Thursday, December 7, 2023

"my wife made me do it": on the Adamic sin nature.

 Soren Kierkegaard wrote some very famous and once very highly-regarded philosophy books.  It was written very richly, with a lot of skill, but the surprising thing is that it offered a theological perspective in all that rich language.

He talked about the sin nature inherited from Adam and Eve in the garden, and how that still bore down hard on modern man, causing various anxieties and so forth, even in modernity.

Indeed, Adam looking for justification, blamed Eve for eating the fruit.

Could they blame the serpent though?  Indeed, blaming the serpent would mean they better understood their sin in reality, but no, they would in-fight rather than blame the eternal Enemy.

In Romans chapter 7, Paul talks about sin pressing in from his flesh, though he yet tried to live in the spirit.  His spirit was good, he said, but his flesh was full of sin.  He had those same desires we have today.  "That which I would, I do not."

That inherited sin nature, of which the King James Version uses a big word: "enmity" a kind of push-pull between the natural and the spiritual, a tension that holds some people forever in damnation, so many of the people of the world.  Even Paul laments these forces in himself, "O wretched man that I am!".

Elsewhere in the Bible, it says that we are tempted beyond what is "common to man", or in other words, we should remember that all of us are tempted.  Be inspired by those that hold the line against temptation, and pray for those that have succumbed to various temptations.

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