Because all die.
You are lying, you said
Does God set us up to fail? or Did God set us up to fail?
Very good questions, but you do not have to go back to Gen. 2 -3 to see how people have misused Godās words to trap themselves in their own arrogance.
I do not consider myself part of the āevangelical churchā that has found itself astray because of bad theology and poor leadership, but I have family and friends who are. I feel for my brothers and sisters who are its victims. Of course it is not too late to repent, but first we need to confess that we are wrong and this seems to be the last thing that they are able and willing to do.
Gen 2-3 does have a message for us. Humans do not want to be like God. They want God to be like them. They like to feel that they are superior to others and even know better than Godā¦ All attempts to make us superior to God and superior to others will FAIL, because we are NOT.
The secret is there is no shame in being a sinner, only to not owning up to it.
Vinnie,
Sin is treason against a perfectly pure Sovereign.
It is an act of supreme ingratitude toward the One to whom we owe everything, to the One who has given us life itself.
God is holy and we are not.
If God executed immediate justice against every sin, none of us would live to see another day.
God is not obligated to give grace to sinners but he does.
God is not obligated to save anybody, but he does.
God sent Christ to bear all sin past, present future that is beyond comprehension.
Scripture tells us Satan the god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers
But anyone who calls on his name is saved
Yet the reality is, the road to salvation is narrow.
To accuse God of setting up his creation to fail goes against his very loving nature.
I agree to all points but this does not really address the issue I raised of every single person who ever loved being in the same boat or failing with their freedom to the point of needing unearned salvation via grace and Jesusā blood.
Not really seeing how you addressed my questions. You say that āTo accuse God of setting up his creation to fail goes against his very loving natureā but I repeat, Christians believe everyone who ever lived and who will love is a sinner. Those are bad odds. Second, you say we are not meant to fall but then point out some higher and more powerful, evil being, namely Satan, has been allowed by God to set up shop and blind all unbelievers (and believers who once had unbelief). That kind of sounds like statutory intellectual rape to me. A higher being we canāt see or really know anything about is allowed to constantly tempt and deceive us into improper behavior. Yeah, Iām going to view that as being set up to fail.
All I want to know is why, aside from God incarnate, Christian doctrine teaches that not even 1 person out of 50,000,000,000 has gotten it right. If this is true, I certainly donāt fault them for thinking those not born will do the same. The statistics say they will.
Maybe itās how Christianity is presented is the problem. Maybe too much of the ābelieve or elseā doctrines have clouded or skewed Godās purpose in creating us.
Vinnie
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Very well put. Rachel Held Evans put forth much the same in āFaith Unraveledā
Hi Vinnie,
Paul tells us in Romans 1:20-23 that Godās nature revelation - his nature and power are clearly seen by all people and understood and people are without excuse. Rom 1:21 is the saddest verse, they knew God but didnāt give thanks and essentially turned their backs.
I believe your comments relate to the problem of evil and free choice.
We do know a lot about this higher being from scripture. Jesus states to a sceptical disciple if you have seen me you have seen the Father. So we do know, the Bible clearly outlines his nature and character.
You may be correct regarding the ānarrow roadā of 1 in 5 million, I donāt know those figures only God, and yes it is sad, and this is the reason why Christ came to defeat sin and Satan and why followers of Jesus are called to witness.
Regarding Satan, God cannot cause evil actions. What is the nature of evil? God alone is eternal, and everything he created was good. What, then, is evil? Evil is not a coeternal principle outside of God
Evil is not a substance but a corruption of the good substances God made. Evil is like rust on a car or rot on a tree. It is not possible to force people to freely choose the good. Forced freedom is a contradiction in terms.15 Therefore, God cannot do away with all evil without annihilating free choice. The only way to destroy evil is to destroy the good of a free choice.
Regarding original sin or the doctrine of original sin, it does not refer to the first sin committed by Adam and Eve, (BioLogos have a different view on this) but to the result of that first sin. Original sin is the corruption visited on the progeny of our first parents as punishment for the original transgression.
Liberal theology, deeply influenced by humanistic assumptions, often decries original sin, all the historic confessions include the doctrine. The degree of corruption involved with original sin has been a perennial point of debate among theologians. The consensus of historic Christianity, nevertheless, is that the biblical view of the fall requires us to affirm some concept of original sin.
Denying original sin, Pelagius argued that human nature was created not only good, but incontrovertibly good -We may sin, but we remain ābasically good.ā
The idea of mankindās basic goodness is a cardinal tenet of humanistic philosophy. It also pervades modern American churches even polls reflect this attitude that people are ābasically good.ā
Here are the two views:
Pelagiusās desire was to protect the idea of manās free will. Man both obeys God and sins against him according to the activity of a free will. Adam was given free will, and his will was not affected by the fall. Nor was guilt or fallen corruption transmitted to Adamās progeny. According to Pelagius, Adamās sin affected Adam and Adam alone. There is no inherited condition of corruption known as original sin.
Manās will remains entirely free and retains the capacity for indifference, meaning it is not predisposed or inclined toward evil. All people are born free of any predisposition to sin. We are all born in the same moral condition as Adam enjoyed before the fall.
Augustine, on the other hand, argued that sin is universal and that mankind is a āmass of sinā (massa peccati). Man is incapable of elevating himself to the good without the work of Godās grace within. We can no more return ourselves to God than an empty vessel can refill itself with water.
I shall stop here.
We passed the 50 BN at the time of Christ, 100 BN the mid-C20th, we should get to 150 BN by about 2400. Not long.
You say Vinnie " I understand my own sin alienates me from God but its this communal, collective depravity of man I am struggling with."
Well when we look around us we see this collective depravity in abundance -drug addiction, sex addiction, lying , cheating , gossiping ,coveting etc. These sins are rampant. But yes there are also āgoodā people -hard working, charitable ,devoted to God and family, good by human standards but far from the perfection that God requires. Romans 3:23" for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,"
1 John 1:5 " God is light; in him there is no darkness at all. "
You ask " does God set us up to fall". Undoubtedly God knew that Adam and Eve would fail the test and consequently all their progeny would inherit their disposition to sin. However we know that God also had a plan to redeem us. It seems to my understanding that God`s purpose is that when we are finally with him in Heaven we will not be innocent in so far that we will know the consequences of rebellion and though having free will we will yet be beyond temptation. I am not a qualified teacher so check it further.
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Perhaps every attempt to pin down the ineffable is doomed to fail? Not being a Christian myself I admit I still harbor affection for it. So perhaps a Christian could respond that yes all you say is true and that shows Christianity is the worst of religions ā¦ except for all the.rest.
So is religion the problem? Maybe. I personally think it needs to be far less dogmatic. It shouldnāt speak for God. But even if we are now free to modify it to better reflect our current circumstance we might still ask whether we could ever have become as we are without the cultural influence of religion ā¦ paradoxes and all.
The evolving God of the Bible sets us up to fail, even in āprogressive revelationā, i.e. cultural evolution including the enculturated recording of the enculturated Incarnation. As the vast majority of readers of the story demonstrate, believers and non, it is all but impossible to see the wood for the trees.
Yeah I believe current estimates are 107,000,000,000 people. Of course, these results are quite speculative. The methodology is probably decent enough but the error bars are presumably huge on that number. I figured taking roughly half of the estimated number would suffice in demonstrating the point.
Vinnie
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Your answer assumes some sort of original sin passed down from a literal Adam and Eve. I understand this explanation. As a modern individualist, I could certainly ask some tough questions about it, but from my perspective the Garden story is not literal. I cannot read its details as if it were and the doctrine of evil and sin coming into the world that day is problematic to me. This idyllic garden is not real. First and foremast, the world has been red in tooth and claw for billions of years. There have been many mass extinctions throughout the history of the earth. The idea that there was a time when the lion would lie down with the lamb in a magical garden with a talking snake defies all evidence for me of how the world works and how it always has worked.
Your point seems to be that yes, we are predisposed to sin, we are more or less playing with a stacked deck, because of the sin of the first humans that passed original sin down to us.
My question was really for those who donāt believe in some sort of transmissible, original sin. Or is there good reason to actually suppose that exists in the first place? I believe there was a response above a little by someone that touched on the historicity of the doctrine. I havenāt had a chance to reflect on it yet.
I am certainly okay with labeling things divine, ineffable mysteries but I canāt help but feel the way Christian doctrine is presented, it looks like God set us up to fail. If God desires we walk a perfectly straight path, it just seems odd that the world seems to be slanted downward for all practical intents and purposes.
Vinnie
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I like it Vinnie, where youāre coming from. As I say above, itās not Him, itās us. We project failure on God. What failure? We havenāt failed, we are not failing, weāre doing what evolution has crafted us to do. Realising that is the first step to transcendence in this life.
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Are you saying that sickness and death equals failure? Are you saying that sin and the need to be forgiven and saved equals failure? If you are, you sound much like the Leader who could never fail to win an election and be a Loser.
Death is a a part of life and God provides Balm which gives humans Eternal Life. Sin is a part of life and God provides salvation which is a cure for sin. To deny the reality of sin and death is to deny an important part of what it means to be human.
Humans set themselves up for failure by thinking they can be equal to God, they are not Losers or they donāt need help from God. Failure is not learning from our mistakes. Failure is not taking responsibility for our actions, but blaming them on others, even God.
The church can set us up for failure by making people feel like failures when they sin,
but there is no shame in making mistakes and in seeking forgiveness from Jesus Christ. Christians are forgiven sinners. Non-Christians are people inside and outside the church who think they can live in this world without forgiveness.
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Fairly well said. I do differ somewhat on the following, or rather that maybe it needs some elaboration:
Not all mistakes are honest mistakes. Thatās like the politician who commits adultery, gets caught, and says, āOops, sorry, I made a [dishonest 
] mistake.ā Some shame is very much in order very much much of the time. If it is not a public sin, however, then the shame does not need to be either. We do need to be ashamed of ourselves and seek forgiveness more than most are ready to admit, though.
No, I am not saying sickness and death equals moral failure. I read the literary creation about Job and understand the message. The Garden story is often used to explain ānatural evil.ā You know, why millions and billions of people have suffered immensely over time due to events outside their control such as sickness and disease, meteorological storms and geologic disasters. That is the most alluring part of the Garden story for me. Explaining why millions of children who donāt seem fit for their environment die every year due to issues that canāt be related directly to poor free will choices. An idyllic garden where humanity brought on its own suffering is a good excuse. Of course, why two people were allowed to bring natural evil on to everyone was always an issue but again, I donāt accept the garden story. The issue is compounded by the fact that a world created by God with cancer and a million other painful and horrible things was deemed āgood.ā Young earth creationism has the better answer to natural evil by far, though it is just 100% factually incorrect from a scientific standpoint.
You are also speaking in generalities. Iām being specific. Why has no one, outside God incarnate, out of the 50,000,000,000 (or 107 billion) people who have ever lived not used his free will property and not been in need of repentance and salvation from God? Why does Christian doctrine assume everyone has gotten it wrong and everyone in the future will get it wrong?
Seems to me the doctrine of original sin and specific understandings of Paul in Romans have paved the way for this. My point is again, for those of us not really vibing with the standard garden story.
I have no issues with the majority of your post. I see how there are countless sinners in the world that God created and designed. I also donāt see how softening the idea of sin to āmistakesā is reasonable given the state of the world and scripture itself.
Iām not denying the reality of sin. You are misunderstanding me completely if you think that. I am asking why it is that every single person who ever lived has used their free will in a way that they deserve death and everlasting punishment? The odds seem to favor the impossibility of actually choosing a path that does not lead to death. Jesus did say narrow is the road which is more reasonable. Christian doctrine after Jesus makes the road an impassable one dimensional road.
I guess I am just looking for a good answer to the ānature of the worldā and how it can be good under common Christian paradigms.
Vinnie
Much of your post didnāt address my specific objection but it was well informed. You are correct in much of your assessment such as this being about free will and evil but not the type you are referring to.
As I wrote above the garden story is also used to explain the state of the world from the standpoint of both moral and natural evil. This latter issue is the most significant.
I guess I am asking for a formulation of original sin that is coherent and makes sense. Saying that we must accept some conception of it is vague. What conception? Any conception, to me, has to be consistent with a world that had suffering and natural evil billions of years before two naive people were tricked into a piece of fruit by a taking snake. Also, any conception to me of original sin being passed down clearly says the deck is stacked. It answers the original question in the affirmative. Sin being transmissible as is, apparently, guilt in this framework, is a design issue in my humble opinion.
You also gave the free will defense but that is kind of off topic. For moral evil I accept the free will defense. Plantinga settled this debate decades ago. Itās a non-issue from a logical perspective. Itās still an emotional issue for many of course, especially in trying times but itās not a valid argument against God or the goodness of God.The best Iāve come up for natural evil is that this must be the way God could create a truly free world where actual choice is possible and other creatures are allowed to genuinely share in his creation. The mere fact that death isnāt the end in Christian belief means that omnibenevolence is possibly salvageable with this world containing natural evils and millions of children who die from environmental incompatibility.
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That makes sense to a large degree to me.
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