The Lost World of Adam and Eve (20 page)

What difference does all this make? It does not disagree with the traditional ideas that sin entered the world at a point in time because of choices made by real people in a real past and that those choices have affected us all. Viewing Adam and Eve as priestly representatives in sacred space who brought the alienation of humanity from God’s presence may lead us to frame differently our questions about our current status in the present. This will be explored in the next chapter. At the same time, it changes nothing about the need we have for salvation and the importance of the work of Christ on our behalf. Perhaps, however, it will help us to remind ourselves that salvation is more importantly about what we are saved
to
(renewed access to the presence of God and relationship with him) than what we are saved
from.
This point is significant because too many Christians find it too easy to think only that they are saved, forgiven and on their way to heaven instead of taking seriously the idea that we are to be in deepening relationship with God day by day here and now.

Proposition 16

We Currently Live in a World with Non-order, Order and Disorder

In Genesis 1:2, the state of the cosmos at the beginning of the story is that nothing is yet functioning as it should (for full discussion see chap. 2). This non-ordered state serves as the canvas for the creative acts that bring a semblance of order to the cosmos. It contains traditional descriptors of non-order that were typical in ancient Near Eastern thinking: sea and darkness. It also features the spirit (or wind) of God prepared to go into action.
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In some of the Egyptian cosmologies, the wind, a manifestation of the god Amun, also plays a role at the beginning in the initiation of creation.
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Into this non-ordered state, God begins to establish order by decree. In the ancient Near East, one Egyptian text (
The Memphite Theology
on the Shabako stone) features creation by the spoken word. More importantly, however, throughout Sumerian and Babylonian sources, the gods bring order (both initially as well as year by year) by orally decreeing the destinies of members of the cosmos. To decree the destiny of something is to assign it a role and a function.
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This is an act of creation as order is established. Consequently, the efficacy of the spoken word in creation is commonplace in the ancient world.

God’s creative work is defined as bringing order to this non-ordered existence. This will be carried out in stages through a process. Even as God brought order, there were aspects of non-order that remained. There was still a sea (though its borders had been set); there was still darkness. There was an outside the garden that was less ordered than inside the garden. The order that God brought focused on people in his image to join with him in the continuing process of bringing order, but more importantly on ordering the cosmos as sacred space. Yet, this was just the beginning.

This initial ordering would not have eliminated natural disasters, pain or death. We do not have to think of these as part of the ordered world, though they are not beyond God’s control, and often they can be identified with positive results.
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All non-order will not be resolved until new creation. In Revelation 21 we are told that there will be “no longer any sea” (Rev 21:1), no pain or death (Rev 21:4) and no darkness (Rev 21:23-25). There is no temple because God’s presence will pervade all of it (Rev 21:3, 22), not just concentric circles radiating through zones of diminishing sacredness. God will be with humanity and be their God (Rev 21:3). Relationship is conveyed through the imagery of husband and wife (Rev 21:2). This is not a restoration of Eden or the return to a pre-fall condition. New creation is characterized by a level of order that has never before existed.

In this sort of thinking, pain and death do not have to be considered part of what is “good” (= ordered; see chap. 5). These are aspects that have not yet been finally resolved into a fully ordered world. The world before the fall was a combination of order and non-order with a strategy launched to continue bringing order. That progress toward order, however, was set back by the entrance of disorder. The serpent, as a chaos creature, was part of the non-ordered world. Its interference, however, launched disorder when people decided they themselves desired to be the source and center of wisdom and order.

This sort of understanding now offers explanation of the statement made in the last chapter. With people as the source and center of wisdom, the result was not order centered on them but disorder in which sin reigned. They were incapable of establishing order on their own with themselves as the center. The disorder this introduced extended to all people of all time, as well as to the cosmos, and life in God’s presence was forfeited.

Therefore, first of all, we now live in a world characterized in part by non-order because it remains in process of being ordered—a process that is hampered because humans have not filled the role for which they were created. This non-order is reflected in natural disasters, disease and pain, among many other things. Sin is not the cause of all of these aspects of our current situation, but they demonstrate human inability to enforce order within creation.
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I would additionally be inclined to place at least some demon activity in this category, insofar as they may be amoral and nonvolitional spiritual forces that are part of the non-ordered world and bring non-order. This matches the profile that they have in the Gospels.

Second, we also live in a world characterized by order, because that is what creation established. We enjoy not only the benefits of the order that God brought and continues to bring but the benefits of kingdom order established through the work of Christ. Furthermore, humans have brought the benefits of order throughout history through discovery and invention, technology, and industry. These very same human advances that bring order, however, often also bring disorder because we too often proceed with our own selfish ends guiding us (ourselves as the center of order) rather than recognizing that we are stewards of sacred space.

Consequently, and third, we also live in a world characterized by disorder. This disorder is found in the ways that we harm the environment, the ways that we harm one another and the ways that we harm ourselves. Disorder is the result of sin, and it continues to reflect our inability to be as good as we were designed to be. Among its many deleterious effects, sin has made us low-functioning creatures, and the paltry order that we manage to bring is a caricature of what God has intended us for. All of creation groans (Rom 8:19-22) in this state of delayed order and rampant disorder, the latter being the result of sin. That sin is most basically manifested in the idea that we thought we could do better than God—a delusion that still plagues all of us.

Proposition 17

All People Are Subject to Sin and Death Because of the Disorder in the World, Not Because of Genetics

We all agree that theologically, biblically and experientially, sin is particular to each of us, universal to all of us corporately and radical in its extent, not just behavioral. As such, sin is in need of a remedy. Less clear in Scripture is how we are infected by it. Neither science nor exegesis provides the answer, though they each can potentially identify problems with proposed answers. In the end, we will inevitably see a variety of possible explanations that are not ruled out by the Bible. We are then left to try to determine which is the best fit.

Original Sin

Why/how did all become subject to sin and death? This is not the place to delve into the intricacies of original sin, how sin spread to all humans and how sin affected the cosmos, though some comments will be offered. These issues have been debated throughout the history of the church, and a few caveats can help launch our brief discussion.

1. It is important to differentiate between what we experience negatively from a not fully ordered world that God still works to perfect and what we experience from the disorder brought into the world by humanity (see discussion in the previous chapter).
   
2. It is important to recognize that there are categories of evil, and not all of them are connected to sin (e.g., what is called “natural evil”). We should, for example, distinguish between experiential evil (discomfort resulting from non-order and/or disorder on all levels), personal evil (antisocial behavior that causes suffering in others), punitive consequence (discomfort resulting from actions by God or rulers designed to punish or discourage personal evil and/or the perpetuation of disorder) and sin (ritual/moral impropriety that damages relationship with deity). Most people use
   sin
   and
   evil
   interchangeably to refer to any or all of these.
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   This is unfortunate because the problem of evil is a larger discussion than the problem of sin that people face.
   

Beyond the larger theological and philosophical questions, a more specific issue is raised when people try to integrate biblical and theological claims about sin and the fall with a scientific understanding that posits humans before Adam and Eve or contemporary with them. How would all of them have become subject to sin? After all, anthropological evidence for violence in the earliest populations deemed human would indicate that there was never a time when sinful (= at least personal evil) behavior was not present. Consequently, such a discussion must revolve around the question of accountability. In this regard, Paul’s statement in Romans 5:13 provides a critical insight: “To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law.”

Starting then with accountability, we can identify
law
as that which helps us to understand what is right and wrong. It can be relative (a law against parking on a particular side of the street on a particular day) and therefore not morally based, or it can be absolute, based on moral issues and inherently in accordance with the desires of God as revealed in the character of the law. In this discussion, we are interested only in the latter category. When a law is identified or when the desires or nature of God are made known, those who receive such information become accountable. By accountable, I mean that they can now be considered guilty of violation and are therefore subject to punishment by the one who established the law—in our discussion, God. There could well be natural consequences with or without accountability.

This reasoning suggests that even though any human population possibly preceding or coexisting with Adam and Eve may well have been engaged in activity that would be considered sin, they were not being held accountable for it: where there was no law or revelation, there was no sin (no consciousness of relationship, no immortality). In that scenario, the sin of Adam and Eve would be understood as bringing sin to the entire human race by bringing accountability. From Romans 5:13 we infer that, in Paul’s view, sin comes into the world when accountability comes into the world. Any humans prior to Adam did not have a personal, conscious relationship to lose (though as God’s creatures they were related to him), so nothing that they did could jeopardize relationship. They did have the potential for eventual relationship with God (having been given his image) but would not have to deal with the disorder introduced by sin, which is more than we have.
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As we then move from thinking about accountability to considering a doctrine of sin, it is important to distinguish between the various sources that inform our current doctrine. Augustine pushes beyond what Paul says, and Paul has moved beyond what Genesis says. In Old Testament theology there is no apparent necessity for asserting the fall, though they understand the reality of sin. Even in Paul, it is not original sin that pervades his writing but the need for the savior.
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Augustine and Irenaeus

The model of sin that is the foundation for most Protestant theology today was expounded by Augustine from his reading of Paul, not by Paul himself, so we have to tread carefully. Augustine’s view of sin was premised from the start on his particular understanding of Adam, which he derived theologically rather than finding explicitly stated in the text.

We neither have the time nor is this the place to engage in a full-orbed treatment of Augustine’s views of original sin. A few basic (and inevitably reductionistic) observations will have to suffice. Augustine’s model is one in which sin is passed from generation to generation as we are born, though of course biology in general was not well understood in his time, and, more specifically, they were totally ignorant of genetics. The more we have learned about biology and genetics, the less likely Augustine’s model has become. Furthermore, if his starting point (view of Adam) is debatable, the rest of his model is jeopardized. If Augustine’s model has been undermined on both counts (starting point and mechanism), one might think that it would have collapsed under its own unwieldiness. The theory, however, has become so deeply entrenched in the history of theological thought and development that it has taken on a life of its own almost independent from its essential roots. Perhaps the time has come for the church to reconsider how original sin is formulated and understood.

The alternative that had been propounded by Irenaeus, even before Augustine, had more of a Pandora’s box element to it. Sin/disorder was released into the world, where we all contract it like a contagion or pollution in the air.
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One of the distinctions between the two models is that in the Augustinian model, the world is infected because we are infected, while in the Irenaean model we are infected from the world that got polluted because of that first act (disorder let loose and run amok).
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