

  
Shalom
George
http://home.neo.rr.com/scitheologyglm

    
-----
    Original Message -----

    
From:
    David Opderbeck

    
To:
    George
    Murphy

    
Cc:
    Steve
    Martin ; Bethany
    Sollereder ; asa@calvin.edu
    

    
Sent:
    Thursday, November 13, 2008 8:17 AM

    
Subject:
    Re: [asa] Adam and the Fall

    
Ok, George, but how then do you avoid Pelagianism?

David W. Opderbeck
Associate Professor of Law
Seton
    Hall University Law School
Gibbons Institute of Law, Science &
    Technology

    
On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 8:02 AM, George Murphy <GMURPHY10@neo.rr.com>
    wrote:

      
The idea of Adam's "federal headship" and the
      imputation of Adam's sin to others is used by many people who want to
      accept both human evolution and something like a traditional picture of
      Adam and Eve.   On closer examination though it runs into a
      serious problem.  If I may give a preview of my
      comments that will be up soon on Steve's blog:

      
This idea of the imputation of Adam's sin to others20is
      questionable.  The oft-noted theological parallel
      between it and the imputation of Christ's righteousness to sinners
      encounters a serious problem.  God's
      creative word does what it says, and in declaring sinners righteous it
      makes sinners righteous:  Sanctificatio n follows
      justification.  (This is not the Roman Catholic concept
      of "infused" righteousness on account of which God then declares the
      sinner righteous.)   If God imputes Adam's sin to
      others then God makes people into sinners.  To say that
      God is the immediate cause of the general sinful condition of humanity may
      be acceptable for some but it poses a serious challenge to the goodness of
      creation.  Cf. Article 19 of the Augsburg
      Confession.

      
Shalom
George
http://home.neo.rr.com/scitheologyglm

        
-----
        Original Message -----

        
From:
        David
        Opderbeck

        
To:
        Steve
        Martin

        
Cc:
        Bethany
        Sollereder ; George
        Murphy ; asa@calvin.edu
        

Sent:
        Wednesday, November 12, 2008 11:03 PM

        
Subject:
        Re: [asa] Adam and the Fall

        
I'd go further, and with due respect to my friend Beth, I'd argue
        that this kind of "certainty" could only be hubris.  What sort of
        evidence could you even begin to offer that would provide certainty that
        there was never a "federal head" Adam?  Given the mists of history
        that ancient, it would be like trying to demonstrate definitively that
        there was never a guy named Zerubunapal who stubbed his toe in Ur in
        4000 B.C.  Now, you might argue that the "federal head" Adam seems
        extremely unlikely and strained, and you might then have a fair
        point.  But as "certain" as something we can directly observe today
        ("there is no solid firmament") -- uh uh.

David W. Opderbeck
Associate Professor of
        Law
Seton Hall University Law School
Gibbons Institute of Law,
        Science & Technology

        
On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 10:20 PM, Steve Martin
        <steven.dale.martin@gmail.com>
        wrote:

        
Hi Bethany,

            
I
              think that one can be as certain that an Adam didn't
              exist as one can be sure that there is no
            firmament...

Wow, that is pretty
          certain :-)

I guess, it is this certainty that I'm
          questioning.  There are many biblical minimalists that state with
          the same certainty that Abraham, Moses, and even David and Solomon
          never existed.  I agree that there is a world of difference
          between Gen 1-11 and what follows in the OT, but to state
          categorically that there is no historical basis for any of the
          characters involved seems too strong.  I can accept that one
          would say it is theologically unnecessary for an Adam to have existed,
          but it doesn't necessarily follow that he didn't.   (Of
          course, the set of those who a) believe Adam existed but that b) it is
          theologically unnecessary for him to have done so,  is
          probably20pretty small).

thanks,

          
On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 9:41 PM, Bethany
          Sollereder20<bsollereder@gmail.com>
          wrote:

          
Steve,

The
            Adam you are talking about (the one that first had a covenantal
            relationship with God) is exactly the Adam that Denis rejects. 
            He holds to gradual punctiliar polygenism, which means the image of
            God and "real humanity" was manifested gradually amongst many
            humans.

I think that one can be as certain that an Adam
            didn't exist as one can be sure that there is no
            firmament...

David,
I can appreciate you wanting to bring
            in Paul and his beliefs as attesting to the historicity of some sort
            of Adam.  But it is not necessary, any more than it is to
            ascribe to Paul's 3-tier universe presented in Phil 2.  He also
            held to ancient beliefs of science and cosmology, and Adam was part
            of that =2 0 package.
Nor do we need the doctrine of original sin
            being passed down through Adam's sperm to hold to the idea that all
            people are sinners.  Sin, as it were, is empirically
            verifiable.  Just look
            around.

Always,
Bethayn

0A

-- 
Steve Martin 
          (CSCA)
  
  
  Instant access to the latest & most popular FREE games while you 
  browse with the Games Toolbar - Download 
  Now! 
 
To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.