Comments on Five Views in the Book (2020) "Original Sin and the Fall"

By Razie Mah

In 2020, J. B. Stump and Chad Meister edit a volume expressing five views of Original Sin and the Fall. The book is published by Intervarsity Press (Downers Grove, Illinois).
Five theologians contribute to this remarkable volume. Why remarkable? The essays are written before a dawning awareness of the first singularity. They are written before many start to admit that our current Lebenswelt is not the same as the Lebenswelt that we evolved in. They are written during a time when modernists still imagine that the human niche must be a composite of material and instrumental proximate niches. At this moment in human history, no one is aware that human evolution comes with a twist.
Consequently, these comments initiate a reconfiguration of long-held doctrines. If Adam and Eve are fairy tales figures, then what is the fairy tale about? The hypothesis of the first singularity proposes a model explaining phenomena that modernists cannot admit, because the positivist intellect rules out metaphysics. Once we admit that these phenomena can be modeled, then we cannot help but admit that there is a corresponding noumenon. This noumenon cannot be objectified by the phenomena of the first singularity. This noumenon entails a breath-taking transition from constrained to unconstrained social complexity.
How to we begin to appreciate this noumenon?
Ah, here is where five views of Original Sin and the Fall come in. The Bible opens with a story about two fairy-tale figures, Adam and Eve, who seem to be as real as you or me. Indeed, they are more real, because Augustine fashions them as the parents of all humanity. Today, Augustine's speculation comes under the myth-busting eye of evolutionary scientists, claiming that human genetics does not support the idea. Well, maybe the logic of genealogies will suffice. Maybe it won't.
Well, then, if Adam and Eve are fairy tale figures, what is the fairy tale about?
It is about a noumenon, the thing itself, that cannot be objectified by the phenomena of the first singularity.
It is about Original Sin and the Fall.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Razie Mah
• Release date: Dec 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781942824954

Razie Mah

See website for bio.

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Comments on Five Views in the Book (2020)

Original Sin and the Fall

By Razie Mah

Published for Smashwords.com

2020 AD

7820 U0'

Notes on Text

This work comments on a compilation titled, Original Sin and the Fall: Five Views, edited by J.B. Stump and Chad Meister, and published in 2020 by Intervarsity Press (Downer's Grove, Illinois). The five contributors are Hans Madueme and Oliver Crisp, for the Reformed tradition, Joel B. Green, for the tradition of John Wesley, Andrew Louth, for Russian Orthodox, and Tatha Wiley, for the Jesuits. None of these essayists are aware of the first singularity. My goal is to comment on these works using this hypothesis, as well as the category-based nested form and other relational models within the tradition of Charles Peirce.

‘Words that belong together’ are denoted by single quotes or italics.

Prerequisites: A Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form, A Primer on Sensible and Social Construction

Recommended: An Archaeology of the Fall, The Human Niche, How to Define the Word Religion, The First Singularity and Its Fairy Tale Trace, Comments on Original Sin and Original Death: Romans 5:12-19

Table of Contents

Reconfigurations

The First Singularity

Why Consider Original Sin?

A Methodist View

The Eastern Orthodox View

Augustine Reformed View

Reconception

Reconfigurations

0001 These comments are not simply reflections on a collection of essays, located under the banner of Original Sin and the Fall. They are reconfigurations in the face of an unanticipated change in the mirror of the world. At the moment, Augustine's formulation of Original Sin, as a weakness inherited by all humans from a single primordial pair, is the object of popular science myth-busting. The science of genetics disputes the possibility. There is no genetic bottleneck, as Augustine predicts.

So, what is a Christian to do?

Anticipate a change in the mirror of the world?

0002 Plus, what is a scientist to do?

As it turns out, the early chapters of Genesis bear remarkable similarities to what is now called, the literature of the Ancient Near East. This literature is not literature as we know it. This literature is found in cuneiform writing, on clay tablets, hardened by fire. They are found in the ruins of libraries in long-forgotten cities, destroyed in war and built over in subsequent generations. Then, even these hills are abandoned.

The tales of Western archaeologists excavating these tablets, as well as clever monomaniacs figuring how to translate them, are amazing. But, the lessons are even more so. All written origin stories of the Ancient Near East depict recent creation of humans by gods.

If this is an observation, then what is the corresponding phenomenon?

One cannot ascertain the phenomenon without some sort of model. That is where the hypothesis of the first singularity comes in. There must be a singularity between these written origin stories and human culture before the dawn of civilization. The fact that all written origin myths of the ancient Near East depict recent creation of humans coheres to the idea that the scribes cannot see deeper in time than the first singularity. Perhaps, their myths contain elements from the other side of the time-horizon, but those features are like zircons embedded within a rock found in an Archaean craton.

0003 Once the hypothesis of the first singularity enters into postmodern civilizational awareness, once the observation that a singularity stands between all civilizations and Paleolithic, Neolithic