(Note: Orthodox use the word "ancestral sin" in
relation to the disobedience of Adam and Eve. The Orthodox
understanding on this matter is quite different from the "west"
in its doctrine of "original sin." This article will also
explain why).
There are two major issues presented by these three texts:- Genesis
3:1-24, Roman 6:22-23 and 1 Corinthians 15:20-28, 51-58 when seen in
conjunction:-
(1) The relationship between sin and death. Here we can
identify:-
Romans 6:23: "For the wages of sin is death; but the gift
of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."
1Corinthians 15:56: The sting of death is sin; and the strength
of sin is the law.
(2) The Orthodox doctrine of salvation as it pertains to the
cross and the resurrection of Christ.
We start with the Garden of Eden. Since in the Greek this is paradeisoz
(Paradise) we may rightly understand the Garden and indeed Heaven as a
real place in space-time but removed from the fallen domain of this
world. In this dimension, our first Parents communed with the world,
each other and God. The Fathers, (Sts. Theophilus of Antioch, Ephraim
the Syrian, Hilary of Poitiers, Maximus the Confessor), insist that our
first parents were created neither mortal nor immortal. Until the point
of his disobedience Adam was sinless but not perfect and able to sin. He
was not immortal but capable of achieving immortality through obedience.
This is most important for what comes after and especially as we compare
the biblical doctrine of our original state with what later emerged in
the post-Orthodox west.
We learn from this starting point that Adam was like a child, fully
capable of growing up in obedience to his Heavenly Father and achieving
immortality. We know that he ate the fruit from the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil in disobedience to God’s Word and suffered
death as a result. We are not dealing here with the Promethean myth of
Greek paganism in which Prometheus stole fire from the gods and paid the
price for his audacity. The fruit itself was not placed in Eden with a
permanent exclusion zone around it leaving humanity in state of
infantile innocence. God’s intention was that Adam should grow up
through obedience until he received the necessary spiritual maturity to
handle such things. Like a child he had to be taught. But like many
children and adults he would not be taught. He wanted to be autonomous;
to be God-like without God and he thereby brought death down upon his
head.
Listen to St. Irenaeus:-
"Man was a little one, and his discretion still undeveloped,
wherefore also he was easily misled by the deceiver."
St. Irenaeus and the Fathers generally, therefore, do not see death
as a divine punishment for the disobedience of our first parents. This
distortion arose later in the west under the influence of Augustine.
The Fathers rather interpret the consequences of the Fall as something we brought on ourselves when we
distanced ourselves from God. God still walks in the Garden. It is we
who hide and shamefully cover our nakedness. Likewise, the expulsion of
Adam and Eve from Paradise and the angel standing guard with the flaming
sword is not an act of divine retribution but a compassionate and
merciful provision lest we eat of the second tree, the Tree of Life, and
die eternally. The fruit of this tree, if we had eaten it, would have
condemned us forever.
Listen to St. John Chrysostom:-
"Partaking of the tree, the man and woman became liable to death
and subject to the future needs of the body. Adam was no longer
permitted to remain in the Garden, and was bidden to leave, a move by
which God showed His love for him … he had become mortal, and lest he
presume to eat further from the tree which promised an endless life of
continuous sinning, he was expelled from the Garden as a mark of divine
solicitude, not of necessity."
[Hom. in Gen XVIII, 3 PG 53 151]
The sin of Adam and Eve was one of disobedience born out of a
demonically induced pride and we know from St. Paul that wages of such
sin is death [Romans 6:23]. Cast out of Eden and barred from
re-entry for their own good, Adam and Eve, in their mortality are now
subject to the corruption of death. Corruption here does not merely mean
physical decay, it describes the fallout from the Fall as death spawns
yet new evils. As St. Paul taught in the context of the resurrection as
the remedy for sin and death, ("O death where is thy sting …?"),
"the sting of death is sin." [1 Corinthians 15:55-56]
Listen to St. Cyril of Alexandria :-
"Adam had heard: ‘Earth thou art and to the earth shalt thou
return,’ and from being incorruptible he became corruptible and was
made subject to the bonds of death. But since he produced children after
falling into this state, we his descendents are corruptible coming from
a corruptible source. Thus it is that we are heirs of Adam’s
curse."
[Doctrinal Questions and Answers, IX, 6 in Cyril of
Alexandria, Selected Letters]
Notice that there is huge difference between this belief that we
share in Adam’s curse through the corruption of death and the view
common in the west since Augustine that we are punished by death for an
original sin in Eden. The west came to believe that this original sin
was transmitted to subsequent generations through sexual reproduction
and that we inherit thereby not only the sin of Adam but the guilt as
well. This view is first found in Augustine.
" … now when this (the Fall) happened, the whole human
race was ‘in his loins’ (Adam). Hence in accordance with the
mysterious and powerful natural laws of heredity it followed that those
who were in his loins and were to come into this world through the
concupiscence (lustful desires) of the flesh were condemned with
him." [Treatise against Julian the Pelagian]
Aquinas and later the Reformers for whom Augustine was all felt
constrained to repeat :-
" … the commingling of the sexes which, after the sin of our
first parent, cannot take place without lust, transmits original sin to
the offspring." [Aquinas: Comp. Theol., 224]
This is not Orthodox. We are responsible for the sins that we
commit, not the sins of our forefathers and not the sins of our first
parents. Moreover, the Fall is not a taint in our character transmitted
by sex, nor is sex itself necessarily tainted by lust. Orthodox refer
instead to "ancestral sin," by which we mean our participation
in the disobedience of the first Adam as inherited through death, not
sex. It is a curse that the Law exposed in the inability of humans to
fulfil the Mosaic Covenant. It is a curse which has been redeemed by
Christ. [Galatians 3:13].
Some western commentators criticise the Orthodox understanding at
this point by reminding us that,. according to Psalm 50(51):5 "behold
I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me."
(NKJV: Masoretic text). As stated, this is capable of being
interpreted either in the "western" manner or in the Orthodox manner.
However, the Septuagint (LXX) version of the Psalm translated into
English reads: "Behold I was brought forth in iniquities, and in sins
(plural) did my mother conceive me." This makes it quite clear
that sin is endemic to the human condition from birth to death. It
says nothing about transmission, let alone transmission by sex. We
must assume that the Jewish scholars in Alexandria knew what they were
doing when they translated the Hebrew text into Greek. The
Orthodox Church certainly accepts their scholarship and, importantly,
there is nothing in Judaism then or now that comes anywhere close to the
Christian west's understanding of original sin which is rather important
if one wants to understand St. Paul's teaching on Adam and Christ the
New Adam in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15. After all, St. Paul
like our Lord, was a Jew by birth and by training, adept in the Law.
This, then, is the characteristic understanding of the Fall in the
Orthodox Church: sin generated by the corruption of death. In the
post-Orthodox, post Christian west however, many people see death as
both the natural created state of man and an unacceptable reality. This
mental bind is also not Orthodox. Death, being the curse of Eden, is an
unnatural enemy, neither designed into Creation by God nor desired by
Him. (see postcript: Evolution
and Death). Death, as the ultimate threat causes people to flee from their
brothers, their sisters and their God in a selfish pursuit of earthly
things as if these will put off the evil day. "Eat drink and be
merry, for tomorrow we die," as the saying goes. This is
the real death, the death of the spirit from whence death itself has
cast a longer and longer shadow over the God-less secularism of western
materialism.
We must remember that this terrible fallout was self induced and not
inflicted upon us by a malign wrathful deity. Even the murderer Cain was
given his mark as a protection. God did not cease to love and care for
us in our fallen state. He desired that the self-inflicted curse hanging
over humanity should be lifted and that humans should resume their role
as God’s priests in creation by growing back into spiritual maturity.
This of course, He achieved through the
New and Final Adam,
Christ.
Characteristically the Fathers speak of God saving us by recapitulating
or regathering the whole creation in Himself and redeeming it,
[Ephesians 1:10]. The beginning of this process was in the Incarnation,
its climax, the death and resurrection of Christ, its fruition in the
outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the Church, the Body of Christ
glorified. As St. Irenaeus proclaimed :-
"God the Son became Man in order to regather in Himself the
ancient creation, so that He might slay sin and destroy the power of
death, and give life to all men."
[Against the Heresies, III, xix 6 ANF]
We should not be surprised then if death, itself the wages of sin, in
bringing yet more sin upon the generations of humankind, must needs be
destroyed in order that the gates of Paradise might be opened once more
to the whole of Creation.. This is precisely what we believe about the
resurrection. Death has been destroyed by death and Christ our
God has emerged victorious by contesting that ancient serpent on
his own ground: death and hell. The voluntary obedience of a
Virgin-Mother bruised the serpent’s head in the Incarnation, [Genesis
3:15] and the voluntary obedience of her Son unto death on a cross
finally granted unto us the victory in the resurrection. In this manner
Christ is revealed as the New Adam and the Mother of God the New Eve. It
is Christ our God who in the icon of Pascha storms into hell and
liberates the captives from the grip of death and sin. A new way has
thereby been opened up for us to regain Paradise, Christ the first
fruits of all those who have fallen asleep.
In conclusion we should note that this state of Paradise is more
fruitful for us than the first. At the point when Adam lost Paradise
both he and Eve had not the opportunity to enter into their full
inheritance as children of God. Their disobedience put paid to that. It
is different for us. In Christ we now have that opportunity, not only to
be saved from death and hell, but also to be glorified by His life in
us, the Holy Spirit. By the love poured into our hearts by that same
Spirit we are now able to eat both from the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil and the tree of life. The tree of the cross has not only
become our cure, the resurrection has also become our portal into the
very life of God himself, our deification. Not just Paradise regained
therefore but a whole Cosmos made new according to God’s plan and
purpose.
Let the last word be with St. Macarius the Great s he picks up a
theme of St. Paul, [2 Corinthians 3:18] :–
"the inner being of believers who through perfect faith are born
of the Spirit shall reflect as in a mirror the Glory of the Lord, and
are transfigured into the same image from Glory to Glory."
****************************************
Postscript 1:
Evolution and Death
It is so commonplace now in the west to think of death as "natural"
... an integral part of a "good" creation that the Orthodox
understanding of death as a necessary but temporary adjustment in God's
plan ... his real goal for his creatures being immortality by grace
seems completely irreconcilable with insights from the natural sciences.
According to these insights death has ALWAYS existed from the dawn of
life. Notice, however, how immortality in Orthodox Christianity is
something to be acquired by grace, humans being created neither mortal
nor immortal. The Paradise account of Genesis reveals a certain
latency toward immortality in humankind which has been spoiled by
disobedience to God. Genesis is silent on death as a more
widespread phenomenon amongst all life forms but Romans is not so
reticent. With the coming of Christ we have new revelation from
the mouth of St. Paul. Corruption and death have indeed spread
from humans to all life forms yet such bondage to decay is being
reversed by the new birth of the resurrection.
"For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but
because of Him who subjected it in hope; 21because the creation itself
also will be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious
liberty of the children of God. 22For we know that the whole creation
groans and labours with birth pangs together until now." (Romans
8:20-22).
We should not, therefore, become too pre-occupied with the chronology of
Genesis. It is a perfectly Orthodox position to take divine
teaching from Genesis without expecting it to deliver a scientific
account of the creation of life and its problematic development. This,
incidentally is why many Orthodox do indeed accept evolution as a
credible scientific theory accounting for the development of life
without feeling that somehow they have thereby sacrificed Christian
insights into humankind's spiritual and moral development. Indeed
evolution itself might provide some clues as to the possibilities of an
emergent human species redeemed by grace. So, in the natural way
of understanding things life is inconceivable without death. In
the perspective of God's saving providence, however, there will be in
the Last Day life without end and a renewed creation. Evolution
might just be the natural process God's uses, hitching a ride as it were
from the resurrection potential of repentance and union with God.
A final question ...
If death has always been around, did God create it ... how are we to
link this to the Fall?
Well, let's get one thing straight. God did not create death
either for us or for any other living creature. We find no such
idea in Scripture and Tradition and it makes God a pretty lousy Creator
to suppose that this is true. The only way of reconciling the
universality of death with the particularity of the Fall (at some point
in our evolutionary timeline) is to suppose that the death spread to all
creation backwards and forwards in time by some major break in the
timeline. The Universe branched into a creation subject to
futility, corruption and decay ... which formerly it had not known.
Surely this must be the context to that great reversal of the cosmic
effects of the Fall to which St. Paul alludes in his reference to the
resurrection in Romans 8:20-22 (ante). It seems to me that the
solution of regarding "death" as "spiritual death" and therefore
"resurrection" as a "spiritual resurrection" cannot accommodate the
centrality to Orthodox Christianity of both the Incarnation of the Word
made flesh and the
Resurrection of the body.
I am indebted to
Colin who in a long running debate on this
page has prompted me to put more "flesh and bones" on the issue of
the ubiquity of death and evolution. Please follow the debate and
some of its implications there ...
If you would like to read an Orthodox critique of Protestant
Creationism and its inadequacies, suggesting an alternative approach, go
here:-
Orthodoxy and Creationism by Fr. Deacon Andrey Kuraev
Article on this site about Orthodoxy and
Creationism
return to previous point in this article
********************************************
Postscript 2:
Adam and Eve: Biology and Theology
Creationists who try to defend Adam and Eve as two historical
individuals often do so on the grounds that the theology of redemption
doesn't "work" if Adam and Eve are mythological characters.
[Of course, they usually defend their position simply on grounds of
biblical inerrancy but the more thoughtful response outlined here
deserves consideration. (On inerrancy, that is easily refuted by a
simple question: "Why do men have nipples?" ... the answer lies at the
foot of this page)].
So. must Adam and Eve actually have existed for Christ's redeeming work
to take place?
To answer this question we need look no further than the Scriptures
themselves. With the sole unambiguous case of 1 Chronicles 1:1 all
the references to "Adam" in the Old Testament can be identified simply
from the word's etymology. Adam means simply, 'Earth-Man' or
'Everyman' - it is a generic title denoting humankind.
In the New Testament, likewise, there are some references, again,
genealogies, referring to Adam as an historical individual, (Luke 3:38;
Jude 14). The overwhelming treatment of 'Adam' however in the New
Testament as well as the Old is of a generic, representative, inclusive
Primal Man who characterises all men, (and by implication women by Eve).
Moreover this is fundamental to understanding what Christ has done to
save us, not opposing or even incidental to that. All humans are
'in Adam' in that we all share in the same human nature. Death is
the empirical evidence of the effects of the Fall experienced by all but
this has nothing to do with transmission, sexual or otherwise, as
discussed before. The genealogies can only be incidental to our
understanding of the Scriptures treatment of Adam in relation to
salvation.
Therefore, the Scriptures themselves neither require us to believe that
Adam and Eve were historical individuals nor do they teach that our
propensity to sin is derived from them sexually or that we should accept
guilt for sins that we have not actually committed.
Article on this site about Orthodoxy and
Creationism
return to previous point in this article
***
ANSWER:
Why then do men have nipples? Because in the womb we all start off
female and only from 14 weeks does the male form differentiate.
So, if anything, metaphorically, Adam was taken from Eve's rib not Eve
from Adam's. Just another example of why the Bible is not a
science text book for all time, (a contradiction in terms of course).
to Salvation History page
