A theological-biological explanation of “the original sin’s transmission”

Faith & Science Conversation
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Thanks Michael for this comment.

I would like to clarify that I am definitely NOT asserting that “God deliberately induced our fallen state simply to save us from it”, and even less that “our fall was an intentional result of God’s plan”.

My assertion is rather the following one:

When God decided to create humankind he considered the possibility that humans sin. Then God in his mercy decided that, in case humans sin, he would not throw them out to join the devil, but would let them on earth and give them the opportunity to repent. Nonetheless, God wisely deliberated that if humans remain on earth without feeling the own weakness and the necessity of God’s help to reach eternal bliss, they would not ask forgiveness, but rather keep on with trying to be like God all alone. Accordingly, God arranged things so that, after the first sin, humans remain on earth in the fallen state we are.

Thus, there is no need to assume

Such an assumption would conflict with God omniscience.
In my view it is better to assume that God wanted to create human beings who love God and the others in freedom, and took deliberately the risk of “our fall”.

In summary:

Our fall was NOT “an intentional result of God’s plan”, but the result of our free decision to rebel against God’s plan.

The fallen state where we are after the first sin is two-sided:

  • As far as it involves corruption and tendency toward sin, it is an outcome of the first sin;
  • As far as it allows us to remain on earth and moves us to ask forgiveness and God’s help, it is a consequence of God’s mercy.

Before continuing I would be thankful to know whether you may be in agreement with this clarification.

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Ah, yes. My suspicion was confirmed that we were, in fact, talking past each other due to my own misreading. I am in 100% agreement with your position.

This is why I qualified my statement with “may have” instead of an affirmative “did”. I have no way to know what God’s intentions were, and it would be wildly foolhardy for me to make any such assumptions. But this leads me back to my original inquiry which is, what about the nature of our disobedience led to the fall? To my mind, the narrative choices of Genesis are much more than just the product of imaginative storytelling - I believe that there is an undiscovered meaning behind the unidentified fruit and the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and that certain scientific discoveries made in recent years may be revealing what that meaning might be.

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Thanks for this Michael!

It looks like we have found common ground; so I dare to move a step further in my explanation:

In the beginning God decided to create human beings and order them to reach eternal life by sharing in the filiation of God’s Son. To achieve this God decided that his Son becomes flesh (incarnates), to the end that humankind could be made in the image of God. Additionally, God considered the possibility that humans sin, and mercifully decided that, in such a case, he would let the humans on earth and give them the opportunity to repent.

To move fallen humans to repent and redeem them, on the one hand God submitted us to illness, death, and the tendency toward sin, so that we can feel our weakness and realize we need God’s help to reach eternal bliss; and on the other hand God decided to die on the cross in order to show us that he loves us and is ready to submit himself to an even much greater suffering than the suffering he submit us.

So, God’s decision to create humankind goes along with the decision to incarnate and, by God’s mercy, also with the decision to die on the cross to redeem us. Only thereafter God decides to make the rest of the evolving corporal world (the galaxies, the plants, the animals).

The important point in all this is that what is truly real and lasts forever are God’s decisions. And this has two important implications:

  1. Even if humans had not sinned, the incarnation and the death of Jesus Christ on the cross remain absolutely real. From the timeless perspective of God, the incarnation and redemption become real by God’s very decision to incarnate and die on the cross, even if from our time-perspective this decision is implemented in time only after the arrival of sin.

  2. The fact that the creation (since the very beginning) is submitted to decay and ruled by mechanisms that lead to the state of “corruption” we are (involving illness, death, and tendency toward sin), is a consequence of the first sin, even if this sin arrives milliard of years later in time.

I completely agree with you. Scientific discoveries are helping us to unravel the meaning of the Genesis narratives.

I will be delighted discussing this point in later posts. But before I would be thankful to know your opinion on what I have stated above in this post.

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You’ve provided quite a bit to unpack here. I’m eager to respond in depth, but I’ve got other tasks to complete in preparation for a long trip abroad. For now, however, I would like to address a particular point you brought up:

I don’t think that God “considered the possibility” so much as He saw our propensity toward sin as an absolute inevitability and prepared for it accordingly. To my mind, this is the real meaning behind the six days creation. This timeframe has always seemed peculiar to me, because it raises the question of why God would even need to rest. Does God experience fatigue from His labor? God being the unmoved mover that exists everywhere and at all times across all planes of existence, I would think not. The six days creation is not a description of God’s experience but is instead the very first protocol He presents mankind with to which we must adhere. The rules are simple - work for six days and keep the Sabbath for rest, reflection and worship. God knows that absent this rule, mankind’s irrationality - which is the most prominent manifestation of sin - would result in man relentlessly working himself to death once he’d been condemned to “eating only by the sweat of his brow”.

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By stating that “God considered the possibility that humans sin” I mean the following:

God wants that we love him in freedom and therefore when God created humankind he did not exclude the possibility that we sin. So, having this possibility in mind, God’s decision to create us was mercifully accompanied by the decision to let us on earth and give us opportunity to repent.

You claim:

Paraphrasing these words, I dare to say:

God’s incarnation and redemption “exists everywhere and at all times across all planes of existence”.

And this means that God’s incarnation and redemption really exist since the very beginning of creation, even if in our time perspective they are implemented milliard of years later:

For he [God] chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will (Ephesians 1:4-5).

But this also means that by deciding to create us, God also figured out which would be the convenient state for us to remain on earth after sin. And (as “our present corruption” manifestly demonstrates) God concluded it would be convenient for us to feel that we are weak and need God’s help.

And so God submitted the creation since the very beginning to the state of decay we observe, although when it came to humans God endowed them with the capability to overpower decay as long as they did not sin (“original grace”). This capability went lost when humans sinned, and then the decay inherent to creation induced in humans the state of “our present corruption”, state that involves illness, death, and tendency toward sin, and is inherited from generation to generation.

In other words, strictly speaking our tendency toward sin is “an absolute inevitability” only after the first sin. Nonetheless you are absolutely right when you claim that “God prepared for it accordingly”: Indeed, after the first sin God bestowed on humans the redemptive grace of Jesus Christ; and before the first sin God endowed humans with the “original grace” (at the end of the day Jesu Christ’s grace as well!).

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Paraphrasing these words, I have stated in a previous post:

God’s incarnation and redemption “exists everywhere and at all times across all planes of existence”.

In this context is also interesting the example given by klw:

The point is that when God decides to create human beings endowed with freedom and ordered to eternal life (bliss, immortality, and divinity), God also resolves in his heart to save them if they jump into sin.

From our time-perspective God’s “resolve” is enacted when we jump into sin. However, from God’s perspective “to resolve” is “to act”, very much in agreement with:

“The Lamb hath been slain from the foundation of the world” (Revelation 13:8);

“[…] you were redeemed from the empty way of life you inherited from your forefathers […] with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or spot. He was known before the foundation of the world, but was revealed in the last times for your sake.” (1 Peter 1:20)

The same idea is expressed in Pulpit commentary to Revelation 13:8:
“What was foreknown to and ordained by God is spoken of as having taken place.”

The fact that God resolves to redeem us and thereby accepts all the suffering of the death on the cross before the foundation of the world is a consequence of God’s will to create us free and of God’s mercy to redeem us, and thereby reveals how much God wants us to be free and loves us!

And from this perspective (I apologize for repeating):

I think the second aspect is a significant result of the discussion in this thread, and fits well with the following statement of St. Ambrose, Exameron, Book VI, Chapter 10, (76) :

“But I do read that He made man and then found rest in one whose sins He would remit.”

Thanks in advance for possible comments.

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As a Christian, I struggle terribly with the original sin and free choice issues. I tend to see the first part of the book of Genesis as wisdom literature – a story (and a good one) that tries to explain how “sin” came to influence human nature, behavior, and eternal destiny. An attempt to explain one of the biggest mysteries to ever confound anyone, anywhere.

Then, my mind goes to the more immediate…my own and family members’ lives as I perceive them. An example: can people who were significantly sexually and emotionally abused as children really grow up into adults who are “choosing” every act and behavior? As creatures and physical beings, we have brain and nervous-system wiring – and learning – that can all but dictate SOME of our behaviors. Also, human individuals and societies are deeply impacted and shaped by larger forces that are in many cases completely beyond their control (economic, social, etc.). Yes, we can sometimes consider how we will respond to various forces. But, because we are limited, we may not even perceive these forces or have any awareness of what is driving us. For me, these are issues of hard science and social science, including neuropsychology, so they are pertinent.

I believe in choosing the good. I believe that intent and will are real. Yet I remain mystified about any explanation of how failing in some of these choices will result in “going to hell,” as so many Christians say. I believe hell is separation from God and came happen here in our earthly life, as well as in a “place” or “condition” referred to as the afterlife. I believe the Kingdom can be real now, here, as well as in an afterlife.

As one Catholic priest I know has said, the decisive action is always God’s. Yes, we “sin,” and yes, we can choose sometimes…but it is God’s response to us that matters. If salvation or “going to heaven” was totally contingent upon us, we’d be in a lot of hot water. Holding this view doesn’t remove my responsibility to do my best; rather, I believe, it acknowledges a great mystery. For me, it also relates to humility. It also underscores that being reductive or simplistic in how we think about God doesn’t align with G_d’s own statement that God’s name is “I AM,” and that our ways are not God’s ways.

What do people think? It would be good to hear that some others on forum regard these questions and thoughts as reasonable for a person who believes that Jesus of Nazareth uniquely embodied the living God, and who tries – with more failure than success – to follow Jesus.

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Hi, Virginia! And welcome to the forum.

You ask great questions - and seem to be musing over much of the same territory that get discussed here a lot. Thanks for your thoughts.

That question in itself is agonized over by a lot here. Or … well … maybe not so much “agonized over” as that there are multiple camps here which have settled in different places on the issue of hell. So maybe it could be called a ‘collective’ agonization. In any case, know that you aren’t alone in having questions and convictions regarding what it means to hold people accountable and responsible and yet also recognizing that some things seem pretty hardwired in to us by - not just our genetics - but by our cultural environment too. There have been a lot of other threads kicking these issues around from various sides in case you want to do any back-searching for any of that. But meanwhile, fresh discussions and perspectives of it are welcomed too! Glad you’re here.

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The only model that has ever made sense of this to me came from my sister, who was a manufacturing and quality control engineer; she likened it to the quality requirement demanded by almost all Japanese companies, 100% inspection and 100% to standards – anything that wasn’t 100% failed.
But that doesn’t cover “hell”, since failed units weren’t put off somewhere that they were locked in forever, they were scrapped and ceased to exist. From various bits of reading I’ve done, including some of the Fathers, I find that a viable possible interpretation, and I have a firm reason for it: nothing exists apart from God continually sustaining it, yet Hell is spoken of as the absence of God – but if God is absent, then existence will cease.

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St. Roymond: Interesting analogy, and I can see why this view might make sense to many. Yet I can’t quite get there in my own mind. As if, with a God who is merciful as well as just, there must be some “opportunity for healing and growth” after the decease of our physical body – in another realm or condition we don’t understand. This idea sounds a bit like the purgatory of Catholicism, doesn’t it? To purge…to get rid of, to cleanse, to empty, to shed what is harmful or not needed…not for the purpose of being left empty but to make space for something new? Grace? Not purity for its own sake – as if this is the only state or condition in which we’d be allowed to enter God’s nearer presence – but because a condition of more grace, love, etc. is what we were created for and can be/do with the help of God.

I hope for this!

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Mervin, Thank you so much for replying! Will search for related topics here and do some reading. I was glad to find this forum as, in my experience, it’s not easy to find folks at church who have the interest, energy, or time to wrestle with these issues. But they have always “bothered” me in a positive way. Much of what is talked about here is far above my paygrade, as they say, but I think the musings of ordinary people count for a lot in any discussion of God and of faith and science. Thanks so much again for the warm welcome!

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Oh - there’s quite a bit of “high-falutin” expertise of technical sorts that’s way above most of our paygrades here - and some of those folks are pretty good about accomodating our level of expertise (or lack of) whenever we take a deeper interest and ask. So don’t let that scare you off.

I like how you put that. I’ve personally been “bothered” in a similar way too, I think - if I hear you correctly. One of my favorite “go-to” authors of recent years in regard to God’s punishment / atonement / wrath / love - is George MacDonald. His writings (both novels and sermons) have had a profound influence on where I am right now with all that. I think I now have a much more joyfully worshipful view of God than I used to have.

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Mervin, this is sooo helpful for me, as I want to travel to a more joyful place in worship/contemplation/daily living and relating, and thinking. God’s wrath, atonement and related subjects, for me, can be deeply saddening and intimidating; I’m searching for a different way of understanding what we call redemption.

Some of the traditional language sounds transactional, when most of me wants some other kind of relationship with God. Can’t “to redeem” mean “to make whole?” To supply a needed element or elements one is missing? I remember reading an interesting note in one Bible that, if one is a widow, your Redeemer becomes your husband; if an orphan, your Redeemer is your father/mother; etc. Your Redeemer makes you whole.

Can “repent” mean “to turn” toward grace/the good, and not just to “stop whatever you’re doing wrong?” Can it be a reference primarily to grace…to what is awaiting us as we shift our awareness, perspective, and behavior based on these?

I think Catholic bishop Robert Barron has said that re-pent (French “penser,” to think) can mean to re-think, “to change the mind you have.” Can this be invitation, and not sound like a threat? I think about this often during Advent, when we hear about John the Baptist. Perhaps Jesus calls John great because John tells us this is the essential – this turning toward – an experience, if we are willing, to be drawn, attracted to Love, and live our lives differently as a result?

I can see that discussing ideas here will tempt me to fall down the rabbit hole LOL! Will the house be cleaned today? The wreath hung? Maybe not… :blush:

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I’ve listened to a lot of Bishop Barron too over the years and have a lot of respect for him too.

Transactional! Indeed I think that comes near the heart of much objection that people like MacDonald and so many other more recent voices too have found with so much recent (and not-so-recent) Christian tradition. I heard/read one other (I can’t remember if it was a MacDonald piece - or maybe it was Richard Rohr) describe it this way: So many want to think of Christianity in contractual terms (which certainly does seem to be the tone of so much Mosaic law of the Torah) when we should instead be thinking of it in convenantal terms, or so the compelling case is made from the gospels and epistles.

MacDonald is a severe critic of anything that gets reduced from the trust of a loving relationship down to mere transaction between parties. And he takes that criticism to the heart of some of our atonement theology of recent centuries. And a lot of strict doctrine-oriented people will probably dismiss his freedom in all that as being “over the pale” for themselves. And indeed MacDonald doesn’t ever really “enter into such fray” on those terms as he seems to have little interest in convincing or compelling people to this or that conviction of his own. He insists that if you and I and anybody else just come sit at Christ’s feet and begin to seek - not just knowledge - but obedient response to him, that all this other stuff we may be so right or so wrong about will all be addressed when Christ sees fit to address it. That’s how I would characterize MacDonald’s attitude, anyway. And yet … yet … (this is just me claiming something on MacDonald’s behalf that he would probably never claim for himself) … in a height of irony, I argue that MacDonald is more steeped in both testaments of scripture than many a strident voice today that claims to be at such pains to defend “the bible”. That is, after reading MacDonald’s unspoken sermons, he seems more scripturally grounded to me today than just about any other popular, evangelical voices that clamor for their tribal followings today. I.e. - the more I read the Bible, the more MacDonald’s discipleship and insight flows from it and makes Christ-centered, joyful sense of it all, and the less biblical today’s ‘biblicists’ are revealed to be in comparison. At least that’s my own provocative take on it. And don’t get me wrong - I probably don’t agree with MacDonald on everything either. (I’m an Anabaptist - we’re going to be outliers on so many fronts!) But after reading GM, I don’t sweat those differences any more.

It may be self-serving of me to bring this up again - but some time ago I started up a bit of a “pet thread” that in a devotional sense followed a C.S. Lewis book titled “MacDonald” where Lewis highlighted favorite excerpts of his from GM’s works. It’s been a few months since I last added to that, but I was doing it daily for quite a while and kept it up as long as interest persisted. You might find a few nuggets of value among that already lengthy thread.

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O my goodness…You have made my day and my week. Thank you so much for your thoughtful response. I am a huge C.S. Lewis admirer, and as such, have heard of George MacDonald. But I have never explored his work. Just now, I read a little on Wikipedia, and if I may say so, he seems to be my kind of guy! Four years ago, I was fortunate enough to visit Cambridge, England, and walk the paths at the university traveled by C.S. Lewis. More recently, I visited Scotland and have developed a great affection for it and will now know it as G.M. homeland. For someone not familiar with MacDonald’s work, what would you recommend I start with?

Transactional and contractual are descriptive words for some of our Christian theology, aren’t they? For me, this is deeply disturbing and limits God in an “unjust” way. For decades I’ve struggled mightily with various theories of atonement, penal substitution, etc., and have come away intellectually unsatisfied and, more important, dispirited/bewildered/sorrowing. I love this Wikipedia bit: “MacDonald rejected the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement as developed by John Calvin, which argues that Christ has taken the place of sinners and is punished by the wrath of God in their place, believing that in turn it raised serious questions about the character and nature of God.[citation needed] Instead, he taught that Christ had come to save people from their sins, and not from a Divine penalty for their sins: the problem was not the need to appease a wrathful God, but the disease of cosmic evil itself.”

Your comment on MacDonald’s truer fidelity to the Bible than that of some past and present influential others is so interesting. I used to read the scriptures a lot and no longer do but intend to return. At times, it’s easy to become befuddled about what the Bible is: a book, a collection of books, all literal truth (I’m not in this camp), wisdom literature meant to raise questions as it answers others, etc. I admit to being a cafeteria reader…I find the OT very difficult but pick and choose wise and comforting passages from Isaiah and Jeremiah; Psalms, Proverbs, and more. It occurs to me that many of us are just trying – on a good day LOL – to ask, “What does repentence look like in my particular life today? What do I do? What do I not do? How can I be loving, both to others and myself? Not just hear the Word but do some work, so that God may make abode with me? And trust. Not primarily to believe or give intellectual assent to doctrine or dogma, but to trust?” This last, the hardest thing ever.

Mervin, thank you so very much. I will look with pleasure and interest at the thread you mentioned. This is a wonderful Christmas gift. At the end here, I see this post has little to do with science!

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welcome

That’s true no matter who you are; we have experts on various things, and some whose expertise isn’t what it used to be, and things can get technical enough at times that most of us fairly often are left clueless. So you’re in good company.

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As a lifeguard I formed my own view of “repent”: it’s what a drowning person does when a rescuer yells, “Come this way!” It does no good to just stay put; what’s need is to change course and keep moving.

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When people tire of scriptures - or how they are so often used in today’s evangelical cultures, reading somebody like MacDonald is a great way to fall back in love with them again. Not because MacDonald pushes that (… how often has GM called attention to things Jesus taught like in John 5:39-40! …) but because MacDonald tirelessly points toward Christ. And because the Bible (especially the recorded gospels) also points us toward Christ - which is exactly the value that GM sees so well. But he will never confuse the signpost itself for the person it points toward. I love that about him!

You ask where to start … and I am almost at loss. Are you a story reader who likes fiction and fantasy? Any of MacDonald’s stories will give you a taste of that (and of him - his fixation on Christ shines through even in so much of his fiction). If you devoured things like the Chronicles of Narnia - then you might enjoy “The Princess and the Goblin”. But just to add some reality in here (as I note over in the Lewis / MacDonald thread) - Lewis actually referred to MacDonald as a 2nd or even 3rd rate story teller. It wasn’t his literary prowess that Lewis admired him for (and called him ‘his master’) … it was GM’s passionate love of Christ and his way of communicating that - seeing GM have a way of cutting right to the heart of things with his words and his characters. You can really see GM shining through in Lewis’ own Christian life and writings. [Despite Lewis’ criticism of GM’s story-telling style - I happen to think his stories are first rate - they catch me anyway. One of my favorites is “The Curate’s Awakening” - but a lot of others are right up there too. One of his that did not captivate me (like it apparently did Lewis) was GM’s “Phantastes”. Apparently I have different tastes than Lewis - or am just not as cultured in all my literary understandings as Lewis was. It was GM’s other stories that drew me in.]

If you’re somebody who likes to dive right into the deep end, and get GM’s sermon thoughts undiluted, then his unspoken sermons will give you that - all of which are available online for free. I can link you to any of those (three whole series). And there is one in particular that I’ve heard some refer to as his “magnum opus” work - a sermon in that series titled “Justice” - and in it he lays bare everything you were just speaking of in your prior post about atonement and his reaction to penal substitutionary atonement. I see that the wikipedia bit you pasted on this gives a “citation needed” request with it. The sermon I mention would be just the perfect citation for that point - maybe I should add it to that page. In any case let me know if you want links to any of those series of sermons or that one in particular. If you’re wading through the GM thread, then you’ll find links to various of those sermons among those posts.

[another added edit - just to help prepare you if you try the deep dive; reading GM’s sermons can sometimes feel like you’re trying to read dense passages of the King James Bible. Maybe not quite that bad - but almost. I can’t speed read them anyway, but when I take the time to ponder - it’s always been rewarding. His literary style is highly didactic (or maybe I mean rich with dialectic) - as in he’s very conversational. He will carry on conversations with an imagined partner, and then give answer to the response. Until you get used to this about his style, some bit may catch you by surprise - how could GM think that?! - and then you realize he’s putting it out there as something that needs an answer - which he proceeds to give.]

I’m so glad you’re interested in all this stuff! You’ve made my day too! Sorry I’m not quick in responding. Sometimes I’m hanging out here for a while and give immediate responses, but today I’ve been out and about a bit doing other things.

P.S. If you’ve ever read Lewis’ ‘Great Divorce’ story, then you’ll recognize a lot of MacDonald influence there. And in fact one of the heavenly tour guides in that story was in honor of G.MacDonald is my understaning. Or maybe in the film depiction. It’s been a while so I can’t remember the detail of that.

-Merv

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Paul does the same thing, and there are places where something he wrote gives a completely different message when he does – and places scholars still argue over.

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welcome to the forum. haven’t been here for a while myself so was interested to catch up on the thread.
My explanation stated further above is simple, the sin symbolised in the fall as the poetic description of puberty, the separation of the self from the eternal line of authority, thus the end of eternal life. In other words, if you do not feel part of the eternal line of life you live in the present and die with it. Death is the logical consequence of separating oneself from God, not a punishment by God. He doesn’t say “if you eat from that tree I am going to kill you” but warns his children about the consequences of rejecting the authority of the father and not be part of him any longer but be your “self”

It is that what makes us different as a species, that moral agency that comes with realising the self we inherited with the moment of getting self conscious.

In Jesus we are offered the tree of life as to learn to be one with God again, if we let him live in us so we learn to live in him again

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