Fall

The Fall refers to the sin of Adam and Eve who disobeyed the divine edict by eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, whereupon they were expelled from the Garden of Eden (Gen caps. 2-3). The concept of the Fall was developed by post-biblical Christian theologians who held that this "original sin" involved mankind in an inherent sinfulness from which it can only be saved by a special act of divine grace. This doctrine is based on Pauline passages such as Romans 5:12; Ephesians 2:3. The concept of the Fall is attractive because it proposes a view of a perfect primeval time when life was not marred by imperfection or sickness. In this idyllic state, when mankind enjoyed unblemished relations with the deity, with other humans and with nature, there was no evil and God's intention for humans was perfectly met. However, the option of disobedience existed, and when the opportunity was grasped, the couple "fell": from grace, from the favor of God or from perfect communion with him. Where once the human couple felt at ease with each other, they now shied away from their creator and covered their nakedness. This myth captured the imagination principally by explaining the origin of evil, illness and toil.

The OT has no doctrine of the Fall and those writers who subsequently drew on OT texts to support their dramatic notions have for the most part misrepresented them. Certainly the reference to Lucifer in Isaiah 14:12 has nothing to do with the fall of an angel but rather is a clever satire mocking the pomp and glory of the king of Babylon who must now exchange his bed of ivory for one of worms. If an identical act could be attributed to either God (II Sam 24:1) or Satan (I Chr 21:1), and if Satan could appear along with the sons of God (Job chap. 1), this probably indicates that the biblical writers had not finally resolved the question of the origin of evil. One solution is provided by Zechariah chapter 3 where Satan is depicted as taking one attribute of God and pushing it beyond any proportion, and in essence this is evil: lack of balance. In any case, Hebrew writings, treating good and evil as ever present, give little attention to the question of the Fall.

The same is true in the writings of the early Christians. Paul makes use of the Adam myth in Romans chapter 5 and uses a word (paraptoma) which has been translated as "fall" (Rom 5:15). But in the writings of the early Christians the idea of a fall is never sustained through recourse to the Genesis story. The belief in human depravity is supported by continuing evidence, not by myths of the past. Classical theology based its view of the Fall and human depravity on Romans 5:12 but it was a mistranslation from Greek into the Latin: the verse should be translated "inasmuch as all men sinned". Any notion of total depravity finds no anchor in the biblical texts, either Jewish or Christian, for the classical texts of both religions affirm the release from bondage and do not revel in the Fall or any view of it which consigns humans to a situation of despair. Paul's interest is not in depicting human depravity but rather in demonstrating that it is within God's power to redeem that depravity – that in fact, the grace of God has been so much more abundantly demonstrated than the evil humans can devise.