It is indeed remarkable how very seldom the Old Testament refers to this history of the Fall. This is not a sufficient reason for pronouncing it of later origin, for the same peculiarity presents itself at the time when, according to all criticism, it was recorded in literature. Prophets, Psalms, Proverbs never quote it; at the most, allusions may be found to it in Hos 6:7 and Ecc 7:29; and even Jesus and His apostles in the New Testament very seldom appeal to Gen 3 (Joh 8:44; Rom 5:12; 1Co 15:22; 2Co 11:3; 1Ti 2:14). But it may be considered that the Prophets, Psalms and Proverbs only mention special facts of the past by way of exception, that the apostles even hardly ever quote the words and deeds of Jesus, and that all lived at a time when revelation itself was still proceeding and did not lie before them as a complete whole. With us it is quite a different matter; we are in a certain sense outside revelation, make it a subject of our study and meditation, try to discover the unity which holds all its parts together, and devote our special interest to Adam as a figure and counterpart of Christ. The creation and fall of man occupy therefore a much broader place in the province of our thoughts than they did among the writers of the books of the Old and New Testaments.

Nevertheless, the Fall is the silent hypothesis of the whole Biblical doctrine of sin and redemption; it does not rest only on a few vague passages, but forms an indispensable element in the revelation of salvation. The whole contemplation of man and humanity, of Nature and history, of ethical and physical evil, of redemption and the way in which to obtain it, is connected in Scripture with a Fall, such as Gen 3 relates to us. Sin, for example, is common to all men (1Ki 8:46; Psa 14:3; Psa 130:3; Psa 143:2), and to every man from his conception (Gen 6:5; Gen 8:21; Job 14:4; Psa 51:7). It arouses God's anger and deserves all kinds of punishment, not only of an ethical but of a physical nature (Gen 3:14-19; Gen 4:14; Gen 6:7, Gen 6:13; Gen 11:8; Lev 26:14 f; Deu 28:15; Psa 90:7, etc.); the whole of Scripture proceeds from the thought that sin and death are connected in the closest degree, as are also obedience and life. In the new heaven and new earth all suffering ceases with sin (Rev 21:4). Therefore redemption is possible only in the way of forgiveness (Psa 32:1; Isa 43:25, etc.), and circumcision of the heart (Deu 10:16; Deu 30:16; Jer 4:4), and this includes, further, life, joy, peace, salvation. When Paul in Rom 5:12; 1Co 15:22 indicates Adam as the origin of sin and death, and Christ as the source of righteousness and life, he develops no ideas which are contrary to the organism of revelation or which might be neglected without loss; he merely combines and formulates the data which are explicitly or silently contained in it.

Tradition does little toward the confirmation and elucidation of the Biblical narrative of the Fall. The study of mythology is still too little advanced to determine the ideal or historical value which may be contained in the legend of a Golden Age, in many people's obsequious honoring of the serpent, in the equally widespread belief in a tree of life. The Babylonian representation also (a seal on which a man and woman, seated, are figured as plucking fruit from a tree, while a serpent curls up behind the woman as if whispering in her ear), which G. Smith, Lenormant and Friedrich Delitzsch compare with the Paradise narrative, shows no similarity on nearer view (A. Jeremias, Das Altes Testament im Lichte des alten Orients2, Leipzig, 1906, 203). Indirectly, however, a very powerful witness for the fall of man is furnished by the whole empirical condition of the world and humanity. For a world, such as we know it, full of unrighteousness and sorrow, cannot be explained without the acceptance of such a fact. He who holds fast to the witness of Scripture and conscience to sin as sin (as ἀνομία, anomía) cannot deduce it from creation, but must accept the conclusion that it began with a transgression of God's command and thus with a deed of the will. Pythagoras, Plato, Kant, Schelling, Baader have all understood and acknowledged this with more or less clearness. He who denies the Fall must explain sin as a necessity which has its origin in the Creation, in the nature of things, and therefore in God Himself; he justifies man but accuses God, misrepresents the character of sin and makes it everlasting and indefeasible. For if there has not been a fall into sin, there is no redemption of sin possible; sin then loses its merely ethical significance, becomes a trait of the nature of man, and is inexterminable.

This comes out, in later years, in the many endeavors to unite the Fall with the doctrine of evolution (compare Tennant, The Origin and Propagation of Sin2, 1905; A. S. Peake, Christianity: Its Nature and Its Truth, 1908; W. E. Orchard, Modern Theories of Sin, 1909; Francis J. Hall, Evolution and the Fall, 1910). All these endeavors lead to setting on one side the objective standard of sin, which is the law of God, and determining the nature and importance of sin subjectively by the feeling of guilt, which in its turn again depends on the knowledge of and the love for the moral ideal, and itself forms an important factor in moral progress. It is true that the strength of all these endeavors is drawn from theory of the descent of man from the animal. But as to this theory, it is worthy of notice: (1) that it is up to the present day a hypothesis, and is proved by no single observation, whether direct or indirect; (2) that the fossils of prehistoric men, found in Germany, Belgium, France and elsewhere have demonstrated the low degree of culture in which these men have lived, but in no sense their dissimilarity with mankind of today (W. Branca, Der Stand unserer Kenntnisse vom fossilen Menschen, Leipzig, 1910); (3) that the uncivilized and prehistoric man may be as little identified with the first man as the unjustly so-called nature-people and children under age; (4) that the oldest history of the human race, which has become known through the discoveries at Babylon in the last century, was not that of a state of barbarism, but of high and rich culture (D. Gath Whitley, “What was the Primitive Condition of Man?” Princeton Theol. Review, October, 1906; J. Orr, God's Image in Man, 1906); (5) that the acceptance of theory of descent as a universal and unlimited rule leads to the denial of the unity of the human race, in a physical and also in an intellectual, moral and religious sense. For it may be possible, even in the school of Darwin, to maintain the unity of the human race so long a time as tradition exercises its influence on the habit of mind; but theory itself undermines its foundation and marks it as an arbitrary opinion. From the standpoint of evolution, there is not only no reason to hold to the “of one blood” of Act 17:26 the King James Version, but there has never even been a first man; the transition from animal to man was so slow and successive, that the essential distinction fails to be seen. And with the effacing of this boundary, the unity of the moral ideal, of religion, of the laws of thought and of truth, fails also; theory of evolution expels the absolute everywhere and leads necessarily to psychologism, relativism, pragmatism and even to pluralism, which is literally polytheism in a religious sense. The unity of the human race, on the other hand, as it is taught in holy Scripture, is not an indifferent physical question, but an important intellectual, moral and religious one; it is a “postulate” of the whole history of civilization, and expressly or silently accepted by nearly all historians. And conscience bears witness to it, in so far as all men show the work of the moral law written in their hearts, and their thoughts accuse or excuse one another (Rom 2:15); it shows back to the Fall as an “Urthatsache der Geschichte.”

But it is the free act and therefore the guilt of man that has changed the possibility into reality. For the mind, there remains here an insoluble problem, as much in the question, why God allowed this Fall to take place, as in the other, how man, created in the likeness of God, could and did fall. There is a great deal of truth in the often-expressed thought, that we can give no account of the origin of sin, because it is not logical, and does not result as a conclusion drawn from two premises. But facts are brutal. What seems logically impossible often exists in reality. The laws of moral life are different from those of thought and from those also of mechanical nature. The narrative in Gen 3, in any case, is psychologically faithful in the highest degree. For the same way as it appears there in the first man, it repeatedly takes place among ourselves (Jam 1:14, Jam 1:15). Furthermore we ought to allow God to justify Himself. The course of revelation discovers to faith how, through all the ages, He holds sin in its entire development in His own almighty hands, and works through grace for a consummation in which, in the dispensation of the fullness of times, He will gather together in one all things in Christ (Eph 1:10). (J. Orr, Sin as a Problem of Today, London, 1910.)

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