Re: [asa] Nakedness and the Fall of Man

Hi Christine,

thanks for the very kind words. :)

I'm certainly no expert on systematic theology, to say the least.? I have had an interest in exegesis more than systematics.? In my little bit of reading, I am familiar with D.M.Lloyd-Jones' discussion of these topics in his lectures on Romans.? Lloyd-Jones agrees that salvation doesn't just make us "seem" righteous (judicially declared righteous), but that we are also constituted as righteous.? God puts life in us, and (as a Calvinist) Lloyd-Jones believed that God will actively keep that seed alive in us so that we will not fall away.? We see something of this when Jesus prays for Peter that his faith will not fail during the crucifixion.? Peter later states in his epistle how "you, who are being guarded (garrisoned) by God's power through [your] faith [till you fully inherit that final] salvation..." (amplified).? The?idea is that God keeps us from falling away by keeping our faith alive, just as he prayed for?Peter's faith to not fail so that Peter would be kept and not f
 all away.? This act of keeping us from leaving God's family by nurturing and keeping an active faith alive inside of us is a part of the inward grace that God plants in us.? So I don't think it's either/or.? I think it's both/and.? But the protestant and catholic views disagree because the former say that justification is not causally dependent on our being constituted as righteous.? We received justification as a gift, and the internal seed of righteousness we recieve as another aspect of the same gift.? One does not cause the other.? Catholics says that our response to implanted righteousness plays some role in justification, although I'm not sure how their system works.

I think we can see relevant hints of this in the garden.? Before man sinned, the tree of life was available and I think this was a reference to Christ.? (George Murphy thinks so, too.)? But after man sinned, the way to the tree of life was removed and immediately we received in its place a promise.? The promise was that the seed of woman would crush the serpant's head (his heel being bruised in return), and this promise came with a picture of animal sacrifice -- the skin covering Adam & Eve's nakedness.? So one form of access to Christ was removed (the tree), and access to Christ through faith in the promise was provided in its place.? I think this change was necessitated because after the Fall we had different needs.? Before, men needed Christ for inward grace, Christ's life that gives us the desire to do right and the power to do it.? But after the fall, while we still need this spiritual life for exactly the same reasons (and even more so now that sin is ravaging us!), we
 now need something more from Christ -- we need forgiveness.? Therefore, the tree of life as a bloodless symbol was removed and replaced by an animal sacrifice and a promise.? And eventually, we see the tree of life itself re-enter Scripture as the Cross.?This provides the aspect of salvation we call justification (the part you attributed to the protestants).? Before the fall, we needed Christ for inward life (the part you attributed to catholics).? After the fall we need him for both.?

God bless!
Phil

-----Original Message-----
From: Christine Smith <christine_mb_smith@yahoo.com>
To: philtill@aol.com
Sent: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:28 am
Subject: Re: [asa] Nakedness and the Fall of Man

Hi Phil,

I just have to say...wow....your posts have always impressed me, ever since I
read your understanding of literal Adam's transformation into a mythical figure
and your understanding of the parallels in the Cain/Seth stories...it just made
so much sense to me, and articulated much more deeply and eloquently a few
thoughts that had already occurred to me...but I think what you write below
takes the cake...I'm certainly no expert, but I find this very persuasive, and
it makes much more sense to me than the traditional interpretations. Are you
planning on writing a book?? :)

For what little I can contribute to this (and you're probably already aware of
this anyway), the Eastern Orthodox church to some extent shares this view, as
they reject the notion of original sin, preferring intsead the concept that we
are affected by sin's origins, but that we do not carry the guilt for it (i.e.
babies are truly innocent when they are born).

One question/clarification for you, as I've been contemplating the imagery of
being "clothed" in Christ lately. My understanding (coming from McGrath's Intro.
to Christianity book) is that the Protestant notion of salvation is that we are
never truly righteous at any point, but that since we are "clothed" in Christ,
we *appear* as righteous before God and that therefore through Christ we are
saved. The Catholics on the other hand, believe that once we become a Christian,
the Spirit acts in us to conform us to Christ ("working out our salvation"), and
that this in essence imparts a seed (if you will) of righteousness within us,
which then grows over time; so, from the Catholic perspective, our salvation
originates with/depends on God's grace (to give us the seed of righteousness),
but nevertheless when we ultimately stand before God, we don't just *appear*
righteous (which to me, echos somewhat the YEC "appearance" arguments), we *have
become* righteous
 through Christ. I wonder how your theological understanding of
nakedness/clothing would interact with e
ach of these perspectives?

Thanks again for your very impressive post :)
In Christ,
Christine

"For we walk by faith, not by sight" ~II Corinthians 5:7

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--- On Wed, 2/25/09, philtill@aol.com <philtill@aol.com> wrote:

> From: philtill@aol.com <philtill@aol.com>
> Subject: [asa] Nakedness and the Fall of Man
> To: asa@calvin.edu
> Date: Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 12:31 AM
> 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 pi
cks 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 would 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
> sa
crifice) 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 the
> 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 beca
>
> use 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 (guilt & 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 adequa
te 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.? The chapter is all
> about the relationships we need t
>
> o 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 secondary 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 l
ogical
> 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 Fall they would
> show us so well o
>
> ur inadequacy apart from Christ.?
>
> Phil

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Received on Thu Feb 26 01:37:01 2009