I did not claim that there were ecumenical councils before the first council of Nicaea, year 325.
AFAIK, during the first two centuries after Jesus ascended, churches were local and relatively small but had connections with other local churches. There appeared to be quite much local variation in practices and what was read in the churches (read in the meetings of believers). There were local variants of simple ‘creeds’ that the persons to be baptized had to confess before the baptism. Trusted writings spread from one church to another but also deviating texts and teachings spread. Especially groups that could be classified as ‘gnostic’ appear to have been productive in generating and spreading tailored ‘gospels’ that they could utilize in their attempts to gain followers.
In the middle of all the deviating teachings and false accusations coming from the various opponents, defending against the false accusations and preserving the ‘orthodox’ apostolic teaching must have been among the key issues within the local churches. The false teachings could lead to divisions among the believers. Splits within local churches was probably a major concern for the leaders of the local churches and possibly the main reason for switching from a collective leadership of a team of ‘elders’ (episcopos/presbyteros) to the leadership of one leader (‘bishop’). The rationale of Ignatios, one of the ‘Apostolic fathers’, appeared to be that if everyone follows just one local leader (episcopos), there will be no splits in the local church - his polemic claim was that where the episcopos is, there is the church.
The first ecumenical council at Nicaea represented all the local churches that sent representatives to the council. The discussions at the council reveal the general state of the network of local churches at that time. Despite the history of the spread of deviating teachings, the majority of the local churches appeared to be following the same path. A small number of representatives supported Arianism, some local churches may have read a partly varying set of texts, but the majority of the local churches appeared to read and teach the same core teachings.
That situation was not something generated or dictated by councils, it was something rising up from the spread of teachings since Jesus sent his apostles, and recognized by the representatives within the council.
After the western part of the Roman empire collapsed to external attacks and the eastern part continued another millennium (Eastern Roman empire is often called Byzantine), the teachings between the west and east started to diverge. There had been cultural differences (Greek vs. Latin) and some mistrust also earlier but that mistrust deepened and lead to differing historical paths, also in teachings. The eastern track (eastern ‘orthodox’ churches) reminds that only what the first ecumenical councils declared are widely accepted doctrines.
The western track of churches, where the bishop of Rome managed to get the leading position, held further councils that added new doctrines. These doctrines do not have ecumenical support and therefore, need to be evaluated against the early ecumenical teachings and ecumenically recognized scriptures (‘canon’, what we usually call the Bible [library of canonical scriptures]).
With such vague correlations, any text could represent any history. ‘A tale of two cities’ could map onto Columbus’s transatlantic voyage. ‘The very hungry caterpillar’ could be an allegory for the expansion of the British empire. ‘Winnie-the-pooh’ could map the history of rugby football, ‘The hound of the Baskevilles’ is about the siege of Masada and ‘The Waltons’ describes the history of the solar system.
Yes, I was relying on memory of an email exchange with a prominent Catholic theologian who’s also written on the subject of evolution. I mainly remembered his summary, which was that monogenism and polygenism are viable opinions for Catholics, as long as the soul is considered directly created by God.
The historical, literal Adam and Eve couldn’t have been two humans chosen by God. I outlined just a few of the problems here:
Second, once we postulate that a literal Adam and Eve were not the first humans, we have opened a whole new can of worms. Whether they were freshly created or “adopted,” whether they were adolescents or infants, if Adam and Eve had to speak an existing language and fit into an existing culture after their expulsion from the Garden, then the obvious questions are how they learned that language (any language!) and the norms of that culture. Once again, children learn by observation and imitation. God himself could not provide Adam and Eve with enculturation, since children learn that by observing and imitating how human beings actually speak and behave in society . It’s possible that the Lord drilled them to memorize an extensive list of rules to observe once outside the Garden (which assumes their failure in the upcoming test). Or possibly he implanted social knowledge in their minds, on top of everything else—but the special pleadings are piling quite high now.
After being expelled from the Garden, with no prior socialization besides an occasional stroll in the garden with God, how do they suddenly and seamlessly integrate into society? How would Adam and Eve know how to conduct themselves? People who’ve been raised in another culture may have different customs, but that’s a far cry from two people with zero experience of human customs or group behavior. Try to imagine such an Adam unleashed upon society. It’s not hard to picture him urinating in public, taking other people’s things, inappropriately touching his neighbor’s wife—and winding up dead of stupidity in short order.
For a recent Adam and Eve, the problem doesn’t simply evaporate if they are “enlightened” or “adopted” from an existing population; it’s still a Catch-22 with no escape. An adolescent Adam and Eve already would have the knowledge of good and evil even before laying eyes on the apple, since they were taken from pre-existing human society, and an “innocent” pair of toddlers would require full-time tutoring by God just to learn to speak, a la Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan. Actually, the Lord might face a bigger challenge than Miss Sullivan. Children learn as much from the conversations around them as they do from direct, one-on-one conversation with a parent. If the only dialogue Adam and Eve ever heard was what God said to them, they would be more deprived than Helen Keller, since Anne Sullivan signed every word of every conversation around them into Helen’s hand.
Noam Chomsky’s theory of a “universal grammar” was based on his observation that children are not exposed to enough conversational examples to acquire all the grammatical features of their native language. This is called the “poverty of the stimulus” argument. Chomsky underestimated the number of examples that children passively observe under normal circumstances, but he wouldn’t be wrong in any of the “recent Adam” scenarios. If Adam and Eve’s only conversational partner is God, then the Lord had better be in a talkative mood for at least a decade to make up the deficit that normal human company provides.
That was quite interesting. For starters, I think this is an often overlooked issue and you have drawn attention to it for me. My initial question would be to ask you if you believe in souls? I do and that seems an easy way to address a lot of your complaints. I don’t think A&E were specially created so a bit of what you wrote does not apply to me so I will leave that out. I don’t even know if they were real or not to be honest. I lean to no but I like to push important beliefs to their limit before rejecting them. I think its best to approach mainline church tradition and scripture with reverence and a hermeneutic of trust, even while fully being able to be critical of both.
If real and chosen by God, Adam and Eve would have had learned behaviors and cultural norms. Animals have learned behaviors as well but I don’t consider animals to have a knowledge of good and evil. Nor do I consider the actions of animals good or evil. They just are. For me, there is something different about humans. Only we are made in God’s image and given the breath of life in Genesis 1. So for me, it’s the human soul which renders most of these objections useless. So when God steps in and chooses the first humans or small human population to give souls to, that is when we move from animals to humans in my book. Before that, I do not think we were capable of being moral or immoral anymore than an animal is. I am also not entirely persuaded by a purely naturalistic understanding of human thought. I have no stake in that game but that is not my current view and I have moved away from thinking we can eventually explain everything with bottom-up physics.
Second, once we postulate that a literal Adam and Eve were not the first humans, we have opened a whole new can of worms. Whether they were freshly created or “adopted,” whether they were adolescents or infants, if Adam and Eve had to speak an existing language and fit into an existing culture after their expulsion from the Garden, then the obvious questions are how they learned that language (any language!) and the norms of that culture. Once again, children learn by observation and imitation. God himself could not provide Adam and Eve with enculturation, since children learn that by observing and imitating how human beings actually speak and behave in society . It’s possible that the Lord drilled them to memorize an extensive list of rules to observe once outside the Garden (which assumes their failure in the upcoming test). Or possibly he implanted social knowledge in their minds, on top of everything else—but the special pleadings are piling quite high now.
I don’t equate a knowledge of good and evil with an animal learning language or imitating behaviors. Animals don’t sin. Humans sin. The charge of “special pleading” carries no weight here. Most Christians feel completely justified in thinking Adam and Eve were real people based off the Church’s longstanding teachings of a fall and original sin. The evidence for our fallen nature is quite obvious for a lot of Christians. Maybe its wrong but it seems to compelling true that some use it as an apologetic justifying Christian belief. Christians believe A&E are real because Paul says : “For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive.” To put the skeptic hat on, if we all didn’t die in Adam, why should I believe we all be made alive in Christ? Or that Christ is the only name under which we can be made alive? Not to mention Pauls much more detailed treatment in Romans 5. There is nothing wrong with coming up with ways to explain how two things you are firmly justified in believing are true can fit together (evolution and a historical Adam and Eve). We all do this every day and countless times in our life. Believe in a historical Adam doesn’t rise or fall on whether we think Adam and Eve learned behaviors from those around them or were specially raised by God in a garden. Those are issues Christians may like to discuss but the central issue is how Christians understand Paul, the apostle specially appointed by Jesus through a supernatural miracle and inspired to write a significant amount of sacred scripture. We don’t have to know how God would have given Adam and Eve the capacity to understand His rule. It’s God, and when He appears in a Garden or anywhere, to accomplish what He wants, His power is well beyond this materialistic reductionism you are trying to use to question it.
and an “innocent” pair of toddlers would require full-time tutoring by God just to learn to speak, a la Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan. Actually, the Lord might face a bigger challenge than Miss Sullivan. Children learn as much from the conversations around them as they do from direct, one-on-one conversation with a parent. If the only dialogue Adam and Eve ever heard was what God said to them, they would be more deprived than Helen Keller, since Anne Sullivan signed every word of every conversation around them into Helen’s hand.
I don’t think an objection to Adam and Eve that puts God in a pretty small box and has an underwhelming view of His power is going to be convincing to most Christians. You think it’s difficult for God to rear infants? Or to put them in a special garden where they could grow and understand life outside the garden? You think God’s dialogue is depriving them? You are jumping the shark here. I am not saying this is the way it was done but I’m just not feeling the objection.
Neither the fall, nor Original SIn are longstanding teaching. Both came out of the Reformation and neither have full Biblical backing.
Why do people insist on making the Garden Real?
If people can accept an alegorical Genesis 1, why then insist on a real Garden? What is it about Adam and Eve that makes them so compelling?
It would seem to be human vanity that spurs on this understanding. It has to be humans that cause all the trouble and God is just helpless and depserate to solve it! And even when He does the problem still persists! Humans have to still be responsible for their own salvation They have to agree, or something! Anything! God just can’t do it Himself! God must Judge! God must condemn! God can’t just forgive!
Have you not been following? Original sin and the fall based on Paul’s teachings in Romans 5.
The reformation in the 16th century? Were cars invented after Covid as well?
This belief started no later than in the 40s-50s with Paul and he was probably drawing on prior Jewish traditions. I think Augustine mistranslated Paul and it’s quite possible a lot of doctrine may go beyond what Paul would have agreed with but the Pauline corpus is the oldest written material we have. Paul seems to have started from the solution and worked backwards to the problem but it’s nonetheless found there and in countless Christians since then. Original sin as a term probably first shows up in Augustine but the sin of Adam and it passing along are found in a lot of places prior.
From Wiki:
The specific doctrine of original sin was developed in the 2nd century struggle against Gnosticism by Irenaeus of Lyons, and was shaped significantly by Augustine of Hippo (354–430 AD), who was the first author to use the phrase “original sin”.[3][4]Influenced by Augustine, the Councils of Carthage(411–418 AD) and Orange (529 AD) brought theological speculation about original sin into the official lexicon of the Church.[5]
For the Apostle Paul, Adam’s act released a power into the world by which sin and death became the natural lot of mankind, a view which is evident in 2 Esdras, 2 Baruch and the Apocalypse of Moses .[10]Paul uses much of the same language observed in 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch, such as Adam-death associations. He also emphasizes the individual human responsibility for their sins when he described the predominance of death over all “because all have sinned” (Romans 5:12).[11] Early Christianity had no specific doctrine of original sin prior to the 4th century.[12] The idea developed incrementally in the writings of the Early Church Fathers in the centuries after the New Testament was composed.[13] The late 1st- or early 2nd-century Didache 's seemingly exclusive preference for adult baptism offers evidence that its author may have believed that children were born sinless. The authors of the Shepherd of Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas, also from the late 1st or early 2nd centuries, assumed that children were born without sin. However Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch, from the same period, took universal sin for granted but did not explain its origin from anywhere; and while Clement of Alexandria in the late 2nd century did propose that sin was inherited from Adam, he did not say how.
Those two works are little later than Paul but from the 1st century. You seem to live in your own imaginary bubble at times. Just because you don’t like the doctrine of original sin does not mean it’s not ancient or not found in scripture.
No it is not. You are taking a single verse out of context. Romans 5 is part of a complete teaching on faith. In with Adam, out with Christ. it does not claim that we are fallen or tainted. In fact , if you read further it says the opposite
v15ff
But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!
The trespass did not affect al, but the gift is for all.
Read what he says instead of jumping at a single verse!
Great. Theology by common consent of non believers!
Original Sin is foul, and scripture denies it
Jer 31:29ff
. 29 “In those days people will no longer say,
‘The parents have eaten sour grapes,
and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’
30 Instead, everyone will die for their own sin; whoever eats sour grapes—their own teeth will be set on edge.
Ezekiel 18
The word of the Lord came to me: 2 “What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel:
“‘The parents eat sour grapes,
and the children’s teeth are set on edge’?
3 “As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. 4 For everyone belongs to me, the parent as well as the child—both alike belong to me. The one who sins is the one who will die.
Paul knew this. Original Sin is not part of Judaism. Paul did not invent it!
It does not exist. It never has existed. People are not tainted. Sin has no power of its own. God made us as He wanted and we did not/cannot change that. Humanity is not more powrful than God.
Original sin doesn’t mean you are guilty due to it. Some Christians teach this but others believe is our individual sin and lack of repentance that condemns.
The teaching is that when the first humans were made they lived in a state of grace with God. By sinning, humanity was knocked out of that state. The analogy I gave from Reddit was that of a reckless king and queen who squandered all their wealth. Their offspring lost what would have been theirs if they had not done so. I’d guess very few Christians think people go to hell because someone else sinned. We all have Ezekiel in our Bibles.
Original sin is the most realistic thing there is. It’s how the world works. Our actions have consequences for us and those around us.
And you might complain original sin is unfair and it is. Not because of a mean old God not giving us all we want. But because the gift of Christ far exceeds the punishment and loss brought about by Adam and Eve. As you said:
In monetary terms it would be like A&E withdrew ten thousand dollars from all our bank accounts but God gives us an unlimited black card. Completely not fair in that we get way more than we lost.
I am of the opinion that Adam and Eve were the first humans to have a covenant relationship with God rather than the first biological Homo sapiens. That being said, it is not mutually exclusive. Adam and Eve could be the direct ancestors of a large population of humans, particularly around the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean, but not all modern humans. People who make the argument that Adam and Eve were the earliest biologically modern humans or the first behaviorally modern humans, usually are ok with saying that Adam and Eve would not have been the direct ancestors, say of Neanderthals, who likely also had language and culture as we understand it. In that case, the ancient Greeks and ancient Israelites could have been literal descendants of Adam and Eve, even if an historical contemporary from Central America was not. An interesting argument I have heard is that the fall was partly setting a precedent for the judgement of future sin. In that way, you would not have to be descended from Adam to be subject to the fall. You just would have needed to live after Adam.
Slight correction. Only we are made in God’s image, but the phrases “breath of life” and “living soul” are applied to both animals and humanity in the Hebrew Bible. Life is manifested in the breath, which comes from the Spirit of God. This is true of both people and animals, since both come from the ground (Gen 1:24, 2:7) and both owe their lives to the spirit/breath of God (Gen 7:21–22).
So after Adam & Eve (or a small population) fail the test and are sent from the Garden back into the general population, you have a situation where two or so people have souls and are fully human, while the rest of the 50,000 scattered across Africa are “soulless” H. sapiens. This creates more problems than it solves.
First, how did the soulless humans receive souls? Two people aren’t going to “outbreed” 50,000. Intermingling will occur, of course, but you still have a situation where thousands of years pass with essentially two different types of humans inhabiting the earth. Some are fully human, and the rest are subhuman. All sorts of racist theories have come from such thinking. (Not that I’m accusing you of racism. I’m saying that racists down through the centuries have come up with similar ideas.) I think the only proper theological response is that every human is created in the image of God and endowed with a soul, however one conceives of it.
Second, I need an explanation for exactly what difference you think the addition of a soul gave to these chosen human beings. It couldn’t have been moral knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil. That was gained through experience when the woman and the man ate the fruit. Prior to that, they were ignorant.
I would argue that all of early humanity was like a young child. They were created in the image of God and endowed with souls, but they were still ignorant of “good and evil” and immature. A modern toddler is created in the image of God, but they have to be trained to follow society’s rules: Don’t hit, don’t steal, don’t lie, respect your parents. (Ten Commandments minus the YHWH-specific part.)
You’re absolutely right that humanity had to transition from innocent animal to guilty adult human. Was it an instantaneous, miraculous intervention of God, a la the introduction of the soul, or was it a natural, if God-guided, evolutionary process? I’m firmly in the latter camp. Human morality depends on modern language, including fully modern grammar, full symbolicity, including abstract metaphorical categories such as “good” and “evil,” and a fully developed brain that is adapted to language and fully integrated, which appears in the fossil record 100,000 years ago and continues to evolve until its modern shape about 40,000 years ago.
The missing ingredient from animal innocence to human guilt is a transitional phase. Innocent animal-ignorant child-guilty adult. It’s as simple as that. Early humans were acquainted with evil. There are multiple hominin fossils with their heads caved in from violence. Murder wasn’t invented by Cain.
Not really sure what you meant by this. Some people interpret consciousness as “the soul,” but I view that as a category error. What I’m sketching out is well documented in the archaeological and fossil record – the growth in size and change in shape of the human brain, the appearance and proliferation of symbolic artifacts, and the flourishing of innovative technologies 40,000 years ago. All of those things are related to the knowledge of good and evil.
Animals don’t learn language, and their primary method of learning isn’t imitation. For example, chimps have culture, but their tool-making behavior is learned by dyadic, one-on-one instruction, and once they learn to make a tool, they don’t stray from that pattern. Human communication and learning is triadic. We observe everything happening around us and infer the “rules” from there – whether the rules involve how to speak and use words or how to behave in society. Think about walking into a new social situation. Say it’s a formal occasion and you’re not sure how to act. What do you do? What everyone does – observe how others behave and copy them. This is well-documented sociology.
A list of special pleadings that are extra-Biblical:
Adam & Eve were chosen out of an existing population.
Adam & Eve were given a soul which other humans lacked.
Adam & Eve were created in the image of God but the rest of humanity – not so much.
Should I go on?
A “fall” and original sin don’t require a literal, historical Adam & Eve. The church’s longstanding teachings are based on ignorance of the facts, nevertheless (by God’s grace) it got a lot of stuff right. The “fall” is a misnomer based upon the incorrect idea that the first humans were perfect and lived in a perfect, deathless environment. We know that’s not true. Kierkegaard was onto that in the mid-19th century without knowing anything about evolution.
The reason Genesis 2-3 still has universal appeal (we don’t read Gilgamesh anymore) is because it describes the universal experience of everyone who “comes of age” and recognizes their guilt and estrangement from God (the divine). Humanity also took the same journey. Ha’adam and ha’issah are archetypes.
All of us are separated from God and need reconciliation. Jesus isn’t out of the equation simply because a literal Adam and Eve are off the table. Humanity went its own way around 65,000 years ago, like an adolescent declaring his/her independence too soon. Every single one of us repeats that journey from childhood innocence to moral guilt. The evidence in the archaeological record is the proliferation of “Venus” fertility figurines, “fantastic” creatures such as the man with a lion head, etc. As Paul said in Romans 1, they abandoned God so God abandoned them, and people began to worship the creation rather than the Creator. That’s the fall in a nutshell. What happened next is the story of the Prodigal Son. That’s also the story of each of us and all of us as a whole.
Nah. This is totally off base. Belief in a literal Adam and Eve is totally open to examining the evidence available, and every scrap of evidence I can find argues against such a belief. The central issue is how Christians understand Christ. Paul is secondary.
Good gosh. Imagining God as a nursemaid is jumping the shark.
One, I possess no knowledge of how big the group was. Polygenism is okay with me. Two, whether or not there was an actual garden is something I cannot know. It is clear to me Genesis 2-3 is not literal history. The only thing the belief I am attempting to discuss needs is the following: there was a single couple or group of people that were chosen by God and somehow failed in listening to Him and decided to go their own way and that fall from grace now extends to all of humanity since.
That is a weird question since the soul is immaterial. My first thought was “how the hell should I know?” From God is the only answer I can muster. I know many Catholics think God uses conception and we tend to reject dualism: “No part of us is simply soul, no part of us is merely body.” – Baglow. I would go with Feser’s definition of the soul I his newer book on the subject:
The soul, I suggested earlier, is best thought of as the incorporeal incomplete substance that persists beyond the death of the body, but is, before death, integrated with the body so as to make up a single complete substance.
I suppose it depends on how many people would be given souls initially. That is up to God, not me. That this belief can lead to racism does not invalidate it. That there would be humans and animals that looked like humans coexisting doesn’t invalidate it. Humans still coexist with animals. I also don’t find race to be real. It seems to be skin deep from my understanding and based solely on environment. Racism has no biological or scriptural leg to stand on. It is 100% a made up social contruct with no basis in reality.
God could have given souls to all alive or to whoever he chose as time was right. Or all subsequent people born after Adam and Eve. This is all just wild speculation and not probative either way. Or maybe the minority who thinks the fall was a meta-historical event are correct and all of our reality has always been fallen
I think that is true by definition. To me that is part of how a “human” is defined.
I tend to think rationality is immaterial and incorporeal. I don’t think genuine morality is possible before a soul was given. I don’t think there was an actual snake and apple. The original problem was "arrogating to ourselves the prerogative of determining good and evil. When our wills become the criterion and the measure rather than God. " I agree with Bishop Barron’s interpretation see 6-7minute mark. The first sin is not murder, adultery or eating a piece of forbidden fruit. It’s something much more subtle.
That is fine to me but I believe a soul is needed for this which you have included.
I believe a person is a unity of body and soul (not into dualism) so I don’t have an issue with human evolution over time. I don’t think either of us think God guided them to transition from innocent animal to guilty adult human. As I said, I think rationality, which seems to be required for making moral choices (maybe I am wrong) is not material. I believe humans have both corporeal and incorporeal parts. This gets a little beyond my comfort zone but I agree with what Feser writes in his new book on the Immortal Soul…
Commenting on this sort of argument, Pasnau raises the question whether the intellect, even if distinct from the body, may nevertheless depend for its continued existence on the body, especially given that (as we saw in chapter 7) its normal mode of operation involves making use of mental imagery, which is corporeal.762 He draws an analogy with an unborn baby which, though distinct from its mother, would die without the umbilical cord that attaches it to her. Now, as Pasnau goes on to acknowledge, just as a baby after birth shifts to a different way of taking in nutrients and oxygen, so too, one could hold (as Aquinas does), does the human intellect shift to a different mode of cognition after death. And in that case, one could also hold that, just as the baby can in such circumstances survive apart from the mother, so too can the intellect persist apart from the body. This analogy, Pasnau grants, suffices to keep the objection in question from being decisive. But Pasnau overlooks the more basic point that the reason an unborn baby will die without the umbilical cord is because its body is a composite of form and matter, and the matter will lose the form without sufficient oxygen and nutrition. But the intellect is not a composite of form and matter, and this (rather than the possibility of shifting to an alternative mode of cognition) is the fundamental reason why no dependence it has on the body could be strong enough to entail that it cannot survive without it.
Note that what I am here claiming is contingent is only the fact that the human intellect, while associated with the body, brings imagery to mind when entertaining concepts that it has already acquired. I am not claiming that it is merely a contingent fact that the acquisition itself depends on abstraction from imagery, and thus on sensation. One can consistently hold both that the intellect can, after death, entertain concepts without resorting to imagery and that said concepts would nevertheless not have been acquired in the first place had the intellect not first abstracted them from images, and thus been associated with the body and its sense organs. Note also that what I am saying is consistent with the intellect’s not only happening to make use of imagery when together with the body, but having a positive, natural inclination to do so.
I think Feser’s argument can apply to morality just as well as intellect. I think what you write is correct. Our morality is intertwined with our experiences in the physical world but I think morality and rationality go beyond bottom up physics and biology. Though if we do support polygenism and evolution I see no reason to assume the fall of humanity had to be an instantaneous thing.
Adam is actually secondary to Paul. He found the answer (Jesus) then worked backwards to the problem (Adam).
All good but I think your first statement raises its own problems. Why is EVERYONE separated from God and needing reconciliation in your view? Traditionally the fall from grace due to the first couple has been the answer. But I can’t see why it’s necessarily true that all humans are separated and need reconciliation without it. Its presumptuous and “based on ignorance of the facts.”
It was not the meaning I took, knowing how he understands sin.
He adheres to the notio that sin can enslave (from Paul) which givs sin some sort of independant presence, and i took it that he views evil in the same manner, that is, it has an influence that can work independantly.
Or you could maintain that all human souls are linked by human nature, so when one got messed up it all got messed up.
Just to muddy the waters a bit . . . .
Babylon and other great “cities of the plain” had serpent-form heavenly beings described as bringing great knowledge and skill to them, making them superior to others. In that light, Genesis 3 could be saying, “Sorry, but that’s wrong; the heavenly serpent-beings don’t benefit humanity, they screwed us up”.
Of course that assumes an exilic or post-exilic date of composition.
“Worked backwards” – interesting view. I’ll have to go read it again.
The fact that evil/sin can enslave, has independent presence, can influence, or can work independently is not the same as anthropomorphizing it. To anthropomorphize is to attribute human characteristics (i.e. characteristics unique to humans among all the things in nature we can observe). Examples of things which enslave, have independent presence, can influence, or work independently but without uniquely human characteristics are legion. Take gravity for example.