I just realized upon following the link myself that I had posted, I really should have included the whole verse for @RichardG (and others of us who have issues allowing God to be sovereign – @mitchellmckain?):
He has saved us and called us to a holy life – not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time,
its easier to recognize when one is way past one’s own 
That would apply to a lot of us here (myself and @Terry_Sampson more than most, I suspect ; - ). And it’s a new one on me and a bit of a stretch – it could have been penned by S. Freud? The newest up to that one is that maybe the first or ‘most important’ sin is blaming and refusing responsibility.
That is certainly the idea which I have been advocating.
I don’t find it entirely unreasonable (unlike not trusting in our Father’s sovereignty ; - ).
Many days I feel more like a rag doll that got tossed in a corner.
I just got back from seven hours of conservation work and my tired brain in its weary body read that as “St. Freud”.
Which triggers a memory of a weird sci-fi story where Freud, Aldo Leopold, and Carl Sagan were saints . . . .
Some have speculated that this is part of why Paul points to Adam as the “prime sinner” – he not only knew what he was doing, he blamed Eve.
Should throw in Carl Jung and his synchronicities too. With his Reformed background, sort of, he should have recognized the Source of all.
the rejection of the authority of the father s not a must in that process, so it does not free you from responsibility of your actions.
what is the worst in the interpretation of the fall is blaming God for our death. its as bad as accusing God of it being his fault because he gave us women. I pity those who think death is the punishment by God for our sin. They must read a bible that says “if you eat from that tree / disobey me i will kill you”. It sets one up for a bad relationship with the father
its far worse, as Adam blamed it on God when he said “it was the helper you gave me”
One of the points of the story is to take responsibility for your own actions Eve blamed, Adam blamed, and neither accepted the fact that no one put a gun to their head and forced them to do it.
Original Sin then reinforces the notion that it is not my fault instead of learning the opposite.
We can only be forgiven if we admit the fault. And that fault is not Adam’s.
Any claim of.
Works against personal responsibility.
Richard
I think that my theological-biological explanation fits both, your envisioning and your brother’s proposal.
Before the beginning of time God decided to create human beings and order them to share God’s eternal life (2 Timothy 1:9).
These humans were supposed to be free, i.e.: they were not predetermined to sin, but could in principle reject God’s love and transgress his commandment.
Accordingly, before the beginning of time God considered the two possible alternative scenarios: Humans sin and humans do NOT sin. And brought about a creation that fits both scenarios.
In case humans sin:
God had the alternative of either condemning us sinners directly “to join the devil and his angels”, or letting us on earth to give us opportunity to repent and reach salvation.
As evidence shows and scripture confirms:
God decided to save us and call us to a holy life before the beginning of the time (2 Timothy 1:9).
However, God considered that for the aim of salvation it would not have been suitable to let us sinners on earth as if we had not sinned.
Thus, God submitted creation to degradation, so that sinners on earth would be submitted to illness, death, and concupiscence, but gave us the grace in Jesus Christ to overpower this state of degradation; and for sure, all this God decided before the beginning of the time (2 Timothy 1:9).
In case humans do NOT sin:
This was undoubtedly a real possibility God considered (and was present in his mind) before the beginning of time.
So, God decided (before the beginning of time) to endow the first human beings with the grace to overpowering illness, death, and concupiscence, at the very moment of their creation in time, and as long as they did not sin.
This grace is also part of “the grace God granted us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time”. (2 Timothy 1:9).
In summary:
If one considers things from our perspective in time, we can conclude that the degradation of nature leading to the state of illness, death, and concupiscence (the “state of original sin”) we are submitted to, is an effect of the first human sin (and in this sense “pollution”) “propagating back through time” (very much along your line of thinking).
If one considers things from the timeless perspective of God, one can say that such a state of degradation wouldn’t have to propagate, it would be there as a real possibility in God’s mind, i.e.: outside our four dimensional space-time world, as “pollution” caused by the first human sin, but used by God to save us and lead us to a holy life through “the grace given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time” (very much along your older brother’s proposal).
To finish I would like to clarify that in all this reasoning I am assuming 2 Timothy 1:9 as an axiom:
We humans are on earth because God called us to a holy life, and in his mercy God decided to let all human sinners on earth to save them all, from the first sin onward.
Obviously everyone is free to reject this axiom, but if someone rejects it, participating to the discussion in this thread may be rather a waste of time for him.
Ouch!
God has given us the free will to choose Him or not. If this si true then the choice of “not” must be a valid one.
You cannot demand that everyone must be Holy (even if you are not specifying Christianity)
Richard
2023-07-31T22:00:00Z→2023-07-31T22:00:00Z
It is written in the Bible that God planted the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the garden. Also in the new Law, in the 1st chapter of the letter of James, it is written that when a believer is tempted, he is also tested by God. In context, it means - God tested Adam and Eve whether they would obey His commandments or not. Adam and Eve were deceived by the Tempter and sinned. But it was God who tested the first people. And it was also God who tested his favorites Abraham and Jesus Christ. And they did not fail God’s test. So how is it possible that Adam and Eve failed? If God’s testing of man is always right, how come the result is not always right?
I believe that if someone is not prepared for the exam, they will fail.
Neither my scenario nor my brother’s have any “in case” in them, not the least bit. Both propose a Creation that was made in perfect harmony, neither had any flaws until the first sin occurred.
And yes, if you’re stuck thinking in a timeline where eternity is locked in with time, that doesn’t make sense. My brother’s point is that thinking only of linear time that God is locked into is bad math because geometrically it’s simplistic.
If I was better at math I might be able to make your view fit some x-dimensional geometry…
I can accept that we are all descended from a single human couple, but not that, had they not sinned, they would not be subject to “death, illness, and ageing”. What age would they be? Every living thing is born and dies, not just humans but the animal and plant kingdoms, also stars and planets. Everything in the universe in fact. The universe itself was born, 13.7 billion years ago, and will eventually die.
I also cannot accept that the “sin”, or the guilt thereof, of the original couple was transmitted by generation, and is “washed away” by baptism, as the Western Church has traditionally believed. This idea originated with St. Augustine, who misunderstood Romans 5:12 due to a mistranslation in his Latin Bible. (Significantly the Eastern Church, influenced far less by St. Augustine, never accepted this understanding of inherited guilt.).
My understanding of “original sin” is this. All living things instinctively are out for themselves, their own desires, survivorship, etc. This can cause harm to others, and if we still pursue this selfishness while aware of the potential harm to others, that is sin.
I try to understand:
You state that you and your brother propose “a Creation that was made in perfect harmony, neither had any flaws until the first sin occurred”.
Two different interpretations could be invoked:
Creation was without flaws before the moment the first sinned occurred. At the very moment the first sinned occurred, flaws propagated backwards in time and affected creation also since the beginning. So the beginning of creation happens both, before and after the moment the first sin occurred. As you remark, it seems that this “doesn’t make sense”, and, in any case, you would be clearly thinking in a timeline after all.
Time begins actually at the very moment God makes humankind in the image of God and calls humans to share God’s eternal life: Before this moment creation has no eternal relevance and therefore can be considered to have only some sort of imagined existence in God’s mind (outside any real space-time). As God gave to the first human beings (called to a holy life) grace to overpower illness, death, and concupiscence, it can be said that for all practical purposes “creation was made in perfect harmony until the first sin occurred” (as you very well state). At the very moment the first sin occurs, the flawed creation became relevant with relation to the human struggle for eternal life, and thereby truly real in our four dimensional space-time.
I get the impression that you are rather proposing interpretation 2.
Thanks for clarifying.
I keep encountering this claim, but it wasn’t actually a “mistranslation”; the Latin “in quo omnes peccaverunt” is a possible translation of Paul’s Greek “ἐφ᾽ ᾧ πάντες ἥμαρτον”, it just loses much of the meaning of the Greek by being a too-stilted word-for-word translation.
And my Latin is so far rusty it may as well be dust for making pigment, so I can’t venture whether there was a better way to translate Paul’s phrase!
BTW, the real lesson of Augustine’s mistake is “Don’t do theology based on a translation!”
In fact (without tracking down references) this can be illustrated from the use of Latin by Augustine and others where “original sin”, taken as “sin of origin”, can mean either the sin of Adam or transmission of sin from parents, and the latter is too often used to argue that sex is sinful.
Yeah, my more limited way of trying to grasp it is too much stuck to a timeline. My brother’s wasn’t, but I never grasped n-dimensional geometry (I always asked how you can do geometry if you don’t know how many dimensions you have) so I’m not even going to try to explain his view.
But my attempt isn’t as stuck to a timeline as it might seem if you think of a timeline as having directional flow; it’s trying to regard the timeline as an object in a space with at least two more dimensions so when a flaw occurs it automatically “defines” the entire timeline, and “propagating backwards in time” is what it would look like from the perspective of anyone on the timeline.
Except since that one sin “infected” the entire timeline the actual point at which “time begins” would be the moment of the first sin, which is mind-wrenchingly strange, plus it is easier to argue (from the scriptures, anyway) that the point at which “time begins” is the first moment of the Incarnation – which from a certain perspective is fitting here since the Incarnation came about to counter sin and thus sin and holiness are both ‘contained’ in that moment. That of course really departs from a linear timeline since it puts the actual beginning in the middle – which apparently isn’t an issue if you have enough additional dimensions including at least two more time dimensions.
Which I’m “proposing” would, I think, depend on how well my audience could deal with geometry that has more dimensions; it’s much simpler to hold in one’s mind the idea of sin/flaw propagating backwards in time (or for a computer-savvy audience, a command that jumps back to the start and changes certain parameters) than to try to think of a timeline as an object within a “space” that has six or eight or more dimensions.
Though I’m not suggesting any “imagined existence”; if anything it would be a sort of “Schrödinger’s Cat”, a “Schrödinger’s Creation” situation where both the flawed and the unflawed Creations are both valid until the triggering event. But even that doesn’t quite work if you consider Adam and Even to have been real in any historical sense because the potentially flawed version would only have pertained externally to them . . .and now I’m grasping t concepts that slip away almost as soon as I look at them.
First, welcome to our little corner of the internet. It is good to hear you voice. Second, my thoughts on the subject are much as you state. As biologic creatures, we evolved to look to our own interest. Such is to be “of the world.” When we reached the place where we were capable and culpable of doing otherwise, we could and did then sin by putting our selfish interests above the will of God.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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