Is the Fall historical? A question for TE believers

DGilmour said:

Greetings,

I am struggling to get my mind around something. For those who believe in God directed evolution (which I understand to be that God used evolution as his means to make the world. through chance mutations? I need some clarification here) For those who believe in TE, how do you account for the doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin?

Click to expand...

Right.

The fall of man is spiritural. Pure and simple. "for in the day you eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, you shall surely die." Gen 2:7

We are told Adam lived to a ripe old age of 930 years. So, we know the fall has nothing to do with our physical being.

But what died, the very day Adam ate from the tree?

I'll give you one guess.

First of all, it depends on what you mean by original sin. Personally, I'm inclined to a more Orthodox view (rather than Western Catholic/Protestant) that sees sin as something we all individually responsible for, I don't believe we're responsible for Adam's sin and I don't see how that would be fair. I'm responsible for my sins. So I don't need a real Adam to know I need forgiveness.

Secondly, it depends on what you mean by evil. Is it evil if there is no moral choice involved?

Thirdly, it depends how you see free will operating. Personally, I don't see God continuously interfering in nature because that would imply that He's trying to control everything. I think he allows the world to operate according to a logical, scientifically verifiable system because it allows human beings to make their own choices. If you put your hand in a fire, it will burn; but you don't have to put your hand in a fire.

Evolution is not, by the way, just chance mutations; it is chance mutations plus natural selection (which has to do with the survivability of certain traits from one generation to the next: a mutation will not survive unless it improves a species' chances of survival if the environment changes.)

As for whether it contradicts the Bible... in the pages of said book, God is said to kill babies, change his mind, get angry, tell someone to marry a prostitute, massacre whole cities...

...in what way could does the Bible portray God as wholly good?

artybloke said:

...in what way could does the Bible portray God as wholly good?

Click to expand...

God is completely Good. He has no evil within Him. He is not judged by human standards, for they are flawed. Our sense of good, is like evil to God. His sense of good is like confusion for man. For man is limited in understanding and limited in being able to see what God does and how it affects the overall picture.

The minute we start to take our limited abilities and judge the limitless God as not always being "wholly good" we become blinded by our own pride, thinking we know better of such things than God.

DGilmour said:

Sorry, I'm confused. Can we not play games?

Click to expand...

Don't be confused, newbie. Do your level best to follow what's being discussed.

If you disagree with my remarks, (or anyone's), tell us why. That's all.

No need to act confused or try to dismiss things as "playing games", just because you may disagree.

DGilmour said:

For those who believe in God directed evolution (which I understand to be that God used evolution as his means to make the world. through chance mutations? I need some clarification here)

Click to expand...

I think that God is able to work through random processes. The apparent randomness of the weather and DNA combination during conception does not prevent God from bringing about his purposes through the weather and in having a certain person exactly where he wants them. But, just because God can use random processes for his purposes does not mean that every random act is ordained by God. Randomness just allows God to be involved in a process without overriding its inherent nature.

For those who believe in TE, how do you account for the doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin?

Click to expand...

I think Romans 1:20-32 is a pretty good prosaic summary of the Fall, and Genesis 2-4 is a mythic telling of the same event. When humanity was able to know God (and I think this would be at the beginning of humanity, since I would say this is a characteristic of being human and sharing God's image), they instead chose to reject God. The result was all sorts of sinfulness that not only corrupted them, but also the world they inhabited.

These original sins led to a bad environment for all future humans. In the story, Abel and Cain grew up in a much different environment than they would have if their parents hadn't sinned. The same holds true if Adam and Eve represent the first population of humans, and it holds true today as well. None of us are raised by perfect parents and we all see terrible actions around us, and probably many of our sins are due to imitating what we see or learning to accept it as natural. So, I don't think Original Sin is something we inherit (such as through genes), but rather its effects continue to be all around us.

Jesus was affected by Original Sin the same way we are, since he too had its affects all around him. As such, we can truthfully say that he "had to be made like his brothers in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people" (Hebrews 2:14-18). We "do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are -- yet was without sin" (Hebrews 4:15).

It seems to me that without God creating a pair of perfect humans in a perfect world that then make a moral choice to sin, the source of evil and suffering would be God himself in that he created a world with evil in it already.

Click to expand...

The potential to do evil was indeed in what God created.

This disurpts the doctrine of salvation in a number of ways. 1) How could God judge something that is both in His nature and that he created.

Click to expand...

God creating creatures who could reject him does not mean God rejects himself. So, I don't see how the evilness of human actions makes God's nature evil.

2) Salvation is supposed to be a restoration of human nature back to its perfect state (new body in heaven), but if evil is gradual, then what are we being restored to?

Click to expand...

I think heaven is far more than regaining what we have lost, and so far more than mere restoration. If it was only restoration, I suspect that God would not have considered it worth the cost.

3) It also contradicts the Bible in the nature of God, all good, no evil....

Click to expand...

All good, no evil doesn't mean God is tame and docile. But, for a more specific response, I'd need to know how you see the TE view contradicting with God's nature.

Then the next question is what was Jesus here for and how does what he and the writers of the NT square with a non-historical Fall.... and the list seems to go on from there..

Click to expand...

I think the Fall is still historical, but the account in Genesis 2-3 is not literal. I don't see how my TE perspective alters what Jesus did.

Mercury said it all for me. I agree 100%

Well DGilmour, firstly I don't think it's too hard for a TE to support a literal Adam, Eve and Fall. I personally believe that God probably took a pair of relevant hominids, did some major renovation, breathed into them and voila! Adam and Eve. Real Garden, yep. Talking snake, no problem. Some are inclined to think of it as mythic, but I'm not smart enough to wrap my brain around it just yet

But if you think about it, the literal position is in just as much trouble from your question as the mythic is. (In terms of the problem of theodicy) - basically it states that God created a Pandora's box (to mix my mythologies) smack in the center of their lives just waiting to blow. I mean, He did tell them not to open it, but "why did He have to create it in the first place?" cries the skeptic. From that angle I can sympathise with the proponents of the mythic argument: the Bible never specifically states anywhere that God directly created the tree of knowledge, which would concur with an interpretation that this tree never really existed (for if it did, God was its direct creator since it is a spiritual thing) but symbolises the possibility of the wrong choice that every human faces. This possibility of the wrong choice was not directly created by God (just the same way God doesn't have to speak proteins into existence every time He gives a couple a baby) but was allowed by Him as part of the consequence of giving humanity choice in the first place.

God is completely Good. He has no evil within Him.

Click to expand...

Couldn't agree more. That's not, however, how some of the OT writers saw him. They seemed to accept a God who could happily commit genocide in order to preserve some spurious notion of "purity." That's not the God of the New Testament or of Jesus. I can perfectly understand it as a human point of view trying to wrestle with the majesty of God; but I'm afraid I don't believe that those bits of the Bible were particularly inspired. In fact, I think there's more of human fallibility in those passages than there is of God. A God that sanctions genocide - for whatever reason - is not a God worthy of worship.

I guess I'm on the fringe of this issue. Not only do I not believe in a literal two person Fall, I'm not at all sure that the doctrine of the Fall affords us an accurate perspective on the source of evil. I understand the story of the Fall ultimately as etiological of the question, "Why are people wicked?" The early Judeo-Christian form of this question and its answer have their basis in the near universal sentiment that original was best, and that evil is corruption of some good - the notions reflected in the current ideas of pristine glory and the good old days. This worldview was strengthened by synchronic observation: "Things seem to be worse now than in Pop's day, so before that, it must have been even better," and so on. With this latent assumption, the question of the cause of the world's evil among earliest believers was, "How did it get this way? Where did things go wrong?"

I believe the presupposition was wrong. Death was always there. Man was always unable to relate to his Creator. I think we can understand Paul's analogy of Adam and Jesus only by taking the myth of the Fall completely on its own terms; Jesus is like Adam from the story, and like Pandora in similar ways, and like Balder in other ways. The fact that Jesus saved the world by himself is not predicated on the mythical analogues being historical, nor does it amount to evidence that they should have been. Paul's comparison was not intended to equalize Adam's Fall and Jesus' atonement on all levels; the analogy was instead weighted towards making Jesus' atonement seem relevant by relating it to a well-known story. So rather than indicating that Jesus' single-handed work relies in any way on the story of the Fall, as some have inferred, Paul places the emphasis on Christ removing sin from the world, by overriding and in fact vetoing the act that supposedly brought sin into the world. This makes Christ's work eminently more important than the Fall story, and independent of any existing etiology of sin. In short, we believe that the ancients were in error on why serpents don't have legs, and I'm suggesting they were wrong on why sin is a part of this world. The Fall is yet another "just so story." The truth that Jesus' work on the cross is the remedy for the world's sin remains in tact.

I don't think anyone can argue convincingly that we are not innately sinful. This is because we are by nature innately selfish, from earliest ages against God's intended schema of humility and reverence for God. I like to think of evolution as serving more than biological purposes. It's as though God brought us as a race to a certain point physiologically and psychologically through evolution, at which point He sent His Son to complete the process. Christianity is the final frontier of human evolution.

DGilmour said:

What would he have to save us from if not from our sin nature?

Click to expand...

Our sins.

If evil is a distinct entity to be created, then your position is equally problematic. God creating us with the ability to "create evil", with His foreknowledge telling Him we would do just that, might as easily lay the blame ultimately at God's feet anyway. If you know your son is allergic to peanuts and put them in his food anyway, can you really lay the blame for his allergic reaction on the peanuts? It's the same as the old slogan, "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."

No, evil is not an entity to be created, but a side effect of creation itself. We are not dealing with dualism here. Evil is only what good is not achieved. In fact, God could not have created anything other than another God if He had not allowed a lack of perfection. Whatever He, being perfect, created would necessarily be less than perfect; the difference occupying the distance between Him and His creation is what we call evil. Evil is not something, but the absence of God and His glory. Perhaps this is what Paul was referring to in 1 Cor. 15:28: perhaps the end of history will be the retraction of that difference between Creator and Creation, so that God is all and in all.

I have to ask, was Pandora originally created without sin? How about Balder?

My memory of Pandora is one who opened the box and cause all evil to come into the world. I don't see how Jesus is similiar to that.

I think the point is missed when you are speaking as you are. Adam was created originally sinless and then he sinned. Like Adam, Jesus was created sinless - hence the Holy Spirit's work in conceiving Jesus within Mary's womb. Unlike Adam, Jesus never sinned.

It is essential doctrine to realize that Jesus was conceived of the Holy Spirit. It is essential doctrine to realize Jesus was sinless. It is essential doctrine to realize that Jesus was the perfect lamb. It is essential to realize that on His death, he brought spiritual life. And upon His resurrection, He brought physical life. Both were lost at the fall, both were redeemed at His death and resurrection. Both are essential, both carry the meaning of redemption. Without one, we are all lost.

DGilmour said:

If death was always there and man was always unable to relate to his creator, then you have just stated that God is responsible for evil in the world. If God created evil, then there is no hope for us. God is then a horrible being, not worth any worship whatsoever.

Click to expand...

[BIBLE]Isaiah 45:7[/BIBLE]

Perhaps you should reconcile yourself to the possibility of a God who allows evil to happen, because it is all a part of His plan...before you talk yourself into deconverting.

I disagree with your predicated statement... If we are not fallen creatures, there is nothing for Jesus to restore us to. But, Jesus' death and resurrection displays with power that he came to "seek and save the lost". What would he have to save us from if not from our sin nature?

Click to expand...

The question is not if we are fallen, but when and how we fell.

Once more for the newbie.

Read everything, and try to get an understanding of what I stated.

TheBear said:

Right.

The fall of man is spiritural. Pure and simple. "for in the day you eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, you shall surely die." Gen 2:7

We are told Adam lived to a ripe old age of 930 years. So, we know the fall has nothing to do with our physical being.

But what died, the very day Adam ate from the tree?

I'll give you one guess.

Click to expand...

It's real simple.

Either Adam physically died the day he ate from the forbidden tree, or his communion with God died in the day he ate from the tree.

TheBear said:

Once more for the newbie.

Read everything, and try to get an understanding of what I stated.




It's real simple.

Either Adam physically died the day he ate from the forbidden tree, or his communion with God died in the day he ate from the tree.

Click to expand...

Maybe it is just me, but this is rather condecending and unbecoming for how one should treat another.

TheBear said:

Once more for the newbie.

Read everything, and try to get an understanding of what I stated.




It's real simple.

Either Adam physically died the day he ate from the forbidden tree, or his communion with God died in the day he ate from the tree.

Click to expand...

Was Adam barred from the Tree of Life?

Did the Tree of Life give eternal life?

If yes to both, then Adam did begin to die that day. But that is not what Scripture says, it says "in the day"

That phrase is a figurative phrase not indicating that it would be "on" that day, but "in" that day.

This phrase is used in another place in the Old Testament where the subject did not die "on" that day, but rather later on another day.

I agree that it is kinda upsetting to be called a "newbie" ... I'm curious Critias. Can you show me where else "in that day" is used in that sense?