Fallenness

The Question:
What is fallenness, how is it passed down from generation to generation, and why didn’t Jesus get it?

The Answer:
It is not a spiritual “germ” transmitted through Adam’s blood. Otherwise Mary would have had it as a daughter of Adam, and she would have passed it down to Jesus who was fully human and likewise a descendant of Adam.

Roman Catholic theologians, assuming a version of this “germ theory” of fallenness (i.e., “original sin”), felt the need to explain why the “germ” did not pass down to Jesus. They devised the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, making it official dogma in 1854. According to this doctrine, Mary of Nazareth was immaculately conceived in her mother’s womb, and supernaturally kept from the taint of original sin so that she could bear the sinless Jesus. There is no biblical basis for this idea, and it seems superfluous (as one of our MC students observed), for if God only needed to do a miracle to keep Mary from being born with original sin (i.e., fallenness), God could have just done that same miracle at the conception of Jesus. By the way, to support the dogma of Mary’s Immaculate Conception, which implies she was not subject to The Curse with its sentence of death, Pope Pius XII in 1950 established the dogma of The Assumption of Mary. According to this doctrine, Mary went to heaven directly at the end of her life, i.e., she was “assumed” body and soul into God’s presence.

The answer is “spiritual deadness.” Biblically, we discover the definition of fallenness by studying the fix or cure for fallenness. Jesus taught in John 3 that a person must be born again of the Spirit in order to even perceive the kingdom of God. Paul taught that our salvation involves a spiritual resurrection (Col 2.11-13), and confirms that the problem was that we were dead in our sins. Indeed, hadn’t God warned Adam and Eve that in the very day* that they ate the forbidden fruit they would surely die (Gen 2.17)? And yet they lived physically for almost a millennium. We realize that our first parents died spiritually, and with the loss of their spiritual vitality, they also lost whatever ability they had to transmit spiritual life to their descendants.

We can compare fallenness to the crash of a computer’s operating system. Imagine that you’ve designed a system complete with keyboard, mouse, monitor, printer, scanner, speakers and cpu with hard drive. When the system crashes, the peripherals still work (just as our physical limbs and organs still work), but the system will not do any of the things that you, its creator, designed it to do. It can’t serve you, and it certainly can’t design the next generation of computers. It must have its operating system (its spirit) brought back to life by a reinstallation (new birth) of software.

The bottom line is that fallenness is not a germ or any other substantive thing; it is a deficiency. It is the lack of that spiritual vitality that enables us to relate properly to God. Mary could not pass that vitality on to her son Jesus, but the Father of Jesus could. Hence, Jesus was born without the deficiency, without this spiritual fallenness.

* The NIV does not use the word day in Gen 2.17, but most versions do as it is in the Hebrew text.

posted by Roderick of TMin @ 11:31 AM