Adam's Fall Research Articles

Original sin, control, and divine blame: some critical reflections on the moderate doctrine of original sin

Abstract This article examines a construal of the doctrine of original sin which affirms the cognitive corruption of human faculties but denies that humans carry original guilt for Adam's fall or for cognitive corruption. All humans require Christ's atonement, because they either inevitably commit at least one sin or are rejected by God for other reasons. We go on to identify three problems with this account. The first problem is the ‘inevitability’ of sinning. Here, the defender is forced either to accept a compatibilist analysis of responsibility or provide a libertarian-friendly analysis of ‘inevitability’. The latter option contradicts the Augustinian contention that it is impossible for sinners to lead a life of virtue and holiness. The second problem has to do with the mechanics of the cognitive effects of sin. The cognitive effects of original sin make it very difficult or inevitable for humans to perform meritorious actions and very easy or inevitable for them to commit sinful actions. If the sinner's degree of control over her sinful actions is so low, it seems that she does not deserve divine blame and punishment for failing to commit meritorious actions. Finally, we raised some problems regarding the fate of the non-culpable sinners.

Covenant: The Framework of God's Grand Plan of Redemption by Daniel I. Block

Reviewed by: Covenant: The Framework of God's Grand Plan of Redemption by Daniel I. Block Reed Lessing daniel i. block, Covenant: The Framework of God's Grand Plan of Redemption (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021). Pp. vii + 680. $54.99. After fifty years of studying Israel's Scriptures, Block presents his magnum opus—calling his book a "Here I stand" account of his findings (p. xiv). Although in his index B. provides two pages of cited works, the vast majority of the book's footnotes reference only biblical texts. In other words, B. does not interact—at least overtly—with other OT scholarship. He writes, "My primary desire in producing this volume is to celebrate the grace of God in designing and implementing his grand plan of redemption and to invite conversation on the plan generally and in its details" (p. xiv). His meticulously organized presentation of covenants in the Bible, then, is the author's academic and personal confession of faith. Foundational to B.'s work is the fact that he rejects the idea that there are conditional and unconditional covenants. Instead, he proposes that covenant theology is better understood through the lens of function rather than duration. That is to say, biblical covenants are either missional/communal or administrative, and they undergird what B. calls the Bible's four movements: redemption's background (Genesis 1–2); the need for redemption (Genesis 3:1–11:26); God's agents of redemption (Genesis 11:27–Malachi 4:6); and the arrival and mission of the Redeemer (Matthew–Revelation). Each of B.'s investigations into these four movements begins with sections exploring missional/communal covenants and ends with a similar analysis of the Bible's administrative covenants. One of the strengths of B.'s work is his consistent probing of the historical and literary contexts that give rise to the Bible's different covenants. Along the way, he structures his discussions from what he calls the cosmic and Adamic covenants, the Israelite (or patriarchal) covenant, the Davidic covenant, and the NT covenant. Throughout the book, B. provides in-depth exegeses and word studies. For example, on p. 111 he gives the semantic spectrum of yārēʾ words: terror, fright, anxiety, awe, reverence, submission, allegiance, trust. The book includes forty-three diagrams and twenty-two tables. Block understands the Noahic covenant as God saying, "I will establish my covenant [with the cosmos] with you" (p. 16). This is the case, B. argues, because the entire universe needs restoration because of Adam's fall. "The narrator [of Genesis] is silent concerning a reciprocal sign of commitment from the second party, but clearly that party is the earth itself" (p. 39). The rest of the First Testament does not let this vision of creation's renewal die (e.g., Hos 4:1–3; Jer 31:35–36). The author further maintains that the grammar of Gen 6:18—literally, "to establish, confirm a covenant"—implies that a preexisting covenant is already in place. This is the covenant God made with Adam. Among other texts to make his point, B. points to Hos 6:7: "But like Adam they transgressed the covenant; there they dealt faithlessly with me" (ESV). Following Genesis 11, God's covenant with Adam decreases while his covenant with Abram/Abraham takes center stage. "Instead of a triangular relationship involving God, the earth, and all living creatures, this relationship involved God, Israel, and the land of Canaan" (p. 68). After divine dealings with the patriarchs, the term "covenant" appears twentyeight additional times in the Pentateuch—the most important ones come at Sinai (Exodus 19–24), where God ordains Israel into priestly service for the sake of the world. Exodus 32–Leviticus 26 renews and completes this covenant. Forty years later, as narrated in the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses reaffirms it with Israel on the plains of Moab. The piel verb [End Page 482] in Deut 1:5, bēʾēr, means "to put into effect." It was necessary, B. contends, to reinstitute Sinai because the new generation of Israelites had not participated in the earlier covenant ratification. Upon entering the promised land, Israel repeatedly failed to hold up its part of the...

Chasing Methuselah: Theology, the Body, and Slowing Human Aging

Chasing Methuselah: Theology, the Body, and Slowing Human Aging

De Natura: The Church Fathers on Creation's Fallenness

De Natura:The Church Fathers on Creation's Fallenness Matthew T. Warnez B.H. Introduction "Who gave the mosquito its stinger for sucking blood? How narrow is the tube by which it sucks! Who has arranged this? Who has made this?"1 These modern-seeming questions were in fact those of Augustine's fifth-century congregation. Augustine plied his usual rhetorical vigor to dismiss the "the problem of natural evil"—as we call it today—and yet his hearers' doubts have persisted down to our own times. Indeed, pace Augustine, it would seem the problem of natural evil has become only more vexing to Christians in the post-Darwinian era. If the animal kingdom was made through a cruel, evolutionary process, and if the wrath of God fails to justify (at least in modern minds) the woes of—say—pandemics, then, should we not suppose that lower creation is fallen? But if it is, how did it happen? Or, if it is not, why does it so often seem fallen?2 Many conservative Christians today, when pressed on such questions, will suppose that lower creation was somehow soiled by the Fall of man. In addition to ostensibly reifying the literal sense of Genesis 3:17–19 (or Romans 8:19–22), this "negative" view of lower creation carries the advantage of a winsome theodicy. For, if all creation was vitiated by Adam's sin, [End Page 933] then God is not to be blamed for natural disasters, mass extinctions, or animal suffering—though presently "thorns infest the ground," the whole world was originally free from pain and death.3 In pastoral settings of all denominations, this tends to be the "received view," not usually requiring explication nor apology. Attractive as this theodicy may be, however, it flies in the face of an evolutionary reckoning of natural history. According to modern biology, life on earth predated man's existence by some four billion years. The fossil record, in addition to revealing that prehistoric creatures regularly died, also suggests that almost every species that ever existed is now extinct. Lest the Fall of man be pushed back into some preembodied epoch, animal death would not seem to be a consequence of the Fall at all. Indeed, some evolutionary theists would go further, holding that man's Fall had no direct effects on nature. According to this "positive" view, both before the Fall and after, animals persisted in their natural behaviors: killing, dying, and gradually evolving. Thus, only the former view offers a happy theodicy, and only the latter harmonizes with modern science. But what is the Catholic view? Although the fallen version is sometimes presumed in modern Catholic theology,4 the magisterium has never authoritatively addressed the question. Thus, and since the meaning of the Bible is often contested on this point, it becomes important to establish the opinions of the Church Fathers.5 Unfortunately, recent decades have seen the publication of only a few, partial surveys of patristic eco-theology with respect to the Fall,6 most of which have been all-too-obviously prejudiced, whether by creationist,7 [End Page 934] evolutionary,8 or conservationist9 ideals. Admittedly, an incomplete and prejudiced survey is one of the few ways to make sense of the data: the Fathers had a surprising amount to say on this question, and their opinions, which varied considerably, are scattered haphazardly throughout their writings. To make matters worse, in the patristic age, the subject rarely received a sustained treatment, and even more rarely did the Fathers comment on each other's views. While I have attempted to set my own biases aside (let the reader be the judge), I can hardly boast, in light of such difficulties, to have produced an exhaustive study of the Fathers. Nevertheless, I do believe this essay constitutes the most comprehensive such study to date, and I do believe my conclusions, though not exceptionless, are adequately representative. In the course of my analysis there emerged two predominant opinions, opinions it seemed right to title by their most influential exponents: Irenaeus and Augustine. Irenaeus took the negative stance (i.e., that Adam's Fall had certain immediate and negative effect upon...

Book Review: From Nothing: A Theology of Creation

From Nothing: A Theology of Creation. By Ian A. McFarland. Louis- ville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2014. xvii + 212 pp. $35.00 (paper).Recent years have seen a renewed interest in, and focus on, the role of the doctrine of creation within systematic theology. North American Anglicanism is no exception to this trend. In 2012, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church passed Resolution A136, which focused on creation in light of the relationship between science and Christian faith, and commended the Catechism of Creation as a tool for congregational study. Unfortunately, the Catechism of Creation left much to be desired as a theological text. Its casual readers may be left with the impression that Christians must choose between either a version of process theology or creationism of the sort unique to contemporary American debates on the origins of the material universe and of humanity.Ian McFarlands compact but rich retrieval of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo offers another way forward, engaging with recent developments in the physical and biological sciences through the lens of the Christian tradition. McFarland, whose previous work has involved theological anthropology as well as Christology, is most recently the author of In Adam's Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin. His latest effort thus follows the trajectory of his previous work, reaching beyond the Fall to the moment of creation. At the same time, however, From Nothing is not ultimately concerned with temporal questions of origins. Instead, McFarland focuses primarily on the dogmatic function of creatio ex nihilo as a Christian proposal about the character of God's relationship to the world (p. xiv).Crucially, this God is not an abstract or universal prime mover, but the Triune God known and revealed in Christ. McFarland argues that the doctrine of creation cannot function as a ?forecourt of the Gentiles,' a means by which Christians can find common theological ground with non-Christians at a generous remove from the more knotty questions associated with topics like atonement, original sin, or the (p. xii). McFarland eschews these attempts to speak in a kind of theological Esperanto, relying instead on a grammar that is emphatically and irreducibly Christian, and grounding his argument in the doctrine of the Trinity through the role of the Word in creation described in John 1. As he explains in the preface, The church's doctrine of creation from nothing is best understood in the context of the specifically Christian doctrine of the Trinity and, still more specifically, as a corollary of the belief that Christ is the one in whom all things were created (Col. …

Intellectual Tennis without a Net? Thought Experiments and Theology

This paper investigates the relationship between thought experiments and theology in three respects. First, it explores the theological dimension of Newton's famous bucket experiment. Second, it looks at the role of the biblical narrative of Adam's Fall in discussions that resulted in the foundations of modern science. Finally, the paper argues that there are at least two classes of thought experiments in medieval thought that depend for their existence on theological assumptions.

In Adam's Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin - By Ian A. McFarland

In Adam's Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin - By Ian A. McFarland

In Adam's Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin – By Ian A. McFarland

In Adam's Fall: A Meditation on the Christian Doctrine of Original Sin – By Ian A. McFarland

Flower symbolism and the cult of relics in medieval Serbia

Flower symbolism and the cult of relics in medieval Serbia

When Did Adam Fall in Paradise Lost

The specific moment of Adam's fall in Paradise Lost would seem unambiguous. It occurs at the moment that he accepts and eats the apple. One might object that these are two slightly distinct moments and that Adam is breaking two slightly different prohibitions, i.e., neither to touch the tree nor to eat the fruit, but Milton plays upon an etymological ambiguity in the word taste (=touch) to conflate God's two commands and Adam's two violations. Thus does one sort of ambiguity appear to resolve the other sort. If we look more carefully, however, the precise moment in which Adam falls dissolves into a process of falling that was prepared for through Adam's idolatrous worship of Eve, confirmed by Adam's inner assent to the evil of placing Eve before God by deciding to accept her gift of the apple, and completed in Adam's act of taking and eating the fruit of the tree. This process has the effect of stretching out Adam's sin, making his fall a process of falling, but it has the advantage of making understandable Adam's decision for Eve and death over God and life.

The Biblical Politics of John Locke (review)

Reviewed by: The Biblical Politics of John Locke Gerard Reedy Sj (bio) Kim Ian Parker . The Biblical Politics of John Locke Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ix, 202. $59.95 Closely argued and united around a few key ideas, the five chapters of Biblical Politics offer a survey of Locke's interest in Scripture (1); an analysis of Locke's view of original sin from his reading of the early chapters of Genesis (2); a summary of the importance of Genesis and of Adam in seventeenth-century political theory, especially that of Robert Filmer (3); and a close analysis of the role of Adam in Locke's 1690 Two Treatises of Government (4 and 5). Kim Ian Parker finds Locke attentive to Scripture, while testing out his own rational assumptions. His main goal is to show how Locke believed that the biblical fall of Adam, when properly interpreted, did not impair reason in the successors of Adam, as a strict Augustinian might hold. Parker makes Locke out to be a truly Enlightenment figure, who freed political humanity from subservience: 'Locke courageously sets human freedom on a par with the freedom of God.' Socialization, not the God of Eden, makes men dumb. Parker has mastered the large bibliography of secondary material on Locke. He also quotes Locke's manuscripts and marginalia. With rare exceptions, Parker notices and quotes without agreeing or disagreeing with the secondary material. For example, he mentions but does not assess W.M. Spellman's John Locke and the Problem of Depravity (1988), a book which repeatedly crosses Parker's chosen territory of how fallen Lockean human nature is. Disagreements with previous authors may or may not be unpleasant, but they clarify one's own opinion. Locke is not a systematic thinker in the sense of having a core set of ideas that are worked out, over the years, across a series of topics. He has eclectic interests whose explanation, by his own rules, requires different kinds of probability. When Parker gives Locke's comments on a topic over his lifetime, he might have better stressed the different genres used. In particular, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) occupies different generic space from Locke's Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), and a difference space again of course from Locke's tentative remarks in letters to continental philosophers and theologians. At the same time Parker's familiar use of so many works of Locke stimulates the reader to further work. Parker's knowledge of the common latitudinarian ideas so dominant around 1700 could be deeper. There is a wealth of sermon material on Adam's fall. While Locke was, like any intellectual of this day, deeply interested in Scripture, he is not an innovator in interpretation. The work of Spinoza, Richard Simon, and others is of an entirely different critical order. Lastly, some fundamental distinctions might have been better drawn [End Page 258] here about the various meanings of the word 'reason.' Parker's book does not complicate my working rule that on the 'reason' continuum, Locke and the latitudinarians occupy a less rigorous position than do contemporaries like Spinoza and John Toland, though I was hoping for new insight. Arguments about so many aspects of Locke's Two Treatises will go on. But no one attempting to discuss their relationships with Scripture will be able to do so without Parker's thoughtful, useful essay, based on wide reading yet tightly focused around his principal thesis. [End Page 259] Gerard Reedy Gerard Reedy, Marymount College, Fordham University Copyright © 2006 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

:Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England

Introduction Part I: 1. Religious roles 2. Religious choices 3. The Virgin Mary and Christocentric devotion 4. The saints 5. Eve and the responsibility for sin Part II: 6. Responses to Reformation change 7. Parish religion in the Reformation 8. The godly woman 9. The Virgin Mary and the saints 10. The return to the Old Testament 11. Martyrs 12. Adam's fall 13. Godly marriage Conclusion Appendix Bibliography Index.

Adam's Evil Conscience and Satan's Surrogate Fall

Adam's Evil Conscience and Satan's Surrogate Fall

Milton's Neo-Platonic Angel?

Readers generally agree that Raphael administers--probably inappropriately--Neo-Platonic correction to Adam when the man extols Eve's beauty (Paradise Lost 8.523-51). However, Raphael only appears to endorse Neo-Platonism in order to entangle a "wary" Adam fatally--and Neo-Platonically--curious about "proportional ascent, which cannot be / But to be gods, or angels demi-gods" (PL 9.936-7). Adam is maneuvered into defending himself by confessing his real fault: his construction of Eve's soul within the context of his desire for Neo-Platonic ascent, confirming (for Raphael) the direction of Adam's fall. A similiar subtlety is evident in Raphael's exposition of the order of creation (PL 5.469-505).

Mount Auburn: Fortunate coincidences and an ideal solution

In New England the Puritan alphabet book began with Adam's fall, and the history of the Puritan settlers began with near starvation. Because food crops like Indian maize were planted not in gardens but in fields where men laboured, gardens developed in the New World only when men and women had time left over from basic farming. In other words, colonial gardens were a luxury that produced fruits, flowers, or vegetables to please the senses but not to sustain life. But by the eighteenth century in Boston, gentlemen like Governor Bellingham and Thomas Hancock had fine gardens with large houses and ample grounds that were being admired as estates. Before the Boston Tea Party, wealthy Gardiner Green and Andrew Faneuil had built greenhouses, and soon after Independence Kirk Boott, brother of London botanist Dr Francis Boott, was growing orchids, a flower that is still today associated with luxury. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, enterprising young men outside the big cities were developing nurseries to supply the growing number of middle-class families that had leisure time and extra money to ornament their property with fragrant flowers and exotic trees. It was such families for whom the concept of a rural cemetery had a special appeal. Because they grew plants for pleasure and saw nature as a blessing not an adversary, the Bostonians who started Mount Auburn Cemetery were more like us than like their stem ancestors.

Adam's Fall as a Prefiguration of Christ's Sacrificing Himself for the Church

Adam's Fall as a Prefiguration of Christ's Sacrificing Himself for the Church

History and Phenomenology: Dialectical Structure in Ricoeur's The Symbolism of Evil

A recent rereading of Paul Ricoeur's influential study, The Symbolism of Evil, led me to a surprising realization: the dialectic of primary symbols in that book, which superficially resembles the dialectic of subject and object found in many phenomenological studies of religion, can be extended to Ricoeur's analysis of myths and even to his hermeneutical program. The result is a systematic dialectical structure which recalls Hegel's phenomenology more than that of Husserl. This structure also suggests a solution to the problem Ricoeur encounters when he tries to understand the historical linkage between the Christian myth of Adam's fall and the Gnostic myth of the soul exiled in the body. Most significantly, the systematic structure of The Symbolism of Evil helps to illustrate the radical difference between transcendental and historical phenomenologies.

Refreshment of the Saints: The Time after Antichrist as a Station for Earthly Progress in Medieval Thought

For St. Augustine the saeculum—the sum total of earthly human existence — was malignant. Not only was it so, he thought, since Adam's fall, but it would remain so until the Last Judgment. Since the Fall this world was no place in which to rejoice; only otherworldly liberation could be had ‘from this life of misery, a kind of hell on earth.’ Historical events, aside from the Incarnation, remained for Augustine ‘a chaos of human sin divided by acts of divine power.’ With Christ, history had entered into its sixth and last earthly age and there was no hope for any greater earthly future. In the City of God (20.7) Augustine rejected as a ‘ridiculous fable’ the view that the thousand-year kingdom of Christ in Revelation (20.1-6) would be a future earthly kingdom, interpreting it instead as a figure for the life of the Church in the present. ‘There are no verbs of historical movement in the City of God,’ Peter Brown assures us, ‘no sense of progress to aims that may be achieved in history.’

The Myth of Eve: The Temptress

Sample comments on Gen 3:6b from the theological literature of patristic, medieval and modern periods show a deep-seated and wide-spread conviction that Eve tempted Adam to commit the first sin. Such comments sometimes go so far as to draw parallels between Eve and the serpent, and even make her the cause responsible for Adam's fall. Nevertheless, Gen 3:6b says nothing whatever about any temptation of Adam by Eve. Nor does Gen 3:17 lend the legend any serious support. The myth of Eve the temptress in its various forms cannot be explained except in terms of each commentator's own presuppositions and cultural expectations.

Lovemaking in Milton's Paradise

ABSTRACT In Paradise Lost, Milton took the unusual stand of asserting that Adam and Eve engaged in sexual relations while still in Eden before the Fall, a stand which was, if not totally original with Milton, at least a departure from almost all treatments of his scriptural material by Christian poets, theologians, and biblical commentators before him. Any importance that the relative distinctiveness of such a stand implies is reinforced further by the enthusiastic outbursts of the poem's usually calm narrator when he touches on the subject of our first parents' nocturnal lovemaking (in Book IV) and on the related subject of the naked Eve's physical attractiveness. What amounts to an instance of Milton's personal emphasis in the poem, then, encourages the reader as well as Adam to view sexual love as the “sum” of prelapsarian bliss (VIII, 522); and when love of Eve proves to be the cause of Adam's fall, we are prompted to appreciate his decision as complex and difficult, even while we judge him mistaken in placing his love of Eve before obedience to God. The difficulty that Milton's own insistence upon prelapsarian sexual love works into Adam's decision is typical of the poet's presentation of prelapsarian life generally. Life in Milton's relatively difficult Eden is not so much significantly different from our postlapsarian existence as it is a pastoral image of our present complex life in small.