But how do you know? Sigh… a concept is just that. An allegory of an imaginary concept is useless. An allegory of a real thing, cannot explain the origin of that thing. The question is still, did man really have an original sin, or was his avoidance of God in the allegorical garden simply the way he was from the time he was a fox or a bacteria. Did God create him with a “good” communion, or with an avoidance preference?
But you didn’t say “how do we know”. You said it COULD NOT apply. You wrote as if you KNEW … what nobody can know.
Original Sin is simply the imperfection of the natural order.
George
Then it is not original. And then it is created by God.
What a delicious torturing of the word “original”, @johnZ !
And this is where, again, we find havoc in attempting to accept the story of Eden literally.
We all agree that the natural world is full of imperfection, yes? Is there such a thing as the PERFECT
snowflake? Is there such a thing as the PERFECT OCEAN WAVE?
The natural order is FULL of imperfection - - and it is created by God.
So, is this saying God created sin? If infants have original sin … isn’t that tantamount to saying God created sin?
But if you say infants are imperfect … well, that’s a different story, right?
Let’s look at the Eden scenario again. Adam and Eve know nothing about Good and Evil, right? So how would you expect any other decision by Adam and Eve? If you give a loaded machine gun to a 3 year old toddler, and tell him to NEVER EVER touch the trigger … what do YOU think is going to happen?
Genesis was written to provide an story for humanity’s toils and troubles … the same for the Greek story about Pandora and her box of evils. If one of the evils in the box is disobedience … how did Pandora have this evil already - - enough to open the box when she wasn’t supposed to?
Adam and Eve is about the IMPERFECTION of the natural order. And God made these natural imperfections.
But you prefer to interpret SIN = EVIL. And somehow the newly born infant is EVIL, right? I think even most evangelicals would take issue with that thought.
But if you ask a Christian if all humans fall short of the glory of God ? You will get plenty of agreement - - because Humanity, by definition, is imperfect.
Or… if you prefer, go to Romans 9, when Paul tells us that God INTENTIONALLY MAKES vessels of wrath … in order to show the greater glory of God.
George
Obviously modern people know that a novel is fiction, that a movie is fiction, etc. There are obvious clues to genre, e.g., when a paperback book says: “A great new novel by Stephen King.” But I think you know what I am referring to. The assumption of the typical modern Bible-Belt Protestant is that all past-tense narration in the Bible is meant to be historical unless it is prefaced by an explicit statement that what is about to be related is a parable. It is very doubtful that a literate Israelite of the 8th century B.C., reading the Garden story, would operate under that “default” assumption.
I didn’t say the story of the serpent was “not true.” You are using “true” in the modern, positivistic sense of the term. For you, if something is “not true” historically, it is “not true” period. That is not the case for many people, including many ancient readers and many ancient writers. The “origins” of things in ancient stories are often more “metaphysical” than “historical” origins. It therefore takes more imagination and literary sensitivity to tease out the meaning of an ancient story. The problem with a certain kind of Protestantism is that it insists that the imaginative and literary defects of, say, a hard-nosed prairie farmer, are regulative of Biblical interpretation. It insists that the Bible has to be the kind of book that a non-poetic, non-metaphysical, non-imaginative, meat-and-potatoes, keep-it-simple kind of person can easily grasp and understand. But ancient literature wasn’t always written in that way. It wasn’t written in the spirit of egalitarian American small-town or rural life. It was written with aspects of elusiveness to it. It wasn’t intended that the simplest of readers would understand it as well as the most advanced of readers. The stories were meant to be chewed on, over and over again.
The Protestant American tendency is always to try to find the correct meaning (as if there can’t be multiple layers of meaning, or even meanings in apparent tension with each other), and make that meaning a simple and straightforward one that can be grasped without too much effort by people who would much rather be farming or building a house or fixing a pipe than talking about spiritual questions. There is therefore a tendency among American Protestants to read the Bible in a “dumbed-down” kind of way. Such people don’t like loose ends; they want to know exactly what they have to believe in order to be saved, exactly what beliefs are wrong and forbidden, exactly what actions are moral and what actions aren’t. They want their religion delivered in formulaic fashion. They want a simple recipe, as the Protestant pioneer knew the recipe for a log cabin and his wife knew the recipe for apple pie. But the greatness of the Bible is that often its stories aren’t so easily pigeonholed, summarized, turned into systematic doctrine, or turned into rigid moral rules. Its stories require thought and imaginative extension. The Garden story is an obvious example of such a case, but most of Genesis is much richer and less straightforward than most churchgoers suppose.
There is nothing perfect or imperfect about snowflakes or waves in themselves, but we could say that all are beautiful in their own way. The imperfection was found in the thorns and thistles. This implies a biological and ecological imperfection, a difficulty for the purpose of man and animals in their natural living. God created them for life, and death changes the result. The imperfection, the curse, and the sin is imbedded in the difficulty for man in his living, and in the ruin of his previously unencumbered relationship with God. This relationship is now messy and full of pain and struggle, both directly in the communication, and indirectly in relation to the creation. Animals no longer live in peace, but in war and struggle, devouring one another.
Evolution is tantamount to saying that God created sin, because the conditions of sin (murder, selfishness, deception, stealing, idolatry) were there before man was, in evolutionary context. Original (biblical) derived from man, not from God, although God allowed the choice. An infant has “original sin” in the sense that he inherited this fallen nature from the original human.
God made what was good. There are two understandings of imperfections… one is that of a different colored flower is imperfect compared to the expected color. But this type of imperfection adds to the variety and the beauty, and like different colors of human skin, are not really imperfections. The other type of imperfection, where a baby cannot see, or is missing a leg, remains an imperfection, and the beauty is not in the diversity, but in our response to it, where we continue to see the humanity of the child, and where the loss of one attribute or gift may enhance the demonstration of other attributes.
Our disobedience is not merely an imperfection, although we may call our desired obedience an imperfect obedience. Our disobedience is an expression of our will, not of our capability, other than the capability of our will. This disobedience is sin. It is not merely imperfection.
22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:
23 And that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of mercy, which he had afore prepared unto glory,
or
> 22 [n]What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? 23 And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory, 24 even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles(NASB)
You and I will never agree on anything. You don’t even interpret English the way I interpret English.
Pax Vobiscum .
George
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