A.Suarez's Treatment on a Pope's Formulation for Original Sin's Transmission!

Faith & Science Conversation
1587

I’ll briefly reinstate my points. Eventually , if I remain in these forums, I’ll do a post on why I don’t believe in original sin and line it out. I don’t see any evidence of anyone ever proving it using scripture. I see people grabbing this or that lost and saying that’s what it means, but I don’t see it actually meaning that. It’s difficult to prove a negative. It’s like trying to use the Bible to say aliens don’t exist because it never talks about it period and any verses someone claims talks about it, don’t.

  1. Adam and Eve had the same flesh as us. Adam and Eve was no different than us. They were not immortal. If they were immortal there would be no tree of life in the garden for them to eat from. It would be pointless because if they are immortal they don’t need it and if they would only need it because they sinned but would be prohibited from having it then it just really makes no sense. The only reason why they would need the tree of life is the same reasons why we need christ. We are mortal beings. Without God giving us a path to immortal life we perish. So Adam and Eve were mortals that would perish if they were denied access to the tree of life.

  2. Adam and Eve had the same flesh as use also because of their ability to choose righteousness or choose sin. They did not have special anti sin powers because they in fact sinned. The story make it seem like sometime shortly after God telling them don’t do it, they both did it, after a single conversation with a snake. They doubted Gods word almost immediately. So just like us, they could sin, and they did choose to sin. So the ability to sin was already there from the very start. Before God even drew a line in the sand about don’t do this, they already had mortal flesh and battled between the fruits of the spirit snd the fruits of the flesh.

  3. Sin has always existed. As soon as there was something here in earth that could reason between good and bad sin existed. However, until God drew a line in the sand, sin was not something we were held accountable to.

Romans 5:12-14
New American Standard Bible
12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all mankind, because all sinned— 13 for until the Law sin was in the world, but sin is not counted against anyone when there is no law. 14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam until Moses, even over those who had not sinned in the likeness of the violation committed by Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come.

  • Sin entered the world because of one man. What this verse is referring to is accountability to sin. Because it says, “ for until the law sin was in the world , but sin is not counted against anyone when there is no law. So sin entered the world, as in the first person sinned, when they broke the law, “ do not touch the fruit “. But if we are really pressed on a purely literal understanding then that can’t even be it because Eve touched the fruit first. But before she touched the fruit, she sinned by doubting God. But maybe before that the first sin was Adam failing to keep her safe by keeping the serpent away. It’s not really clear. We just know that Adam was the first man to disobey God in some way resulting in accountability to sin, but before that, it already existed, just no one was accountable to it.

*the death is not a physical death. God said on that day Adam and Eve would die. In hebrew it’s on that day they would die by dying. The death was a process. From throughout scripture we know it’s actually the destruction of the soul that is the ultimate death. Physical death has always been here. Evolution does not function without death. Snakes don’t exist without death. They eat meat, corpses, not plants. So death was happening before Adam and Eve was even called into their own promise land. So the death is a spiritual death. The wages of sin is death. Little babies that die don’t die because they sinned. They die for all kinds of reasons but none of their personal choices. Animals die all the time. They die without having committed sins. So no matter how you try to look at it short of a extremely literalist worldview where everything was created at once fully formed and would life forever until Adam made a bad choice and all of creation would have to pay for it. But that’s silly, and I don’t think that biblically accurate and I’m even more certain it’s not scientifically accurate.

So the sin that spread is spiritual sin. God started holding all of mankind accountable to the law.

Now the law means a lot of things. First of all, law actually means the teachings , the decrees. For Adam his law was presumably small. He had just a lines drawn in the sand. For the Israelites the laws was in the hundreds, possibly thousands. The scriptures only contain 611 do’s and don’t’s. For those that have never heard any scripture in their life they are judged by the laws on their hearts, which is just the Jewish way of saying judged by their own conscience.

Romans 2:12-16
New American Standard Bible
12 For all who have sinned without the Law will also perish without the Law, and all who have sinned under the Law will be judged by the Law; 13 for it is not the hearers of the Law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the Law who will be justified. 14 For when Gentiles who do not have the Law instinctively perform the requirements of the Law, these, though not having the Law, are a law to themselves, 15 in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience testifying and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them, 16 on the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge the secrets of mankind through Christ Jesus.

For those never given the decrees of the law they will be judged in a different way. They will be judged by their conscience. Jesus Christ will reveal what’s in their hearts. Culture can’t hide that. Morality is not just culture. Instincts define us as well. No matter the culture, no matter the era, we all know kidnapping and torturing someone. Our species , since we’ve been around and maybe even our earliest cousins in our genus has known that those things are wrong. Even in cultures where they taught things in Okoyong like of a woman gives birth to twins one of those twins were gathered by the devil and so both were killed either actively, or passively by leaving them in the first. I’m quite certain if you begin to dig into it you’ll have found women, and fathers, fighting against it the whole time. That’s why Mary Slessor was able to so quickly undermine it for the most part ending the murders.

When those men and woman stand before Christ he will reveal that even then they knew what they were doing was a sin. That they hardened their hearts against righteousness and if they did not repent in some way before death he will destroy their body and soul. They will die again and never come back from it.

So for your theory to be verifiable it would require these things.

  1. You’ll have to prove biblically that Adam and Eve had a different kind of flesh.

  2. You would have to show genetically that there is something there in all of us.

1588

As for how do I define original sin. I define it by how it was originally used going back thousands of years ago. It’s the belief that all of humanity is born automatically deserving of hell because of a curse placed on all of us because of Adam and Eve’s choice. Original sin has from the earliest taught that even babies born that die a few days later, are going to hell or purgatory. It’s the whole reason why the “theological wars” of the Anabaptists to the early 1500s when the Schleitheim Confession was generated.

Prior to that we see it expressed by Augustine of Hippo in the late 300’s AD. He taught unbaptized infants go to either limbo or hell. He started teaching that to counter Pelagius’s view of free will and denying the original sin concept. Since the first century there has always been those who accepted and rejected the belief. So it’s not like I’m the first to come to this conclusion.

1 Like
1589

Ordinary life kept getting in my way. I’ll return tomorrow with comments.

1590

I find Point 1 a very interesting remark.

By contrast I do not understand well what you mean by “something” in Point 2 and would be thankful if you elaborate a bit more, in order I can answer fittingly.

1591

I still need to answer your previous comments, but I’ll start with the most recent.

So this is an infinite regression until someone inevitably sins in the likeness of Adam. If Adam hadn’t sinned, Cain’s sin would have repeated the temptation and sin of his father, and if Cain hadn’t sinned, his sons’ sins would have been like the “first sin” of Adam, etc. I’m sure you’ve heard the expression that “every sin is Adam’s sin.” If Adam’s sin hadn’t been the first, then mine would have. That’s all I’m saying. Adam’s sin is repeated in every individual human life, and the serpent is always involved. That’s why the “first couple” are represented in the story as “the man” and “the woman,” not as the proper names Adam and Eve.

The temptation the snake represents is threefold: First, it questions the “rightness” of the command; second, it denies the consequences of disobedience; third, it questions the motives of the lawgiver. This is a universal pattern in moral maturity. What happens when the child begins to question the “rightness” of a rule, and the motives of the rule-giver? The pattern isn’t unique to Adam & Eve. As I’ve said elsewhere,

The serpent introduced doubt from the outside, and the woman determined her personal moral principles vis-à-vis the command. She applied her own moral judgment, a phenomenon that begins in adolescence and continues throughout the rest of life, and weighed whether the rule was hypothetically non-binding and contrary to her own self-interest (the fruit was “good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom”). The universal nature of temptation and sin appears at the end of a process of moral maturation that all children undergo. In the end, the adolescent applies her own moral principles, considers her self-interest, and declares her independence, albeit prematurely.

I would say the opposite: St. James’ universal pattern doesn’t just apply after the first sin; it applies from the first sin to the last. Eve surely desired something that was “good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom.” The first desire is purely physical, the second esthetic, and the third intellectual. The woman’s experience represents all three, but as individuals we can desire to exceed the boundaries in any of those areas.

I agree in principle. The temptation does emerge from “urges rooted in evolved animal emotions and passions.” I differ at several points. First, evolution always involves a population. If Adam & Eve were two specially created individuals, then they represent a disjunction in history. The evolved urges, which are the “propensity to sin,” skipped those two, but the temptation to sin immediately reappears in the generation afterward. If the source of temptation emerges from an evolved population, then the “propensity to sin” existed prior to A&E. That means it can’t be the “original sin.”

Second, the experience of the man and woman are repeated in every human life, but not everyone is born in a culture where “God’s law” is known. Limiting sin to a known violation of God’s law would mean that only those who know God’s law can commit sin. That’s clearly untrue. A morally culpable sin is not just a violation of God’s known law; it involves a desire to exceed the boundaries in any area of conscience. All have sinned and fallen short.

This introduces all sorts of difficulties. As I said in Kierkegaard’s Complaint: Putting Adam Fantastically Outside of History:

Kierkegaard complains that traditional conceptions of original sin introduce “a fantastic assumption, a state which by its loss involved the Fall.” What was that state? Most of us have heard it from childhood: Adam and Eve were created perfect and lived in a sinless, deathless paradise. Everyone agrees that such a situation doesn’t exist today, but as Kierkegaard pointed out, the theologians “forgot that the doubt was a different one, namely, whether it ever had existed — and that was pretty clearly necessary if one were to lose it. The history of humanity acquired a fantastic beginning. Adam was fantastically put outside.

Consider the fantastic ways literal Adam has been portrayed… Writing on the Thomistic Evolution website, Rev. Nicanor Austriaco says God “created all things flawless,” and our original parents were “established in friendship with their Creator and in harmony within themselves and with each other and with creation around them.” Besides this “original state of harmony,” Adam and Eve also received sanctifying grace that justified them and made them righteous. To that list, Thomas Aquinas adds three more gifts to “perfect them by remedying their natural weaknesses” — immortality, integrity, and infused knowledge. On top of that, St. Thomas declares that Adam and Eve were impassable, meaning they couldn’t experience suffering or pain. Taking human evolution into account, Rev. Austriaco adds even more gifts to counter the effects of common descent: the strength to resist infidelity, violence, and false knowledge.
At this point, Kierkegaard’s complaint that human history has acquired a “fantastic beginning” appears an understatement. Adam is a superhero straight out of the Marvel Universe.

The evolved tendency to selfishness is the “propensity to sin,” and therefore it was present among the first humans prior to the first sin of the first sinners. “Full-grown sin” cannot be distrusting that God is love, because that presupposes that everyone knows God is love. Many, many people are born into situations where they don’t know God and they don’t experience love, so they can’t be charged with distrusting in something they’ve never known or experienced. Nevertheless, they can sin fully-grown sins like everyone else.

I completely agree that the difficulty in most conceptions of “original sin” is accepting that A&E were gifted with a grace that the rest of us did not receive. Back to your original question …

More tomorrow.

1592

Independently of what was taught by Anabaptists or Augustine of Hippo, when you refer to “original sin” you seem to have in mind a teaching characterized by the following tenets:

I agree that “original sin” as you define it in this post, it is not in the Bible. But this is not my view of “the state of original sin” at all.

My view is defined by the following tenets:

  1. God created the first human beings in the image of God in a state of original righteousness, free to sin or not to sin, but without propensity to sin, that is: endowed with grace to offset the evolved human appetites and emotions like lust, greed, anger, deceit, jealousy, pride, and evolutionary mechanisms like death and illness.

  2. After the first human sin all of humanity (including children) is born lacking original grace and being in need of redemption, with strong propensity to sin, submitted to death and illness.

  3. Unbaptized infants do NOT go to hell.

In a previous post I have argued that this view is clearly supported by the Bible.

You have objected:

Adam and Eve (intended as the first sinners) did not have “a different kind of flesh” before they sinned, but “a different state of soul” without propensity to sin and capable of overcoming death and illness.

That such a state of the human soul existed in the beginning before the fall is clearly attested by Genesis 2:17 and 25.

And it is additionally supported by Hebrews 7: The description of Melchizedek in this passage fits perfectly to someone in the state of original righteousness.

As already said, I do not understand what you mean by your second objection above (“to show genetically that there is something there in all of us”) and would appreciate if you could clarify.

1593

I won’t be able to respond for a while. But when I get time I’ll make sure to copy and paste what I’m responding to.

As for my second point it was this.

What is the scientific evidence for an original grace as you call it that offsets instincts. Is there any genetic evidence for it. The article seems tied to genetics. So I would think that there would be some type of mutation you’re referring to to show Adam had this ability to avoid sin easier or whatever it is. What’s the genetic is evidence that a biological change happened within us making to weaker to sin. If there is any. If not then I’ll focus on it strictly from a theological standpoint.

1 Like
1594

Starting from the top,

I answered the first point in post 1579 above.

On your second question, which I presume is about Enoch, the passage is enigmatic. “Walked with God” does not necessarily indicate sinlessness, and if the interpretation is adopted that Enoch was sinless and was translated directly into “heaven,” then Christ was not unique in human history, either as the “sinless one” or as the “firstfruit” of the resurrection. As the saying goes, hard verses make bad doctrine.

Regarding the flood, I should say off the bat that I’m not a concordist in the model of Reasons To Believe or other organizations. I see certain intriguing parallels between Gen. 1-3, history, and evolution, but I don’t think God gave a vision of human prehistory to the author(s)/editor(s). That becomes obvious in what follows.

The genealogies, the flood, and the story of Babel are first of all polemic against Mesopotamian mythology. The genealogies reply to the Sumerian King List (SKL), the Genesis flood to several ANE flood myths, and Babel to the myth of Enmerkar and the Lord of Arratta, which like the original SKL most likely was written during the reign of Shulgi. Add to that the fact that many of the names are word plays in Hebrew, which wasn’t a written language until shortly before the monarchy, and the conclusion is that Gen. 1-11 is not a historical narrative.

There wasn’t a global flood, but besides what I mentioned for Gen. 1-3, I still see other connections between Gen. 4-11 and history. The first mention of sin in the Bible relates directly to the shedding of blood, and the reason given for the bringing of God’s judgment in the flood is that humanity has filled the earth with violence. The genealogies show the progress of both sinfulness and cultural advances. Contra ANE ideology, progress isn’t brought about by the king, but by normal people. The aftermath of the flood is presented as a “restart” for humanity and the animal world (a “re-creation”). Babel is the result.

The myth of Enmerkar presents the situation that existed from the dawn of writing until the defeat of Neo-Babylon by Cyrus. Cuneiform was the written language of empire – economic trade and diplomacy. All the earth “spoke one language,” as it were. When Cyrus came to power, he declared alphabetic Persian the language of the empire, and the hegemony of cuneiform was broken.

Genesis 1-11 isn’t historical. It’s an inoculation against seemingly more “advanced” Babylonian mythology and culture for a people defeated and headed into exile. It wasn’t the first thing written in the Hebrew Bible, despite the fact that it’s the first thing that we read.

1 Like
1595

“Original grace” (the grace characteristic of the original state of righteousness) is a spiritual quality inherent to the human soul, and there is no genetic evidence for it. It refers to the fact that the first human beings in the image of God were created with free will and intellect strong enough to totally mastering the Darwinian selfish mechanisms inherited through evolution: They were not urged by concupiscence (envy, lust, anger, greed, fear, grief, etc.).

This mastering of evolved passions and emotions in the state of “original righteousness” can be better understood through the comparison with martyrdom: Martyrs become capable of dying for their faith by overpowering the utterly strong survival tendency inherited through evolution.

There is no “type of mutation” to show that Adam was free from envy, anger, lust, etc. And the sin did not cause any biological change in A&E’s DNA that could have been genetically inherited.

The so called “state of original sin” means rather “the lack of original grace”, which results into the incapability of totally mastering the Darwinian selfish mechanisms inherited through evolution, and causes a state with strong “propensity to sin” (so called concupiscence). Had God not endowed Adam and Eve (in the sense of the first image bearers) with “original grace”, would they have been created with strong “propensity to sin” engrained in the selfish evolved mechanisms, i.e.: in “the state of original sin” and being “in need of redemption”.

So in speaking about “original sin” one has to focus not on “biological changes”, but rather on “theological ones”. The state of “original sin”, with propensity to sin and need of redemption, which we all are born in, becomes transmitted at the very moment a human soul lacking original grace becomes embodied in evolved flesh.

Many thanks for your valuable contributions to the thread!
I will be pleased to hear again from you, and specially appreciate if you find time to reply this post.

1596

Yes, I’ve read @SkovandOfMitaze’s posts, but haven’t had time to reply to them yet. Good thoughts. I hope to get around to them soon.

1597

I clarify that I am referring to Melchizedek (not Enoch) according to the description of Hebrews 7.

Thanks in advance for any specific comment on this.

1 Like
1598

Good objection!

It seems to me that most of the last posters in the thread ( @MOls , @Christy , @Dale , @Mervin_Bitikofer ) acknowledge that:

  • God created the first human bearers free, and therefore able to be tempted by the devil and sin. However, these first human bearers were without any propensity to sin (concupiscence) coming from envy, lust, greed, fear etc., and therefore were not in need of redemption.

  • After the sin of Adam and Eve, i.e.: the first human sin (not necessarily the first sin of the first human bearers), the propensity to sin (concupiscence) is present in human beings, including children, and therefore they all are in need of redemption.

Now you object: Many infants and children die before being morally accountable and guilty of a sin they themselves committed. Do they exit this life without receiving Jesus Christ grace and becoming redeemed? What then becomes of them?

Here my answer:

Since the redemptory grace of Jesus becomes transmitted through baptism, if these infants or child receive baptism they become full redeemed and can join heaven to participate of God’s eternal life.

Regarding those who exit this life without baptism:

On the one hand, it looks like they would remain in need of redemption, and could not join the saints in heaven. On the other hand, and most importantly , they can neither be doomed to hell nor send to be purified in purgatory because they are not guilty of any actual personal sin .

So two options seem open:

  1. Since the propensity to sin , and the corresponding need of redemption, is permitted by God in order the sinners can remain on earth and get opportunity to repent, God applies the grace of Christ to those who die without having they themselves sinned and without baptism, to remove their propensity to sin and satisfy the need of redemption, “by analogy with the gift of salvation given sacramentally to baptized infants” (see International Theological Commission “The Hope of Salvation for Infants who Die Without Being Baptized”, point 87).

  2. They can re-incarnate, since they have not faced judgement, according to Hebrews 9:27: “people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment”.

In my view choosing one of these two options, or even both, would be fitting to God’s wisdom, justice, and mercy.

Interestingly, option 2 would mean that the teaching of re-incarnation (as for instance in Buddhism) could be integrated into Christian faith to some extent.

1599

I must admit I wasn’t expecting that. The “primeval history” is generally taken as Gen. 1-11, so I don’t think of him as a “primeval character” since he falls within Abraham’s historical timeline. Either way, I see no suggestion in Scripture that Melchizedek was sinless, let alone a clear suggestion. Hebrews 7 heaps a bunch of superlatives on him, which I’ll come back to shortly, but I’m not aware of any modern interpreters who suggest that he was sinless. Some interpret him as a “pre-incarnate” appearance of Christ, along the lines of similar interpretations of the “angel of the Lord” in the OT. I disagree, but even in those interpretations, Melchizedek isn’t understood as a literal individual in history who was sinless and lived forever/was translated directly into heaven. In that case, what I said previously about Enoch also applies to Melchizedek,

In short, if Melchizedek was sinless, then Jesus was redundant.

Regarding Hebrews 7 and Melchizedek, the basis is Gen. 14:18-20 and Psalm 110:4. Little actual information about the historical person is given, so the author of Hebrews engages in what Judaism would call “midrash” but we call “typological interpretation” to fill in the blanks. By its nature, such interpretation is metaphorical. The “type” is metaphorically compared to the “antitype,” but the antitype is presented as a “greater” fulfillment. They aren’t identical in every way.

Melchizedek appears and disappears from the Genesis narrative without fanfare. Strictly speaking, according to the text, he has “no genealogy” and his story has no formal ending. That doesn’t mean the historical person was specially created as sinless and was translated directly into heaven. Otherwise, Melchizedek is the “second Adam” and Jesus becomes a third (or fourth) option.

The author of Hebrews isn’t making a point about the historical person in Genesis. The context makes clear that the overall concern of the chapter is to demonstrate Christ’s status as the ultimate high priest, despite the fact that he is not a descendant of Levi. If all that was said of Jesus as sinless and exalted from death was also true of Melchizedek, then the conclusion of the chapter no longer applies only to Christ:

“Such a high priest truly meets our need—one who is holy, blameless, pure, set apart from sinners, exalted above the heavens.”

1 Like
1600

That’s all I’m saying too! My sin would have been Adam’s sin (the “original sin”), if I had been the first sinner.

On the other hand, it is a fact that in the human history many sins have been perpetrated. So it is obvious that one of these sins was the first one, and the sinner who did it had a proper name. So you can consider that the term ‘Adam’ in Genesis refers to both, “the man” and the proper name of “the first sinner”.

Maybe “you differ” because you understand “propensity to sin” differently as I do.

In my view it is important to distinguish between “evolved urges” and “propensity to sin”.

I agree that the “evolved urges” existed in the Sapiens creatures, which God transformed into the first human beings in the image of God (A&E). In this sense the “evolved urges” existed prior to A&E. However, such “urges” could not be “propensity to sin” in the Sapiens creatures prior to A&E, because such creatures were incapable to sin: They had no awareness of their responsibility and accountability toward God.

The first sinners (A&E) were endowed with special grace to master the “evolved urges”, and so they were created by God without “propensity to sin” (i.e.: concupiscence coming from envy, lust, greed, anger, etc.). The “propensity to sin” emerged through the first human sin, and thereafter was present in the first sinners A&E (in this sense it did NOT skip “those two”) as “state of original sin”, and since then also all human beings come into existence lacking the special original grace and thus with “propensity to sin”.

In summary:

The “evolved urges” existed prior to A&E, but the “propensity to sin” did not exist prior to A&E, as it was caused by their first sin.

I would be thankful to know whether you agree to this statement, and if not, which would you propose in change?

1601

No, I couldn’t agree with that statement.

We agree that evolved urges existed prior to sapiens. I would disagree that sapiens were suddenly “transformed” into humans in the image of God. I take the propensity to sin at face value – the inherited tendency toward sinful behavior. It’s possible for that to exist in exactly the same form in creatures that lack moral knowledge. Chimpanzees wage “war” on neighboring groups. We would call that “sinful” among humans, but we don’t because they lack moral knowledge. They have no awareness of moral responsibility, just like human children.

I don’t believe the first sinners were endowed with special grace to master the “evolved urges.” I also have to point out a contradiction. You agree that “evolved urges” existed prior to A&E. Were these urges not sinful? And if they were sinful, even though God did not count those urges and resulting actions as “sin” because of their ignorance, then the “propensity to sin” didn’t appear with A&E’s first sin. What is a “propensity” but an urge?

Is propensity to sin equal to original sin? You’ve said that children are born with a propensity to sin. A 2-yr-old must be taught not to take a playmate’s toy. We are selfish from an early age. That’s our evolutionary inheritance – the “animal instinct,” if you will. The “evolved urges” have been with us from the start. The propensity to sin is necessarily present, both in early humanity and in early childhood. Yet both can be spoken of as “sinless” because both lack the mental and linguistic capacities to recognize their actions as “sinful.”

I maintain that a state of sinless perfection has never existed. If common descent is true, which it is, then human morality had to evolve from an animal-like, “innocent” state to the guilty sinners we observe now. The transition involves the acquisition of moral knowledge. Somewhere along the way, a line had to be crossed, and it didn’t require a specially-created first couple, or a special dispensation of grace that no one before or since has received.

Genesis 2-3 doesn’t tell the story of how the propensity to sin appeared in human history. It tells the story of how the first humans acquired the “divine knowledge” of good and evil. The consequence of the fall wasn’t a loss of perfection (that never existed), but an awareness of ourselves as guilty before God. We collectively and individually choose self. The conscience itself accuses us. The first boundary violation was violation of the conscience.

1602

Coming back to this earlier objection: Did there obviously (logically) have to be a “first sinner” who thought the idea or put sin into words?..

In one sense, yes. If God was holding a stopwatch to hit as soon as the first person crossed the finish line, then I’m sure one person crossed milliseconds ahead of another. If you want to assign a personal name to that event, I suppose Adam is as good as any other, although Eve would be more accurate.

But in the most important sense, the person who thought the thought or came up with the word to describe it wasn’t validated until they shared it with someone else, who shared it with someone else, who shared it with someone else, etc. A thought that dies of loneliness never existed. The “first sin” wasn’t realized and set in motion until it was shared with others and became community property. In modern terms, sin went viral. That’s how language and culture work, from the distant past until now.

1 Like
1603

Theft (or any other sin, or sin in general) wasn’t a thing until there was a word for it?

1604

Blue jays steal other birds’ nests. Hyenas steal prey caught by cheetahs. Are those actions sinful?

The short answer is that sinful behaviors also existed in the human population long before we were capable of giving them a name and assigning them to a general, abstract category such as “evil.” Mature human morality is rooted in our capacity for language.

1605

Do they have agency?

1606

It is the first time in this thread that we are discussing in depth the most important role Hebrews 7 credits to Melchizedek. I warmly thank you for this!

The description in Hebrews 7 clearly supports the following tenets:

  1. Melchizedek is truly human, otherwise he could not be a priest, i.e. a man chosen by God to the aim of sustaining and increasing God’s Kingdom on earth.

  2. Melchizedek is a historical human being, otherwise the priesthood of Jesus Christ would belong to a metaphorical order. The reasoning in Hebrews 7 to strengthening that the order of the Melchizedek’s priesthood is superior to the Aaronic priesthood, clearly suggests that Melchizedek is as a literal character in history as it is Aaron.

  3. Melchizedek cannot be “a ’pre-incarnate’ appearance of Christ”, as Christ himself refers to “the incarnate Son of god”. It could be a “pre-incarnate” appearance of God’s Son, similar to his appearance as one of the three Visitors in Genesis 18:1-2, when “The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre”. But in this case he could not be considered a priest as he appeared as God and not as true man.

  4. Furthermore, appearances of people in heaven do happen only after they have passed away, as it is the case in the appearance of Moses and Elijah during the Transfiguration reported in Matthew 17:3. Accordingly, Melchizedek could not be an “appearance“ of Jesus Christ backward in time.

  5. Melchizedek is said to be like the Son of God: This means he could be someone (a human being) who is like Christ because he is seeing the Son of God in heaven as he is (see 1 John 3:2).

  6. Melchizedek is created the same way as Adam was created, i.e.: without being born from “human parents in the image of God”.

  7. Melchizedek is without end of life: This is only possible if Melchizedek himself did not sin and was taken to heaven.

If you put all this together, the more fitting interpretation seems to be:

Melchizedek was a primeval image bearer, contemporary of Adam and Eve, who did not sin, and was taken into heaven, since for the sake of redemption God established that on earth there are only people in need of redemption. Notwithstanding Melchizedek could appear to Abraham to establish the order in which Jesus Christ is priest.

If you disagree, could you please specify which of the preceding 7 points do you reject?

If you take ‘Adam’ as referring to humankind, “the last or ultimate ‘Adam’ “ (see 1 Cor. 15:45) is certainly Jesus Christ, as the whole humanity will become “one in Christ Jesus” (see Galatians 3:28).

Melchizedek, as sinless contemporary of Adam and Eve, was taken into heaven for the sake of redemption. And to this very aim he also appeared to Abraham, for establishing the redemptive priesthood of Jesus Christ.

Melchizedek is not the redeemer, but a main contributor to the redemption’s work of Christ, the only redeemer. In this sense Melchizedek can be somewhat compared to Maria, the mother of Christ.