One important distinction is between original guilt vis a vis inheritance of the sin nature.
While the Eastern church does not emphasise on original guilt. It does emphasise on the corruption of humanity via Adams Sin and Christ’s sacrifice and Sanctification as the means of restoring the image of God.
For example if you read Athanasius, his concern is with the image of God which God conferred upon Adam and was corrupted by Adams Sin. He equates this image of God with ability to reason… And corrupt image of God is being restored in and through Christ in believers. In heritance is an important part of his theology.
Not in 15 years friend. Glad for the time I spent in it as a young man when I had the patience for it. Left for private industry and never looked back.
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I have great respect for Athanasius. I like his creed the best of the big three. Are you thinking of a particular link to share on that?
Just read his book on the incarnation… translations are available online…
I also have great respect for his way of approaching things.
Not sure what you’re asking
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I’m curious your thoughts on some of the OT precedence for original sin that I cite. Of course, I know that there is a large range of views on this. You are more than welcome to correct me…
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There can be prooftexts here or there, but nothing like a sustained reflection like we get from Paul (primarily), who speaks of Sin (personified) in way unique to earlier Jewish reflections, and perhaps even unique among NT writers. The OT makes no direct connections between Adam’s sin and human sinfulness (unless the disputed Hos 6:7 is used…but, even then, it’s still surprising that there’s only one and it alone is insufficient to build a whole doctrine). It is not surprising, then, that the current Jewish position(s) do(es) not agree with historic Christianity.
Having said this, we do know there were competing views of human nature/sinfulness in Second Temple Judaism, some making the connection back to Adam. This suggests that it is possible, even apart from the fuller NT revelation, to connect the OT dots and land at something on the trajectory toward full-blown human depravity/original sin. There are two specific OT narratives/trajectories I see that make the strongest case.
First, Gen 4-11 is well-known for its dual themes “spread of sin” and “spread of grace.” In fact the episodes go back-and-forth between these. The pervasiveness of sin is so universal that just a few chapters in God is ready to wipe them all out! “And the LORD regretted that he had made 'adam on the earth” (Gen 6:6). There’s no doubt these chapters are tied to the Garden. If someone needs more textual support, (a) chs. 2-4 are part of the same toledoth and thus form a unit; (b) the next toledoth begins with Adam and continues through the (divine IMO) rebellion of 6:1f and the announcement of the flood in 6:7; and © Noah as a new Adam (both in covenant with God and in their sin). I could also add a connection between the three rebellions of Gen 3; 6; and 11. The point is that Adam’s sin leads to universal rebellion; the whole point of the entrance of Abraham is that this (not the flood) is God’s answer to the universal sin problem, as well as the way God will fulfill his promise in Gen 3:15. The possible reason we don’t hear more universal statements about sin after the beginning of Genesis is that the rest of the OT, for the most part, is focused on Abraham’s seed.
Second is the pessimistic view of Israel’s heart in the book of Deuteronomy. This was a major part of my dissertation on the theology of exile in Deuteronomy. In short, God and Moses know that exile is inevitable (4:25-28; 28:58-68 with ch. 29 and 30:1) because Israel has (present tense) a stubborn and uncircumcised heart (e.g., 9:4-6, 24; 10:16; 29:4; 31:16f; ch. 32), only to be remedied after the exile (30:6; cf. 4:29-31). It must be emphasized that the Deuteronomic rhetoric will now allow these negative evaluations to be charged only against a few individuals or one generation; rather the “you” is Israel as a single covenant partner and subsumes all generations. Moses’ actual audience is the second generation after the exodus. But, Moses speaks to them as the same “you” that was in Egypt and at Sinai (4:9ff; 5:1f), that rebelled in the desert and specifically against Moses (chs. 1-3 and 9-10; note “because of you” in 3:26, that will enter the land, and will eventually be exiled, but then restored (esp. 4:25-31; 30:1-10). Again, the inevitability is due to consistent depravity, the answer for which is an act of divine grace (.promised after the judgment of exile).
The logic is that if this is true of God’s covenant people, then surely the same goes for the whole human race. I think this logic is what Paul does in Romans. OT Israel is the Prodigal Son–the failed covenant partner who, despite the privileges and advantages of God’s presence and mission, could not overcome her nature. In effect, Paul says, “This is what is true of all humans left to themselves to rely on their own resources and wisdom.”
So, this is how I would make the case from the OT. No, it’s not as clear as the NT (duh!), but there is consistency and allowance for progressive revelation. Hope this helps.
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Excellent reply, Keith.
I would add, in the context of the Pentateuch, those early indications of universal descent from Adam, and in particular the Table of Nations.
If your case against Israel is right (and I read the Pentateuch the same way), and Adam’s sin is implicated in that corruption, then it’s equally a case against the nations mentioned in the Table - who have the additional factor of being known to be idolaters universally.
Exactly how later writers like Paul get to the universality of Adam’s inheritance I’m not sure. But it would be reasonable for them to assume the Table of nations implies universal common ancestry from Adam - and of course, in our day under Genealogical Adam, Adam’s acnestry of the Table of Nations more or less entails Adam as a universal ancestor.
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You mean Ken, right?
And yes, it was excellent.
I wonder if we could tease this out in a couple of ways (this is just an initial thought experiment). The first thought may or may not be relevant, since it brings in some connection between rebellion in the the divine realm and human rebellion. I know you take a non-divine view of the sons of God in Gen 6, but I assume you agree with the serpent in Gen 3 as more than a snake. Then we have Gen 10-11, which brings in what Heiser calls the “Deuteronomy 32 worldview.” An allusion to Babel (and subsequently the Table of Nations) is here (following DSS/LXX not MT): “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. But the LORD’s portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage” (Deut 32:8-9 ESV). Other relevant verses are Deut 4:19; 32:17; and Psalm 82. The overall point is that divine rebellion and human rebellion go hand-in-hand (and it’s universal). This does not take away human responsibility, but adds a “supernatural” angle often missed (which is also why the redemption of Christ includes a defeat of supernatural forces, including a reversal of Babel at Pentecost). Of course, it would take much more time to unpack.
Second, with or without the above, might there be an analogy between Noah (the second Adam) and Israel (also a second Adam). Noah was elected and rescued out of a universally sinful generation. Likewise, Israel, beginning with Abraham, is elected and rescued out of universally idolatrous humanity. However, Noah took his sinful nature with him on the boat, and so fell like Adam on the other side. Likewise, despite God’s grace to Israel, she too would fall because she is made of the same stock as all humanity.
This fits not only Heiser’s work, but much of what N.T. Wright has done. And it fits the idea of Adam being elected out of an early population. I guess the one difficulty here is that we are now pointing to Adam as the fountainhead of rebellion. Stlll thinking…
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This goes back to an inside joke involving name confusion on The Hump.
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K-k-k-ken-k-keith…
@K-k-k-keith-k-ken:grinning:
I do agree angelic realm is an important part of the narrative, and have to say Heiser triggered at least some of my thinking with his contention that the Serpent had a perfectly good reason to be in the garden as part of Yahweh’s divine council.
This fact also gives him a reason to be jealous, not of God, bit of Adam, who would (he rightly surmised) be on the way to outranking him. This works its way through in the narrative right up to the final overthrow of Satan, which becomes morally possible for God since the sin of Adam which Satan held over him as accuser, has finally been dealt with justly.
The ransom theory rules again, OK - or at least, finds a rightful place in the story.
And so the first rebellion begins with Satan, but not in some remote pre-creation time, but in the garden itself, and occasioned by man. And the power gained by Satan over man goes at least some way to explaining the “powers and principalities” as legitimate angelic “guardians”, but gone bad.
Or at least, that’s my working summary.
What is never stated in Scrioture, so far as I know, is any suggestion that the angelic powers have been given any authority to corrupt nature: all the references seem to refer to their relationship to mankind an, especially, civil powers.
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Reposting some older comments:
“Okay, so one of the theories I’m working on, with ramifications for the ‘inheritance of a predisposition to sin from Adam’ tenet of theology, has to do with a potentially permananent, morphologically-expressed change to human consciousness introduced by Adam and Eve, who both ‘ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,’ with the results being a sudden break in their trusting orientation towards their Creator, a sudden sense of shame and vulnerable transparency, and generally a near-permanent moodshift away from the easy innocence and even joyful orientation that had characterized their experience with life up to this point.
It is as if they suddenly took morally, ontologically and relationally ‘sick.’
Another related consequence was ‘greatly increased pain in childbirth.’
Following Carl Sagan’s lead, I theorize that all of this suggests a sudden, perhaps not well-regulated or neurologically received, shift in neocortical neurological networks, dendritic actvity, and the resulting increase in conceptual abilities implied by this new ‘knowledge of good and evil’ – a sudden ‘supercharging’ of brain physiology, which moved us in a saltational leap, permanently past the relative moral innocence we had known in the garden prior to that point.
The concept might be coined, to take your lead, Josh, something like ‘neocortical morphological Adam,’ and begin to explain why his influence on all subsequent human births is universal through interbreeding, outcompetition, or deliberate elimination.
The ‘humans outside the garden’ didn’t stand a chance, ultimately.
Given that we’ve seen peer-reviewed articles which elucidate ‘a frameshift adding function to a protein,’ we can speculate about whether the introduction of an enzyme or suite of enzymes ingested by Adam and Eve when eating this unique fruit caused a ‘superactivation’ of, say, the relatively subtle ARHGAP11B gene, resulting in a meta-physiological change which resulted in a permanent morphological novelty, and which turned Adam and Eve’s descendants towards a predisposition of (to say it most dramatically for the sake of illustration) becoming genius-level sadists?
The near evidence has Adam blaming God for giving him the woman who tempted him with this fruit in the first place, a blame-shifting technique at the root of all kinds on human self-deception.
Then there’s the potential discovery of a ‘virus’ which may account for rudimentary human consciousness in the first place, to which we could have lost an immunity, e.g.
This is all highly speculative --a suggestion, really --and no doubt there will be no significant effort at negation OR confirmation by those better equipped than I-- but, is it totally beyond the pale?
Is the fear that we might be discovering the rudiments of an etiological pathway through which the pathology of human sinfulness came into the world really all that scary?
Joshua eschews this approach, not seeing how the ingestion of a substance could lead to permanent morphological change, and admittedly that pathway is far from developed.
It’s just that Adam’s new form of ‘knowledge’ was, apparently beyond his capability prior to the fall, and so a theory of the development of neurological pathway to a novel, heritable neocortical ‘mutation’ arising as a consequence (the natural consequence of illegitimate ingestion of the fruit), resulting in a whole new functional morphology that eventually becomes predominant throughout the population is not really any more science fiction than a simple retelling of the known facts, from the perspective of genetics, genealogical theory and population studies, isn’t it?
We know there were ‘spiritual’ things going on during the fall; why not physical things that contributed to the developments, as well?
I almost certainly don’t have the exact components right, but the principle seems sound.
Just like mood-altering drugs can change our whole daily experience, why couldn’t there be something so unique and historically consequential that it permanently so disposed us?”
Universal descent, or at least the beginnings of it, but not sole descent. The two verses from this section most often used to indicate sole descent are, in my view, poorly translated and mis-interpreted. I figure that you agree with me on this issue, but to make it plain I’d like to talk about those two verses a bit…
In chapter nine, verse nineteen the King James Version reads “of these was the whole earth overspread.” This is speaking of the descendants of the three sons of Noah. Some versions say that of these three was the whole earth “populated.” Both of those are terrible translations of the Hebrew word na-pe-sah (Strong’s 5310 root of naphats ). Naphats means “sunder, scatter, dash in pieces, or disperse.”
Some versions do translate it “dispersed”, which is at least within the allowable meaning of the root word. It does not mean populating or peopling. There are other words which could have been used and have been used to describe populating the land. “Filling” could have been used, as it is used so other many other places in Genesis to describe population growth. That this word, or any of the others, was not used here demonstrates that these verses are not describing a situation where Noah’s family comprises 100% of the population on earth.
Rather I think the text indicates, both here and as we read on in Genesis, that the descendants of Noah became the natural nobility of the surrounding peoples. They had all of the advantages mentioned previously concerning the sons of Adam, but were less likely to be so completely entangled in sin. Whereas the prior Adamic peoples were mostly dominated by surrounding tribes, the descendants of Noah behaved more wisely.
As they lived their lives it would only be natural that they accumulated servants and hangers-on. Abraham, as a private citizen, was so powerful that the King of Gerar felt compelled to establish a peace treaty with him. Isaac grew even more powerful, so that the leaders of Gerar asked him to depart because his household was stronger than all of them put together!
You may recall that Abraham was able to raise three hundred and eighteen fighting men on short notice, almost all from his own household. These were not his sons or his family, that is just how many people attached themselves to him. These were not unmotivated slaves. These men enthusiastically identified with the house of Abraham. They defeated the armies of several city states! In the same way Esau gathered four hundred men with him for the showdown with Jacob.
If this was the drawing power of Abraham, and of Isaac, and even of Esau, imagine the force of attraction the nearer descendants of Noah had on the primitives around them. By the time of Abraham, the knowledge of how to farm and the domestication of livestock were more widely disseminated. Not so in the day of these people. Can you imagine being a Hunter-Gatherer coming into contact with people who had herds of “prey” animals willingly following along with them? People who, instead of foraging for berries, made all manner of fruits and vegetables rise up out of the ground wherever they lived.
For those who met the near descendants of Noah this must have seemed like an impartation of sacred knowledge which produced a better life. Perhaps something thing like this happened earlier when the sons of Adam made contact with nearby peoples. The ancient inhabitants of Sumer said that they had been taught civilization “by the gods”.
An accurate description of this situation would be to say, as it does in the King James translation of verse 10:32, “by these were the nations divided.” This is not to say that every person in all of those nations was a direct descendant of the patriarch which formed that nation. Rather, the peoples were divided up into nations by these men. These men became the founders of those nations in the sense that their households- those of their blood and otherwise- were forged into those nations.
Guy
The “natural nobility” idea may be true, if we accept that Adam’s line got big ideas in the garden. I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary in order to confirm your dispersion idea. The whole history of humanity - including the formation of Israel - involves the mixing of people groups by conquest, infiltration and assimilation.
So for both exegetical and anthropological reasons, we don’t need to say that the Table of Nations represents the spread of mankind on a virgin earth, but only those nations which could be seen as descended from Adam as a mixed population at the time of writing.
That happens to correspond pretty well with the distribution of the western neolithic (anatolian) dispersal, and so it’s not unrealistic to match the account with that.
That fits very well with the Genelogical Adam idea, I agree.
Do you maybe mean to address those comments to Mark?
Quite right - suffering from an Indian takeaway too late last night…
“No more to be said
The poor lad was dead
From commitiing Hurry Curry.”
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“What naan sense these mortals speak!”
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