4. Sin and the Fall

Previous posts
Chapter 1: What is Biblical Theology?
Chapter 2: Theology of God
Chapter 3: Creation and Consummation

Chapter 4: Sin and the Fall
4.1 Rule of Faith on the Fall

• God created the world good but with the potential for evil.
• Adam's default state was without sin but capable of sin (posse non peccare).
• Adam and Eve were created in the image of God (imago dei).
• Adam sinned and brought the power of Sin over humanity and the world. The world thus is not as it should be or could be.
• We now sin like Adam. We now die like Adam.

4.2 Genesis and Romans

• Genesis three is an etiology of snakes, wives, and husbands. Debate over whether it is descriptive or prescriptive, whether it is punishment or consequence. Debate over whether it indicates hierarchy as consequence or damaged relationship between wives and husbands. Death seems to be the default to which the Tree of Life was an antidote.
• Romans 5 introduces new terminology and broadens the scope (the Fall plays no real role in the theology of the OT as a whole): sin, disobedience, condemnation, Sin as a power (flesh sometimes mistranslated as sinful nature), cosmic scope (creation in bondage to corruption and decay), death as new element rather than one to which the Tree of Life was the antidote.
• Augustinian elements introduced: original sin, total depravity, sinful nature, 
• 1 Timothy 2 and this text.

4.3 Excursus: The Fall and Evolution

• Clearly unforeseen by the Genesis or Pauline texts, as are strategies such as the gap theory. Whether this fact is fatal or not depends on your understanding of inspiration and/or your understanding of genre. Many would argue that the question is simply beyond the scope of what Genesis 1 meant to address in context. What is the genre of Genesis 1?
• Romans 5 is more difficult for evolution than Genesis 1. Evolution requires lots of death, yet Paul seems to say that death is a consequence of Adam and Eve's sin. Some say Paul is referring to spiritual death, but 1 Corinthians 15 makes this reading difficult.
• Science has of course problematized a literal reading. The most recent difficulty is the human genome, which seems to indicate that the human genetic pool could not have come from one man and one woman at the same time. 
• The most clever solution is that of John Walton, who argues that Adam and Eve were king-priests living in Africa several tens of thousands of years ago before homo sapiens left Africa. As representatives of the human race, they sinned and brought the consequences on the human race as a whole.
• One might then argue that they brought the power of Sin on the earth, including the prevalence of Satan and the demonic over the earth. And while humanity might have enjoyed eternal life, now we die as the progenitors of humanity did.
• This discussion no doubt is not yet over in the church.

Greatest Common Denominator: The Fallen World

Previous posts were:
God
Creation

Now, the fallen world.

1. I have never really thought this question through in its potential complexity. I know the Augustine/Wesley schtick, of course, the one we read in all the theology textbooks and Wesleyans used to preach. God created the world perfect. Adam sinned. Sin came on all the world, both the creation and humans. We now have a sin nature that makes us sin. Christ's death atones for the sin acts we do, the Spirit removes our sin nature so that we do not have to sin any more.

This is a mixture of Paul, Augustine, and Wesleyans. What Paul taught, I believe, is that the creation has been under the power of Sin since Adam. With regard to the world, it became subject to corruption and decay. With regard to humanity, the weakness of our flesh makes us susceptible to the power of Sin. The Spirit empowers us to live righteously and fulfill the law of love.

But is this the greatest common denominator of Scripture? It is the model that won out in the Western church, the Catholic side. It is the model that has dominated Protestantism because Luther's base camp was in Paul. But Paul is only one voice in Scripture and the West is not the whole church.

2. Adam plays no significant role in the theology of the OT itself. That is to say, Genesis 4 through Malachi do not use Adam to make any argument at all. He is generally absent from those pages. Here you have to remember that most of us do not read the Bible for what it actually says. The question of Adam's significance for the OT is not debatable--he simply is not given a thought from Genesis 4 on. But we might read him into the pages because of the glasses we wear when we read the OT.

Similarly, Adam plays no clear role in the NT outside of Romans 5, 1 Corinthians 15, and possibly Hebrews 2. Again, most people--including pastors--don't read the Bible. They read into the Bible. We have no evidence that Adam featured at all in the theology of Matthew or Mark or John or James. Our default reading of the Bible is through theological glasses, and we see things that weren't originally there.

Did Jude believe in Adam's Fall? We don't know. He quotes 1 Enoch, and the Fall in 1 Enoch came not with Adam but when angels sleep with human women in Genesis 6, had giant offspring, from whose dead bodies the spirits of demons originated.

I'm digressing simply to point out the extent to which our organization of Scripture is dependent, not on Scripture itself, but on the traditions of organization we have inherited growing up in the church.

3. What most Scripture does assume is that we are separated from God and in need of atonement and redemption. Even here, however, the assumptions of Leviticus are one strand within the OT and one that stands in some tension with the prophetic strand. Jeremiah 7, Micah 6, Isaiah 1 all deny the importance of sacrifice over and against a more fundamental obedience to God in relation to how you treat other people. In the NT, Hebrews makes explicit the end of the sacrificial system.

The proximity to God in Scripture still varies. In the OT, Israel stands closer to a right standing with God than the pagans do. The NT sets us on a trajectory in which all people stand equally close to such a right standing. It is not that humanity has come closer to God but God has come closer to humanity in Christ.

So we can at least say that the common denominator of Scripture is that the default state of humanity is one of separation from God. It is a state of sinfulness in need of reconciliation and redemption.

4. But what is this sinfulness? In the OT Law, the need for sacrifice primarily has to do with "ceremonial impurity." Theoretically, "high handed" sins resulted in death, and since most of the OT does not have a conception of an afterlife, death was the ultimate purging.

I don't think there is any evidence that the standard of sin was absolute perfection. This perspective comes from a couple obscure verses in Paul, lifted to inappropriate centrality. The standard of sin, in the NT, becomes motive in relation to love. Jesus points in this direction in the Sermon on the Mount. John's writings support this perspective. Paul's writings support this perspective.

The Greatest Common Denominator of Scripture might thus view the understanding of the Law so prevalent in Christianity today as an immature one that has not fully grown into the NT. Sin has always been, for God, any act of will that wrongs another, including God. One can wrong another person both intentionally and unintentionally, but it is the intentional ones that most concern God.

Our Fallen World

Yesterday morning a popular boy whom we knew from the neighborhood we used to live in was shot five times and killed here in Marion.  What a waste.  You can tell from the response on his Facebook page that he was well loved.

My sense is that he was on a typical trajectory.  Easy going kid hanging out with friends, having a good time, living for pleasure.  No sense of anything greater than doing the next thing.  No sense of how his next thing might come into conflict with someone else's next thing.

The church is not having much impact this age group--high school and just after who aren't headed to college.  Those who try mostly just come off as preachy.  The trajectory of the government toward his demographic is either to reinforce the status quo (Democrats) or to worsen it (Republicans).  I have heard of some Christians who move into neighborhoods without meaningful trajectories and actually live out good news, give hope, give healthy distraction.

God save us from ourselves and send us some true prophets...