Re: [asa] Adam and the Fall

Phil - Thanks for your complimentary remarks. However, it seems that your own experience & reflections on it have given you a good deal of insight on the issues.

On your own experience I'll just take the liberty to note that the kind of "revival theology" that demands that a sinner reach a certain degree of sorrow &c for sin is badly mistaken. While this is not its intent, it makes our salvation dependent on our own works - i.e., how much remorse we can summon up. But the gospel is the objective reality of forgiveness & acceptance for Christ's sake. As soon as a person has been brought by preaching of the law to realize that he/she is a sinner, the gospel of free forgiveness should be proclaimed. This is why Lutherans have never liked revivals.

On your 2d point - yes, Gen.3 gives a weaker picture of the consequences of Adam & Eve's sin than the western tradition might suggest. OTOH Gen.1-2 gives a correspondingly weaker picture of human qualities before the fall. They say nothing about human perfection, let alone the extravangant things about freedom from disease, amazing wisdom &c that people have sometimes speculated about. What we have in fact is a picture of human beings created with the potential to obey & progress toward God, but also able to disobey & drift away. & the picture of increasing evil that we have in the chapters following 3 sketch just toward a drift with humanity getting worse & worse.

Shalom
George
http://home.neo.rr.com/scitheologyglm
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: philtill@aol.com
  To: GMURPHY10@neo.rr.com ; asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Friday, November 14, 2008 11:39 PM
  Subject: 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. Bu nyan 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 period 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=2 0us 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. 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 pr oclivity, can it? I think the biological proclivity is what I am choosing "for", not choosing "with", when I turn from God.

  I have some further 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=2 0of 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 sin (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 invol ves 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 irrelevant. 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 for20my 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 little 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=2 0his 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 unable 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 the20beginning 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 about 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 others is questionable. The oft-noted theological parallel between it and the imputation of Christ's righteousness to sinners encounters a serious problem. God's cr eative 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 un necessary for him to have done so, is probably20pretty small).

            thanks,

            On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 9:41 PM, Bethany Sollereder <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

            --
            Steve Martin (CSCA)

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Received on Sun Nov 16 18:35:36 2008