a distorted reading of the command. In fact, Ward argues, “Even if the woman’s words to the serpent had remained the same there would have been a slippage of meaning, because the context of each iteration is different. The woman cannot then repeat what God intended when he first spoke. Reiteration will always be interpretation and misreading.”102 Language in a fallen world can be twisted and misused for ends not intended by the original speaker. Even speech suffers the destabilizing effect of the fall.
Just as Gregory of Nyssa, John Bunyan, and Phyllis Trible opened up new and thought-provoking perspectives on the second creation story, so too contemporary thinkers help us to read the text in a new light. The orthodox correlation of the old Adam (anthropology) and the new Adam (Christology and soteriology), the liberal treatment of the fall as existential estrangement, the postliberal absorption of the biblical narrative into one’s own life story, and the postmodern focus on the various forms of distortion suggested by the fall help revitalize our appreciation for Genesis 2–3 as a text that speaks powerfully to the human condition.
Discussion Questions
1. What is your interpretation of the story of the fall?
2. Gregory of Nyssa speaks of the human as positioned between divinity and brutality. Is this an accurate portrayal? If so, how do humans move closer to divinity rather than brutality?
3. Is the persistence of temptation and despair a sign that a person has not made any progress in the Christian life?
4. Does the traditional reading of Genesis 2–3 legitimate patriarchal attitudes and practices? What are some common misreadings of the second creation story?
5. What types of personal and social forms of distortion exist? How does the gospel address these conditions?
Suggested Readings
For background on Gregory of Nyssa’s understanding of the creation and fall of humans, see chapter 4 of Johannes Zachhuber, Human Nature in Gregory of Nyssa (Boston: Brill, 2000) and chapter 11 of Morwenna Ludlow, Gregory of Nyssa: Ancient and (Post)modern (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For a discussion of Bunyan’s theology, see Michael Davies, Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). For general background on Bunyan, see Anne Dunan-Page, The Cambridge Companion to Bunyan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For a fuller exposition of Trible’s position, see chapter 4 of her God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978).
38. The work is also commonly cited by its Latin title, De Hominis opificio.
39. On the structure of Making, see Behr, “Rational Animal,” 66.
40. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, 55. Roth mentions that the character Macrina seems to argue two different positions in the dialogue regarding the passions. At times she speaks of the passions as attached to the original “passionless blessedness” of the soul (114) and at other times as them being part of the soul from the start (n. 20, 56–57).
41. Ibid., 57.
42. Behr, “Rational Animal,” 238.
43. Pascal, Pensees, n. 358, 99.
44. Scuiry, “Anthropology of St. Gregory of Nyssa,” 37.
45. Gregory of Nyssa, Great Catechism, 479.
46. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, 114.
47. Ibid., 119.
48. See Greaves, John Bunyan and English Nonconformity where he warns that “extreme caution must be used when employing [Grace Abounding] to construct Bunyan’s life and religious experience” (38).
49. Owens, “Introduction,” ix.
50. Bunyan, Doctrine of the Law, 25.
51. de Vries, John Bunyan on the Order of Salvation, 99.
52. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 154.
53. Davies, “John Bunyan and Spiritual Autobiography,” 73–74.
54. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 48.
55. Ibid., 14.
56. Ibid., 59.
57. Newey, “‘With the Eyes of My Understanding,’” 192.
58. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 11.
59. Ibid., 14.
60. Ibid., 16.
61. Newey, “‘With the eyes of my understanding,’” 196.
62. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 18.
63. Ibid., 29.
64. Ibid., 34.
65. Ibid., 51.
66. Ibid., 37–38.
67. Ibid., 53.
68. Wakefield, “Bunyan and the Christian Life,” 131–32.
69. Davies, Graceful Reading, 152–53.
70. Trible, “Eve and Adam,”
