Flattery will get you nowhere. Unless youâre bearing gifts like that fifth @Kendel had on the shelf. haha. Youâre a good man.
We resort to metaphor to describe complex, typically abstract ideas by comparing them to concrete things from everyday experience. (Christy knows more about the subject than I do, if she wants to jump in or correct me.) No single metaphor is âabsolute,â as you say, because none of them by themselves are adequate to convey the whole reality. Jesus spoke to the crowd in parables.
Yes, Iâve already said I donât care for the terms âfallâ or âfallen.â I think âmoral maturityâ is a better descriptor, but I sometimes use them interchangeably for simplicityâs sake. Theyâre all metaphors for the same concept. At a certain point in human evolution, brain-culture coevolution reached a âtipping pointâ when our species became capable of the sort of mature moral reasoning âthe womanâ shows in Gen. 3. As I said in the article on the Lutheran website linked above:
The temptation the snake represents is threefold: First, it questions the ârightnessâ of the command; second, it denies the consequences of disobedience; third, it questions the motives of the lawgiver. As the man and the woman are archetypes, so is their temptation and fall.
In his 1932 classic, The Moral Development of the Child, Jean Piaget studied children of various ages playing games and concluded that the younger ones regarded rules âas sacred and untouchable, emanating from adults and lasting forever. Every suggested alteration strikes the child as a transgression.â This matches quite well the attitude of many interpreters toward the command not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. The first humans should have accepted it without question, obeyed it and, presumably, lived forever in paradise. But is unquestioned acceptance of the rule truly a mature moral choice? Iâd suggest that condition belongs to the state of childhood.
Updating Piagetâs work, developmental psychologist William Kay observed, âA young child is clearly controlled by authoritarian considerations, while an adolescent is capable of applying personal moral principles. The two moralities are not only clearly distinct but can be located one at the beginning and the other at the end of a process of moral maturation.â In what could be called the first instance of peer pressure, the serpent introduced doubt from the outside, and the woman determined her personal moral principles vis-Ă -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 âgood for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdomâ). 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.
As for being human, Iâve called it âBecoming Adam,â meaning adam as in âbecoming humanityâ (Gen. 1:26-28). If God desired to create a flesh-and-blood creature capable of loving and communing with both fellow creatures and God, certain âcostsâ were involved, such as a challenging environment and the experience of making good and bad moral choices. The evolutionary pathway makes the most sense, and it also makes the âfallâ an inevitability. Moral knowledge wasnât forbidden. It was just grasped too soon by immature creatures.
Thatâs why I said the father didnât blame the Prodigal Son. The elder brother did. This is even more obvious in an honor-shame culture. The younger brother has shamed his entire family. The father, as patriarch, should be more outraged than anyone else. Yet he honors the profligate?
Speak for yourself! Haha. Good talking to ya.
