glenn morton wrote:
>
> At 08:15 PM 3/9/00 -0500, George Murphy wrote: ........................................
> But briefly, what necessitates the saving work of Christ is
> >the pervasiveness of human sin & the inability of people to solve that
> problem
> >themselves. Lack of an historical account of how that condition came
> about doesn't make
> >Christ unnecessary. (I do not mean that it is therefore of no value to
> try to
> >understand the origins of human sinfulness in the evolutionary process.
> But actually
> >what's harder is to make sense of the idea of original righteousness.)
>
> Of course you will be 'shocked' if I were to disagree. Vedic sin or evil is
> likened to an illness which can be cured by means of ritual. If the story
> of the Fall is false, then there are more possibilities than merely that
> Christ had to pay the penalty for sin regardless of how it came about. One
> possibility is to view sin as the Hindu's do. Christ is unnecessary in
> their theology for the remission of sin. Part of the problem I see with the
> approach you take is that it is provincial only seeing solutions within the
> Christian paradigm. There are lots of other possible solutions that the
> rational person should not rule out apriori. Evidence is one of the best
> discriminators between what is true and what is false. That is why I like
> to take a concordist approach.
Shocked * dumbfounded - almost!
The idea "that Christ had to pay the penalty for sin" is one of at least a dozen
"theories of the atonement" which have been held within Christianity. This particular
one has been very influential in the western church but no one theory has dogmatic
status. Most of them have been held by Christians who assumed Genesis 3 to be an
historical account of what happened with the first humans, but could also be held with
small variations by those who don't.
There are a number of ways of understanding the work of Christ & while some of
them may be commonly expressed in terms of a literal interpretation of Genesis 3, they
are not really dependent upon that. So one can't start from what Christ did & argue
back unambiguously to a knowledge of how sin originated.
Shalom,
George
George L. Murphy
gmurphy@raex.com
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
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