the story of Genesis 2-3

there's a pretty clear chiasm, which Blocher (In the Beginning, 1984) and Walsh (JBL, 1977) both explain:

A 2.4-17 God made man and put him in the garden
    B 2.18-25 God made the animals and the woman
        C 3.1-5 Dialogue 1: between the snake and the woman
            D 3.6-8 The Sin
        C’ 3.9-13 Dialogue 2: between God and his disobedient creatures
    B’ 3.14-21 God declares his verdict on the animal and the humans
A’ 3.22-24 God kicks the man out of the garden

(with my adapted titles).

the thinking i was doing a couple of years ago on this topic led me to think this story is best read as a story, explaining the way things are. that is, in order to explain the existence of a tree lying on the ground, you can talk about a wind having blown it over. now there's a big disanalogy here, in that you can accurately hypothesise with a fallen tree in a way you can't with the universal sinfulness of humanity.

the difficulty comes when within the story itself there are various aetiologies - childbirth hurts because of sin; snakes don't have legs because of sin; work is hard because of sin - but how do i then talk about the relevance of the story to the state of affairs now? that is, can i say more than that it teaches us that the way things are isn't right, and that they will one day be made right (particularly now we know Jesus was raised bodily)?

read my essays?

you may've listened to my sermons

you may have read the blog posts as i thought through Isaiah 26 here and here

you may have read the blog posts thinking through the historical fall here, here, here and here

well, thanks to jay-z and earngey, you can now read in full the essays that resulted, isaiah (with formatting errors - hebrew and spacing doesn't work so well across platforms it seems), and historical fall.

for other nerdy essays, you can look further at the filing cabinet, on the same topics (OT & doctrine), as well as church history and NT.

but do bear in mind, it's quite nerdy. read with due caution.

no fall put to the test

last night at bible study we did the final in our series based on Tim Keller's "The Reason For God". we looked at Sin, through the lens of Genesis 3:1-13, Romans 1:18-32, Romans 3:21-26.

as you would know, i've just finished an essay on the consequences of denying an historical fall (here, here, and here). the position i finished at was that the idea of "the fall" is not what Genesis 3, nor the rest of the testimony of the bible, is trying to get across.

rather, as Karl Barth agreed with me, "the first man was immediately the first sinner." (CD IV.1 §508)


so as we discussed the idea of the fall, we didn't use the terminology of "fall", but analysed what the story said. and it said that sin consists of disobedience, selfishness, disrespect, but primarily trusting Satan's lies. we agreed that none of us would have been different, and that this grasping against God is something we all continue.

i can perhaps post some of the best bits of my essay a little later, but i just thought it would be helpful to show where this thinking has ended me up (if that sentence makes sense!).

Historical Fall in the key of B

so far i've narrowed my doctrine essay down to the following points:

• Babes or bound (the historical debate - Pelagius vs Augustine)
  
  
• Blocher or Barth (the current debate)
  
  
• (Bavinck and Bloesch - minnows, relatively, yet helpfully starting with a B)
  
  
• Bible (Romans 5 and Genesis 3)

and finally, inevitably, painfully:

• Bibliography

i'll probably talk about Ricoeur also, but i may have to deliberately rename him Bicoeur for the purposes of this essay.

check here and also here for the background.

don't know why all this matters? this is why.

the myth of the fall

i've been thinking this week through the question of the theological consequences of denying an historical fall. one thing that has been growing on me today is the question of where the idea of the Edenic sinless perfectionism comes from. i'm sure everyone's seen the first two boxes of 2WTL (click on the link if you are unaware), the first one being the one where everything's perfect, sort of like the island the Phantom puts all his animals, after he's taught them to be piscetarians (is that what people who eat no meat except for fish call themselves?).

now the whole point of showing that everything was tops was to explain

1. why life isn't always tops now, despite a good God, and
2. to give a picture of what we're looking forward to.

however, on 2/, despite the line in the otherwise great Rob Smith song 'Worthy of All Praise' back to the garden, we don't really want to go back to the garden, but look forward to the new creation. so now i'm trying to work out the importance of 1/ - why do we need to say there was something perfect that humanity "fell" from?

it sort of smacks of platonism, and i have this vibe that it promotes a dualistic view of things. so can we read the account of "the Fall" in Genesis 3:1-13 differently? not that it doesn't depict perhaps the first direct transgression of God's law, but is it such a great "fall" as all that? where does our eschatology fit with a fall?

and yes, this is linked to my previous post!

[apologies for my absence. exegetical to hebrew to greek to doctrine has made for a busy period of time.]