Re: [asa] Nakedness and the Fall of Man

 Hi Bernie,

I need to clarify one point before answering your bigger question.  First, when I say "in Christ", I do recognize that the Hebrews of that day didn't have the full understanding of Christ.  What I mean by "Christ" in that context is the presence of God interacting with his world.  God created the world through Christ ("through Him all things were made...").  He is the firstborn of creation, the mediator between Creator and created, the lamb slain before the foundation of the world.  Christ has a special relationship with the creation.  It can
be appropriate for us to speak of Christ in this passage, as it is His Office as Christ that we refer to, even if the Hebrews didn't know that yet.

As to the bigger question, I don't know Paul Seeley but I would guess I'm reading it closer to how he would, since I'm taking into account that ANE stories of this category aren't focused on teaching trivia or history.  They are intended to tell very focused messages.  Some weaknesses in interpreting the text too literally (failing to give proper due to the symbols) include:

A.  The sampling of "useful" trivia supposedly taught in this chapter, such as "why do people hate snakes" is truly trivial and inadequate to be considered the author's intent.  For every question supposedly answered, there are 10,000 more not answered.  For example,

"why do people hate roaches, bats and spiders (not just snakes)?" 

"Why do we have to go to=2
0sleep every 24 hours?

"Why do monkeys look like little people?"

"Why does fermented drink make me feel good and do things I regret?"

B.  Rather than answer questions, It actually raises new questions,such as,

"If snakes talked in the garden, why don't they talk any more?" 

"How can eating food make you literally become like God?"

"Is the garden with the angels guarding it still there, or were they eventually taken away, and if so then why weren't they simply taken away in the first place?"

"If a bird ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, how would it be affected?"

"Why did God plant that deadly tree in the garden, anyhow, if we weren't supposed to eat it?"

How can Adam be made out of dust since our bodies are 65% water but dust contains negligible water?

How can Eve be made out of a rib of Adam unless she was very, very tiny, approximately the size of a rib? Or else Adam must have started out almost twice as big so that an entire woman could be carved out of his side. (Or maybe the Bible didn't tell what else Eve was made out of, which would have been the majority of her body.  In other words, it doesn't seem to really be answering practical questions, but rather just telling about relationships and theology through the use of symbolic things and actions, like making Eve out of Adam's side -- very symbolic but not very useful to explain how God actually made Eve.)

C.  It also includes things we know
 to be false (if taken literally), such as,

A snake can't really vocalize because it has no vocal cords, inadequate lung capacity, the wrong shaped tongue, no lips, soft pallet, or teeth to form consonants, and no speech center in the brain (having a merely reptilian brain).

Snakes are not really the craftiest beasts of the field.  Raccoons, monkeys, and crows are far more crafty than snakes.

Someone might reply that the serpent is really the devil in a snake's body.  But the text never says that -- we figure out that the devil is somehow involved by recognizing the clear symbolism.  (It literally says the serpent is the craftiest beast of the field, and it never mentions the devil at all.)  If we are really to accept that it was speaking symbolically when it said the serpent is the craftiest beast of the field, then why not accept that other symbols as well?

If the author was trying to answer practical questions important to the Hebrews, he didn't do a very complete job.  But if he was using symbolic elements to tell about our relationship to God and one another, then it is a very elegant piece of work.

Phil

 
-----Original Message-----
From: Dehler, Bernie <bernie.dehler@intel.com>
To: asa@calvin.edu <asa@calvin.edu>
Sent: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 2:43 pm
Subject: RE: [asa] Nakedness and the Fall of Man

Phil said:

“I've been re-thinking the Fall of Man, and I've
concluded that the author intentionally doe
s 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.”

What if, instead of “nakedness” representing something in
Christ, it instead meant something literal and helpful to the Hebrew readers of
the day?  Maybe Moses was simply explaining:

1. Why do humans wear clothes, but animals don’t?

2. Why do guys have to work so had to live?

3. Why do women have overwhelming pain in childbirth?

4. Why do we hate snakes so much?

5. How come we know “good and evil” but the animals
don’t?

6. Why celebrate the Sabbath (6 days of creation and 1 day of rest)?

Maybe what I’m suggesting is the “Paul Seely reading method?” 
(I’m not sure if Paul would agree to this suggestion.)

…Bernie

________________________________________

From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of philtill@aol.com

Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2009 10:31 PM

To: asa@calvin.edu

Subject: [asa] Nakedness and the Fall of Man

George,20this 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 Chr
ist", 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 co
ntext, 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 ha
d 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 answer
ing 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 hama
rtiology 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 h
im.  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 o
riginally 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 ca
usal 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

To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@calvin.edu with
"unsubscribe asa" (no quotes) as the body of the message.
Received on Thu Feb 26 22:45:36 2009