Where do you find that definition of sin? I can’t find it in any Bible or theological dictionary. Under that definition, many people besides Jesus have lived sinless lives. It doesn’t matter how generically immoral or even “evil” they were in their behavior or thoughts; all that is required is that they were ignorant of God’s commands.
Even people who are ignorant of God and his commands can sin, and they do so whenever they violate their own conscience and community standards of what is “good” and “evil.” While God’s standards are absolute, it is not necessary for human beings to be aware of those standards to be judged by them, just as “ignorance of the law is no excuse” even within human societies.
Moreover, it is not necessary for God to judge ignorant human beings by an absolute “law” of which they may or may not be aware. As Jesus says several times in his parables, “I will judge you by your own words, you wicked servant …” The same principle of “relativism” in God’s judgments is also found in his rewards: “For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”
In short, a person ignorant of God’s commands who commits “generic immorality” has sinned against conscience and community, and they fall under God’s judgment just as surely as one who covets his neighbor’s wife. Otherwise, how could God judge the world? (Rom. 3:6).
Isn’t that the whole question between active and passive evolutionary creation, though? It’s almost a question of ID, isn’t it, regarding moral code? I agree that God wouldn’t be surprised. But I don’t at all know what the definition of an image of God is, and wonder if we don’t make too much out of it. I don’t really agree with Collins’ and Lewis’ impression of a universal, God given moral code; it is much less black and white to me, and more naturalistic. It seems to me that the code itself carries evolutionary advantages too, as in Justin Barrett’s cognitive science of religion. So, as with @Jay313, there are degrees of awareness and responsibility.
It’s my understanding of Romans 4:15 (where there is no law, there is no sin), James 4:17 (If you know the good you ought to do, and fail to do it, you sin), 1 John 3:4 (sin is breaking God’s law).
The cognitive metaphor given in Scripture for sin is missing a target (Romans 3:23). Judges 20:16 uses the same expression as the Hebrew expression for sin in the context of soldiers with slingshots who never “missed.” And the Bible makes clear it is God’s target, not a community target, or a personal conscience target.
When I say sin did not exist until God revealed his standard, I’m talking in a human history sense, in a “sin enters the world” sense, not in a personal history sense. Yes, obviously there are and have been many sinful people unaware of God’s standard. I was talking in the context of a historical Fall. The fact that sinful and yet ignorant people exist is to be expected within the concept of a fallen world.
I think that for a historical Fall to have happened, God had to have revealed his will for humans to rebel against (I’m not opposed to the idea of a representative Adam, minimally as a mental construct for understanding sin and Christ’s redemption), and it doesn’t make sense to me to talk about the evolution of moral awareness as something conflated with the entry of sin into the world. If someone doesn’t care about or believe in a historical Fall, then obviously they would have different questions and different answers.
I guess mainly I am reacting to the idea I see around here sometimes that hominims evolved moral awareness and the image of God and therefore could sin and so God was compelled to interact with them. I think that is wrong-headed. I don’t think anything the human race did or any capacity they developed forced God’s hand in terms of how he chose to reveal himself or relate. I think God chose to interact with humans according to his will and time frame not according to the human evolution trajectory. God chose to call humans to bear his image when he desired to, not when or because humans deserved the calling based on their newly developed capacities. I think the narrative of Genesis describes a recent history and humans had the capacity to interact with God and make moral choices long before the event recorded in our Scriptures. Did they interact in ways we don’t know about? Maybe. But I’m most interested in understanding the revelation we have, not in speculating about the eternal destinies of early hominims that we don’t have any revelation about.
"J. Richard Middleton (Roberts Wesleyan College) puts it well in The Liberating Image. He offers that the image of God describes “the royal office or calling of human beings as God’s representatives and agents in the world.” Image of God means that humans have been given “power to share in God’s rule or administration of the earth’s resources and creatures.”
“When one reads Genesis 1:26-27 with this in mind, the point becomes fairly obvious: “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish…birds…cattle…wild animals…creeping things” (NRSV).”
“Humankind, created on the sixth day, has been given the authority to rule over the other creatures God had made on the fourth and fifth days. They have that authority because humankind is made in God’s image.”
“There is nothing here about a soul, the ability to reason, being conscious of God or any other psychological or spiritual trait. As John Walton points out, as important as these qualities are for making us human, they do not define what image of God means in Genesis. Rather, those qualities are tools that serve humans in their image-bearing role.”
Here’s an angle that maybe someone here has thought of before:
As you will recall from the New Testament account of the Transfiguration, Jesus joins Moses and Elijah as glowing figures, reflecting the “glory” that was associated with Things Divine during that time.
What many Westerners might not be too familiar with is that Moses and Elijah were treated in the writings of that day as people who were conveyed into the presence of God (Enoch-like) . So they glowed with divine light, either constantly or temporarily. And Jesus began to glow to demonstrate his spiritual communion with these two heroes of Jewish mysticism!
In the Wiki article, we read this brief sentence:
“In Christian eschatology, Eternal Life is said to be the transfiguration of all of humanity.”
If being an Image Bearer doesn’t make one into a literal angel … it at least seems to be part of the equipment of the “best of the best” image bearers!
And if by being human we all merit the potential of Eternal Life, as the “transformation” of all humans … then I think the author of the article, Pete Enns, is on to something (even if I am not an Open Theist!).
Gregg, just read your article. Though I tend to favor a historic Adam as our representative, your proposal for the possibility of a historic Adam as progenitor is elegantly presented. I also appreciate your statements below, which are relevant to the current discussion:
'[The] physiological structure that facilitates awareness cannot generate that awareness without the actual possession of a nonmaterially constrained soul. I would argue that the gift of a soul to a previously soulless, yet biologically equipped hominid, had the potential to impart a quantum, bigger-than-biology shift in the emotional and relational awareness of Adam and his bride that set them apart from their contemporaries."
And in contrast to the “soulish” higher animals, you write:
“A soul-bearing creature—what we think of today as a human—has mental and relational capacities that go well beyond soulishness, such as a cognitive understanding of justice and mercy, the ability to create and appreciate art, the desire to understand why things are the way they are, the ability to ponder and communicate abstract ideas, the desire to know truth, and the sense that there is a realm or existence that is beyond the physical. When the Bible speaks of creation in the image of God, it is not a physical appearance, but possession of such characteristics that allow human beings to be God’s relational representatives on this earth.”
I suspect we could contemplate ad infinitum what it means to be created in God’s image, and perhaps more importantly what it means to image him.
“What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet. (Psalm 8:4-6)
@Davidson I agree this is elegant. However, in primary care I see the disintegration of such characteristics piecemeal when the brain is exposed to toxins like opioids, insults like frontotemporal and Alzheimers dementia (neurofibrillary tangles), and affected by organic causes in other ways. I therefore personally baulk at assigning characteristics to a human soul or element. I feels like a “God of the gaps” argument to me (at least, potentially). I’d like to read more, for example, on evolutionary psychology and cognitive science of religion from Justin Barrett, the Christian researcher from Cambridge and Fuller. It makes me wonder even more what “consciousness” is–even if we go to Heaven, etc, what that would mean, when I “meet” my father again (who passed 7 years ago from mesothelioma). I just have faith that there is such a thing as a soul and God and afterlife. I’m not confident of assigning uniqueness, as a result, to any particular portion of our ancestry–Adam or not.
I agree, Jason, with your quote from Psalm 8:4-6. (I can’t get the quote function to add it on).Amen.
Randy, I completely hear you on this. I would argue that we can neither prove nor disprove the existence of a “soul” or the “image of God” through scientific inquiry (although that depends on the precise definitions that are being used).
I also have patients that appear to lack the “mental and relational capacities” as well as “characteristics that allow human beings to be God’s relational representatives on this earth” in the more immediately accessible senses. We see that Christ infuses dignity into all of humanity in various texts, such as when he teaches that we are actually loving him by caring for “the least of these.” I think of that passage in Matthew 25 when I encounter a patient that is either miserable and difficult to love or incapable of responding to love in discernible ways.
Obviously, we’re not going to develop a complete theology of sin here, but I’ll attempt to plow through a little of this, starting with the last point. Romans 2:12-16 pretty clearly spells out that conscience serves the same function as the Mosaic law in rendering the Gentiles guilty before God, even though they did not possess the law or have any awareness of God’s revealed will:
12 All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. 13 For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. 14 (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. 15 They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.) 16 This will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as my gospel declares.
The primary metaphor for sin is missing a target, but just as the legal metaphor of “justification” does not exhaust every aspect of what God has done for us in this “so great a salvation,” the metaphor of missing the target does not exhaust every aspect of “sin.”
For instance, what God-given absolute is missed in James 4:17? “If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.” Is “the good” we ought to do only that which God has directly commanded, such as visiting the prisoner, or is “the good” dependent upon the situation, according to what our conscience tells us? (Hint: “it is sin for them,” not an absolute standard for everyone.) In this case, “the good” we ought to do is something that we have deduced for ourselves, and once we have reached that place of decision, the Lord holds us responsible for acting upon what reason and conscience have told us we should do. Thus, “the good we ought to do” is not exhausted by the specific “oughts” that God has revealed in Scripture; we also use our own judgment to recognize those times when we ought to do good, and when we choose to do something other than that, we have sinned. This applies equally to believers and unbelievers.
To illustrate, let’s take another statement about sin: “whatever is not from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23). Douglas Moo’s commentary on this verse states, "What (Paul) here labels ‘sin’ … is any act that does not match our sincerely held convictions about what our Christian faith allows us to do and prohibits us from doing. … Violation of the dictates of the conscience, even when the conscience does not conform perfectly with God’s will, is sinful." This, again, is sin based upon a violation of conscience, even when the act in question (eating meat offered to idols) is not sinful in itself (i.e. prohibited by God), yet because the person involved believes the action is sinful, it actually is sinful for him or her.
In short, “sin” appears in a myriad of forms. It can’t be limited only to willful violations of God’s revealed standards.
I understand that, but this conception of the “late” entrance of sin creates a host of problems. First and foremost, if sin did not enter the world until God revealed his standards, then Christ is the solution to a “sin problem” that God himself created.
Second, it is incoherent to speak of humanity making moral choices prior to “the event recorded in our Scriptures,” since “moral choices” require the abstract moral categories of “good” and “evil” in order for such choices to qualify as “moral.” In effect, you’re asserting that mankind already possessed the knowledge of good and evil long before Eve ate the fruit. In that case, what knowledge was actually gained in the garden?
Third, if we take seriously the fact that ha’adam, “the man,” is an archetype, then we cannot apply one rule for his sin (“God had to have revealed his will for humans to rebel against”) and another rule for the sins of everyone else who has ever lived. Without question, billions of people have been born, lived, and died in complete ignorance of God’s revealed will. Were they not sinners in need of Christ’s forgiveness? God did not have to reveal his will to each and every one of them individually in order to convict them of sin, so why was it necessary in the case of “Adam”?
Moral awareness, whether in Adam and Eve or in children today, is logically prior to awareness of sin. We see this in childhood development and in the universal human concept of an “age of accountability,” when children are held legally responsible for their actions. This goes back to “the man” as an archetype. Just as children must first learn the difference between good and evil actions before they are held responsible, so “the man” had to learn the difference before God could hold him responsible, no matter where you believe “Adam” might fall in the historical timeline.
Yes, I see that tendency, too, and I feel the same way about it. Gen. 1:26 is a statement of purpose: “Let us create adam/mankind in our image…” This, alone, is reason enough to reject that line of thinking. In my view, the human evolutionary trajectory was planned and guided by God.
Okay. But how could sin exist outside of potential relationship with God? All of the teaching about sin in the Bible presumes God has already initiated a relationship with some representatives of humanity. We don’t have any revelation about humanity before the Garden, before God establishes a relationship.
I’m not following. God initiated a relationship with humans. So yes, in some ways he created the context for sin to exist. The relationship had terms and he made himself vulnerable to disobedience. But isn’t this the same scenario Christians have always wrestled with? What scenario can you propose in which human immorality matters to God but God has no relationship with humans? Humans sinned (violated the terms of the relationship, which God revealed at least to some humans) and compromised the relationship. By whatever calculus God uses, the potential for relationship with all humans was affected by that violation. We need Christ primarily to restore the potential for relationship with God, not for other secondary benefits like peace on earth and freedom from personal guilt and shame.
The God of the Bible is a relational God. He’s not some impersonal decreer of moral absolutes or setter of platonic ideals of goodness. As humans, our highest calling is not to arrive at some self-actualized pinnacle of moral awareness and rectitude. All of the metaphors are relational: We’re to be the spotless bride, the heirs, the faithful servants, the beloved children, the rescued sheep, the redeemed slaves, the ransomed captives. Our fulfillment as humans is always defined by our relationship to God who is always an essential entity in the metaphors. You can’t have a bride without a bridegroom, or heirs without a parent, or domesticated sheep without a shepherd, or slaves without a master.
Is it though? You can make moral choices without accountability. Very young children who are not considered morally accountable have concepts of good and bad, right and wrong, kind and mean. Even dogs know when they have been bad dogs. Maybe we are using “moral” differently. But I imagine very early humans living in social communities had some kind of agreed on moral code where the group exerted pressure on individuals to behave in “good” ways and expect social punishment for being “bad.”
Good question. I guess I would say “the knowledge of good and evil” is different than general moral awareness or the capacity for moral decision making and has something to do with accountability in relationship with God. I think the capacity existed long before the accountability. Clearly God expected obedience from Adam and Eve before they had “the knowledge of good and evil.” He expected them to know that disobeying him was wrong. And they did know, that’s why Eve had to be convinced to take the fruit. I think the Garden story is a rebellion story about rejecting God’s rule in favor of autonomy more than it is a story of the first immoral choice.
Right. I didn’t write Romans, I’m just trying to understand it. It sure seems clear to me that all humanity is counted sinful because of their identification with the sinners that came before them and their birth into sinful human community. Adam and Eve, or whoever they represent were chosen and God initiated a unique relationship with them, like he initiated a unique relationship with Abraham and with Israel and with the church after Pentecost.
I’m trying to imagine this representative idea, and I just don’t really get it. What if, for example, God actually set Adam and Eve out in the midst of today (rather than 6000-500,000 years ago, as in a geneaological Adam)–and it was Mr and Mrs Adam and Eve Jones down the street? Here we are in small town America, and we suddenly learned that 2 doors down, Mr and Mrs Jones had a special relationship with God and messed up. He planted a garden in their back yard, say, and they ate one of the fruit that He told them not to.
Since I’m not sure of the unique difference between us–we really know, as @Christy says, right from wrong already–my reaction would be to say to my kids, “Don’t go dating Mr and Mrs Jones’ kids. They fell out with God, and there’s some sort of curse on all their kids, too. You don’t want to mix in with them. We expire when we die, but unless they do the right thing, they’re going to either Hell or Heaven for eternity.” That doesn’t really sound to me like something God would do. The choosing sounds more like a curse; and I wouldn’t really want to be involved in that. @Jay313, does that have anything to do with the sin idea from your point of view?
Even if it was a genetic Adam and Eve, it seems so odd for God to transmit evil in that way.
I gravitate more away from the representative idea, and more towards Irenaeus’ idea of children learning right from wrong as they grow older–and God guiding them.
My concept of the representative idea has nothing to do with genealogical Adam. We can be counted as grafted into the tree of Israel without any genetic or genealogical relationship to Abraham. We are in Christ with no reference to our genealogy. I see sin as a matter of identification, not literal inheritance.
Although I think the Garden narrative is describing a historical reality, I think the description is figurative. I don’t think there was a literal tree in a literal Garden with a literal naked couple. Those are the mental pictures we were given to understand the spiritual significance and consequences of the event, not the “facts” of the event.
The same way that it existed in Romans 1:18-25. In his commentary on this passage, J.D.G. Dunn notes the “obviously deliberate echo of the Adam narratives” in Paul’s sequence of events, commenting that “it was Adam who above all perverted his knowledge of God and sought to escape the status of creature, but who believed a lie and became a fool and thus set the pattern (Adam = man) for a mankind which worshipped the idol rather than the Creator.”
We have concrete evidence of idolatry as far back as 35,000 years ago. Is idolatry sin?
We do have revelation of God’s relationship with humanity prior to the fall. Proverbs 8. In the poem, wisdom is personified and speaks directly to the reader, a form similar to a Mesopotamian hymn in which a deity praises himself in the first person. Christian interpreters traditionally have viewed the personification of Wisdom in the poem as a type of Christ, who says:
“The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way,
Before His works of old.
“From everlasting I was established,
From the beginning, from the earliest times of the earth.
“When there were no depths I was brought forth,
When there were no springs abounding with water.
“Before the mountains were settled,
Before the hills I was brought forth;
While He had not yet made the earth and the fields,
Nor the first dust of the world.
“When He established the heavens, I was there,
When He inscribed a circle on the face of the deep,
When He made firm the skies above,
When the springs of the deep became fixed,
When He set for the sea its boundary
So that the water would not transgress His command,
When He marked out the foundations of the earth;
Then I was beside him, as a master workman;
And I was daily his delight,
Rejoicing always before Him,
Rejoicing in the world, His earth,
And having my delight in the sons of adam. Prov. 8:22-31
“Rejoicing” here has the connotation of playing, of laughter, and the “delight” that Wisdom expresses is the same delight that God expresses for Ephraim, his dear son, in Jer. 31:20. As I see it, this was the condition before the Fall, before humanity was barred from God’s presence. Those who are evil cannot look upon a holy God and live. God could no longer laugh and play with us. Instead, he hid from us, for our own good. But, as Jeremiah prophesied, no matter how often the Lord has rebuked his dear children, his heart still yearns for us, and he will surely have mercy on us.
In the end, God will again play with his children. No longer will he hide his face (Is. 45:15). When we finally “see him as he is,” we shall laugh with him and delight in him forever, as he always intended from the beginning. The Lord’s creative purpose will inevitably be achieved.
Human morality is rooted in our capacities to symbolize and generalize to a categorical abstraction. Children don’t acquire the capacity to do that until around the age of 10. Something similar occurred in human evolution. As the cognitive neuroscientist Peter Tse explained, “The birth of symbolic thought gave rise to the possibility of true morality and immorality, of good and evil. Once acts became symbolized, they could now stand for, and be instances of, abstract classes of action such as good, evil, right, or wrong.”
But I think we are talking different levels of “moral choice,” as you said. In my case, I am thinking more of mature judgment, as in Isaiah 7. Both Deut. 1:39 and Is. 7:15-16 explicitly state that a child lacks the “knowledge of good and evil,” with Isaiah especially emphasizing that mature judgment involves knowing “to reject evil and choose what is good.”
Exactly. In Proverbs, “the fear of the Lord” is the beginning of wisdom (9:10), which 8:13 has previously defined in moral terms:
The fear of the LORD is to hate evil;
I hate pride and arrogance,
evil behavior and perverse speech.”
In Proverbs, pride is “a self-confident attitude that throws off God’s rule to pursue selfish interests,” as Bruce Waltke commented on this verse. Arrogant pride seeks its own way, independently of God, and the result is lives of habitual evil and deception, so that “their thoughts became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened," as Paul described it in Romans 1.
If ha’adam represents all of mankind, which “the man” does, then all of mankind began in relationship with God. (Is it possible to have a “unique relationship” with all of humanity?) God did not have to reveal himself in a theophany to establish relationship. As Paul pointed out in Rom. 1:19-20, “that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” Unless the Fall had no effects, it is only after that relationship was severed by sin that mankind was left in spiritual darkness. God’s “election”/call of Abram from out of the darkness of idolatry (Josh. 24:2) was the beginning of the God’s plan to redeem humanity.
If they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, yes. But if no one in human history up until that point had any knowledge of God, then how could it be sinning against God to reject his rightful rule? It would be ignorance. You can’t pay homage to a king who has never established his dominion over your land.
So are you conceiving of some early hominim community where everyone submitted perfectly to God’s rule? Hmm. I think Scripture teaches in Genesis that when God established a relationship with a human/human community, they pretty much immediately broke faith with him. Not that it’s a hill I’d die on, but it seems pretty speculative to build a concept of God’s relationship with pre-Fall humanity on an inference from Proverbs. And I thought the personification of Wisdom was typically equated with the third person of the Trinity, not Christ.
No argument here. I just don’t believe that the developed capacity entails that God had to do something about it. Humans needed a savior for (minimally) thousands of years before Christ. We’ve been waiting thousands of years for Christ’s return. I don’t think God’s will/plan/timing is all that dependent on what humans could potentially profit from. Just because humans needed a true God to worship and his revealed will to follow doesn’t entail to me that he would meet that need. Not because I think that is logical or fair, I just think that’s reality. God chooses people. Some people aren’t chosen. This is something I wrestle with not because I like it or because it makes sense but because I think it is an aspect of who God has revealed himself to be. When it starts to bother me too much I think about grace a lot until I feel better.
Exactly. But you can’t throw off God’s rule until he establishes it. Maybe he did prior to 35,000 years ago. I’m skeptical that our revelation describes any such thing though, for reasons I’ve explained before about the preservation of oral traditions. I think Genesis describes a relatively recent history of the ancestors of Israel. Does it have to be describing the absolute first fall of humanity ever? Again, not a hill I would die on. Especially considering that many ancient cultures viewed history cyclically instead of linearly. Adam and Eve could be typologically telling the cyclical story of every human community from time immemorial. I believe the wisdom of God can sometimes be found in the ancient traditions of cultures who have no ties to Israel and no knowledge of Christ.
But Paul was not speaking of some ancient hominim on the cusp of moral awakening “pre-Adam” humanity. In his rhetoric, Adam is the first man. The humanity he is describing is post-Fall, because in his telling, the first man falls. In Paul’s argument, God established a relationship with the first man and so everyone to come after had no excuse, because the knowledge of God had been revealed. I don’t see how you can take what Paul is describing and make it about something he clearly had no concept of.
I read DL’s books and took his class. His ideas are crucial to be exposed to. I am EC.
On Gen 1-11, the first question is what is the literary genre of these texts? I think they are Creation/De-creation/Re-creation myths when compared to other such texts. If that is too large a pill, then I call them parables and there are clues all through the texts some of which get lost in translation. Christians often are taught to read these texts as history and to not do so is unfaithful but I think it is more faithful to read them as myths or parables.
Sorry for the delay, but we seem to be conversing with ourselves anyway, so I’ll take a break after this one.
You’re conflating knowledge of God and acknowledging God as Lord. One can have a knowledge of God that doesn’t rise to the level of worship. That is exactly what Paul describes in Romans 1:20-21, again: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.”
Basically, in vv. 18-25 Paul is explaining why the whole world is in the grip of idolatry and spiritual darkness, seemingly abandoned by God. To do that, he reaches all the way back to the creation and Fall. In v. 20, Paul clearly says that, from the beginning, people have had an intuition that God exists. This is a form of “knowledge of God.” Paul does not say that they knew God intimately or worshiped him.
Has anyone but Christ ever submitted perfectly to God’s rule? Is there a present-day community where everyone submits perfectly to God’s rule? In any case, the short answer is “no.” For most of human history, we did not possess the necessary grammar and lexicon even to conceptualize a god, let alone worship YHWH.
Oh, it’s not just Proverbs. The same verses from Gen. 2-3 that imply some sort of relationship between God and “Adam” apply equally to “the man.” But, the main problem is that we’re not using “relationship” in the same sense. I am not talking about an intimate relationship, which seems to be your meaning. I am talking about a sense of God’s presence, an intuition of his existence and divine nature – something akin to a child’s understanding of God. Again, pre-Fall humanity simply lacked the abstract conceptual language to think and speak about God the way that we do.
Well, Waltke could just as easily have said that “pride is a self-confident attitude that disregards God in pursuit of selfish interests.” Be that as it may, when did God establish his rule upon the earth? I would say that God’s role as Creator established his rule from the moment he said, “Let there be light …” If “the kingdom of the world” (Rev. 11:15) is presently ruled by “the god of this age” (2 Cor. 4:4), then that occurred at the Fall, which means that God certainly was the ruler of the world of pre-Fall humanity.
I mashed these two together, but it sounds to me that the reason you are resistant is because of the implications for the genealogies. Is that an accurate guess?
Paul wrote an inspired interpretation/extrapolation of Genesis 2-3. The fact that it has some correspondence to history is my fault, not his. Haha
Of course Paul wasn’t. However, simply assuming that Paul always considered Adam to be “the first man” is begging the question. McKnight did a pretty good job of showing that first-century Jews considered and spoke of Adam as a corporate symbol as often as an individual man.
Yes and yes. Most of what Paul says in Romans 1 concerns the consequences of the Fall, but that is simply because he is concerned to show us the spiritual root of the thing, not just the facts of the matter. Oh, and in my scenario, “the man” also fell.
Look again. Paul says nothing about God establishing a relationship with the first man.