Carey Griffel: Welcome to Genesis Marks the spot Where we raid the ivory tower of biblical theology without ransacking our faith. My name is Carey Griffel and I was not gonna do a follow-up episode to my last one where I was talking about J Harvey Walton's dissertation. I was just going to leave it at that, but then I got to thinking about it and I decided that there's just too much more I would like to say.
[00:00:36] So I'm gonna go ahead and do a follow-up episode to that. Today I'm going to be getting into a little bit of pushback I have on some of his ideas. But I still really do want to follow the path of understanding it in a way that might be more helpful rather than just strictly critical. So I'm still not here to just pull it apart, even though there might be warrant to do that in some form. But I still really do want to bring it into a fruitful conversation rather than just a critical conversation.
[00:01:11] So be forewarned that this episode is going to be really rather speculative. I'm going to be talking about J Harvey Walton's ideas, but I'm gonna be bringing them into my own thought process and I'm going to be thinking about them in basically theological ways. So we're stepping slightly outside the realm of typical biblical theology and entering what might be a broader realm of theology in general.
[00:01:41] With all of that in mind, my major goal today is to explore how Walton's reframing interacts with Paul's theology, especially in Romans five and one Corinthians 15. And again, I will be bringing up some points where I have some questions about his reading.
[00:02:01] Our main question for today is , if Adam's story is about stepping into what we might call fragile human order, rather than the typical idea of falling from perfection, then what does it mean for Jesus to be the second Adam?
[00:02:22] Just a really brief recap of what I talked about last week. In Walton's dissertation, he describes Eden not as a perfect finished paradise, but rather as a space where God has begun ordering the creation. But that order is incomplete, it's immature, and from the beginning, humanity is invited to participate in the extension of that order.
[00:02:48] That extension begins via humans trying to create order in typical, ancient near Eastern ways in the Book of Genesis. These ways not only don't work, but they create a state where evil is introduced and then chaos comes collapsing back in to destroy the whole thing.
[00:03:10] Now, of course, that's just my retelling of what Walton's saying, and so probably he wouldn't fully agree with everything I say in the way that I said it. But in his reading, Adam and Eve's choice was not simply moral rebellion. Instead it was a step into maybe what I would call self-determined order.
[00:03:32] I would say that what Adam and Eve are doing is reaching for a divine prerogative before the time was right. And I think that reading it that way is pretty in line with what we see historically in the church. And I would agree that death was already the default outside the sustaining presence of the Tree of Life.
[00:03:54] So again, to briefly recap, Walton's Tri-part value model of the world here where he is drawing from Egyptian and ancient Near Eastern thought and seeing how those are really pretty parallel to what we have in Genesis and Genesis of being a polemic against those things.
[00:04:14] Walton particularly goes to an Egyptian model where we have order chaos and evil, although I don't really like the term evil because it doesn't entirely encompass the idea. When we think of evil, we're thinking of moral choice and the idea of evil here is not always or necessarily moral, but it does refer to a breakdown within ordered space. So morality is part of that, but it doesn't entirely encompass it.
[00:04:49] What I described in last episode is that we have an overarching state that is just kind of the baseline of everything, which we might call chaos. This is everything that exists without the imposition of order. It is unordered space. It lacks structure. It's definitely not always morally evil, but it is inhospitable to life, and that's what we have with Genesis one is the imposition of order upon this chaos.
[00:05:22] Order is harmonious. And it aligns with divine purposes, and it is life sustaining. It is something that needs to be maintained or sustained. Now, of course, the major maintaining of order is God, but he participates with creation, with humanity in particular, and we are to participate with God's desire to create order.
[00:05:49] Okay, so then our third aspect here is anything that is going to disrupt the order and bring back chaos. And the important point here is that evil presupposes the existence of order. It can only exist within a system that has structure in which to corrupt. Chaos, on the other hand, exists outside of the order altogether.
[00:06:13] So again, we do not have Eden as a perfect space, but it is an initial zone of divine order within a larger unordered world. That's why Walton describes Eden as divine space.
[00:06:29] Now this order, because it is implemented and sustained, is fragile. Now, that's not to say that God is fragile or that God's order is fragile, but the very fact that God wants to participate with us, to maintain and create and sustain that order makes it fragile. Not because God is the weak link, but because we are.
[00:06:55] God's purpose here is to create an order that is maintained and extended through human vocation, but we are weak, we are fallible, and we don't really do that all that well. Humans are tasked to work and keep the garden. This is language that has priestly overtones and it implies care and protection of sacred space. Now, chaos is still going to exist outside that garden space. We have no plants, we have no rain, we have no man to work the ground before the garden scene.
[00:07:34] I've already talked about death and mortality as being a kind of default. Without access to the Tree of Life, humans are naturally mortal. We weren't initially created immortal in any way, shape or form, because then we wouldn't need the Tree of Life.
[00:07:52] So the tree represents God's provision for life beyond the natural human lifespan, I would say. We get kicked out of the garden. We lack access to the Tree of Life. And so life in that way is sustained only in divine presence. So the expulsion from the garden means that we lost access to that life sustaining order, and it confirms our mortality.
[00:08:19] Now, for Walton, knowing good and evil is not moral awareness, but rather it's really the divine capacity to order and govern. It is a wisdom prerogative.
[00:08:33] Now, Walton in his dissertation does not really portray the eating from the tree as a premature claiming of authority to define and manage order, but he presents it as a legitimate choice for Adam and Eve.
[00:08:48] The act of eating from the tree disrupts their ability to stay in divine space and partake of the Tree of Life. This introduces what we might call a fragile human order and opens the door to the idea that chaos, or loss of divine protection, and evil, or corruption from within the human sphere, can now affect us.
[00:09:14] So for Walton, Adam and Eve's choice between the two trees is not simply a test in the way that we would normally suggest it was. Walton also doesn't think it was just breaking a rule. He's not really presenting this as a vocational failure, but a real choosing between human order, over divine order. Divine order would be staying in the garden where it is actually uncomfortable for human life because it is not organized for human order.
[00:09:50] So in this idea, death is not introduced by sin, but it is confirmed and entrenched by the choice that is made. Humanity becomes severed from the life source and locks them into a mortal condition. So mortality and disorder become an ongoing human reality that needs to be dealt with outside of God's presence.
[00:10:15] So really, I think one of the hardest points about Walton's thesis is this idea of the trees as being a legitimate choice rather than moral rebellion. I understand why that is something hard to process and that is going to be something that we're naturally, as Christians not going to want to really see it that way because we've never seen it that way before.
[00:10:41] I don't think his ideas are entirely opposed to the idea of immature taking. So the idea of the immature taking of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is that we took it before we were ready. Like God's plan was to give us that in time, but Adam and Eve instead chose to take it before they were ready. That's not what Walton is saying, but those two ideas are not entirely opposed to one another, at least the way that I'm thinking about it.
[00:11:16] So really, here's the question in my mind between these two ideas of the trees as being a legitimate choice and not a moral rebellion, as Walton is suggesting, versus a more nuanced idea that the tree was going to be given, but we took it too early. Now the taking of it too early could still be seen as moral rebellion. But there's also a nuanced way we could see it. Taking from the tree in immaturity would be like a child doing something that they shouldn't do, but they're doing it for kind of a legitimate developmental reason in their framework.
[00:12:00] And you're not gonna blame a child for those kinds of mistakes in the same way that you would blame a mature adult. So you see, even in the idea of Adam and Eve being immature, taking from the tree prematurely, that is not the same as an out and out mature adult rebellion. So Walton is saying that this is not a moral rebellion, but on the other hand, seeing it as a premature taking could be kind of a moral rebellion, but slightly a more understandable one if we're seeing them in the framework of immaturity.
[00:12:43] Now the whole problem with all of this is really that it's hard for us to kind of parse that and really walk through it when we want to see sin as a really firm doctrinal thing. Because our traditional view is that eating was a direct violation of a command. It was a sin that promoted guilt and ended up with judgment.
[00:13:08] But if you've listened to this podcast a lot, then you'll know that I kind of push back on some of that judgment idea. Adam and Eve are not directly cursed as the serpent and the ground are. So just with looking at the text really, really carefully, I don't think we can go this direction, that it was a sin that ended up with guilt and produced a judgment.
[00:13:34] Now there's something along those lines that are going on. They made a choice that ended up with a consequence that ended up with death. There's something along those lines that is similar, but I think there's a reason why we have the word sin only show up in Genesis four and not in Genesis three.
[00:13:57] What's going on with Genesis three is going to lead to what we have in Genesis four, but it is not exactly that. And I think the idea of maturity can be very helpful to us here. As opposed to the traditional view, Walton's reframing of it where eating might be a choice that leads to death. And loss of access to life and order and entrenched mortality. Well, if nothing else, that can fit really well with the idea of overreach and premature eating. So we kind of put a little bit of that rebellion in there, but it's not the same, again, as a mature rebellion.
[00:14:44] We see many Christians throughout history talking about this story as seizing a role before they are ready. Very similar to the child claiming adult authority before they're ready to do that.
[00:14:58] So now let's take Walton's idea of the legitimate choice between the two trees and see what it looks like in this tri-part lens that he brings out. So what we have is order. If the humans had stayed in the garden, they would be within the realm of divine order. Death would not have entered into that situation. That means that chaos would have been kept at bay, but humans would not have gotten the chance to participate in the human order in the way that we see it actually played out in history today.
[00:15:38] Now here's part of a little bit of pushback I have with Walton. He doesn't want to see the trees as being any kind of connection to the evil disruption within created order. And I don't understand why he does that, because personally I can see how in his tri-part structure here, what Adam and Eve do is still a disruption of order that brings into the world chaos. So whether or not we call that evil sinful, Adam and Eve's choice still becomes an internal negation of the order that brings in the chaos.
[00:16:20] But I don't think Walton is describing it like that, which I think this is one of his inconsistencies. And I think that if he saw that, then his ideas would actually align very much more with what we have in traditional theology, rather than being a disjointed idea from traditional theology as I think a lot of people are going to read it as.
[00:16:45] I mean, here's the thing, if the two trees are a legitimate choice, In the sense of something that humans were destined to have one day, then we could say that the act is not necessarily morally equivalent to rebellion in a legal adult sense.
[00:17:04] When we move into the New Testament, Paul's sin that came into the world that we have in like Romans five, that would be read as something other than simple law breaking. And we could see it as more of a headship level decision that altered a human condition. And that, again, really goes well with historical theology.
[00:17:27] Now, I would agree that this weakens the really neat crime and punishment model that we wanna have as evangelicals. But it does strengthen the idea of two paths of ordering the world. We have a divine order path, which leads to life, and we have a self-order path that leads to death.
[00:17:50] Now, I won't get into the description here, but part of Walton's idea is that in Genesis two 17, the language of you shall not eat. Well, that seems to be a command. And so removing sin from that equation as being a moral rebellion here, well, I think we can all see how that risks undermining the Adam to Christ parallel that we have in Paul if we're not careful to reframe that in covenant or representational terms.
[00:18:25] The strength of Walton's idea is that it fits ancient Near Eastern royal wisdom imagery, and it preserves the death as the default idea in Genesis that I have brought out elsewhere. And it reframes Genesis three as what we might call a vocational tragedy rather than just a moral failure. But even the word tragedy here, we're kind of presuming that human order, which includes things like death, is somehow completely wrong.
[00:19:00] And that's kind of where I'd like to dwell a little bit here. Now, I don't wanna say that there's nothing wrong with death and that we're presenting a story here where death is a perfectly fine thing. That's not my point. But my point is that yes, the ancient people saw death as a problem just like we do today, but they did have their own ways of dealing with that.
[00:19:26] Theodicy is the explanation for why we have evil and death and bad things, and how we can explain that. And what Walton is suggesting is that the ancient world had a different theodicy than we have today. Today, on this side of Jesus' work, we understand that what Jesus did was an undoing of everything bad in creation, right? He undoes evil, he undoes sin, he undoes death. He brings healing and restoration to the world. That is what we should be seeing in the work of Jesus.
[00:20:08] Well before Jesus came on the scene, it's not like people weren't wrestling with these ideas and trying to figure out how they could understand a world full of death and sin and chaos and corruption and all of these problems. They were dealing with the same philosophical problems that we deal with today, but they were doing it in a different way.
[00:20:33] For the ancient Near East, in general, their explanation for things that are bad involve all of these ideas of, well, if you don't have a king and you don't have civilization, and you don't have agriculture, well, that's when things are really bad. But again, according to the ancient Near Eastern mindset, if you have a proper king, if you have a good civilization, if you have agriculture that's running the way it should. And if you preserve your name and your memory with your descendants, then this is part of the undoing of death, the undoing of evil, the undoing of chaos, and basically the explanation of why and how things can be good.
[00:21:21] For us today, we're gonna look at that ancient mindset and we're gonna say, well, that's not enough. What about eternal life? What about bodily resurrection? Weren't they worried about those things? Weren't they thinking about that? And look, all we have is the data that we have. If we have no actual description of them thinking about those things, then we should not presume that they were thinking of things in the same way that we do today.
[00:21:53] And again, that doesn't mean they weren't thinking about them at all. It was just an entirely different framework. So then what we have in Genesis going on is an overturning of those common ideas. But Genesis wasn't overturning it in the way that we see in Christian theology and the New Testament with embodied resurrection, with the Spirit in dwelling us, with all of these ideas that we have now in the church.
[00:22:23] Genesis wasn't thinking that, but Genesis was trying to do the same kind of work. How do we understand death? How do we understand all of these other ideas that we have in pagan nations around us, where they are saying that it's kingship and civilization and fame that is going to undo all of that?
[00:22:47] Genesis instead puts it on its head and says, no, it's not all of those ideas, but rather the way that all of that is defeated is by being in covenant with Yahweh. That's the answer. And then you compare that idea with the idea in the New Testament?
[00:23:08] Well, I mean, it's basically one and the same. It's just that in the ancient world, we're thinking a covenant with Yahweh in a certain way, and Jesus comes on the scene and we have a new covenant. So that's very different, but it's also fundamentally the same.
[00:23:30] One of the things I've been working on kind of in the background a lot in this podcast is how do we see the gospel in Genesis? The traditional way to do that is we zone in on a few verses, right? We zone in on the serpent seed and the woman's seed and oh look, that's the gospel. And I mean, that's part of it.
[00:23:55] But what I'm really appreciating about the work and ideas of the Waltons here in forms of covenant and order and axiology, like I was talking about last week. If we are thinking of the gospel message as the Messiah coming into the world and repairing things, making it all restored and good. Well, if we go back into the book of Genesis, then the gospel message is very much the same. The gospel message is covenant with God. Being in relationship to God.
[00:24:30] We are living in a fragile, ordered human existence. And in order to defeat the problems that that brings, we have to be in covenant with God. In the Old Testament, that meant covenant with Yahweh, being part of the Israelite nation. All of these ideas there.
[00:24:50] In the New Testament, we are now part of Israel in a way that we are in Israel because we are in Christ and we're in Christ because he's the representation and the embodiment of Israel. Jesus did what the people of Israel could not do on their own.
[00:25:09] And while we could see that as two different things, it seems to me that we can really bring them together in a big way here. It's old and new. The old leads to the new.
[00:25:22] Okay, so coming back into Walton's ideas of the two trees and being a legitimate choice. A choice between the Tree of Life, staying in the divine world where we don't die, but we're also not really fully living out our vocation as humans. Versus the choice of the Tree of Knowledge causing us to now live in a human existence .
[00:25:48] Again, I understand how that seems to minimize the moral dimension of the act. And I think that's really what Walton is doing. And it's really hard, then, to go into Paul and see sin entering through one man. Well, one of the things that I find inconsistent with Walton's work in his dissertation is that he is suggesting that the divine space in Eden and the situation with the trees is not a covenant.
[00:26:19] That's one of my biggest problems with this whole thing. Walton is saying that Adam is not a priest, rather he is a royal steward. He is saying that Eden is not really a temple because it is literal divine space rather than divine space on earth, I guess we might say. And he is saying that Genesis two has nothing to do with covenant.
[00:26:44] And he has reasons for thinking all of these things, but those reasons are because this whole situation in Genesis two and three do not include all of the elements of the priesthood. They do not include all of the elements of the covenant. And the idea of divine space versus the idea of divine space on earth. Those are somehow two different things to him.
[00:27:11] That's something I don't understand. I don't see why we have to be that particular and that distinctive in those differences.
[00:27:21] The first story does not have to have all of the elements of the later stories in order to be in parallel with them. So Adam does not have to have every aspect of the priesthood in order to be a priest because he's a proto priest. He's the first priest. There would be reasons why he doesn't need to have all of the elements of a later priest.
[00:27:48] And the idea of Eden as divine space versus being a temple. Again, I don't really see how that has to be that distinctive of a difference to be two separate things.
[00:28:02] And I understand how he's getting at this idea that not all of the elements of covenant are present in Genesis two. That does not then make it not a covenant. It's not a formal covenant in the same way that we have later ones. So I would agree with saying, okay, it's not really a formal exact covenant, but I would say it's a proto covenant.
[00:28:29] Let me dig a little bit more into my disagreement and what I see as him being inconsistent here. Now we've talked a lot already about law collection versus law code, so I won't go over all of that right here. But Walton is invoking the idea that ancient Near Eastern laws were more like collections of wisdom than they were codified legal statutes. Okay? I say that's fine, that's all well and good.
[00:29:00] And that then entails what we have in a covenant is not a set of law codes, and therefore you're not out of covenant simply by quote unquote breaking a law.
[00:29:15] You bring those ideas into Genesis two, and then what we have here is Adam is not kicked out of the garden simply because he broke a law. Him breaking the law or disobeying the command is not then the reason that he gets kicked out of the garden. I'm actually fine with all of that.
[00:29:40] But Walton then goes back into Genesis two and tries to say, oddly that Genesis two cannot be a covenant because Adam isn't kicked out of the garden by breaking the law. It's almost like Walton forgets the distinction between collection and code when he brings it back into Genesis two.
[00:30:06] I think what he's trying to do is explain how the consequence of getting kicked out of the garden was not just because Adam broke a law. But how does that explanation, then, turn into the idea that there's no covenant here? Because Walton's literally saying that covenant doesn't involve the law code idea.
[00:30:31] He's using this as an example of why there's no covenant in Genesis two. That doesn't make any sense because if covenants are not law codes and if Adam's not kicked out of the garden because he broke a law, then it still goes along with the idea that there can be a covenantal type relationship here rather than our idea of law code and legal stipulation.
[00:31:01] My point here is that ancient people conceived of commands or laws in a different way, but that doesn't erase what's going on here in Genesis two. It actually really meshes well with what we have in Genesis two with the idea of covenant and law collection.
[00:31:22] In other words, I'm trying to say that Adam eating the tree can still be part of the breaking of the covenant. Because it's not the law code. It is not specifically why he got kicked outta the garden. There's a broader picture here.
[00:31:39] But let's move into the implications for reading the New Testament. If we adopt what Walton is saying here, then Adam's act as described in Romans five, needs to have a new look. I think that this can fit really well with some relational and covenantal models of sin. But I understand the concern that this risks softening the moral gravity here that people want to attach.
[00:32:10] When we read Paul saying through one man sin entered the world, then we would have to interpret that not as being the first moral evil necessarily, but rather a decisive human act that entrenched death into the world by the choice of stepping outside God's divine life order and stepping into human order.
[00:32:37] I mean, we can see how this would matter for Paul. in Romans five and also in one Corinthians 15, it kind of hinges on the universality of Adam's act What we have with what Adam did is a kind of archetype of humanity's problem in general.
[00:32:56] We do, however, have Paul saying that not all transgressions are the same as Adam's. Adams is somehow distinctive. So if Adam's action is not sin in the fullest moral sense, like an adult mature person making a mature moral decision, then Paul's analogy between Adam and Christ becomes less about legal guilt and more about rival orders of existence. For instance, the idea of self-rule versus divine rule.
[00:33:36] Now I can see how that is kind of a major theological shift for many people, and we need to explain it very carefully to avoid reducing sin to bad timing or immaturity. And really it doesn't have to be an either or. Especially when Paul himself brings out the idea that Adam's sin is not like everyone else's sin necessarily.
[00:34:01] Actually, let me hit a little bit more on this idea of covenant and law code or law collection, ' cause I think that might help us with Paul. Walton suggests very strongly that covenants are not law codes. They're not about legal stipulations, But he is partly rejecting the incident in Eden as being a covenant because it's not a law code. And I just think that's inconsistent because if Eden is covenantal, then it sharpens all of these ideas.
[00:34:36] In the ancient Near East, a covenant is fundamentally about a relationship of loyalty and obligation between parties. It is formalized by a sovereign and a vassal. And again, it's not about just written, codified legal statutes.
[00:34:53] And then Walton in part says, because Genesis two lacks a structured set of stipulations and sanctions, typical of a law code, then he says it's not functioning as a covenant.
[00:35:06] And here's the inconsistency, Walton emphasizes that ancient Near Eastern covenants aren't law codes. So the absence of a codified law doesn't disqualify Genesis two from being covenantal. Walton and others say that in ancient near Eastern Covenant, the covenant relationship exists before the formal written covenant.
[00:35:31] So the fact that we don't have a written covenant in Genesis two doesn't or should not disqualify it. So I think that Genesis two and three definitely has those covenantal dimensions. We have God as sovereign, we have humans as vassals, and there's obligations there.
[00:35:53] There's blessings like the Tree of Life, and there's potential curses like expulsion or death. And Adam's failure fits naturally into this biblical pattern of Adam as being a covenantal head. And he parallels later figures like Noah, Abraham, Israel, David. And if we see this as a covenant violation, which is not necessarily the same as a sin, then we have the loss of blessing. We have exile from sacred space and we have death.
[00:36:29] And so this would align very closely, I think, with Paul's Adam and Christ parallel that we have in Romans five and one Corinthians 15 where Christ functions as the covenant keeper and restorer.
[00:36:47] So again, I think if we keep this idea that Adam is explicitly covenantal, not in the sense of a covenant of works versus a covenant of grace, but rather a proto covenant, then Christ as the second Adam is not just reversing a vocational failure or even reversing a sin in particular, but Jesus is fulfilling covenant obligations on behalf of all humanity.
[00:37:16] And so again, I think this strengthens a headship motif that we see in Romans five and supports a broader biblical theology pattern where covenant heads represent their people. This is as opposed to what Walton is saying in some form, because he's divorcing the idea of Adam as Israel.
[00:37:37] Which that is something I don't understand. I get that Walton is trying to keep the context of Genesis in Genesis, but I don't think Genesis has a context outside of the compilation of the Hebrew Bible in particular. I think that that compilation of Scripture is what we have as the context of Genesis.
[00:38:01] So Adam must be seen as Israel, rather than Walton's idea that Adam's story is distinct from the Israelite story in general.
[00:38:12] It's just really strange to me because I think in general most of Walton's work fits really well with this covenantal idea. And so it's bizarre to me that he makes this break here because if Adam has nothing to do with covenant at all, as Walton seems to be suggesting, then the whole thing kind of breaks down theologically, which Walton might not care about that because he's not trying to make a theological argument.
[00:38:42] But again, I just don't see how you can take the book of Genesis out of the canon of Scripture as its basic, fundamental context. We don't have anyone in the story writing it way before Moses or something. We don't even know if Moses wrote Genesis.
[00:39:01] But we do know that Genesis fits really well as a prologue to the entire Hebrew Bible, and as such, it forms a really good prologue to covenant. It's just so strange to me that Walton is divorcing that idea, especially when all of his ideas are leading up to the idea of covenant as being the ordered principle.
[00:39:26] I think a lot of people who have either read his dissertation or are going to read his dissertation. really kind of have this negative reaction, and rightly so, because it's really strange how he makes this distinctive difference here.
[00:39:42] Again, if there is no covenant situation, and it doesn't have to be a formal covenant, it doesn't have to be a covenant that looks like a later covenant, and it certainly doesn't have to be a law code with legal stipulations, but if we still see it as part of the covenantal narrative, then basically all of Walton's ideas fit really well theologically with the historical church. And when I say the historical church, I'm just looking at theology across time and the things that we generally will agree upon in Christianity.
[00:40:18] Now that doesn't mean everybody's going to agree with that, certainly. But just looking at the overall picture, what Walton is saying can fit really well if we keep the covenantal narrative in Genesis two and three. Again, I have to repeat myself, but I'm not talking about a covenant of works with Adam.
[00:40:38] That's not the picture of covenant we have here. I think the picture would be in line with all of the other covenants in Scripture, in which case we then have to ask tough questions of why did they look different? What are the distinctive differences there? But first of all, we need to see what is similar, because if we don't see what's similar, then there's no real basis for comparison at all to begin with.
[00:41:07] I began my discussion about covenant theology. And covenant theology goes down those paths of the idea of Adam having a covenant of works as opposed to later covenants of grace. I don't think that we need to see that distinctive difference. I think there is more parallel here than what that suggests. And I just wanna make sure I make that clear here, because I'm not talking about a covenant of works. I am suggesting that what we have here is the instigation of the whole thing.
[00:41:40] And whether or not you want to call that a covenant is kind of beyond the question honestly. Because again, this is why I love frame semantics. If we are less focused on, we need to see the word covenant here. Versus how do we see the concept? Then that's going to help our actual view of what we can see in the text and how it is conceptually framed.
[00:42:09] So no, we don't have the word covenant. No, we do not have all of the elements of a covenant. But do we see the framework here? And I would suggest yes, yes we do. If Eden has those covenantal dimensions, then Christ as the second Adam becomes the covenant restorer.
[00:42:33] Then we can move into the Jesus temptation parallel. Adam was in a garden of abundance and he was tempted to grasp prematurely. Jesus was in the wilderness of chaos and he is tempted to seize provision and power before God's timing and in a way contrary to God's purposes. So we have Adam who reached for self-rule, and then we have Jesus who chooses divine order even in hunger and weakness. This frames Jesus not only as the one who overcomes death, but as the faithful representative human who resists what Adam's pattern was from the start.
[00:43:19] All right. I want to move on to Romans five, and I'm going to read the text here in a second. But Walton has an excursus in his dissertation where he talks about Romans five, and he says that Paul's Adam- Christ contrast is not really a theodicy. In other words, he is saying that Paul is not trying to prove that every single death is like a just dessert of personal guilt.
[00:43:48] And in fact, it seems like Paul says the opposite, sin is not charged where there is no law and yet death reigned. It seems like this is not retributive accounting. And I'm okay with presuming that Paul is not giving a the or an explanation for death in general, like, we usually suppose that this is where we say that everyone is guilty and everyone dies because everyone sins. That's not really a very satisfying reading for the passage, to be honest or logically even really.
[00:44:22] But there's still something here in that there's a contrast between what we have in Adam and what we have in Christ, and we really need to see how that contrast is being portrayed. Adam did a thing and that thing led to sin and death. And Walton's dissertation kind of has a lot to say about that, right?
[00:44:44] And my suggestion is that Covenantal headship fits this perfectly without collapsing Romans five back into a theodicy. I don't think we really need to see all that much of a chronological theological disconnect between Genesis two read in its ancient context, and Adam, as Paul sees him. Of course Walton tries to kind of say that there is that disconnect, and honestly, I'm not sure there is one, at least not to the extent that Walton says.
[00:45:19] When a covenant head breaches the covenant relationship, the people are swept up into the consequences of that breach where they have exile, they have loss of access to life and God's presence. And even when many individuals didn't personally commit the inaugural act, they're still stuck in that. And this explains universal death without claiming that God had to justify each death as individually deserved. It's like solidarity and representation. And I know, I know. We think that, hey, now that's unfair. But it fits within this ancient context.
[00:46:03] And I think this is key. Covenant headship actually strengthens the typology that Walton is bringing out. A typology really needs a one-to-many structure here, not just a literary echo, which is what I fear he's trying to do. Now I think he's saying that, yeah, Paul was just using this text back in Genesis literarily in a new way. And frankly, I don't think it has to be like that.
[00:46:32] I think, unlike Walton, that from the beginning, people were reading the story of Adam as an allegory with Israel. Honestly, I don't see how you get away with not seeing that. So then here's one way to see this. This is just one idea amongst several that I think that we could go with.
[00:46:52] Adam being the representational head of humanity, Adam as that covenant head, he provides the means by which one man's act produces unearned consequences for the many. Now we have death outside the life source. So then we have Christ as the new covenant head, and he can likewise bestow unearned life on the many.
[00:47:19] Walton wants unearned death matched by unearned life, which is fine. And covenant headship supplies exactly that structure. It's not justice satisfaction on every individual. But it is representational participation in the head's outcome. That's what makes Adam a type of Christ.
[00:47:45] Notice too, in this reading that I'm going to do, how Paul's words sit naturally in a covenant frame. We have disobedience, which is not just breaking a statute, but rather failed loyal allegiance to the sovereign.
[00:48:02] We have trespass, and this is a boundary crossing term that fits covenant breach just as well as it fits a traditional idea of law code violation. So when Paul says, by the one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners, and by the one man's obedience, the many will be made righteous, he is not asking us to add up all of our personal infractions. He's contrasting t and the real participation we have in their orders of life.
[00:48:37] So I agree with Walton's typology, but I think that Adam is both type and covenant head and Christ is both anti type and covenant fulfiller. That preserves Paul's non theodicy posture that Walton wants to see here. And it explains the universality of death without retributive bookkeeping. And it clarifies how unearned death and unearned life move through a people by covenant solidarity.
[00:49:12] Okay, so now I'm going to read the text and I will give some more thoughts here.
[00:49:18] Let's go ahead and look at Romans five. I'm going to go ahead and read verses 12 through 21. Romans five says, quote, "Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given. But sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one man's trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free gift of the grace of that one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for many. And the free gift is not like the result of that one man sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brought justification. For if because of one man's trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
[00:50:41] " Therefore, as one trespass led to the condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man's disobedience, the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience, the many will be made righteous. Now, the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord." End quote.
[00:51:20] There is way more in this passage than I could possibly unpack in a single episode, but I want to kind of highlight some of these ideas and suggest that if we're reading this through the idea of covenant and law collection. Versus the idea of law code and legal stipulation, then it does shift our framework of viewpoint here.
[00:51:45] Yes, we have the word sin, we have the word trespass, we have the word disobedience, and all of that is applied to the story of Adam.
[00:51:55] But again, if those things are not relegated to a simple idea of breaking a single law versus something a little bit broader and a little bit more in line with the idea of covenantal disorder and taking wisdom, when you're not supposed to take wisdom in an improper way, then all of that can still work together.
[00:52:21] Because again, we have distinctive differences here. We have Adam as one whose transgression was not like everybody else's. And we have the idea that sin was in the world even before the law was given. And the law is probably talking about Sinai in particular. So it's giving a really broad, big picture view of a lot of things.
[00:52:46] What we have in one type of traditional reading of this is that Adam sin introduces physical and spiritual death. And for some they're saying that there's a transformation of humanity itself because we had an immortal world and now we are mortal. That's kind of a traditional reading .
[00:53:08] But if we reframe that as death already being a human condition and possibility or a default apart from the Tree of Life, then we have death coming through sin, and that means Adam's choice entrenched humanity in that self-ordered human existence, cutting us off from access to the life sustaining presence of God.
[00:53:32] Then what we have through the rest of the Hebrew Bible is this desire and project of God to still be in our midst in a way that is life sustaining and bringing his presence and order. That's the whole point of the covenant with God. We are being brought into his life sustaining presence, and that causes flourishing of life, and it means that we're not allowing evil in to disrupt that order.
[00:54:02] So then Paul's reign of death is humanity living entirely within the realm of fragile order, and aligning ourselves with entities, even, that are disruptive to that order. It's possible here that the difference in terminology that we had in the Greek. We have the word sin. You know, it's very common to see sin as missing the mark. Well, what mark are we hitting here? What if it's missing the mark of human vocation rather than being solely a legal transgression?
[00:54:37] Then we have the word transgression here in Greek. Stepping over a set boundary, which could fit the Eden story as breaching divine ordering limits. So Paul's logic here is that Adam's one act put many in the state of sin and death. And then we have that as opposed to Christ's one act where we have many in a state of righteousness and life.
[00:55:03] So if this is covenantal, then Adam as the covenant head who fails, we are exiled from divine life. Then we have Christ as the covenant head who obeys and he follows the wisdom of God. And then we have restored access to divine life. And again, I think that fits the biblical pattern. We have Noah, Abraham, Israel, David, all covenant heads whose obedience or failure shapes their people's destiny.
[00:55:37] Taking just a brief moment into one Corinthians 15. We have the same kind of things here.
[00:55:44] I'll go ahead and read one Corinthians 15, 20 through 28. Quote, " But in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead. The first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die. So also in Christ shall all be made alive. But each in his own order. Christ the first fruits. Then at his coming, those who belong to Christ. Then comes the end when he delivers the kingdom to God, the Father, after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For God has put all things in subjection under his feet. But when it says all things are put in subjection, it is plain that he is excepted, who put all things in subjection under him. When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all." End quote.
[00:56:57] And there we have Adam as the first man who becomes a living being. He's vulnerable, and he's sustained only in the divine presence.
[00:57:07] Then we have Christ who is the last Adam, and he becomes a life-giving spirit because he's the intrinsic source of life and able to share it permanently.
[00:57:17] So the contrast here is that there's two kinds of human existence, the Adam kind, where we have self-order life. It's finite, it's perishable, and it's shaped by dust. Then we have the Christ kind of existence. The God- ordered life. It is imperishable. And it is shaped by heaven.
[00:57:42] So going back to the idea of death as default. Adam's act doesn't create mortality, but it locks humanity into it by cutting off God's sustaining presence. And then Christ, by defeating death, doesn't just reverse Adam's act, but he provides a new mode of human life that's immune to chaos and evil.
[00:58:07] And that's what we see in the temptation narrative. Jesus resists the exact pattern of grasping that Adam fell into. And his obedience under extreme deprivation shows he can hold divine order intact even in the most chaotic conditions. His obedience continues through his ministry . And there's the resurrection, and this is the vindication that his way of life, God's order over self-order or human leads to incorruptible life.
[00:58:39] So the Adam Christ parallel here could be seen as Adam's humanity is a fragile order. It is subject to disruption. And Christ's humanity is a stable divine order that is unshakeable and eternal. So we might say that the good news here is the invitation to move from Adam's humanity to Christ's humanity. From a life sustained only in Eden's boundaries to a life sustained eternally in Christ himself anywhere.
[00:59:13] In either reading a traditional reading or Walton's reading, we do have two Adams and two outcomes. So going back to the tri-part model where we have chaos. In that mode, death is the ultimate form of disorder and the marker of life outside God's sustaining presence. Then we have what we might call the the disrupted order within.
[00:59:38] And in Adam, sin then becomes entrenched with human alignment with corruption, and that makes death inevitable and unbroken.
[00:59:49] Now, the Genesis story is that that is undone by being in covenant with God. Then we move into the New Testament and in Christ, in the new covenant, resurrection brings life into a state of incorruptible order that chaos and evil cannot penetrate. In Christ, we have Spirit-filled life that secures order forever.
[01:00:16] Ultimately, the end goal is to have all things in order. Christ's resurrection as the first fruits signals the reordering of creation that has begun. Chaos is defeated, all enemies become subdued, and the last enemy is death itself, the ultimate in chaos. We also have evil eradicated within this.
[01:00:42] Christ delivers the kingdom to the Father, so there's no competing will. There is no internal corruption. With God, who is all in all, there is a complete saturation of divine order through creation. There is no longer anything outside of that.
[01:01:02] Paul uses creation order imagery like seeds and plants and celestial bodies to explain this transformation in one Corinthians 15. The Eden parallel here is that the garden had life, but it was in perishable form. We could be cut off from it. The picture of new creation has life in imperishable form where we are no longer cut off from it because it is integrated into our very bodies.
[01:01:34] So chaos becomes eliminated by the resurrection body being fitted for stability in God's realm and no longer subject to decay in the human realm. We're not lifted up into heaven to be disembodied. Rather, there is a new earth that we are inhabiting, and again, evil becomes eliminated because the body is Spirit animated and fully aligned with God's will.
[01:02:02] We don't have time to get into this, but in one Corinthians 15, we have kind of four transformations here. We have perishable to imperishable, and this overcomes the chaos and death. We don't have entropy, we don't have decay.
[01:02:19] And then we have dishonor into glory. This is a picture of overcoming evil. There is no corruption within creation itself.
[01:02:29] We have weakness into power, and this is a picture of order being established with full capacity for divine vocation.
[01:02:38] We have a natural body that becomes a spiritual body, not in the sense of being disembodied, but in the sense of securing that order because the spirit's life is going to animate every part of our existence.
[01:02:54] The picture of Adam being the living being is dependent on certain things. And that life is vulnerable. Being in the last Adam has us sustained eternally.
[01:03:07] One interesting thing is the idea of how all of this fits in with different traditions.
[01:03:13] We have Augustine's idea, where Adam's sin is imputed to all of humanity and death is physical and spiritual, and we have the whole idea of original sin that's transmitted at conception and all of that. None of that really fits well with anything I've been talking about today. That's kind of the traditional idea right there.
[01:03:36] We have reformed theology that kind of maintains that Augustinian framework, although we do have an emphasis on federal headship and things like that, and so there are some things there that can fit in with this covenantal model, but usually it goes a little bit too particular along with it.
[01:03:55] We have Roman Catholic theology. There is a tendency there to distinguish between loss of original righteousness and a tendency towards sin, which is similar to evil as corruption that, if left unrestrained, will disrupt the divine order. This theology, I think, seems to align a little bit better with all of these ideas than Augustine, but there's still some distinctive differences where it doesn't really work out all that well.
[01:04:26] Now, from what I understand in Eastern Orthodox traditional ideas, that seems to be a little bit closer to what we're talking about today. In that tradition, there's a really big emphasis on Christ overcoming death and removing sins' dominion, and thus restoring access to order. There's definitely a whole lot of idea of chaos and mortality being a problem to be healed. Corruption seems to be a consequence of living under chaos and death. So if a death is healed, then that is also going to take part in healing that corruption. And I think in Eastern Orthodox tradition, there's definitely this idea that creation divine order has its restoration in the resurrection life of Jesus and participating in that.
[01:05:17] So that's really interesting to see how all of these things fit or they don't.
[01:05:23] Ultimately, I think that what we can say is that Genesis three does have a lot of disconnect between what's going on there in the story and this fall from perfection idea. But I already thought that before I read Walton's work.
[01:05:39] What really appeals to me is this idea of resurrection as secured order. And Jesus is reversing Eden, but doing more than that. He's completing the ordering project.
[01:05:52] I love the idea that resurrection and life in Christ in particular, defeats both chaos disorder and evil or corruption.
[01:06:03] Now, I don't tend to get into a whole lot of eschatological implications in my podcast, but I do think that there is always a whole lot of alignment with the purposes of creation as we see in Genesis and the eschaton and the church life even today.
[01:06:23] And I really like how this kind of helps us to see that the resurrection body is an ultimate reality that we're gonna get. But it's also kind of seen as something that we live into now because we are in Christ. And this fits a second Adam role where the first Adam could only receive and participate in order in a really limited, fragile way, versus what we have with the second Adam who can actively generate and sustain it himself because he is God.
[01:06:56] He is God entering into creation in the ultimate way to dwell with us, to fix all of these things. I think the invitation with Christ is not just to escape death, but to enter a world where chaos and evil are no longer possible realities, and we are to work for that. And while we think of resurrection as being at the end time, and we have that hope in that permanence with no more fragility after that, I think this picture can also encourage our perseverance today in what we're doing right now.
[01:07:33] Our current work in ordering life, bringing justice and beauty and care for creation is not, in fact, in vain because it will be taken up into that final secured order in Christ at the end.
[01:07:49] All of this is not necessarily what Walton himself says, but I think that his work can be taken a lot of these directions and I think it's helpful because again, that can fit in with an overarching narrative that we have in theology in history. The goal doesn't have to be to choose only one model wholesale, but to see how integrating all of these perspectives and ideas can deepen our understanding and appreciation of what Scripture is telling us.
[01:08:19] I think we can respect the ancient context like Walton is trying to do. While we can bring some of that into our theological tradition and Pauline framework, without oversimplifying it or really taking anything important away.
[01:08:35] I would invite you to see salvation as being more than just escaping guilt. But really entering God's ordering work. The idea of resurrection as stable incorruptible order can be brought into our daily existence today. And I think that this can help us see that chaos is not always a moral failure and sometimes immaturity is a really big deal, but Christ can meet us in both of those things.
[01:09:04] Now, if Eden's arrangement again has covenantal dimensions where God is sovereign and humanity is a legitimate covenant partner. Then I really think that Paul's Adam and Christ theme becomes even richer. And I think this could shift how we read Paul's language of obedience, righteousness, and life as not being a burden that we have, but rather a participation with Christ in what he was doing. And then that brings us into the body of Christ as genuine participants of God's divine order.
[01:09:39] We aren't the one defeating death ourselves, but when we bring that order to creation, it is acting within that framework.
[01:09:49] I hope this conversation was interesting, even if it was slightly on the speculative views here. You can look forward to something really interesting next week that's going to drop that I think you guys will love hearing, and after that we are going to dive directly into the flood and to baptism and a whole lot of ideas like that.
[01:10:11] As always, I appreciate you guys listening. I appreciate the different ways that you support me, whether that's through listening or even financial support. If you haven't joined my new community at On This Rock, I invite you to come and check that out. You can find
[email protected], but you have to put hyphens between those words and I will be sure to leave a link for that in the show notes.
[01:10:39] At any rate, I wish you all a blessed week and we will see you later.
