Creation/Redemption

3. The Fall

Human love for God is expressed as trust and obedience. God uses his freedom well, loving his creation "to the uttermost" (John 13:1). "Such is the generosity of God's goodness that He has not refrained from creating even that creature which He foreknew would not only sin, but remain in the will to sin."¹ Humans did not use their freedom well. The results have been this difficult world that we live in and our lack of freedom, that is, our enslavement to sin, to the powers of evil.
     The Bible depicts the fall as occurring after humans have discovered that it is in their power to love God or not love him. This was a discovery of something that God himself had created, namely human freedom ("knowledge of good and evil," Genesis 2:9, 17).
     Can we conceive of human freedom existing and not leading to at least one decision not to love God? That is, was the fall inevitable? This question can be asking for speculation about nonexistent past possibilities, but if it is a question about what sort of story God initiated with creation, then the answer must be Yes. Creation was not an experiment and it has not gone awry from what God intended. God knew that he would redeem creation, and so he knew that it would need redemption, that sin would come into being. God knew where the risky act of creating other wills would lead and took account of that knowledge before he created.² Milton's Adam was glad that he had sinned at least because his sin was a necessary step toward redemption.³
     The nearly constant effort in Christian theology to guard against any understanding of God as "the author of sin"⁴ becomes less important if we think of creation as the initiation of the whole creation-redemption story. The fall has a place in the development of the divine project of creation toward its goal. Love for God is one possible outcome of human freedom, which would not be possible if another outcome, namely sin, that is, the decision not to love God, were not also possible. God's way of carrying out his creation intention assumed that the fall would occur and that redemption would follow.
     Human freedom is therefore not merely an abstraction. It is exercised concretely and is real freedom. But it is not absolute. Neither human freedom nor any factor that limits it is subject to alternatives of complete power or no power. Every human decision is at least strongly influenced by the individual's physical and mental abilities, cultural mores and patterns of behavior, and countless other factors outside the person's will. But most important, and standing behind many or all of these other factors, are the powers of evil.⁵ The powers of evil may only pretend to exist independently outside human sin.⁶ It is clear, at least, that the inevitability of their power is itself a pretense, a lie, the myth by which unredeemed humanity lives. In other words, the result of that first decision not to love God is that people believe that their captivity to sin is final and unending (though this is usually experienced as toleration of limits rather than as captivity). There is, for humanity in that state, no story, because a story requires freedom.

Creation and Redemption

3. The Fall