RE: [asa] Nakedness and the Fall of Man

Not to step on George's toes but you might take a look at this web page and
the picture of the naked men taking their offerings to their gods. By the
dress (or undress) of the men bearing baskets, they would be Sumerian
priests. The onlookers are in Akkadian dress. Adam as a priest should be
naked before God, but lost his rights as a priest through sin and was
clothed. That's one possible interpretation.

http://www.bibleorigins.net/UrukNakedMenOfferingHarvest.html

Dick Fischer, GPA president

Genesis Proclaimed Association

"Finding Harmony in Bible, Science and History"

www.genesisproclaimed.org

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of philtill@aol.com
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2009 1:31 AM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: [asa] Nakedness and the Fall of Man

George, this is especially for you becaue I'd like to know if you (or anyone
else) has seen much theology written about this topic of Nakedness in the
Fall of Man, and what it means to the theology of the Fall.

I've been re-thinking the Fall of Man, and I've concluded that the author
intentionally does not introduce the category of "sin" in the story, and
we've been mistakenly inserting it there. Instead, the author's principle
categories for the Fall of Man are "nakedness" and "knowing good from evil."
IMO, this distinction (nakedness, not sin, as the essence of the Fall) has
profound theological and Christological importance, including our
understanding of man's origins and its relationship to science. Here's the
idea:

1. The imagery of Nakedness speaks of being not clothed with Christ (i.e.,
not having God's life in us mediated by Christ)

* It indicates our inadequacy to live as moral agents apart from God.
As long as Adam had not gained the "knowledge of good & evil", then he had
no moral inadequacy and so no sense of moral inadequacy (not "ashamed" of
nakedness).. As soon as he gained moral knowledge, he recognized his
nakedness and was ashamed. That is, he realized something was missing from
himself which made him "not right." He needed something to be added to
himself to be completed. What he needed was Christ.

* Paul picks up on the same imagery in Rom. 13:14, "clothe yourselves
in Christ", and in Gal.3:27, "all of you who were baptized into Christ have
clothed yourselves with Christ." Surely Paul had the garden of Eden in mind
when he thought being naked and being clothed was an important way to
describe Christ.

* I think the case for this interpretation is made very strongly,
below

2. God contrasts vegetation with animal sacrifice in both the account of
the Fall and in the Abel & Cain account. This parallelism between Gen. 3 &
Gen.4 is striking and should not be missed.

* Adam & Eve clothed themselves in vegetation, but God rejected that.
Cain brought a sacrifice of vegetation, but God rejected that.

* God replaced Adam & Eve's vegetaion covering with a sacrificed
animal's skin, which He accepted. Abel brought a sacrifice of an animal,
which God accepted.

* The parallelism of rejecting vegetation versus accepting a killed
animal indicates that the symbols have he same meaning in both accounts

3. The symbolism of vegetation (the fig leaf to cover nakedness and also
Cain's crop offering) represents our "works", our reliance on our own
efforts to span the gap between us & God

* Adam & family were gardeners, charged with growing plants. This
appears in Gen.2:15 and again in the curse Gen.3:17-19 which is focused on
the growth of crops as mankind's occupation, his "work", his "sweat". It
appears again in the curse of Cain's work. Throughout this context, Adam's
and Cain's "works" were the leaves they produced as farmers/gardeners.

* Using a fig leaf to cover your nakedness represents trying to save
yourself by works, trying to make up with is missing from ourselves by
something that we can find conveniently at hand.

3. In contrast, the symbol of animal sacrifice pictures Christ. It
demonstrates faith in God's grace that He will provide a substitute so that
we don't need to rely on our inadequate works. This is consistent with the
theology of atonement and symbolism of blood sacrifice throughout the OT.

4. Since God solved our nakedness by clothing us with Christ (pictured by
the sacrificed animal), then obviously the problem was that we needed Christ
and didn't yet have him. I.e., if Christ was the solution, then being
without Christ was the problem. This is a compelling argument that
nakedness represents being without Christ.

5. But the text makes it clear that being without Christ was OK for Adam
before he became a moral agent. Nakedness is not sin!!! It is OK for an
animal that doesn't know good from evil to not be clothed with Christ.
However, it is never OK for any moral being to not be clothed with Christ.
Even un-fallen beings like angels, if they are moral agents, need Christ.
It is a category mistake to think that any being can produce a moral life
apart from Christ. God is the source of all goodness, so the category
"being good" is undefinable apart from relationship with Christ who lives in
us. So that is why God told Adam and Eve that they must not become moral
agents (as they were, naked -- not clothed in Christ), lest they die. In
this account, death is not a judicial pronouncement God w ould render for
their disobedience; No! -- it is the natural outcome of becoming moral
agents who do not yet have Christ.

6. As I read the text I see how it is all about nakedness rather than about
sin. They were naked and unashamed. Then they ate of the tree and knew
they were naked. (The text immediately goes to their nakedness as the
all-important category at the moment they ate of that tree). Then they
clothed their nakedness. They were ashamed of nakedness and that is why
they hid. "I was afraid because I was naked." Then God discusses their
nakedness. Then God un-clothes them and re-clothes them His own way. Then
the symbols of the two kinds of clothing (vegetation and animal sacrifice)
are repeated in the Cain/Abel story. So the Fall of Man is ALL about their
nakedness. Nakedness is not a quaint little illustration of man becoming
ashamed after he falls into sin. NO! Instead, it is the very essence of t
he falling. (The other part of that essence is becoming one who knows good
from evil.) Note also that it doesn't say Adam and Eve hid from God because
they were ashamed because they had disobeyed and were feeling guilty, or
they were ashamed because they sinned and knew they actually were guilty.
No! None of these categories (sin, guilt, guilty feelings for sin) have
been introduced by the author into the text. These are things that we
wrongly read into the text because we are trying to jump ahead too quickly.
Instead, Adam and Eve were ashamed simply because they were naked. That's
they said, and that's the only thing the author considered to be important
enough to tell us about their hiding. It really is a story about their
nakedness, their inadequacy apart from Christ. Being without Christ (naked)
is vastly more important than having guilty feelings for disobedience.
We've been majoring on categories (gui l t & sin) that the author has not
even introduced into the text, and we've been missing the importance of the
one category (nakedness) that the author has been harping on over and over
again all through the text.

7. This interpretation helps to make sense of the rest of the story. Why
did the author think it was important to have Adam name animals and Eve be
made subsequent to Adam? Surely there are multiple reasons, but one reason
that I think unifies the main themes of the text is that it is about human
inadequacy and the need for relationships. Man is inadequate and so he is
told to find a helper, and so he examines and names the animals but finds no
helper. Animals are incapable of answering man's inadequacy. God then
provides for man's inadeqacy by making him a helper. To be adequate in this
world, man and woman need each other. Relationship solves inadequacy. But
the author finds it important to say in the very next sentence that both man
and woman are naked -- so the sexes "complete" one another in an important
sense, but we do not "clothe" one another in the (symbolic) sense that we
need relationship with God, too. Th e chapter is all about the
relationships we need to be adequate.

8. The first time God introduces the category of sin is not in the Fall,
but in the Abel/Cain account. Abel rightly continues trusting God to cover
his nakedness (so to speak) as pictured by his offering of animal
sacrifices. Cain represents the human tendency to slip back to trusting
ourselves rather than God, trying to cover our nakedness (so to speak) by
vegetation offerings (our works). His offering is rejected, and he is
angry. Now for the very first time in the Bible God mentions sin, that it
is crouching at Cain's door (a picture of a lion about to pounce) and it's
desire is for him (the lion wants to eat him). So the category of sin is
introduced not as the quintessence of the Fall, but as merely a consequence
of the Fall. The Fall was about our lack of relationship with Christ. Sin
is the outcome of not having that relationship. This puts Christology at
the center where it should be, and hamartiology in the second ary position.
This is the importance of the Cain/Abel story and why the author included it
in the Scriptures (something that was always a mystery to me until now).
The author, having dealt with Christology in the Fall, now proceeds to
hamartiology in the Cain/Abel account.

9. This puts the theology of Genesis 3 at a very highly developed level, as
high as what we find in the NT. It is identical to Paul's discussion of Law
and grace. Paul says that a Law has not been given capable of communicating
life to us. Instead, the law communicates death because it leaves us
inadequate to keep its demands at the same time it makes them. It only
shows us how we fall short. Life is found not in our efforts to keep the
law, but as a gracous gift in Christ, through the indwelling Spirit. We
need to be clothed in Christ. The author of Genesis was no theological
slouch. He anticipated all this (inspired as he was) and told a story of
early man becoming a free moral agent while not yet clothed in Christ. The
law (the knowledge of good & evil) did not communicate the ability to keep
its demands. It only allowed them to recognized their inadequacy as moral
agents who were missing something important ( Christ). Man was ashamed at
his inadequacy and relied on his own efforts to try to make up for it. But
naked and not trusting God as he was, sin was crouching at his door and it
consumed him. As Paul said, the law brought death, and spiritually dead
people sin. The law stirred up in us all manner of covetousness.

This is freeing because I see no conflict with what we know from science
with this kind of an understanding of the Fall of Man. We know that at some
point man became different than other primates because he became a moral
agent. We know that in this process he did not end up being clothed in
Christ, a spiritual being whose every generation comes out of the womb
singing Hosannah. Instead, he comes out relying on his own works to make up
for his sense of moral and spiritual inadequacy. The inspired author of
Genesis interprets this for us theologically. He connects the dots between
these two common-sense observations about man's original state by explaining
the causal relationships between them. He says that our becoming moral
agents while yet naked (inadequate to the task of moral agency apart from
Christ) made us inherently spiritually dead.

We also know as a common-sense observation that man ended up being consumed
by sin. The author of Genesis connects this dot for us, too. He tells how
the moral agent man (Cain), relying on his own works rather than Christ,
fell short in his behavior and so mankind was consumed by sin. The causal
relationships are:

* Naked (not in Christ) + Become Moral Agent --> Death

* Death + Rely on Self (not Christ) --> Sin rules us

This is different than what I was taught traditionally in church, as
follows:

* Sin (disobey command to not eat from the tree) --> Death

* Death --> have guilty feelings illustrated by the quaint example of
Adam not wanting people to see his privates

The traditional view fails because it treats the symbols in the text as
trivial. It ignores the symbol of the tree making us into moral agents. It
tries to say instead that man was already moral agent in his original
estate, and hence capable of sinning (disobeying the command to not eat from
the tree). It thus finds it necessary to make a strained re-interpretation
of the tree as "knowing good and evil in our own way rather than God's way"
rather than simply "knowing good and evil" as the text has it (and as God
affirms in saying "man has become like one of Us, knowing good and evil).
The traditional view also trivializes the symbol of nakedness, which is the
most important part of the whole story. The traditional view also fails
because it tries to psychologize Adam's hiding (a guilt reaction to sin)
rather than seeing it as a deep statement of Man's recogniation of his
inadequacy, being as he was apart from Christ. The traditional view simply
makes a muddle out of the text.

The traditional view is also hard to interpret in light of science. Much of
what we consider our "sinful nature" is the result of evolutionary
inheritance. If Adam was originally a moral being while yet unfallen, then
at least those parts of his "sinful nature" must have pre-existed his fall.
He would have been a moral agent with biological urges to do morally
unacceptable things and yet without any sin. While this is not a logical
contradiction, we have to wonder how Adam pulled that off, and why he later
failed to continue pulling that off when he fell. And how does that kind of
Fall correlate to the symbols in the text, eating of the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil? The loss of Adam's (supposed) ability to
perfectly resist biological urges does not correlate with "Man has become
like one of us, knowing good from evil." Science just does not correlate
with the text, read that way.

But taking the categories the author uses, and steadfastly refusing to read
into the text any categories that the author has not yet introduced,
produces a picture that is completely consistent with evolution. Early man,
prior to the Fall, would have had biological urges that must be resisted if
he were to become a moral agent. So to avoid spiritual death, before he
becomes a moral being he must put on Christ so that he will be able, through
Christ, to resist those urges. But sadly, man became a moral being while
yet "naked" and inadequate, being without Christ. Even without biological
urges, being a moral being without Christ would have produced death. The
evolutionary biological urges were not in any way causal to that death,
although they help us to understand our need for Christ quite efficiently.
In fact, we might conclude that God in his economy decided that man should
have biological urges inherited by evolution because after his Fal l they
would show us so well our inadequacy apart from Christ.

Phil

  _____

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Received on Wed Feb 25 11:19:42 2009