A Life Without Sin Is Death
The Fall was presented to me as a bad thing
The Fall was presented to me as a bad thing. Man sinned by eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which God told him not to do, so he “fell” into a life of sin and death. Man must seek forgiveness from God through Christ for his disobedience to be saved and gifted new life.
Many people think that this sucks. They say that The Fall was a bad thing because it separated man from God, which is bad. After all, a life separated from God is a life of sin and death. And death is bad.
The Fall used to bother me philosophically. How could God create man’s nature and then condemn man for enacting that nature? I’ve heard countless explanations. None of them make sense. I don’t want to worship a cruel god who does that, who would? I decided that I would rather live life my way and burn in hell for eternity than be enslaved to a vindictive god. I still feel that way.
There’s a sleight of hand in the way I presented The Fall above. It’s the way it’s usually presented, which I think is an unwise interpretation. Knowledge of sin and life begin as distinct things. Adam and Eve are obviously physically alive in The Garden. They eat of the Tree of Life which exists in The Garden, so they’re for sure alive. They were alive before they ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, before they knew sin. Adam and Eve were living without knowledge of sin.
Just take a second here to appreciate how these things are separated. You can be alive without knowing sin. You can live life without knowledge of sin. Knowing sin and living are separate concepts, separate things. They relate to each other, of course, but they are separate and distinct things.
All of this is acknowledged in the perspective that views The Fall negatively, but only temporarily, when it’s convenient. Look at this sentence again:
Man sinned by eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, which God told him not to do, so he “fell” into a life of sin and death.
Do you agree? Obviously, people use different words to articulate this, but they deliver the same message: Sin made man fall into a life of sin and death.
Knowing sin and living start out as separate things, but they are then quickly unified in the idea that a life of sin is the same as a life of death. To sin is to die, sin leads to death, sin is death, sin is separation from God which is death, and so on. In all these equations, a life of sin equals a life of death.
Now, you can’t sin without dying. Now, sinning makes you die. People who view The Fall negatively take this to mean that, if you sin, then you will go to Hell after you physically die. You can’t live without being destined for Hell because you, unlike pre-fall Adam, cannot live without sinning.
But this is a messed up way to think about life. It makes God cruel, it makes people think that living life means sucking it up until your body fails and you enter paradise. It makes people feel ashamed for being sinful, which is to say for being fallible and vulnerable. But everyone is fallible, everyone is vulnerable, everyone is sinful. You can’t live as a human being without being sinful. Am I to be ashamed for living at all? Only a sadistic god would curse man for simply being alive.
It also makes a conceptual mistake by conflating things. Please hear me when I say that it is not the Bible that conflates these things, but people. God commanded Adam, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Adam eats the fruit and he dies. According to God, Adam dies “in the day” that he ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam dies.
But also, and this is a rather minor detail here, Adam does not die. He actually does not die. Literally speaking, Adam doesn’t die. He, in fact, does not die. God sends Adam out of The Garden, but Adam is, yes indeed, still alive after eating the fruit. He ate the divine fruit one day and the next he probably ate something way less tasty and transformative. Still alive, though, that much is patently obvious to us all.
Adam’s continued existence is an inconvenience for people who view The Fall negatively because it presents God’s symbol for humankind as somehow living after sinning. Somehow, Adam sinned without dying afterwards. He didn’t physically die after sinning, he didn’t go straight to Hell. Adam lived. How is this possible if a life of sin equals a life of death? There must be a rational explanation for why God didn’t instantly murder Adam or decide to start mercilessly torturing him forever in Hell for his disobedience. Surely, God still plans to torture him somehow. God does love torturing people for living out the nature He imbued them with, so there has to be some way to explain why Adam didn’t actually die that still allows God to be a sadist.
People who think The Fall is bad make up all kinds of rationalizations to explain away the unfortunate reality of Adam’s continued life (human life). They don’t like how it presses on the crack between the things they’ve smooshed together, namely living and knowing sin — and, inversely, dying and knowing sin. Adam was alive before he knew sin and afterwards. He came to know sin and didn’t physically die. He wasn’t sent straight to Hell, he continued to live on earth.
Adam was alive before he knew good and evil. He lived before he gained an awareness of justice, shame, honor, guilt, and all the other moral emotions. Adam lived before he knew what Christ was, before he had any understanding of sacrificial love. And Adam remained alive after he came to know sin and experienced shame for the first time.
Anti-Fallers hate this. I can feel the defensiveness arise in some of them when I raise this minor detail of Adam’s, and symbolically humankind’s, still being alive after sin. They tremble, but not before God. They tremble before life.
They say that God meant that Adam would physically die eventually. “The day” doesn’t mean the literal day, just look at the historical context and the cultural meanings of the terms in the original language. God meant that Adam would physically die at a later time because “day” at that time and in that place didn’t mean what everyone thinks it means today (even though it is translated that way). Their idea is that Adam wouldn’t have ever physically died if he hadn’t eaten the fruit, so eating the fruit “killed” him in the sense that he now will eventually die.
But being killed by death is best way to be killed imaginable! Death kills everyone eventually no matter what! Adam supposedly lived over 900 years, so his eventual death was way better than most people’s today. I’d like to die a death where I live for centuries! It’s entirely unclear to me why God would say, “Adam! Don’t eat the fruit! It will make you live for centuries and then die at an old age from natural causes!” If that were my punishment, I’d happily accept it to know good and evil.
Another rationalization says that maybe Adam’s soul died that day in the sense that, before he ate the fruit, he was headed to paradise after physical death, but, as a result of eating it, his soul became destined for eternal torment after physical death instead. The death day is the day of spiritual re-destination from Heaven to Hell, and “Heaven” and “Hell” here are conceptualized as immaterial places (whatever those are) people go after physical death. In other words, Adam died that day in the sense that he would now eventually suffer eternal torment after physical death instead of eternal paradise.
Again, this kind of eventual soul death doesn’t sound so bad to me. Whatever that kind of death is, I can’t experience it yet. I can’t feel it. I can’t understand what it’s like to be in an immaterial place after I physically die. I can’t understand it because I am still alive.
Oh, how my continued living blinds me to the truth! What a shame it is that life keeps me from understanding God’s reality! How much more life must I suffer through before I can be at peace? How much longer must I live before I can understand what it truly means to live in God? Why don’t I just kill myself now to see it more clearly? Why don’t we all just kill ourselves to overcome the blindness of living? If only God condoned suicide, then we could all righteously end our eternal torment! Then we could immediately understand what we simply cannot accept right now — that life is good!
If I were Adam and God escorted me out of The Garden with only the threat of an eventual death, I’d be like, “Phew! Thank God I didn’t die and that I’m still here! Thank God I’m still alive! Thank you, God, for allowing me now to live with new knowledge, new eyes, new awareness of the good things, the beautiful and joyful things that make human life more than animal life, and the evil things, the ugly and shameful things that equally spiritualize human life! Thank you God for this new life with ups and downs, growth and decay, shame and forgiveness, guilt and joy, transformation and addiction, good and bad, and all the opposing forces that make life creative and organic and exciting and essentially what it is! I’m so glad that I ate that fruit! Thank you, God, for putting the Tree there and telling me not to eat of it, for You knew that saying that would lead me to eat of it given the nature that You imbued me with — Your Nature! Thank you that I now know what it means to feel ashamed! Thank you for my shame, for without it I could not experience Your forgiveness! Thank you!!!”
That would be my response. It is my response to God. And it is also my response to the sort of sadistic god that the Anti-Fallers worship. If that torture-loving god truly exists and he thinks that my thanking him for my new life and for awakening my soul is shameful, then I will thank him for life even harder. I will make my thankfulness for life my revenge on that god. The God I worship does not hate life because I do not hate life, and I do not hate life because life is a gift from God.
God did mean that Adam would die that day. He didn’t mean that Adam would eventually die spiritually or physically. That would be pointless. Everyone dies, even stars burn out. God also didn’t mean that Adam would die that day in a physical sense. Adam continued to physically live, so obviously he didn’t die in a physical sense. God must have meant something else by “die that day.”
God meant that Adam would experience shame, spiritual death, which Adam did in that very day that God actually said that he would. Shame is clearly identified as not being present when man was created. “And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” Man was not morally knowledgeable, morally aware, spiritually vulnerable (“aware of their nakedness”), so man could not experience shame. Shame is then is singled out as the key difference for mankind post-fall. “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths.”
The moment that Adam and Eve became aware of good and evil was same moment that they experienced shame. This is also the same moment I experienced shame and you experienced shame. There was a time when I first realized that I did something wrong, an event that marks to me in my memory the dawn of my moral awareness. I sinned, I became aware of shame and guilt, I learned that there is a world of things that can make me feel guilty and ashamed and joyful and just. Did I physically die? No. Did God re-destine my soul for Hell after I physically die? I didn’t experience that happening, I can’t know what life is like after I physically die, and I hope and pray to grow as a person from my sins regardless of what happens after I physically die, so I don’t care. But did I experience shame? Yes, and it actually hurt. Shame actually hurts like death. Shame is something everyone struggles with and avoids and hopes to overcome.
Adam did not fall into a life of eventual death after he ate the fruit. Everyone eventually dies. Adam was always going to physically die because he was a human being like everyone else and we all die eventually. No, Adam fell into life! He fell into the kind of life that everyone reading this inhabits, a life of falls and ascensions, ups and downs, good and bad. You can hate life, I frequently do, but at least acknowledge that you hate it if you do. Recognize that every time you condemn man for being the sinful, fallible way God made him, you condemn man for being alive. You condemn life.