A Thinking Reed

A historical Fall?

Written by

Lee M.

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I’ve never had a problem with the idea that the opening chapters of Genesis, which I re-read just the other day, are to be read in a way alternately described as “myth,” “legend,” “metaphor,” “saga” or what have you. Moreover, I think reading Genesis in this way is fully compatible with as robust a theory of biblical inspiration as you care to assert. There’s no contradiction that I can see between saying the Bible is inspired and saying that each book has to be read according to the conventions of the genre(s) it exemplifies.

In the case of Genesis, I’m perfectly comfortable with the common view that the creation story is more about disclosing God as creator of the universe, and humankind’s special place as the imago dei than it is a literal account of the mechanics of how the universe and life came into existence. In other words, there’s no reason to reject the view that human beings evolved from less developed forms of life in order to maintain the truth of the creation accounts.

However, what I’ve never seen resolved to my satisfaction is the role of the Fall in a post-evolutionary understanding of human origins. It’s difficult to square an evolutionary account of human origins with the idea that humanitiy’s original state was one of blessedness from which they fell into a state of sin. As far as evolutionary history can tell us, there’s no evidence for such a radical break in human pre-history. And there was almost certainly no period when human beings didn’t suffer death, disease, and the other afflictions mortal flesh is heir to.

Simply dispensing with the idea of the Fall hasn’t seemed viable to most Christians, not least becasue it would seem to have major ramifications in Atonement doctrine and responses to the problem of evil, among other things. So there have been a number of different attempts to re-think the Fall in the context of an evolutionary worldview. For instance, one might think of the Fall as describing something that each of us experiences individually, or a sort of ahistorical description of the “human condition” (see, e.g. Reinhold Niebuhr’s seminal Gifford Lectures The Nature and Destiny of Man). One problem with this view is that it has a tendency to make sin a constituent part of human nature or creation or finitude as such, which seems to compromise the goodness of God’s creation.

Another move has been to adopt what, for lack of a better term, I’ll call a “neo-Irenaean” view. Irenaeus, it appears, held that humankind was not created in a kind of preternatural state of power, wisdom, and innocence. Instead, he thought Adam and Eve were more like undeveloped children and the Fall, rather than being a cosmic catastrophe, consisted of humanity gettting off track from the path God intended for them. This has obvious similarities to the evolutionary view in that it sees humanity as starting out from an undeveloped state, rather than one of what seems to us to be superhuman blessedness. On the other hand, it may at times tend to a naively Pelagian view of freedom and to blunt the seriousness of sin, which may partly account for Irenaeus’s view that the Incarnation would’ve happened even if humanity hadn’t sinned.

So, any thoughts? Do you think of the Fall as a historical event (even if the Genesis account isn’t to be read as literal history)? Is it a metaphor? Something in between?

Comments

5 responses to “A historical Fall?”

  1. Joshie

    Obviously Irenaeus couldn’t be Pelagian since he lived centuries before Pelagius, but I’m just bringing that up to be an ass.

    That view attributed to Irenaeus is close to my understanding of the Eastern Orthodox view of sin, but I don’t think it is “weak on sin” since, although humanity was immature and underdeveloped in this view, Adam and Eve were still “tried as adults” if you will, and found guilty of sin.

    To the question, I do think it is best read as metaphor. God created us good, intended us for good things, but, some time very very long ago, in a place far far away (Turkey?) we made a decision to disobey and that has marked our natures ever since. So maybe that’s more in the combo arena but whatever.

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  2. Eric Lee

    It’s not the same topic, although they’re often intertwined, but in an edited discussion called Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy, some of these views of the fall were considered. John Hick has a very Irenaean view of things, one which makes a bit of sense. Process thought, like David Griffin and Marjorie Suchocki, tends to have the most ‘satisfactory’ view of evil and the fall, but that’s only if you presuppose that God really isn’t omniscient, which may turn out to not be satisfactory at all. Suckhocki has a book on the fall called The Fall To Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology, which is an interesting process look at the fall, but even though I read it years ago, what little I can remember of it probably doesn’t jive with what I hold to today. Probably quite problematic.

    I still haven’t completely re-visited this discussion of evolution much, ever since my repulsion from my own former creationism. On the one hand I believe that God created everything good (Gen. 1:31), but I don’t know how exactly that squares with an evolutionary view of all being natural selection, violence, etc. I’m not sure. Conor Cunningham, author of the rad Genealogy of Nihilism has a book coming out on Darwinism sometime in the next year which should be interesting.

    </rambling>

    Peace,

    Eric

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  3. Gaius

    Take both the story of the Fall and the bad fit between the story of evolution and the idea of a substantial human soul and you get 2 more reasons to add to Berkeley’s for rejecting matter.

    The older I get the more seriously I take human incompetence, stupidity, and corruption. And the more I think they render much supposed human achievement incredible, the more I think that, too, is an argument for idealism.

    Another way to put it. Much of what we think happened in the world we extrapolate from our experience could not have happened, partly because humans are too stupid, vicious, and incompetent. Hence the unreality of that extrapolated world.

    And if some, at least, of the past we extrapolate from present experience just never happened? The right answer to the question how things were may be that they weren’t any particular way because they just weren’t, at all.

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  4. Anonymous

    Do you stop at Adam and Eve or do you think one can interpret Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as a mythological figures? Is the Covenant as well as Eden a mythological construct to illustrate the condition of man?

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  5. Lee

    FWIW, someone else who takes an Irenaean view is the eminent philosopher of religion Richard Swinburne, who is, I think, a convert from Anglicanism to Eastern Orthodoxy.

    I was thinking a bit more about this, and it occurred to me that there almost has to have been a historical “fall” in some sense. What I mean is this: pretty much everyone agrees that non-human animals aren’t moral agents. That is, it’s impossible for the actions of a non-human animal to be good or evil in the moral sense. But given that, then it follows pretty much right away that moral evil entered the world at some historical point that is, at least in principle (though almost certainly not in practice), identifiable.

    At some point in human evolution we developed a capacity for recognizing the difference between good and evil. Or, put another way, we became able to adopt the “moral point of view” with respect to our own actions and the actions of others, to evaluate them in light of criteria that weren’t simply expressions of our own immediately felt needs or desires. At that point in human (or proto-human) development, the possibility of moral evil entered the world. We might think of this as corresponding to the part in the Genesis story after God has warned Adam and Eve not to eat the forbidden fruit, but before they have actually done it. The possibility of disobedience exists, but hasn’t yet been actualized.

    And moreover at some point (whether by a single individual, or by several) this possibility was realized. Somewhere back there among our ancestors someone choose to pursue a course of action that was in opposition to what they perceived (however inchoately) as the right way. And once this choice was made, evil became a permanent part of the human condition. That is to say that humans, being social creatures, now had this evil as part of the social and cultural environment, their mental furniture.

    This might indicate that the “transmission” of original sin that so vexed Augustine might be better thought of along the lines of the spreading of a “meme” rather than in a quasi-physcialist way. Just as a particular crimes sometimes evoke “copycats,” the ur-crime of choosing evil may have been propagated through cultural rather than physical means. Evil became part of the social and mental environment into which each human being was born, thus making it harder to avoid.

    Of course, I can think of at least two problems with this. One, it’s more of a “nurture” rather than a “nature” account of sin, and so may seem to make sin seem less deep seated than the tradition has usually taken it to be. Secondly, it doesn’t take into account the God-related aspect of sin. That is, sin is usually thought of not just as a moral transgression, but as disobedience of God. That would seem to require some kind of awareness of God against which our ancestors rebelled.

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