Recovering Evangelicals #18 Original Sin: what does science say?
Our goal next week is to talk about the core of Christian faith: Atonement Theology. But before we can do that, we need to talk about a fundamental concept on which it’s built: a concept called “Original Sin.”
The Christian understanding of that idea is rooted in the story found in the third chapter of Genesis: the one where Adam and Eve bite into the apple in the Garden of Eden, breaking the human-Divine relationship and unleashing sin, death and destruction into all of human history, and also on the rest of creation.
Last week, we saw how Christians took this story and turned it into something completely different from how the ancient Hebrew authors intended it, and how their ancient Hebrew readers understood it to mean.
This week, we’ll see how they took this story and turned it into something that bears no resemblance at all to what modern scientists have learned about actual human history. We think it’s legitimate to bring Science to bear on this very theological discussion, because science can be used to:
- show us that humans never originated from a primal pair roughly ten thousand years ago in a Garden in Mesopotamia, but instead arose out of a group that never numbered less than a few thousand, and migrated out of Africa a few hundred thousand years ago.
- trace a couple of our common ancestors down through genetic lines: “Y-chromosomal Adam” who lived in one part of Africa about 240,000 years ago, and “mitochondrial Eve” who lived about 100,000 years later than him (and from a different part of Africa a thousand miles away).
- trace down through genealogical lines (different from genetic lines) to show how it’s conceivable — not a proof, but a distinct possibility — that everyone alive on earth can still trace their ancestral roots to some one individual who lived as recently as 1000 AD to 2000 BC.
- dispel the idea that humans fell from a state of perfection. Instead, over the past several million years, we’ve always been on an upward trajectory physically, physiologically, intellectually, theologically, and even morally.
- still show us that we did “fall”: we’ve been on that upward trajectory, but “fell short” of our full potential. We caught a glimpse of a human-Divine relationship, and we turned that into a resource. Remember, we learned last week how, when the Biblical authors looked for a word for “sin,” they didn’t borrow one from law (rule; penalty; fine; infraction; punishment), or from medicine (illness; wound; disease; infection), or from architecture (flaw; warped; broken; bent), but instead they took a word from archery … a word that literally means “to fall short.”
With this new information on the table, what can/should we now say about Atonement Theology? Stay tuned till next week!
Tell us your thoughts on this in the comment box below …
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