More accurately, scripture doesn’t particularly care how things work in the real world – it’s not a concern.
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But the “imager vocation” was not assigned in the A&E story, it comes from the previous Creation account.
I can see room to argue that A&E were meant to be special imagers, imagers-to-the-imagers if you will, but all humans have always been imagers – that’s a primary message of Genesis 1.
Personally I don’t see GAE as a change for the better, it’s just another shift in the game of demanding that scripture conform to a MSWV.
I resolve the difficulty by recognizing that through the twin processes of inspiration and canonization the Holy Spirit gave us authoritative material to work with and it doesn’t need any imprimatur from modern – or even ancient – science. So I turn to a model from the culture when the accounts were set down: royal representation.
Adam as priest-king stood in place of everyone and when he failed he failed for everyone.
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Since I believe God goes each person a rational soul, yes he wants us to have knowledge. In fact, I believe sin is only possible if you have knowledge so any sin of Adam and Eve occurred after they had knowledge. Of course, I think we should try to define what “sin” actually meant to Paul when he writes what he does in Romans 5.
I don’t read it as a story of ignorant kids being kicked out a a garden for breaking rules they didn’t understand. That really doesn’t make sense of any scripture in my mind and it isn’t really consistent with how I understand the word sin to begin with. At any rate, some of what I quoted above from Walton is relevant here and this is his conclusion about sacred trees:
In the ancient Near East, life and wisdom are the prerogatives of the gods that they are reluctant to grant as they try to maintain distance between themselves and humanity. In the Bible, life and wisdom are possessed by God, and they are made available to humans as they are in relationship to him. The trouble comes when humans try to seize wisdom on their own terms. They are told that the fruit will make them like God, but unfortunately this is as independent agents rather than in relationship to him. In this way, the Bible has a very different read on these issues than its ancient Near Eastern counterparts.
I don’t take the trees as literal but I do take Adam and Eve as attempting “to seize wisdom on their own terms.” That is what eating the forbidden fruit meant. I don’t have tree genealogies nor is their existence central to Paul’s punctiliar understanding of sin so I feel no need to take them literally.
This question makes less sense to me because I believe our natural state is to be in fellowship with our creator. They should have sought wisdom in the context of their relationship with God. Eating the tree represents them seizing wisdom on their own terms. So I don’t think God wanted them to sin.
Vinnie
The problem is that this account may stem from a time period 1000 years before Paul or even more. A lot changes in how something is understood and I am still left with what Paul thinks 2000 years ago. His view on Adam is as much scripture as Genesis 2. And royal representation doesn’t preclude historicity. Limiting our view of Adam to only what we think someone 3200 (original myth) or 2600 (exile view) years ago would read it as is problematic to me. Not to mention, God can reveal new knowledge and understandings of older material any time He wishes to. Which is why when @Jay313 remarked on the possibility of Adam and Eve being possibly late editions to the Hebrew corpus in another thread, even though I disagreed with it, my first thought is so what?
I mean if they lived 6000 years ago or 60,000, the story is already pretty late to begin with…even if it was 1000 years older than it currently is. When God chooses to reveal what He does to the authors of sacred scripture over its thousand year composition is His business.
Why?
You’re making an assumption that the actions of men are more powerful than God.
I’m trying to think what other term might have fit. “Fall” puts the blame squarely on the perpetrators and I can’t think of any other word that fits as well.
Or it offered a promise of things to be had when the time was right.
Then there’s the proposal that Adam ate because he trusted God to make things work out.
He seems to have blamed the women pretty quickly and even God himself (“that you gave me”!). He trusted God (he was with Eve) so he disobeyed God? That seems off.
I have to wonder what was in Walton’s mind when he wrote that. I’m blanking on it, but there’s a Hebrew word that works far better than “guilt”, and can be rendered as “error” though not so much in a moral sense so much as “missing the mark”, illustratable as a carpenter failing to cut a board in the right place and ending up with a flawed product. Then each successive human is marked for measurement by the flawed board.
GAE doesn’t require anything from Christians who already have an allegorical view of Genesis.
So what you probably meant to conclude is demands a reinterpretation from
from those who are too brittle in their view of Genesis.
G.Brooks
No, I meant just what I said – from my perspective it’s all part of a useless game where things are measured by a MSWV.
I was trying to be polite. How can your assertion be credible if GAE only applies to people who take Genesis 1 and 2 super-literally, with no textual ambivalences?
Because the whole point is to make the text fit a MSWV. That’s what YEC (on one end of the spectrum) and TE (on the other) are all about.
I don’t think there is much choice here. YEC’s lobby to pass real world laws filled with
intolerance and religious views which have no place in politics.
I was going to ask, do you not think a mythological A&E do this but apparently you. So what is your position?
My religious views belong everywhere in my life. I don’t need to push them on people but they generally shape every aspect of what I think, do and believe.
Vinnie
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What if Romans 5 has nothing to do with the nature of Sin, but actually the limits of (the) Law?
Romans 1-8 is one complete argument. It is about the inadequacies of the Law and our ability to either avoid or be cleansed from Sin. Hoiking Romans 5 out and making it a doctrine on its own is misreading Paul. Paul argues in sequence. He starts and argument, then thinks of a variation, then another and so on. It is legalistic thinking whereby you have to clarify, then clarify your clarifications. Each part of the argument is built on the last and underpins the next part. Just as parsing posts on this forum can misconstrue, so does taking a few verses out of Romans 1-8.
How do you get that from my posts?
We are expelled from that garden because we are n longer able to live in it, not because of some angry punishment. Eden cannot exist in this world as long as we have the knowledge of good and evil, along with eyes that see and brains that understand what they see.
Now this is different from the concepts of Original Sin, and more to do with having a relationship or not with God.
There is an underlying doctrine within Christianity that dictates that we cannot live how God wants without His help. It is wonderful humility but completely impractical and throws a very bad light on God’s creational abilities that he cannot make us self sufficient. Everything else is self sufficient, why not humanity!
Scripture says that God has written His Laws (ideals) on our hearts. Why does He then have to control us for us to utilise that information?
Giving my life to God does not turn me into an automaton, or slave, or mindless minion. it is a statement of intent, not a slave contract. And it can be nullified by either party at any time.
This is what I mean when I talk about ramifications and understanding the consequences of what we believe. If the doctrines are not practical or refect God’s Grace and power then they are clearly misguided. God Has the power to dictate and the grace not to.
Richard
Maybe the faith statement he had to sign to keep his job at the time? Just a guess.
WE BELIEVE that God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the entire human race; and that they were created in His own image, distinct from all other living creatures, and in a state of original righteousness.
WE BELIEVE that our first parents sinned by rebelling against God’s revealed will and thereby incurred both physical and spiritual death, and that as a result all human beings are born with a sinful nature that leads them to sin in thought, word, and deed.
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I don’t have one. The text is authoritative, and the type of literature it is can be treated as literal in order to understand the message – fashioning schemes to make it fit science can be an amusing passtime, but it makes no difference to what the message is.
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“Hoiking” – that’s a fun word! 
What’s it supposed to be?
We’re not like everything else.
You switched from “help” to “control” – do you see no difference?
A fine word. From the Roman occupation.
Colloquial for removing a piece. Often with a crowbar (jimmy / prybar) and brute force. The reverse of a “Brummy Screwdriver” (AKA a hammer)
If Paul was trying to enforce a “new” or at least important doctrine, don’t you think he would take more than a couple of passing lines (in two different letters).
You who is so adamant about the text and what it should mean. Have you ever considered Romans 1-8 as a complete text, rather than fragmenting it.
Perhaps there was a reason no one before the reformation got so stuck with this.
That is human vanity, as well as not very scientific.
It was not a switch, Orthodoxy, and Paul, go further than just help.
Richard