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Chapter Three: Eschatology and the Fall
text, on which so much of the Augustinian theology of the fall was constructed, is eschatological rather that protological. Its aim is to speak of the last rather that the first Adam.
5. Wemusttakeintoconsiderationthenuancesthattheexpres- sion “good” or “very good” bear in their Hebrew original, as these are pointed out by Claus Westermann in his Commentary on Gen- esis. “In any case,” he writes, “‘good’ is not to be understood as indi- cating some fixed quality; the meaning is rather functional: ‘good for....’ The world that God created and devised as good is the world in which history can begin and reach its goal and so fulfil the purpose of creation [emphasis added] ... The Hebrew does not contemplate the sheer beauty of what exists prescinding from the function of what is contemplated.”10 This comment helps us to place the narrative of creation and the fall in an eschatological perspective; in declaring it to be “very good,” God had in mind creation as it will be in the end rather than as it then was. God creates “complete” and “final” things.
6. Neither of the texts referring to death as a consequence of Adam and Eve’s disobedience (Gen 2:17, 3:19) suggests necessarily that death did not exist before the disobedience. Both of them may be understood in the sense of a realization of what was already there due to creaturehood, which the human beings could have avoided if they had obeyed God. This would be supported also by the original mythology, which the biblical author must have had in mind and transformed11 and whose central point is that humans were expelled from paradise precisely because they attempted to obtain immortal- ity that only the gods enjoyed.
The patristic evidence seems to split in two directions, one at- taching perfection to the beginning and the other to the end of the world’s history.
To begin with, there is no reference to the fall in the Apostolic Fathers, the Didache, I Clement, Ignatius of Antioch, or the Letter of Barnabas. Even in Hermas, who speaks extensively about penance and the connection between sin and death,12 the idea of the fall is
10 Westermann, Genesis, p. 165f.
11 See H. Gunkel, Genesis, trans. M.E. Biddle (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press,
1997), pp. 37–39.
12 Hermas, Pastor, vis 1.18.
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