"For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Romans 6:23
The destructive power of sin is a painful and constant reminder of the Fall, the breaking of mankind's perfect relationship with God. In the Genesis story, the Fall comes from Adam and Eve's failure to obey God's one command: to not eat the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Their actions bring about a curse from God and banishment from the perfect paradise of Eden.
However, if we do not accept a literalist reading of the Genesis account, what are the implications for the Fall? If Adam and Eve did not eat the fruit, where did the Fall originate? Could accepting BioLogos have devastating consequences for the origins of sin, a key facet of Christianity?
As we address in Question 15 on our site, a literalist reading of Genesis is not required to accept the Fall. Other ways of interpreting the passage exist, which still account for the existence of sin. In fact, these views have been accepted by many theologians and scholars, including the late C.S. Lewis.
For more on the Fall, be sure to visit www.biologos.org. If you liked the video, we encourage you to visit Highway Video for more worship videos and sermon illustrations.
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Although this film lays out an extremely important message, the take home message is subtly inserted below it: "The gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord." The tape can be played backwards...at top speed!!!
How and when does a person exactly rejects God? For someone to reject something, it has to be aware of that something. So can a baby reject God? A Toddler? A mentally challenged person? A child born in an atheist family? One may say that the rejection occurs when one disobeys a God-given command...what which God? And which command? And from which religion? Christians and Jews may praise Yaweh, but they have different views about him and life. The Ten Commandments are an almost exact copy of the ones found in the Egiptian Book of the Dead.So if we do not worship Ra, are we rejecting God? Or are we talking about Jesus commandments to love God and others? As nice as they sound, how can you command love? And how exactly did nature rejected God to be part of the fall? Did the bacteria from two or three posts ago said sometthing offenseive in their chemical language?
One of the great paradox for me about Christianity is to see Christians chanting how great God is, because he made the land and the see, and then go about whinning because they live in a fallen world. I was really exited about this blog, because I thought it would provide a bridge beteen science and the Divine. As it turns out, it appears to be nothing more thatn another Christian propaganda site. What a shame.
K, we hope you'll stick around for further discussion. As Francis has stated, the main audience for our website is Evangelicals, and so often they use the idea of Genesis and the Fall as a way to "prove" that evolution is false. How else could such a key tenet of their faith be explained than the story of Adam and Eve?
Our hope with the post and question was to show that such a view of sin is not necessary and does not preclude a relationship between science and faith. Certainly, the questions you have raised are worthy to consider, and countless writings by scholars and theologians have been dedicated to what exactly "sin" is.
We hope this post doesn't come across as propaganda, but merely as another factor to consider in the complex interactions between science and religion.
It's good to see Christians struggling with evolution and trying to work it into their world view.
However, I see a problem with an allegorical reading of the fall. Evolution creates effective, but imperfect organisms. So human morality also seems like an effective but imperfect creation. So it seems more likely that evolution created us in a pre-fallen condition rather than our own choices.
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