Re: The wrong horse in evolution education

The belief that Janice expresses below is held fairly widely but faces some problems, of which I'll note just one. While justification is often described as being purely forensic, in that God imputes the righteousness of Christ to sinners "without any merit or worthiness in me," it is not a mere legal fiction. God's word is creative & does what it says. Thus in the act of declaring the sinner righteousness, God makes, or begins to make, the sinner righteous. (Recognizing this has helped Lutherans & RCs to get past some of their historical differences over justification.) The problem is that if we try to understand original sin in the same way, we're forced to say that God makes all humans sinners because of the sin of Adam, & thus God is in a real sense the creator of sin.

I am going to try to refrain from getting into extensive debate about original sin here because I have what I think is a fairly substantive paper titled "Roads to Paradise and Perdition: Christ, Evolution, and Original Sin" coming out soon in PSCF. It will probably be more profitable to wait for reactions to that rather than deal with the issues piecemeal.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Janice Matchett
  To: Peter Ruest ; Jon Tandy
  Cc: asa@calvin.edu
  Sent: Monday, April 03, 2006 12:32 PM
  Subject: RE: The wrong horse in evolution education

  At 10:33 AM 4/3/2006, Peter Ruest wrote:

    ".. sin is not inherited."

  @ The sin of Adam is imputed to all human beings. (Just as the righteousness of Christ is imputed to those that God elected out from among the sinners before the foundation of the earth.)

  ....................
Received on Mon Apr 3 14:37:01 2006