Traditional accounts: the fall, fallen powers and the groaning of creation

Program / Course 15: The Problem of Evil and Suffering / Lesson 3.2

What you will learn

• Describe how Christians have linked natural evil to the fall of humans.
• Explain the teaching on fallen angels and spiritual powers and its role in accounts of nature.
• Read Romans 8:19-22 carefully and state the main ways it has been interpreted.
• Compare how the traditions, and modern readers who accept evolution, use these accounts.

The big idea

For most of Christian history, the tradition explained natural evil by the fall: human sin damaged the created order, and spiritual powers opposed to God work in it. Romans 8 speaks of the creation groaning and waiting for deliverance. These accounts give a story in which suffering is not part of God’s original intention and will one day end. They also meet hard questions. Fossil evidence shows suffering and death before humans, and critics ask how a story of angelic or human sin can explain it. Christians answer in several ways.

Key terms

The fall

The Christian teaching that the first humans disobeyed God and that human nature and the world were affected.

Fallen angels

Spiritual beings who, according to Christian tradition, rebelled against God. Their leader is called Satan or the devil.

Principalities and powers

A New Testament phrase for spiritual forces, understood by Christians as angelic or demonic powers, and sometimes also as social structures.

Bondage to corruption

Paul’s phrase in Romans 8:21 for the decay and death in which the creation is held.

Cosmic fall

The idea that a disaster at the origin of creation, before or beyond human sin, disordered nature.

Young-earth creationism

The view that the earth is only thousands of years old, a view not shared by most Christian scientists and theologians.

Renewal of creation

The hope that God will heal and transform the whole created world, not only human beings.

Background

Before modern geology, the standard Christian account was easy to state. God made a good world. Humans sinned. Death, disease and disaster entered as a result. Genesis 3 tells of thorns and thistles and of toil, and of the sentence of death. Paul writes that sin entered the world and death by sin (Romans 5:12).

As the church fathers read Scripture, the picture was richer than a simple chain of cause and effect. They also taught of the devil and fallen angels, who tempt, afflict and distort. The Gospels show Jesus healing sicknesses that they sometimes link with demonic power (Luke 13:11-16) and stilling a storm with a rebuke (Mark 4:39). The tradition drew the conclusion that some of what is called natural evil is not a part of God’s will.

The modern challenge is that science dates the origin of death and disease long before any human existed. How have Christians kept the tradition? The honest answer is that they have taken different paths, and this lesson sets them side by side.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: The fall and the world

In Genesis 3:17-19, God says to Adam that the ground is cursed for his sake, and that it will bring forth thorns. Many early interpreters took this to mean that human sin brought a change in nature as a whole. Athanasius, in On the Incarnation, describes humans drawn into corruption and death by turning from God. Augustine held that all of creation was affected.

The idea fits with a conviction in Scripture, that humans have a special role as stewards of creation (Genesis 1:28). When the steward falls, the household suffers. Understood in this way the fall does not blame the earthquake on a person’s act. It says that the human vocation was to bring the world to God, and that failure left the world incomplete.

Step 2: Romans 8 and the groaning creation

Paul writes: “For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:22). He adds that “the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope,” and that it “shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:20-21).

The meaning is debated. Who subjected the creation, God, Adam or Satan? Most ancient and modern interpreters say it is God, who subjected creation to futility in view of its future redemption. Some see the reference as to Adam. Does creation mean the nonhuman world, or all humanity, or something else? The majority of commentators say the nonhuman world, at least in part. All agree that Paul sees the present suffering as temporary and as part of a movement toward renewal, comparing it with the pains of childbirth (Romans 8:18).

Step 3: Fallen powers

Another line of tradition holds that part of the disorder in nature comes from spiritual beings who have turned against God. Plantinga raises this as a possibility in his free-will defense. C. S. Lewis, in The Problem of Pain, suggests that a corruption of the natural world by a fallen power might precede the coming of humans. He offers this as a speculation, not as doctrine.

Scripture speaks of cosmic powers in several places, such as Ephesians 6:12 and Colossians 1:16-20. Yet the Bible gives no detailed story of how these powers affected natural processes. Critics say that this appeal is unfalsifiable and that it fails to explain why God would allow such powers to act for millions of years. Supporters answer that it is a reasonable extension of what the tradition has always said, and that it fits with the biblical picture of a conflict between God and his adversaries.

Step 4: Modern strategies

Christians who reject evolution hold that the fossil record is to be explained otherwise, and that death entered with Adam. They say the traditional account stands. Many theologians and scientists do not take that path. Some argue that Genesis speaks in figurative language and that the fall tells a truth about the human race that does not require a literal first couple. Others argue that the fall explains moral evil and spiritual death, while physical death and natural evil belong to the created order from the start, and that God’s purpose is to bring creatures through it to a life beyond death.

Eastern Christian writers often describe the world as created mortal and made for growth into immortality through communion with God, and the fall as the failure of that growth. Death is still seen as an enemy. These accounts do not explain why natural evil took the form it did. They place it in a story where the world is unfinished, not a story of a perfect design that was ruined.

Step 5: Evaluating the accounts

The traditional accounts have strengths. They affirm that suffering is not God’s goal, and they link nature to hope. Their weaknesses are plain. Taken literally they conflict with the scientific record, and taken loosely they seem to explain little. Fallen-powers theories require speculation. The strongest use of the tradition is probably not as an explanation but as a framework of meaning: creation is good, damaged and promised renewal.

1. What did earlier Christian writers mean when they connected nature’s disorders to the fall?
2. How do you read Romans 8:19-22? Whom do you think Paul means by the one who subjected creation?
3. What does it add to the discussion to speak of fallen spiritual powers?
4. Can Christians accept evolution and also the idea that death is an enemy?
5. Which is the stronger claim: that the traditional accounts explain natural evil, or that they give a framework of hope?
6. How might a critic respond to the claim that God subjected creation to futility in hope?

Examples

Different perspectives

Catholic

The Catechism teaches that the world was created in a state of journeying toward perfection, and that physical evil exists as long as creation has not reached it. It also teaches that the fall affected humans and that the devil and other angels fell. It does not require a particular view of the age of the earth, and many Catholic scholars accept evolution.

Orthodox

Orthodox writers treat death and corruption as enemies, which Christ overcame by his own death. They differ on the origins of death, some seeing the world as created mortal and others as made for incorruption. They hold that the creation will be renewed and that the saints will participate in that renewal.

Protestant

Many conservative Protestants hold that natural evil entered after the fall of Adam, with some also holding to a young earth. Other evangelical and mainline Protestants accept evolution and read the fall as a fundamental truth about humans. They tend to give less weight to fallen-power explanations, though some hold them.

Critical and scholarly views

Biblical scholars note that Paul is not writing a theory of natural evil, and that Romans 8 is about hope. Historians of religion note parallel stories of cosmic conflict elsewhere in the ancient world. Philosophical critics hold that pushing the cause back to spirits only moves the problem, since God made the spirits and the world in which they act.

Why it matters

These accounts have shaped Christian hymns, liturgy and hope for centuries. Whether or not a student accepts them as explanations, knowing what they say prevents misreading older writers, and keeps the vision of a renewed creation in the discussion.

Common misunderstandings

Knowledge check

Think it through

1. Does the picture of a damaged and unfinished creation seem to you to make the problem better or worse?
2. How do you balance respect for older writers with respect for the findings of science?
3. What hope do you find in the idea that creation itself will be renewed?

Independent assignment

Reading Romans 8

In your own notebook, write about 400 words. Copy Romans 8:18 to 25 from the King James Version. Write two questions you have about the passage. Then write a paragraph on how the passage might be used in answer to the problem of natural evil, and one on what it does not claim. Keep your work private.

Further study

• Athanasius of Alexandria, On the Incarnation of the Word Read the early chapters on the fall and corruption and on Christ’s defeat of death.
• C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain Read the chapter on the fall of man and the chapter on animal pain.
• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church Look up the sections on the fall of the angels and on providence.
• Romans 8:18 Paul says the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the coming glory.
• Genesis 3:17 The ground is cursed because of the man’s disobedience.
• Isaiah 11:6 The wolf shall dwell with the lamb in the coming peaceable kingdom.