The Doctrine of the Fall
The second creation account in Genesis (Gen. 2.4-3.end)
gives more emphasis to the origin of the human race than does the first
account. It includes a number of key assertions upon which the Christian
understanding of salvation is based. These include the unity of man and woman,
the unity of the human species, the sin of our first parents and the
consequences of the fall from divine favour.
The story thus provides a mythological explanation of the
current and fallen state of humanity.
The story emphasises that “God fashioned man (adam) from the dust of the soil [adamah]”. There is no intention of
suggesting that those who told and re-told this story ever had any evolutionary
understanding in mind; they were no doubt thinking in terms of a clay image
into which God then breathed life. Nevertheless, we could regard the phrase as
providential, and accept it as an abbreviated and ‘poetic’ expression of the Earthly
evolution of humankind. It is a
serious error, however, to try to interpret either Genesis 1 or 2 in terms of
evolutionary theory, not only because our understanding of evolution will
undergo changes in the future, but because of the need to respect the
intentions and world-views of the biblical authors.
It would be an equally serious error to try and rescue from
the ‘Fall’ story in Genesis 3 a historical paradise of total vegetarian
harmony. There have been various efforts to understand the reasons for the myth
of Eden - it could even lie so deep in the human unconscious as to reflect the
retreat of the forest which forced the most primitive proto-hominids to
exercise what ingenuity they could out on the African savannah. But there is no
evidence that hominids were ever in an idyllic, predation-free relationship
with the non-human creation. The importance of the Fall story must be that it describes that peculiar sense
of alienation that seems to characterise the life at least of technological
humans, a sense that we cannot wholly settle in our ecological niche or network
of relationships, a sense that we yearn for something other but cannot grasp
it.
The need to move away from the historical Fall has been
strongly emphasised by the scientist-theologians.Peacocke takes the argument in a helpful direction when, drawing on his idea
that relationship with God and right perception of our environment represent
the highest-level ‘emergent’ in the biological hierarchy, he argues that
humans’ ecological niche includes a right relationship with God, which for all
sorts of reasons - some genetic, some cultural, some as mysterious as the
appearance of evil in Gen.3 - continues to elude us.
Email
link | Feedback | Contributed by: Dr. Christopher Southgate and Dr. Michael Robert Negus
Source: God, Humanity and the Cosmos (T&T Clark, 1999)
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