On Sin and Death in Genesis

Over at Jesus Creed they’ve been exploring Genesis as it interacts with science and faith. I’ve not done a specific study, but I’ve read a book or two on Genesis from the Ancient Near Eastern perspective. Of course if you have been living anywhere other than a cave you’ve heard from the not-so-new atheists about how science and faith are incompatible, and you can’t live without science, so you must drop your faith. As if it were so simplistic – they should be scolded. The recent Pew data should show them that Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus – by percentage – believe in evolution more frequently than the “Unaffiliated” group (which I would imagine includes atheists). Religious belief is certainly compatible with science – even evolution. Perhaps if they were to change their rhetoric to “Fundamentalist Protestant Faith is incompatible with science” then they might have a case. But since not everyone is a Protestant, let alone a Fundamentalist, there is plenty of room. Or at least there should be.

As I am not a fundamentalist (any longer), they very idea of death and sin (or original sin) requires a major effort to understand. This one post, which really needs to be re-categorized, talks specifically about the understanding of death and its relation to sin.

My understanding as it is now is that death is the cessation of life. Man is a one-part being, the soul or spirit of a man (God’s ruach or pneuma in Genesis) combines with the “dust/clay of the ground” to form a being. The clay was not a “living being” (nephesh) alone, nor was the “breath” alive on its own. Only when combined do they form a living being. This seems to be a very simple, and to me, uncontroversial, point. Death then is the reversal of this process, the separation of these parts, the undoing of life.

I fundamentally disagree with Calvin’s guiding hermaneutic that mankind was not destined for an earthly existence. That flies directly in the face of all Jewish theology in the 10th and 8th centuries BC as well as Second Temple Judaism (I needn’t back this point up, Daube, Sanders, McKnight, Evans, NT Wright, as well as so many others do it quite well). NT Wright at least has a foothold to stand on when he writes:

One potentially helpful way of understanding the entry of death into the world through the first human sin is to see “death” here as more than simply the natural decay and corruption of all the created order. The good creation was nevertheless transient: evening and morning, the decay and new life of autumn and spring, pointed on to future, a purpose, which Genesis implies it was the job of the human race to bring about. All that lived in God’s original world would decay and perish, but “death” in that sense carried no sting. The primal pair were, however, threatened with a different sort of thing altogether: a “death” that would result from sin, and involve expulsion from the garden (Gen 2:17). This death is a darker force, opposed to creation itself, unmaking that which was good, always threatening to drag the world back toward chaos. Thus, when humans turned away in sin from the creator as the one whose image they were called to bear, what might have been a natural sleep acquired a sense of shame and threat.

His assertion would be that mankind was not meant to live forever, just an incredibly long and full life. He uses some natural revelation to back this up, the transient seasons, etc. I have to agree that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are mytho-historic and in direct relation (sometimes implicit agreement, other times explicit contradiction) with other Ancient Near Eastern beliefs surrounding them. Being in the middle of his 700pg Resurrection of the Son of God gives me plenty of other thoughts surrounding the very idea of resurrection and ‘life after death’/'sleep’/'soul sleep’/etc in pagan and Jewish contexts. Perhaps this is just another turning point.