target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_401c4e25-5655-56c1-9fa6-a504c70344b6">46. Essex, “The Abrahamic Covenant,” 211.
47. Ibid., 212.
3
The Fall
James Spencer
Introduction
The fall of humanity has been the subject of a great deal of theological reflection. The narration of the disobedience of the first human couple is a core component of Israel’s national narrative. This chapter will examine the fall through an analysis of the dynamics of Gen 3:1–7 in relation to structural evil. Though it is not often treated in a formal, systematic, or even explicit, fashion, structural evil is available in the works of several theologians. Augustine, for instance, describes the difficult interplay that exists between individuals and society by noting his experience in positions that “require the holder to be loved and feared by men.” Such positions have the capacity to diminish one’s potential and hold one captive to humanity’s praise. In this manner, the joy that Augustine once placed in the truth is transferred to the “deceitfulness of men.” Augustine’s experience reveals the difficulty of separating from social conventions and the dynamics that govern them. It is the difficulty of escaping humanity’s “well done, well done.” The presence of sin in this case is evident in the social practices that inspire individuals “to be loved and feared, not for Thy sake, but in Thy stead” (Confessions 36.59).
Cornelius Plantinga suggests that structural evil is intimately connected to personal evil and “comprises a vast historical and cultural matrix that includes traditions, old patterns of relationship and behavior, atmospheres of expectation, social habits.”48 In describing social or structural evil, Plantinga does not absolve humanity from responsibility for sin. Instead, he extends individual culpability for evil by highlighting the impact of individual acts of evil on the world around us. He notes,
Though we cannot always measure culpability for it, we do know that sin possesses appalling force. We know that when we sin, we pervert, adulterate, and destroy good things. We create matrices and atmospheres of moral evil and bequeath them to our descendants. By habitual practice, we let loose a great, rolling momentum of moral and spiritual evil across generations. By doing such things, we involve ourselves deeply in what theologians call corruption.49
While we do not fully comprehend the extent of our individual acts and ongoing participation in evil, whether knowingly or unknowingly, we are not innocent in the creation of the world around us or in the evil that occurs within it.
It is important to note that evil is not confined to intentionally evil acts. Surely intentional acts of evil contribute to structural evil in a variety of ways, but structural evil also comes “through ignorant if well-intentioned choices.”50 The reciprocal relationship between personal and structural evil, as well as the often unintentional complicity that perpetuates structural evil underscores the complexities involved in identifying, examining, avoiding, resisting, and counteracting structural evil. Individuals live within a series of relationships. They live in relationship to the natural world, to other humans, to institutions and organizations, to governments, and to God. Charles Taylor describes the way people understand these relationships in terms of “social imaginaries,” or “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”51
Individual and corporate social imagination provides a sort of logic or sense through which humans navigate complex interactions on a day-to-day basis. Such imagination is inspired by human notions of order, fairness, and, ultimately, fitting participation within a given social imaginary. In other words, the social imaginary provides the background for behaviors and those behaviors reinforce the social imaginary. As such, behaviors often betray aspects of individual or corporate social imaginaries, which “begins to define the contours of their [the participants’] world and can eventually come to count as the taken-for-granted shape of things, too obvious to mention.”52
Thinking about structural evil in terms of Taylor’s concept of social imaginaries offers a new means of describing the phenomenon of structural evil that recognizes the interdependence of the background understandings that provide context for actions and for the actions themselves.53 Structural evil does not excuse intentional acts of evil, nor does it bracket out one’s culpability for unintentional evil acts. Instead, structural evil recognizes that evil acts, whether intentional or unintentional, individual or collective, are undergirded by common understandings of how society is ordered, as well as reinforcing or otherwise influencing that common understanding. At root, structural evil is a theological problem whereby the underlying order of things is misrecognized resulting in a number of distortions some of which we notice and others which we don’t.
The Fall, Structural Evil, and the Gospel
While the gospel is often rightly discussed in terms of individual forgiveness of sins, the gospel entails far more than the salvation of individuals. It also impacts the manner in which those individuals relate to one another and to the world around them. If, as argued above, structural evil is the misrecognition of the fundamental order of God’s creation, the gospel is the good news that proclaims the true order of things and gives a sure hope to all creation that God’s order will be restored.
Salvation by grace through faith has implications for the individual soul and for the whole of creation. Living in light of the gospel means more than acting ethically or morally. Rather, living in light of the gospel means that God empowers us to be at peace finding strength and solace in the knowledge that our troubles are “light and momentary. . .achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Cor 4:17). We have, through the gospel, a hope that allows us to break away from the misrecognized order of structural evil in order to represent God faithfully by conforming to the image of Christ.
The gospel is the slap in the face we need to dismiss our delusions about ourselves and the world. It reminds us of the leveling power of depravity and the common ground that all humanity finds in the need for God’s grace (Eph 2:8–22). It reminds us that the powerful serve at the will and whim of our God. It reminds us that we do not belong to this world, but that “our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Phil 3:20). Ultimately, the gospel calls and empowers God’s people to align with God participating with him as he reorders creation according to his perfect will and wisdom.
Analysis of Genesis 3:1–7
After narrating the creation of the world and all things in it, the book of Genesis focuses in on a set of specific events in the garden. We find the serpent conversing with the woman who has been placed in the garden with man. The serpent is characterized as “crafty.” This English translation does not preserve the ambiguity of the Hebrew term (arum), which is not always used with negative connotations (Prov 12:23; 13:8; 14:15). As modern readers, we know the story and recognize that the serpent is an agent of chaos. Within the narrative, however, it is important to allow the character of the serpent to emerge since it is not necessarily clear that the woman automatically recognizes the serpent as her enemy.54 Part of what the woman is trying to determine
