Creation was very good! But this was not the last word… there follows the story that we call “The Fall.”

I. Sin in our Culture:

• The human race was made in God’s image, and is therefore good, but has fallen and in rebellion. This is a point on which we are very strongly criticized in our culture. To call a person a sinner is like the greatest sin you can commit! It undermines their humanity. People need to be encouraged and told that they have great dignity, deep worth… [true, but not the whole story!]
  
• Certainly from the time of the Renaissance onwards, European culture has tried to take an optimistic view of human nature. We have rights! To life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, for example. The middle ages had not expected happiness on earth — only the first taste of it. They expected it to come at the end. From the Renaissance onwards, however, human nature is good. Yes there are bad people, but that is the exception.
• We have a very strong tendency to identify sin with particular groups. Nazi Germany, for instance [or these days, the LGBTQI community, Muslims, drug addicts] — there has been the suggestion that we dealt with that, and it should never happen again! But of course it has happened again, and is happening.

II. The Bible on Sin:

• The Bible of course speaks about humanity as sinful, but what grounds do we have other than the third chapter of Genesis? We should also be able to identify this doctrine of sin at the heart of our Scriptures, namely, through the account of the incarnation, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. To put it very crudely, we know that we are sinners because of what happened on Good Friday. That is the ultimate ground.
• The cross means that we are all in the same situation regardless of our differences, because what happened on Good Friday is that when God personally met us as a human race, face to face, it was for practical purposes the unanimous decision of that representative company that he must be destroyed.

o The crucifixion was not the work of a few bad people. It was brought about by those who were and are accounted as the “best” people! The righteous, the priests, the scribes, the governing officials, and of course the crowd in the streets [also the disciples abandoning him!]. So unless we take the view that we are in a very special case, essentially what happened there was that the human race came face to face with its Creator, and its response was to seek to destroy him. That utterly central and crucial moment in universal history is the ground on which we are compelled to say that all of us, the “good” and “bad” together, are sinners.

• Now of course if that were the last word, then there can be no future for the human race. The only authentic response to what happened would be what Judas did when he went out and hanged himself! What future is there for the human race?

III. The Cross as God’s Response to Sin:

• But of course it is not the last word, because the crucifixion of Jesus, while it was on the one hand the work of sinful men and women, it was on the other hand the work of Christ, who went deliberately to that meeting point in order to give himself for the life of the world — so that at that point where we are judged and condemned without distinction, the cross cannot be used as a banner for one part of humanity against another. It is the place where we are all unmasked as the enemies of God.
• But it is also the place where we are offered the unlimited kindness and love of God, so that while that in a sense the first reaction to the cross is a sentence of death upon all of us, it is also a gift of life. For, as Paul says, I am crucified with Christ so that it is not I but Christ that lives in me! This life is no longer ours, but rather is one in which we live by faith in the Son of God who loved us and gave himself for us.
• That is why we preach the doctrine of original sin. We can only know that we are sinners because we have been forgiven — because it is sin itself that blinds us to sin! It is only the forgiven who can truly repent. So we do not speak of sin because we are in a position to pass judgment on anybody else, but because we are all in the same situation.

IV. Fall and Redemption for Fully Expounded:

• Romans 5-6 — our solidarity in sin. In Adam, we all sin, and in Christ, we are all made alive. This statement though, as has been grievously misunderstood, partly as a result of some words by Augustine. When “death passed from to all people,” the sin of Adam did not automatically make us all guilty. The true text means that it is because we have all sinned that we are in solidarity. Sin is not transmitted through the act of sexual intercourse, as Augustine came near to saying. This corrupted Western thinking about both sin and sex.
• Apart from those individual choices about which we are conscious and for which we are responsibility, we are also part of a network in which, from the very beginning, we become victims of sin, collectively (wars, poverty, environmental degradation, etc.). We are all together in this web of sinful relationships. It was there before we are born, and we are incorporated into it in the way that we are brought up into this situation.

o Original sin in this sense is much more intelligible. And in addition to this, any parent who has had to cope with a small child having tantrums because it doesn’t get what he or she wants understands very well what is meant by original sin.

–> The answer to this is “a righteousness from God by faith.” In other words, it is the gift of a relationship to replace the one that we had broken.

A. Theological Anthropology: What does it mean to be human?

• Our thinking has been very much shaped by the Greek conception of substance — the idea that behind everything we know, there is a kind of underlying substance, which is the real thing, and that everything is to be understood as its essential substance. But the truth in the Bible is that what we are is constituted by our relationships. We are human beings by virtue of the fact that we are related to others and to God. Human nature does not exist except in a pattern of relationships.
• In physics, for centuries, people have sought to identify the atom as the essential unit of matter — the ultimate substance that underlies everything. But of course we know now that the atom is actually a network of dynamic relationship between particles of electrical charges. Moreover, on the other end of the cosmic scale, it is proper to the Christian faith that when we use the word God, we are not speaking of some kind of divine substance. We are referring to a pattern of relationships of total and complete communion between three persons (Trinity).
• From this point of view, we can see that the fall is essentially the attempt by human beings — whose only relationship is one of dependence upon God — to establish for themselves a reality independent from God, which allows them to make up their own minds about what is good and evil, and not simply to stand in a relationship of love and obedience to the Creator.

o This is why the answer to the appalling fact of sin is the establishment of a new relationship — the righteousness of God by faith, and not our own righteousness. It is a righteousness constituted by the fact the God has accepted me in Jesus Christ, and in faith, we believe and accept. That relationship between Holy God and sinful us which constitutes the only righteousness that there can be. How is this brought about though?

B. Old Testament Background: The Old Testament is full of terrible stories of the wickedness of human beings — from Cane and Abel through all that leads to the flood story and the tower of Babel, which was another instance of human beings trying to establish their own authority. The response of God is the passion of God, which is a theme of the whole Old Testament, for sinful humanity:

• God invites a people to learn to live a new life simply by faith, called to leave home, rescued out of slavery, brought into a good and pleasant land. But that family defiled that land and rebelled again and again against its loving Creator. God responds in agony, sometimes threatening and apparently following through with terrible punishments — and then again repenting and wooing them back as his bride. We see this from the unconditional love but also anguish of God as expressed in Hosea and the Servant Song in Isaiah — the Servant who should be Israel fulfilling its true calling of bearing the sin of the world in its own heart.

C. The Culmination of the Story of Israel: And finally of course we come to our Lord himself, in whom all these signalings of the passion of God and prophecies are made flesh and blood in the life a human being. We see Jesus Christ calling Israel to fulfill that role to which it was called, to be God’s servant people for all the nations. And when that calling is denied, Jesus goes alone to the cross bearing the passion of God for a sinful world.

• And so, the one who is Lord of all is humiliated, cursed, cast out, executed with the execution of a criminal and a blasphemer, and cries out in desolation, “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?” going down to the greatest and darkest depths, so that nothing would escape his redemptive reach.
• God raised him from the dead, to new life, and exalted him to heaven as Lord and sent forth the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost to fill the church with the knowledge that this is the Lord, this crucified man, rejected by the world. And so the church goes out to proclaim the mystery of salvation.
  –> The point that Newbigin is especially trying to bring out by narrating the gospel story is that, this fact of God’s victory, is a fact of history before we come to our attempts to explain it. By the coming of the Holy Spirit, the church was given the assurance to preach this to the world, that the righteousness of God has been given to us, so that we, the unholy, may live in the love and fellowship of the Holy God.

D. Three Traditional Theories of Atonement, and Newbigin’s Signal Toward a Fourth: Newbigin is confident that when we talk about the atonement, we are speaking of something that we can never fully explain in human language, because we are dealing ultimately with that which is the contradiction of all reason, namely, sin. And if we could incorporate sin into a coherent rational structure of thought, it would no longer be sin. Our attempts to comprehend the atonement will always fall short of the truth of it. They can only point us toward this truth. And if one takes some of the great metaphors of reconciliation that are used in the Scriptures:

1. That of ransom, which draws on the experience of the redeeming of a slave from its master by the generosity of another, and was a metaphor of enormous emotional weight for a society in which slavery was so common. But of course if you push this metaphor to its conclusion, you have to ask, to whom was the ransom paid? So some early theologians said to God, and some said to the devil. Neither of them can be accepted, however, because to say that it was a ransom paid to God implies that God had to be placated in order to forgive us, and this sets an antagonism between the Son and the Father, which is wholly contrary to the Christian faith.
2. There is, secondly, the metaphor of substitution, in which another has died in our place, and that again has an element of deep truth in it. And yet it cannot finally explain what happened because it is so very clear that in the teaching of Jesus himself — although he goes before us, he alone can meet the ultimate enemy in that final battle — yet it is not in order that we may be excused from that encounter, but precisely in order that we may be enabled to follow him, to take up the cross and go the way that he has gone.
3. And again, there is the metaphor of sacrifice, which is so fully developed in the letter to the Hebrews, and so clearly fulfills the Old Testament regulations with regard to sacrifice, so that we see Jesus as the ultimate sacrifice to the father. But yet again, we must be careful not to state that in such a way as to make it seem that there is a relation of antagonism between the Son and the Father as though, once again, the Father needs to be placated [i.e., a punishment/penalty satisfied].

• It’s one of the little features of the Old Testament use of the word expiation or atonement that that Hebrew verb, which is so constantly used in relation to God is never used in the form which puts God as the object. It is used when Jacob wants to placate Esau who is coming to meet him with an armed band, and Jacob sends gifts ahead of him. There the word is used, he is trying to placate his brother. But that word is never used with God as its object. It is always that God has provided a sacrifice to make atonement concerning your sin or whatever it may be. It is used always in that subtle, indirect form, so that there is no question as it were placating the Father. On the contrary, the atoning work of Christ is also the work of the Father.

• And yet all these different metaphors help us, at least to come a little nearer, to the center of this mystery. Newbigin thinks that one of the most helpful of them is the one in which the Old Testament Hebrew word for mercy seat, the place where the sinner could be received by the Holy God is used, translated in Romans 3 as the place of propitiation. Surely here we come near to the heart of what was done there.

• It has created a place where we who are sinners, still sinners, can nevertheless, be in fellowship with God who is Holy. Because in this act in which the son of God in loving obedience to the Father has taken his place right where we are in our lost state and therefore made possible a communion in the Holy Spirit in which we share the very life of God himself — sinners as we are.
• This word koinonia/fellowship/communion, is actually a word that means common sharing in a property. It’s a shared participating in the actual life of the Spirit. And that place is the church, where we gather in the name of Jesus, we hear his words, and in the sacrament he ordained we partake — his dying and his victorious resurrection ad victory over death. And there is the place where we know justification and sanctification.

E. Justification and Sanctification:

• Justification, that is to say, being recognized by God not because we are in ourselves just or righteous, but because in this act in Jesus Christ, he has accepted us as just, as righteous. It is a righteousness on the one hand that is the sheer gift of God and on the other hand that is accepted in faith. It is never in our possession but rather something we receive moment by moment by faith in what God has done for me in Jesus Christ.
• And here also is where we know sanctification. But here sanctification does not mean a process by which we gradually become holy in ourselves, as though we could have a holiness which was not simply God’s gift, but was our characteristic. That would be a contradiction at the very heart of the gospel.

–> It is interesting that when Paul puts the words justification and sanctification together, it is sanctification that comes first: “You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified.” Both the words sanctification and justification refer to a relationship with God, not to something that we possess in our ourselves. And the holiness, which is the proper mark of the a disciple of Jesus, is not and can never be something that we possess in ourselves, so that we can say that holiness is so to speak a designation of myself. That perfect holiness is simply the relationship of faithful dependence upon the sanctifying grace of God.

F. Reclaiming the “Good News” of the Doctrine of Original Sin:

• And all this adds up to a very joyful preaching of the doctrine of original sin. G.K. Chesterton talked about the “good news of original sin.” If the whole lot of us are nothing more than a bunch of escaped convicts — and that is what we are, basically — then there is room for an enormous amount of joy in the church. We don’t have to go around pretending like we are righteous people.  And that is good news.
• We are forgiven sinners. We have been embraced, accepted and loved by the holy God. That is something which can only lead us to singing and dancing. We are delivered from the unbearable burden of trying to be ourselves, and in ourselves, righteous. We have only one thing to do — to give ourselves moment by moment as a thank-offering, to the one who has loved us and laid down his life for us. That’s what the Christian life is.

I. Genesis 1 is an absolute beginning. In the beginning… God. In Colossians, St. Paul spells that out more fully when he says all things in heaven and earth, visible and invisible. There are been many futile arguments that have resulted from forgetting the doctrine of Creation.

• For example, the theological question of “whether a thing is right because God commands it, or God commands it because the thing is right?”: This question implies that there is something called right which exists before or apart from God, but the phrase “all things invisible” protects us from that idea. We think of concepts like right and wrong, beautiful, or coherent, as if they have a timeless existence. But that is not so. All things have their sole source and origin in God.

Newbigin draws out five points that are brought out in those first chapters of Genesis:

1. There is an emphasis on the distinguishing of things, one from another, the separating of things — light from darkness, sea from land — and the different species of animals and plants. In general the distinctness and specificity of everything that is created.
2. Secondly, the created world is given a kind of autonomy and life of its own to reproduce, distinct from God (though not separate).
3. The whole created world is created as a home for the human family. On the fourth day, when the sun, moon and stars are created, these words were almost certainly written during the time of the Babylonian Captivity — working as powerless slaves under the shadows of the enormous palaces of their foreign rulers. The sun, moon, and stars were considered divine and part of the heavenly bodies by the Babylonians. They were even worshiped and prayed to. But on day four of the Creation Story, we get a different account of these “heavenly bodies.” They were placed in the sky by God for the home that God has made for his family. The meaning of the whole creation is that of home for God’s family.
4. The human family is given a particular responsibility. It is to cherish the creation, to bring the creation in the perfection which the Creator desires. This has an important message for our whole ecological concerns at the time. Moreover, it is not God’s intention that the world should be mere a wilderness. it is the be a garden, and the human family is to till, nourish and cultivate it. The human is given the responsibility of naming the animals so that we have a relationship with these animals. It’s part of the human responsibility to bring animals to their fullest potential as God created them to be. Take, for example, a well-trained dog in comparison to a wild one.
5. God looked at everything he had made and said it was very good. This contrasts so sharply with much of human religion which has regarded the world as a bad, dark and dangerous place. The world was created, in John Calvin’s words, to be a theater in which God’s glory is reflected.

II. “Pagan” (or just non-Christian) views of the Created World in Contrast:

• Nature itself is in some way divine and is the ultimate reality. This is expressed in both primitive and mystic forms, in which the physical world is seen as a place where divine energy rests. In Hinduism, for example, the sheer natural powers are identified with God. The power of human sexuality, for instance, is glorified.
• And things are seen as transient. Most of nature is marked by change, passing away, and dying. So there’s a strong tendency to feel that the ultimate reality must indeed be trans-temporal — something timeless and changeless to be grasped by the mind (thinking of Plato and Greek/classical philosophy here), rather than the fleeting things that we know by our senses.
• Plato said that the ultimate realities are ideas, non-material things. And everything in this world is merely an imperfect, shadowy imitation of the perfect, invisible world (Plato’s Allegory of the Cave). Aristotle makes the similar distinction between substance and accidents. All we really know and experience are accidents (characteristics). The substance of things remains hidden.
• So there comes to be this sharp distinction between what the Greeks called the sensible world and the intelligible world, and between the material world we touch on the one hand, and that we grasp with our contemplation and spirits on the other hand. And so the way to ultimate reality is thus declared to be via the mind, not the body. We must bypass the accidental happenings in history that cannot give us ultimate truth — either by the powers of human reason, mystical contemplation, self-transcendence, and to pass beyond to the eternal invisible.
• Therefore, history cannot have real significance! It may appear to be going somewhere, but it’s really just going around in circles. Now the Christian gospel was launched into a pagan world in which these were the dominant ideas! During the period in which Christianity was a persecuted minority, struggling for its life and advancing through its testimony by the martyrs, there could not be much mature discussion between these two ideas: the Christian gospel and these pagan views. But once Christianity was acknowledged as a permitted religion and as the religion of the Empire, the way was opened for vigorous discussion, which took place especially in the great intellectual center of Alexandria. In the 4th and 5th Centuries, these two worlds engaged each other.

III. The Christian Response: One of the convictions of the Christians was that you cannot build on the classical philosophy — the gospel builds a completely new starting point. If the Divine has indeed appeared in the person of Jesus Christ, then that has to be the starting point for all our thinking. Based on this conviction, and in light of the Greek philosophy it was encountering, several definitive thoughts arose that have been central for Christian theology ever since:

1. Since the world is the creation of a rational God, and since God has created us in his image, there is therefore rationality in the world which in principle our reason can grasp. Thus, we can take it as a matter of faith that the universe is ultimately, in principle, comprehensible — even though we don’t know everything about it yet. This is the foundation upon which modern science has been built.
2. Since Creation is not an emanation, this created world has a relative (not absolute) autonomy — a measure of independence. In Aristotle’s thought, everything that moves, moves because God is moving it. And this is followed by Islam even to this day. But for Christians, everything that happens is not the result of the direct action of God.
3. But how much autonomy does the world have? It’s possible to go to one extreme and say that it has almost complete autonomy. This is the image of a clock that has been wound up by God, and God no longer needs to interfere. This is called deism, which was very dominate in the 17th Century when Isaac Newton was working. Perhaps from time to time God would move in and adjust when necessary, but this “clock maker” model eventually becomes merely redundant by the time of the 19th Century in much of philosophy and science, which still has such a large influence today.
4. The other extreme, which we call pantheism, is when the world is understood as being totally dependent upon God all the time. The world is impregnated with God, and God is in everything, but God is not more than or independent of everything. On this view, you cannot distinguish God from the world. God is identified with nature. This thinking reasserted itself during the Renaissance. The New Age spirituality of today is an example of this same view. (So Christianity has always had to find itself in between these two extremes, deism and pantheism – more below)
5. Lastly, because of the Incarnation, it is permissible to think in terms of material means for our salvation. Whereas the Greeks had developed the science of medicine to a consider degree, and the practice of medicine, the Hebrews rejected it. Healing is the direct work of God and answer to prayer. There is no place for medicine. But the early Christian theologians argued that, since in the Incarnation, God had used the actual material life of Jesus Christ to bring about the salvation of the world, we cannot reject the material world as a means for salvation.
   o Medicine then, for instance, was accepted. And a whole healing ministry has been developed out of it — not to mention the wider developments of technology ever since, which Christians are certainly entitled to utilize and celebrate. Francis Bacon and others stated that we must development science and technology for the good of humanity.

–> But sadly of course we also know how technology can become an instrument for terrible evil.

IV. How do we answer this question about Autonomy, without falling into either extreme? How is the created world related to God? This is perhaps one of the most difficult and inescapable problems in all Christian thinking about the world.

• The reason why Islam has to reject the central Christian doctrine of Christ’s death on the cross as simply impossible is because Islam believes Jesus was an apostle of God, and that God could not have killed his own apostle. And since everything that happens in the world is a result of the direct action of God, it is incredible and preposterous to believe that Jesus died on the cross.
• But the other extreme is to claim total autonomy for the world, to see it as a closed system, entirely controlled by the laws of cause and effect (19th Century Positivism).

–> In both of these cases, there is no place for intercession, miracle or divine providence. We cannot ask God to interfere in a world that is quite independent, nor in a world that is utterly dependent from him. In sum, Newbigin doesn’t think that there is a metaphysical/philosophical solution to this problem. It depends rather on faith in God’s grace as revealed to us in the Bible.

But what might illuminate this further, however? How far does God “interfere” in the workings of the natural world?

1. God does not act arbitrarily or whimsically. There is an orderliness. Science helps us with this too, with the laws and regularities of nature. Without that, human freedom would be impossible. We can only act responsibly if we know that the world is not an arbitrary place.
2. Human beings have the responsibility and therefore the freedom to obey and disobey God. We can sin and repent. So certainly everything that happens is not the direct will of God. Human beings are able to do things that God does not will.
3. We can look at the world like a machine — how a machine works is different from what it is for… (this is also from his other lecture on “How do we Know?”)
   o There’s a hierarchy of levels of knowing a thing — atomic, molecular, mechanical, biological, etc. You cannot replace biology with physics, chemistry or mechanics, for example. Questions of purpose, however, are of a totally different nature.  While the world can at one logical level be explained as a self-operating mechanism, that is in no way a total explanation of the world. To attempt to understand the world apart from the purpose of what/who has created the world is a logical mistake. It is to misunderstand the difference between these logical levels.
4. Having said all of that, it still remains for us a mystery that God does give us this freedom to disobey him, that God does give to the world this kind of regularity which we cannot ignore or reject, and that yet God does “work all things together to good for those who love him” (Romans 8:28). It is only by grace through faith that we understand that. And that understanding begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus.

–> Because the cross is, from one point of view, the most complete contradiction of God’s purpose, and yet has become the most complete expression and action of God’s purpose. The cross and resurrection of Jesus are the place where by faith in response to grace we can believe even if we cannot completely explain, that, in spite of the relative independence God has given to the world, that nevertheless he does overrule all things for good to those who love him.

V. What does it mean to seek the truth: if we know what it is, why do we seek it? If we don’t know what it is, how do we recognize it when we find it? This is the conundrum of Plato (also from previous lecture on “How do we Know”).

• The passion to know, and the passion that leaves unwilling to accept mere confusion, which drives us to seek patter, order, beauty, coherence — in all the multitude of things that face us — that heuristic passion isn’t something which simply arises from below, but is the response to the grace of God who has made us so that we might feel after him and find him.
  o And if that is true, it brings our knowing and our being together, because we would have to understanding that it is that same grace of God calling of all creation to its full perfection, which also brings about the developments in nature. Evolution of living creatures in the world, not simply by blind forces from below, but rather by the response of the creation to the calling of its Creator. It is in us as human beings, finally, that this response becomes a conscious response, such that in all our hearts we struggle to grasp the meaning of this wonderful and perplexing world in which God has placed us.

–> And if that is our understanding, then we will also be able to understand what we call the Fall. We know that the human story is not the story simply of our faithful search for the truth and of our growth toward God’s purpose. If this picture above is true, then we can understand the Fall exactly as Genesis 3 portrays it, namely, as the struggle to know, perverted into the desire to have power for oneself. The serpent deceives Adam and Eve by temping them to try to know rather than trust. This is the essence of the fall, which explains why our use of science and technology, our stewardship of nature — which is suppose to serve humankind — can and has become so corrupted and self-destructive.

V. Finally, we are talking about not only the visible world, but the invisible world: invisible things, which are nevertheless real and powerful (e.g., structural and systemic sin — not just invisible sin).

• Sometimes in the Bible this is the political/imperial power, or the Jewish Law in Galatians, or Greek philosophy in Colossians 2. Sometimes it is the whole establishment that put Jesus on the cross (Pilate, the crowd, scribes, Pharisees, priests, etc.).
  o Caesar, for example, is the present embodiment of an invisible worldly power and ideology — a spiritual reality — that is represented temporally in human beings and human institutions.
  o Some individuals in positions of great earthly power nonetheless feel relatively powerless due to the institutional constraints and limits of the power structures in which they find themselves (capitalism, socialism, political parties, government branches, etc).
  o There can obviously be a good purpose within political power and economic order and so forth, but these are still fallen powers. They have also become part of this fallen Creation. They have sought to absolutize themselves. In this way, therefore, they can also become agents of evil against which we have to struggle.
• But as the New Testament reminds us, in his dying on the cross, Jesus has disarmed these powers. He has dethroned them! The prince of this world shall be cast out! They are not destroyed, but they are disarmed. So we live in the time in which these powers, which still exist, and still threaten us, have yet been robbed of their final authority.
• Therefore, we can, as Paul says, put on all the armor of God, and fight not against flesh and blood — not against other human beings — but against these principalities and powers — these invisible realities, which are part of the creation — God’s creation, a fallen creation! — but one that is nonetheless ultimately redeemed by the power of Christ.

–> And so we live by grace through faith in the confidence that God, who in the beginning created all things visible and invisible, will in the end reign in glory over all things, and that the earth will indeed be a theater of his glory