Kevin asks about the origins of evil. The mystery of evil is ultimately inscrutable. Kevin suggests that answer if found in Adam’s free will. I agree that Adam’s will was free, however I do not believe this takes away the difficulty. The Bible, and Christian tradition, affirm that Adam was made in the image of God. Adam was created “good.” He knew the true God experientially. He was righteous in every way. The law of God was written on his heart. It might be said that Adam was perfect. Almost. One imperfection existed. Adam’s perfection was mutable.
The mutability of Adam’s righteous estate presents the central drama of the creation narrative. Adam was created righteous but his righteousness would be tested. The test comes with these words, “you shall not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” The threat raises the stakes. On the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.”
In this primeval covenant, father Adam was free. Free to choose. Free to obey. His rebellion was freely chosen and the result was disastrous. But how does this solve the problem of the mystery of evil? Kevin seems to imply that Adam’s freedom demands the God had not providential control of the events. This is problematic.
According to the Bible and Christian tradition, God is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. To quote the Westminster Shorter Catechism, “in being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.” He is the Alpha and Omega. He does not change. He does not repent. He knows the Creator of all things, the sustainer of all things. His providence extends to all things, including the birds of the sky and the hairs on our heads. As God, He does not learn by external observation. His knowledge is not dependent upon His creatures, but His creatures are dependent upon His knowledge. He is the self-contained, ontological Trinity. Any other conception of God makes him mutable, changeable, and dependent upon His creation. Such a God is not the true of the Bible and Christian tradition.
So in short, the Bible, as it is understood and confessed by the Reformed, teaches that God is not the author of evil. Further, Adam was free. He is culpable for his guilt. But the tension remains. How was a creature that enjoyed the kind of perfection that Adam enjoyed, who had the law of God written on His heart, tempted? I do not know. I do know what the Bible teaches. God was sovereign. Adam was free. The result was disaster… but O happy fault that lead to such a great salvation.
Finally, the thing that troubles me about Kevin’s post is that it seems to imply an analogy between Adam’s freedom before the fall and our freedom after it. This makes a categorical mistake. Adam was holy, just and good. Original sin has forever changed that equation. Adam’s children are not placed back in his shoes, able to freely choose life through obedience. Such an analogy is pure Pelagianism. Of course, Kevin is not a Pelagian, but we need to be aware that any leap from Adam to his children needs to take into account the results of the fall. If we are talking about Christians, then the leap not only must take into account the results of the fall but the work of the 2nd Adam. Now on these issues, the Reformed and the Roman Catholic are likely to disagree.
This might not be useful, but I wonder if we might want to bring angels into the discussion.
They didn’t have any corrupted concupiscence (as we do) which makes us so prone to sin. They didn’t have the kind of struggles and disorders of intellect and will, of will and passions, of soul and body, etc., that humans have today (though Adam didn’t have them because of the graces in which he was created). They are pure spiritual beings. How do we explain their sin? Well, of course, there is the mystery of iniquity.
But I wonder if we can dig deeper. Could angels have been created in pure nature, without supernatural grace? They would have been purely spiritual beings without the relationship of God in charity or the Beatific Vision, etc. In this state, it seems, they could not have sinned. How could they? But because they were created in grace, created in this loving relationship with God, there was, as it were, a tension in their natures between the “natural” and the “supernatural.” They were able to reject the gifts that exceeded their purely angelic natures, choosing their natural good. In so doing, they would sin. (This is still rather mysterious. Why would you reject divine friendship, especially when it is “right in front of you”? But it *might* put some flesh on the bones.)
Now, it’s a bit awkward that grace opened up the possibility of angelic sin. BUT the response can be that the gifts of charity that were given to the angels, that kind of participation of the divine nature, is such an infinite good that such a question can be set aside.
The original justice of Adam was often seen as constituted by two basic sorts of gifts. One made our nature “whole”, ordering all of the faculties–soul to body, will to intellect, intellect to the Good. The other elevated even this perfectly ordered nature to the supernatural good of the Beatific Vision and Divine Love and friendship. Even a perfect intellectual nature (whether human or angelic) does not “deserve” divine friendship. So God could have simply created us with the first sort of grace. In that situation, could we have sinned? I’m not sure how!
But he gave us the infinite gift of divine friendship. As such, we had that same “tension” in our natures as the angels had…
I’ll stop now; this might not be very useful. But the category of the “supernatural” took a while to emerge in Christian theology (and not always with wonderful consequences!), but it is useful to consider its implications not only for the primeval sins but also for how those stories shed light on our own situation today, whether in the state of fallen nature or justifying grace.
One strength of the Reformed view, the biblical view, is that it leads us to one unavoidable conclusion: Adam’s sin and by our implication in it our sin, is eminently sinful. Allowing for the mystery of the fall by holding together God’s sovereignty and both Adams responsibility and his creation in perfect uprightness is truly a mystery, but it allows us to see sin as sin and grace as grace. I have heard it said that if one understands and embraces our doctrine of Total Depravity in that famous TULIP moniker, she will not long buck against the rest of the doctrine of grace. In a word, the Reformed understanding of creation, fall and redemption glorifies God because it shows sin to be sin and grace to be grace. It’s weakness is that it doesn’t answer every curious question we have, but then neither do the Scriptures and where do we get off calling that a weakness? Let us learn to be creatures dependent on God’s revelation and not be like Adam who broke God’s covenant.
Matt is driving forward toward areas where we start to feel the tension between the Reformed and the Catholic.
The difference as to due with the nature of Adam’s original righteousness, and as Steve has pointed out, the effects of the fall.
Like the angels, Adam suffered from no concupiscence. He was endowed with natural gifts. Was there grace? That is a question that depends on definition. God condescended to create man in covenant with Himself. Divine friendship was part of the creatures purpose for existence. Adam was to be a son and a servant. Was this gracious? Yes and no. God did not need to create man in such an exalted state. In this sense there is grace. But if grace is unmerited favor, one wonders how to judge of whether God’s friends is unmerited in Adam’s sinless state. What we deny is that Adam had some superadded gift… the domum superadditum. In other words, the Reformed deny the Medieval teaching that Adam was created with some deficiency that made was made up for by a “superadded gift” prior to the fall. Rather, we affirm that man was created after the image of God, was good, and was given no extra-added gift.
The point extends us into the effects of the fall. For the Reformed, original sin is not the loss of some etherial “superadded gift” but is rather a global distortion of the image of God as it pertains to body, heart, and mind. We are fallen. We are spiritually dead. We are totally depraved. We are in need of a 2nd Adam.
This is worth discussing! Thank you, Dr. Chellis. Before moving on, I just want to make one small point. It is not quite correct to say that “Adam was created with some deficiency.” This was admittedly a debated point, but it was perfectly orthodox (and, I think, a majority opinion) to say that Adam was created “upright” (that is, in original justice) from the moment of his creation.
And I don’t think that it is fair to call the “superadded gift” something ethereal. It was quite real. In fact, it is, at least from an historical standpoint, our truly human nature. It is the nature in which our race–the race of Adam–was created. It is this creation wherein we were made in the “image and likeness of God.”
I think it is worth continuing the dialogue about exactly where the Reformed and Roman Catholic traditions part ways here. I mean, the notion of a “superadded gift”, which is being disputed here, is partly based upon an abstraction that was always acknowledged to be founded upon a hypothetical situation. That is, human nature, as something made of flesh and bones and corruptible elements, would “naturally” tend to corruption (death) and have a tendency to gratify fleshly desires. “Rational animals” are not angels. But God, in His love for His creation and as the Master Crafsman, created man for beatitude and thus created him to be immortal and to be free from such concupiscence…
The notion of a “pure nature”–a human being without original sin and without grace–who would die and actually sin, etc., etc., is, historically speaking, a fiction.
Having fallen from that state, we have a corrupt, fallen nature that is prone to sin, whose intellect is darkened, whose will is turned away from its true end, etc., and that, worst of all, is utterly incapable of pleasing God. Thomas Aquinas is quite clear that the good of nature has been corrupted. Now, he would say that, from a certain perspective, human “nature” is still intact. Our sin did not make us a different species or anything of that sort. In other words, we still are rational animals with the capacity to understand, choose, emote, etc., etc. But we cannot choose God, we cannot withstand the temptations of the flesh, we cannot obey the commandments of the “natural” law (granting a kind of imperfect, civic virtue), we certainly cannot follow the supernatural obligations to believe, hope in, and love God. We are helpless without grace, “dead in our trespasses and sins.”
It is only Christ’s work and the grace that His work attained that make it possible for the human being to be, in this life, partly restored (I say partly because, for instance, we don’t become immortal as Adam was, we still struggle with sin in a way that he wouldn’t have, etc.) It is the incorporation of the believer into Christ that allows us to benefit from the Redemption that the Second Adam has brought about. We can be restored to that friendship and communion with God, being partakers of the divine nature, that is also referred to as “adoption.”
God comes to us first. As a Thomist, I reject the meritum de congruo where God responds to the human being who does what is in his powers. No, it is God who, from the foundations of the world, chose the elect, it is He who chooses the means of bringing about that election, it is He who, by “prevenient” grace, awakens/revives the fallen soul and draws him towards Himself, it is He who justifies the ungodly, which, in Thomas’ words, is God’s greatest work, greater than the creation of the universe! It is God who gives the unmerited grace of perseverance by which the elect comes to the truly human (even though supernatural) end of man, loving communion with God Himself.
Well…there’s always much more. But I’ll leave it there for further discussion.
Matt,
It is a delight to have discussion across ecclesial boundaries as it keep us honest and forbids the beating of “straw men”.
There is a great deal of fruit that can come from seeing how our Arminian/Calvinist debates have played out in another context as a Thomists/Jesuit debate.
I find little to disagree with in your post.
Lets sharpen things a little more. There are hints of that Augustine saw a covenant relationship between Adam and God prior to the fall. Reformed theology had developed that line of thought and refers to the whole affair as a Covenant of Works. We understand that covenant to be a matter of pure merit. Obedience leads to life. Disobedience leads to death. Eat of the forbidden tree and you will surely die. There is no room for grace. Strictly merit through the keeping of the law. Hence the title, Covenant of Works.
In response to Adam’s sin, God does something surprising. Coming in judgement, he gives a promise of life. The seed of the woman will crush the head of the serpent. The gospel has been proclaimed. Adam calls his wife Eve, the mother of all living, a testimony to his faith in the promise. A new order for the ages. A covenant of gracious promise through a Savior, a new Adam.
At the heart of the Reformed faith stands this fundamental division- the covenant of works (do this and live) and the covenant of grace (believe this and live). New we have come back to the original question of faith and works.