Freedom and Free Choice

Unveiling of the Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World
(1886), by Edward Moran

In terms of importance to the western cultural ethos, freedom or liberty is up there in the company of such ideological priorities as life and equality. The story of modernity is easily conceptualized as a progression from less freedom to more freedom, from bondage to despots, superstition, and the shackles of nature to the freedom offered by liberal democracy. More "freedom", whatever form it may take, is a Good Thing; it is thus common for debates on social issues to be framed in terms of promoting freedom.

Just what kind of "freedom" is being assumed here? Arguably, it is the freedom of choice, of self-determination, the freedom to chart one's own course in life by acting on one's free will, and the corresponding freedom from any oppressive constraints that prevent one from doing so. (This is the distinction between positive and negative liberty) On a societal level, in modern liberal democracies this freedom is seen as a goal in itself; it serves to support and ensure the capacity of the individual to formulate and live out his or her own goals in life, whatever they may be, and it is the duty of the state to protect it.

But, however praiseworthy the power of choice may be, does "freedom" truly consist in it? I would  disagree. Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart (in a First Things article about, of all things, Janet Jackson's accidental exposure at the Super Bowl) considers the consequence of equating freedom with choice to be "that we tend to elevate what should at best be regarded as the moral life’s minimal condition to the status of its highest expression, and in the process reduce the very concept of freedom to one of purely libertarian or voluntarist spontaneity." For Hart, and for many others in the eastern Christian tradition, "freedom" includes, but is much more than, the freedom of choice. "True freedom," he says, drawing on the definition inherited by classical Christianity from Platonic philosophy, "is the realization of a complex nature in its proper good (that is, in both its natural and supernatural ends); it is the freedom of a thing to flourish, to become ever more fully what it is."

In light of this definition, choice is not automatically an expression of freedom, but can actually impair it. In fact, as Hart says in his book The Doors of the Sea, "the will that chooses poorly, then—through ignorance, maleficence, or corrupt desire—has not thereby become freer, but has further enslaved itself to those forces that prevent it from achieving its full expression." (71) Freedom is not simply the ability to choose between ends arbitrarily; it is directed towards a particular end, the realization of what we are, what we are created to be (not simply what we choose or wish to be via self-determination), and freedom is truly suppressed when this realization is hindered—even by our "free" choice. The particularity, the directionality toward which our nature is oriented, far from a constraint which much be cast off to maximize freedom, is rather the mode in which we are most truly free. In the words of my high school economics teacher, true freedom is freedom for (the full realization of our nature), not merely freedom from (oppression and constraint).

In Orthodox theology, this dynamic is applied in the distinction between two kinds of "will", the natural will and the gnomic will, developed especially by the 7th-century church father Maximos, as Fr. Stephen Freeman explains:

St. Maximos the Confessor, in writings that have become the teaching of the Church following the 5th Ecumenical Council, held that there is such a thing as the “natural will.” This is the will of our human nature. The natural will always wills the good and right thing. It wills the proper end and direction for a human being. This is an inherent part of every nature. It “wants to be” what it is, so to speak. But we do not directly experience our nature for the most part. What we experience as “choice” is a brokenness that St. Maximos called the “gnomic will.” It does its best (as we do when we’re at our best) but is frequently torn between things.

The innate desire of the natural will is the "true freedom" described above by Hart. It is an inalienable part of who we are, namely beings created good by a loving and all-powerful God for union with him (cf. John 17:21-22), and through it we innately, naturally desire to be more what we really are. Our created freedom to realize this highest end is a consequence of our creation in the image of God (Gen 1:20-21), who is perfectly and completely free to be who he is, as the second-century church father St. Irenaeus writes:

If then it were not in our power to do or not to do these things, what reason had the apostle, and much more the Lord Himself, to give us counsel to do some things, and to abstain from others? But because man is possessed of free will from the beginning, and God is possessed of free will, in whose likeness man was created, advice is always given to him to keep fast the good, which thing is done by means of obedience to God. (Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.37.4)

Throughout this section, Irenaeus presupposes that the created nature of man and the biblical admonishments to obey and choose the good which he is given entail the power of choice, "so that those who had yielded obedience might justly possess what is good, given indeed by God, but preserved by themselves." (IV.37.1) Our active, free participation in the good is what makes it so precious and worthwhile. In the same vein, St. Gregory of Nyssa later wrote in the fourth century:

He who created human beings in order to make them share in his own fullness so disposed their nature that it contains the principle of all that is good, and each of these dispositions draws them to desire the corresponding divine attribute. So God could not have deprived them of the best and most precious of his attributes, his freedom. (Gregory of Nyssa, Catechetical Oration 5)

But obviously we do not always realize the desire of this natural will. We sin, we miss the mark, we fall short of attaining to the likeness of God (Rom 3:23) as our natural will desires. And so, because of sin, our will experiences fragmentation, debilitation, corruption, inner division. We become double-minded, as James describes in chapter 1 of his epistle. Our nature itself does not change (for this is a misunderstanding of the concept of "nature", and otherwise no one could "by nature do" the things of the law, as Paul describes in Rom 2:14, followed by a description of the double-mindedness involved). As Freeman writes, if our nature had actually changed from good to evil, "we could never be nor become what we truly are", because we would truly be evil, and any change from this natural state would be a delusion. Nor is our freedom of choice totally abolished, for then we could not be held responsible for sin (a common intuition among the Fathers, especially Irenaeus and Chrysostom), but the faculties of our nature, the will and the passions, are blinded and corrupted. The image of God is still very much present in us, and our nature remains good just as God created it, but the expressions of these things become distorted and confused.

And so choice, intended to be the manifestation of our natural will's freedom, always freely choosing God, instead becomes its own kind of bondage. Choice is no longer simply the singular voice of the natural will calling out to God and freely moving towards him, but an often agonizing and unclear deliberation of one course of action among numerous alternatives. We have to choose because we are torn between the still, small voice of the natural will and the corruption of sin, and so situations that are transparent to the natural will seem opaque to us. For to one who knows the way perfectly, there is no real "choice" to make between possible routes; there is only freedom to walk the Way. Similarly, I normally don't have to "choose" to be faithful to my wife, but only in times of extreme temptation and weakness do any alternatives to faithfulness begin to seem like possibilities. This imprisoning necessity of choice which the world considers true freedom is what Maximos calls the "gnomic will". Hart writes that "this is the minimum that liberty must assume; but it is also, just as obviously, a form of subordination and confinement." (The Doors of the Sea, 70-71) Freeman further describes our situation:

We may choose countless numbers of ways to remain in bondage. But unless and until we can see the proper goal of our life and existence, we cannot freely choose it. We live our lives in an illusion created by free-choice, but always with a vague, haunting sense that something is missing – this is the echo of the natural will.

This is something like how Orthodox believe that we have the freedom of choice, so that we can actually be expected to obey the commands of God and held responsible for disobedience, while remaining enslaved to sin and unable to free ourselves. For we are not saved simply by making the right choices, even if salvation necessarily involves our active "yes". Christ promises to set us free, as in John 8:32-36—what kind of freedom is this? Not the voluntaristic freedom of choice idealized by modern western culture (which, as we have seen, is really the expression of our captivity), but the kind that makes us "slaves" to God and to righteousness (Rom 6:18-22). This is no paradox or contradiction, but the heart of Christian soteriology.

In my opinion it is characteristic of the western controversies about justification and the "order of salvation", especially following the Reformation, to conflate and confuse these two kinds of freedom or willing. Pelagius, against whose teaching much of the debate was reacting in one way or another, arguably did so. Jaroslav Pelikan describes Pelagius' view:

[To Pelagius, t]he doctrine of original sin was self-contradictory. 'If sin is natural, it is not voluntary; if it is voluntary, it is not inborn. These two definitions are as mutually contradictory as a necessity and [free] will.' Even after sin the will remained as free as it had before sin was committed, for man continued to have 'the possibility of committing sin or of refraining from sin.' (The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, 315)

Pelagius' heresy, in one sense, was the denial that we are any less free after sinning than we are before, because sin remains voluntary; we can seemingly choose to sin or not. Yet as we have seen, according to the Orthodox tradition choosing not to do any particular sin does not make us any freer; we remain trapped in the necessity and blindness of choice itself. In a very real sense, all of our choices not made by faith, even our "good" ones, are sinful (that is, they miss the mark of union with God); see Rom 14:23. Despite having the "freedom" to choose, we remain in bondage to sin. Pelagius' error was supposing that because the gnomic will remains "free", the natural will must be free as well.

The Protestant response to Pelagianism tends to continue his conflation of the natural and gnomic wills and argues the contrapositive—that because our natural will is bound, our gnomic will must be bound as well and our "freedom of choice" abolished. Instead of the minimal, sorry condition of our fallen nature, free choice is seen as somehow exceptional, a power that has been lost to the Fall, the power to "save oneself" in a Pelagian sense. Conversely, when we are made "free" in Christ, this refers to the restoration of choice; as one saying puts it, after redemption in Christ, we become free to sin or not to sin, whereas before, we could only choose to sin. The role of choice in salvation, somewhat paradoxically, thus tends to be exaggerated, especially in traditions placing great emphasis on the "decision for Christ" as the decisive crux when someone "gets saved".

This way of thinking presupposes a radical view of the Fall as abolishing or destroying the image of God in man, or actually changing our nature to be evil instead of good as originally created (which, again, is a contradiction of the classical definition of "nature"). As the commonly used term "sinful nature" suggests, in this view sin is taken to have become the "natural" or baseline condition of our existence as human. Such an intensive view of the Fall is unknown in the Fathers, and is considered by Orthodox to be incompatible with the doctrine of creation, and of evil as a privation of the good. For in this view, sin cannot exist on its own, as a discrete thing occupying the place formerly held by the love for God in our natural will, but only as a parasite, alongside and beneath a good will. If there were no prior desire for God in our hearts, there would be nothing for sin to corrupt. If the image of God were not only tarnished and damaged, but actually destroyed, along with our free will, we would be little different from the animals, unable to be held responsible for our sins (St. Irenaeus expresses this idea in Against Heresies IV.37.2), and there would be no one to save. St. John of Damascus wrote that "God made [man] by nature sinless, and endowed him with free will. By sinless, I mean not that sin could find no place in him (for that is the case with Deity alone), but that sin is the result of the free volition he enjoys rather than an integral part of his nature." (The Orthodox Faith II.12) Our freedom of choice is not removed by sin; it is what makes it possible for us to sin (and to be saved).

All of this speaks to my prior confusion about how the Fall could have actually changed our nature; how did Adam have such power to do so? Why can I not change my nature back through my own choice, as he apparently did? Or did God inflict the "sinful nature" on him as a punishment, thus creating the problem he would later solve through the gospel? As I came to understand and accept the Orthodox teaching on the matter, it became much clearer.

So for the Orthodox, "free" choice is not as a casualty of sin, but a symptom of it: it entails not that we have the power to save ourselves in a Pelagian sense, but that we are "rational" (not mere animals), able to be held responsible for our deeds. It is not really "free", not in the sense of being somehow prevented from choosing good, but because it testifies to our weakness, our frailty, our inability to see and know the good and our resulting vacillation between good and evil, or (as we all too often perceive them) pleasure and pain. Our rejecting the evil and choosing the good does not, in itself, make us any freer; against Pelagianism, Orthodoxy rejects the notion that we can be saved simply by the exercise of the will, without the intervention of divine grace received through faith. In other words, our "free will" (as choice) is not constrained; it is itself the constraint on the innate desire of our deeper, still-good natural will, as Hart summarizes:

The natural will must return to God, no matter what, but if the freedom of the gnomic will refuses to open itself to the mercy and glory of God, the wrathful soul experiences the transfiguring and deifying fire of love not as bliss but as chastisement and despair. The highest freedom and happiness of the creature ... is the perfection of the creature's nature in union with God. And the highest work of providential grace is to set our deepest, 'natural' will free from everything (even the abuse of our freedom) that would separate us from that end, all the time preserving the dignity of the divine image within us. (The Doors of the Sea, 85)

The Confession of Dositheos, an Orthodox confession promulgated by the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672 largely in response to the claims of Calvinism, expresses how the human will can naturally choose what is good (explaining how, in the language of total depravity, man is not as evil as he could be), but cannot do any "spiritual good" (leading to real salvation) without grace working through faith.

We believe man in falling by the [original] transgression to have become comparable and similar to the beasts; that is, to have been utterly undone, and to have fallen from his perfection and impassibility, yet not to have lost the nature and power which he had received from the supremely good God. For otherwise he would not be rational, and consequently not a human. So [he still has] the same nature in which he was created, and the same power of his nature, that is free-will, living and operating, so that he is by nature able to choose and do what is good, and to avoid and hate what is evil. For it is absurd to say that the nature which was created good by Him who is supremely good lacks the power of doing good. For this would be to make that nature evil — what could be more impious than that? For the power of working depends upon nature, and nature upon its author, although in a different manner. And that a man is able by nature to do what is good, even our Lord Himself intimates saying, even the Gentiles love those that love them. {Matthew 5:46; Luke 6:32} But this is taught most plainly by Paul also, in Romans 1:19, [actually Rom 2:14] and elsewhere expressly, saying in so many words, “The Gentiles which have no law do by nature the things of the law.” From which it is also apparent that the good which a man may do cannot truly be sin. For it is impossible for that what is good to be evil. Although, being done by nature only and tending to form the natural character of the doer but not the spiritual, it does not itself contribute to salvation without faith Nor does it lead to condemnation, for it is not possible that good, as such, can be the cause of evil. But in the regenerated, what is wrought by grace, and with grace, makes the doer perfect, and renders him worthy of salvation.  

A man, therefore, before he is regenerated, is able by nature to incline to what is good, and to choose and work moral good. But for the regenerated to do spiritual good — for the works of the believer being contributory to salvation and wrought by supernatural grace are properly called spiritual — it is necessary that he be guided and prevented [preceded] by grace, as has been said in treating of predestination. Consequently, he is not able of himself to do any work worthy of a Christian life, although he has it in his own power to will, or not to will, to co-operate with grace.

Position Paper: Anthropology

The following is my third position paper for my systematic theology class, on anthropology (a theological perspective on humanity).

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In Christian theology, the knowledge of God is inseparable from the knowledge of ourselves. Calvin said of them, "as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other."¹ At least as much as the questions of theology proper, the questions about humanity are universal, human questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Where did we come from? What is wrong with the world?

First, the question of human identity. First, and basically, what does human nature consist of? Are we ordered collections of atoms? Do we have a body and some kind of incorporeal soul responsible for consciousness? Is matter an illusion altogether? Any attempt to separate human nature into more than two parts seems to be needlessly speculative and difficult to support biblically. Monism (the view that there is only one basic human substance) runs aground on passages that speak of an intermediate state in which the soul/spirit is separated from the body (Luke 16:19-31, 23:43, 2 Cor 5:8); Mat 10:28 also seems to make a strong distinction between body and soul. This leaves some kind of dichotomism (people have bodies and souls/spirits), but a simply dualistic approach that locates the "self" or consciousness exclusively in the soul does not do justice to the biblical idea of body-soul unity and the promise that our final state will be as new bodies, not disembodied souls (2 Cor 5:2-4, see also 1 Cor 15). Though it is by no means explicitly spelled out in the Scriptures, it seems best to conclude that the normal state of the human is a body-soul unity, with both together constituting the "self", but which can be broken upon death, though this disembodied state is by no means ideal or permanent.²

Humans were made in the image and likeness of God. (Gen 1:26-28) Are the "image" and "likeness" are synonymous or different. The early church generally believed they were different: the image of God is something innate and essential to humanity that remains untouched by the Fall, while the likeness is something humanity has to grow into through Godward growth in holiness and Christian maturity. Origen wrote "that man received the dignity of God's image at his first creation; but that the perfection of his likeness has been reserved for the consummation."³ Irenaeus identified the image with reason and free will, and the likeness with growth into Spirit-endowed righteousness.⁴ This distinction is still a frequent teaching of the Orthodox Church today: "The image, for those who distinguish the two terms, denotes man's potentiality for life in God, the likeness his realization of that potentiality."⁵

In contrast, Luther taught that the image and likeness are synonymous, with Gen 1:26 an instance of Hebrew parallelism⁶, as did Calvin.⁷ On this he based the belief common in Lutheran and Reformed theology that the whole image of God has been damaged in humanity by sin; only a relic remains, and the whole person (even the will, mind, etc.) is in need of regeneration. I tend to agree with the traditional view that the image and likeness are distinct, reflecting the fact that due to sin we are lacking in some areas of God-resemblance (those pertaining to morality and knowledge of God) but not others (the innate faculties we have in common with God that make relationship with him possible, as Irenaeus states). Put another way, our creation in the image of God means that humans, of all the earthly creatures, are not only capable of a personal relationship with God, they cannot escape this relationship, whether positive or negative. The image of God is also the biblical basis for human rights and dignity which are in no way affected by sin; we see it used as the justification for prohibiting the shedding of human blood (Gen 9:6) and cursing others (Jam 3:9). Because of the image of God, there is something innately valuable about a human person. But the likeness of God is something we must grow to realize, which means developing this relationship, strengthening it with love, and being transformed by grace into the likeness of Jesus Christ. (Rom 8:29, 2 Cor 3:18, Eph 4:15)

Next is the question of human purpose: why are we here? Reflecting the previous point, I think God's desire for humans is to grow into his likeness. Christians seek to be imitators of Christ. Paul speaks of this goal in Eph 4:11-16, saying that God builds up the body of Christ (the Church) "until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ" (v. 13 RSV). "Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ" (v. 15). Jesus was the perfect example of a true human being, and we were made to become like him. On a broader level, we see the purpose of humanity in the initial statement of their creation: after making humans, God tells them to "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." (Gen 1:28) In a Christian context, this means our imitation of God (in his moral nature) applies to our relation to the rest of creation as well as to each other. We become most fully human when we live in union with God and fulfill his purposes for us.

Regarding the third question, the Bible gives an account of human origins depicting our instantaneous creation by God, along with the rest of the world. Genesis 1 and 2 appear to contain two different creation accounts side-by-side,⁸ the first emphasizing God's majestic sovereignty that creates the cosmos in a peaceful, orderly fashion, the other emphasizing his personal nature and creation of humans in particular. People have been making much of these accounts since before Christ, but our appreciating them today is complicated by their apparent contradictions with the scientific account of our origins. I do not consider biblical concordism a suitable option for reconciling the two accounts as it imposes our modern expectations on an ancient text, which tends to lead to ad hoc interpretations that often produce more questions than they answer, questions which the biblical authors almost certainly didn’t concern themselves with. To further explain why, let's look at some historical approaches to interpreting Genesis.

The traditional interpretation of Genesis 1 does view it as speaking historical truth: how God really created the heavens and the earth. However, to note only this is misleading. Early interpreters did not view the literal sense of Scripture (not just the "literal" interpretation, but the intended meaning of the author) as the only way to read it, or even the most important. Because the Scriptures were inspired by the Spirit of God, they had multiple layers of meaning, including dimensions the human author did not intend.⁹ The church fathers focused on the allegorical or spiritual meaning of the paradise narrative, mostly using Adam’s historicity to prove the universality of Christ’s salvation of all the sons of Adam.¹⁰ In The Literal Meaning of Genesis, St. Augustine cautions against interpreting the Bible to contradict facts that are common knowledge among nonbelievers, for fear of casting doubt not only on themselves, but on the Scriptures as well.¹¹ In other words, if we consider ourselves defenders of "traditional Christian orthodoxy", we should not assume that a literal, historical interpretation is the only one possible, even for passages that appear to be historical. And we should be willing to rethink our interpretation of Scripture if it contradicts things that even unbelievers know to be simple fact. To adopt a nonliteral interpretation of Genesis 1 in response to scientific evidence is not to compromise on the integrity of God's word, but to accept our limitations as human interpreters.

It is often pointed out that Paul seems to believe in the historicity of Adam, and indeed claims that sin and death came from Adam's sin. (Rom 5:12-21; 1 Cor 15:21-22, 45-49) Doesn't this settle our interpretation of Genesis 2-3? Without a historical Adam, what did Christ die for? I will briefly respond with two points to consider. First, Paul was an ancient man, reading his Bible (Old Testament) with an ancient understanding of science and origins that was, in his time, entirely uncontroversial. Elsewhere in 1 Cor 15 he states (about the resurrection) that "What you sow does not come to life unless it dies." (v. 36) But today, we know that a seed that dies cannot germinate.¹² Paul’s being wrong about botany does not falsify the resurrection any more than his being wrong about the historicity of Adam does. Also, Paul is not making his understanding of Christ dependent on his understanding of Adam, but the other way around. What Christ reveals about Adam is not his place as the historical originator of sin and death, but as a type of Christ, his archetypal sin serving as a typological prelude to Jesus' universal redemption. In a very real sense, Christ reveals to us the nature of the very problem he solves.¹³

One other argument is the question: if man was not created instantaneously but by evolution, when and how did the human soul (or the image of God) originate? Did God at some point in evolutionary history implant it in a sufficiently developed primate? I think this question again arises from concordism, the quest to align biblical history with scientific history. But as a scientific theory, evolution is not bound to answer theological questions like this any more than the Bible is bound to answer our scientific questions. Is the origin of souls really an essential dogma of the faith? (Keep in mind that Genesis 2 never specifically mentions any ensoulment of Adam; it must be inferred by assuming that it tells us the etiology of souls) We should not expect spiritual realities like these to be accountable to our modern, scientific inquiries; "spiritual realities are not open to this kind of precise analysis".¹⁴ I don't see any problem with considering the origin of souls a divine mystery, real but wholly outside the explanations of science.

Regardless of how God created us, our biblical status as beings created by a personal God (in his image, no less) has great significance. We are simultaneously connected to God and to the rest of creation. Like the animals, we are limited, part of the creation and dependent on him for our existence (see Psa 104, Mat 6:25-34). But at the same time, because of our creation in the image of God, we have a unique relationship with him among all the earthly creatures. As our creation mandate directs, we are made to be God's stewards and emissaries here on earth, taking an active role in the exercise of his rulership of creation. In light of Adam's role in naming the animals (in the ancient Near East the name of something was effectively its identity¹⁵), we are even made to be God's "assistant creators", continuing his creative work in his Name towards the redemption of all things. And of all the creatures besides the angels, we alone are capable of knowing God and loving him personally. Scientific or no, the Bible gives a much better account of human origins than the dominant stories of our culture.

By studying the original ancient Near Eastern context and genre of Genesis 1-3, we can better understand the intent of the creation account beyond simply telling ancient history. The contrasts between Genesis 1 and contemporary creation myths (like Enuma Elish) are glaring. Unlike Marduk, "God is portrayed as truly mighty in that he is solely and fully responsible for forming the cosmos"; there is no struggle involved in his doing so, and the elements of creation are depersonalized rather than enemies that God has to subdue.¹⁶ Since Enuma Elish predates the Genesis account, these contrasts are surely intentional. Genesis 1, besides an account of Israelite origins, is a polemic for worship of the true God. John H. Walton offers another interpretation, that it may also be a description of God establishing the cosmos as his temple and taking up residence in it to rule all things.¹⁷ Genesis 2 has typological parallels with Israel's exile, and since it was completed from an earlier written/oral tradition after the Babylonian exile¹⁸, it likely reflects a humble Israel's desire to remember her past sins and seek to serve her Creator humbly. These are just a few examples of the significance of the creation account beyond the literal.

No biblical discussion of humanity would be complete without turning to what is known as "the human condition". Christians and non-Christians alike know that our existence is not perfect. We are reminded of it every time we look to the news, and sometimes with problems that hit closer to home. The faithless believe the apparent indifference of the universe is exactly what it looks like; the faithful agonize over the question, why does a loving, all-powerful God allow suffering, evil, and death? This is the "problem of evil", a fundamental question of human existence. Our understanding of mankind is inextricably connected to it.

In light of my ahistorical interpretation of Genesis 1-3, I don't attribute the existence of evil and death to an original human sin that somehow corrupted our nature; the presence of "natural evil" before the existence of humans makes this conclusion untenable. This view also has theological problems: I see no way that Adam could possibly have ruined human nature in a way that takes God thousands of years to mend. If, as some suppose, this corruption was instead an act of divine judgment,¹⁹ then by implication we need salvation not from sin and death but from God himself. Additionally, if basic human nature really is corrupted by sin, then Jesus, by being sinless, was less than fully human. I consider these implications untenable.

I instead hold something like the eastern formulation which, instead of making Adam's act of "original sin" the source of our total depravity that is condemned with death, holds that mortal is our basic problem, and that sin springs from it.²⁰ Sin is not something that Adam (much less God) somehow injected into basic human nature, but the result of slavery to the terror/power of death wielded by the devil.²¹ (See Hbr 2:14-15) As Paul wrote, "The sting of death is sin" (1 Cor 15:56). Yet at the same time our sin pulls us further from God, the giver of life, which accelerates the vicious cycle; "the wages of sin is death" (Rom 6:23) In Orthodox theology, sin, death, and the devil are all viewed together as a sort of unholy trinity, namely the one Jesus came to defeat.²² Human nature, created by God, remains essentially good, but is trapped by these forces and cannot escape corruption and destruction on its own. What we need is not legal pardon, but rescue and vivification; the arena of salvation is not a courtroom, but a hospital. This theology, with its focus on sin and death together as present realities which we understand and are delivered from through Christ, is much more amenable to a nonhistoric Adam.

Yet I, for one, can't simply ignore the question of the origin of death. If death was not only the condition into which the first humans were born but vital to the evolutionary mechanism that produced them, the question must be asked: did God create a world with death "built-in"? And if death is "the last enemy to be destroyed" (1 Cor 15:26), does this make God responsible for the very problem that Jesus solves? Only if we view salvation history as merely a timeline, a succession of events one after another. Some (particularly in eastern traditions) restructure even this timeline around the eternal reality of the Incarnation. One priest writes: "But does this mean that God created a world that has held death from the beginning? It would not be strange to say so, since Pascha [Easter] was before the beginning."²³ The second-century church father Irenaeus even views our faithful journey through the presently corrupted world as an intentional part of God's process of soul-making, bringing us to full maturity in the knowledge of him as well as freedom from sin and death. Accompanying this is a concept of “perfection” that is not simply freedom from taint, but fully realized completion. "God, for his part, could have offered perfection to humanity at the beginning, but humanity was not capable of receiving it, being no more than an infant."²⁴ Though unintuitive, I find this way of approaching the problem of evil compelling in that it does not clash with scientific discoveries but challenges us to take on God’s eternal perspective and put off the human one from which we pose our accusatory questions.

I believe that Christianity, more than simply being conversant with philosophers’ questions about humanity, holds the best answers to them. Who are we? God's beloved creatures, made in his image to shine in his likeness. (Phil 2:14-16) Why are we here? To be conformed to the image of God's Son (Rom 8:29) and, with the Son, to become participants in God's ongoing work of new creation/reconciliation of the world to himself (2 Cor 5:19). Where did we come from? The hand of God (Gen 1:26-28), working with the instruments of nature. What is wrong with the world? The oppression and corruption wrought by sin, death, and the devil (Rom 6:23, 1 Cor 15:56, Hbr 2:14-15), whose works have already been brought to nothing by the Lord Christ and in whose victory we participate by the shedding of his blood. (Col 2:9-15) Calvin was right: it is impossible to come to a full understanding of ourselves without also finding a full understanding of the gospel.

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1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (trans. Henry Beveridge; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2008), 1.1.1.
2. Millard Erickson, Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 491–492.
3. Origen, De principiis, III.vi.1 (22 October 2014).
4. Erickson, Christian Theology, 462.
5. Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1995), 66.
6. Erickson, Christian Theology, 462.
7. Calvin, Institutes, 1.15.3.
8. Denis O. Lamoreux, Evolutionary Creation: A Christian Approach to Evolution (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008), 199.
9. Michael Graves, The Inspiration and Interpretation of Scripture: What the Early Church Can Teach Us (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2014), 48–55.
10. Peter C. Bouteneff, Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation Narratives (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008), 173–180.
11. Augustine, “The Literal Meaning of Genesis”, quoted in Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006), 83.
12. Lamoreux, Evolutionary Creation, 137.
13. Fr. Stephen Freeman, “Creation and Evolution,” Glory to God for All Things, 11 February 2014, (17 October 2014); see also Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn’t Say About Human Origins (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2012), 131–135.
14. Lamoreux, Evolutionary Creation, 289.
15. Henri and H. A. Frankfort, “Introduction,” in The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977), 13.
16. Enns, The Evolution of Adam, 41.
17. This is the overall argument of John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: 2006).
18. Enns, The Evolution of Adam, 23–26.
19. R.C. Sproul, “The Pelagian Controversy,” Ligonier Ministries, 1 August 2005, (22 October 2014).
20. John Chrysostom, “Homily on Romans 5:12” in The Works of Saint John Chrysostom (ed. Philip Schaff, George Barker Stevens; Kindle edition: 2011).
21. Richard Beck, The Slavery of Death (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2014), 12–14.
22. Beck, The Slavery of Death, 17.
23. Freeman, “Creation and Evolution”.
24. Irenaus, “adversus haereses,” in The Christian Theology Reader, 343.