Dear Paul ( and if he is on the same cc-list, Augustine, the one from Hippo),
I have read your epistles to the various cities and Christian communities with understandable and overall interest, but while I was contemplating the behavior of our two household felines, I was brought back in particular to your comments in Romans 5:11-21.
It is understood that you had written this piece to interpret the meaning of events described in the as yet unwritten accounts given in the Gospels. And also you had written these letters with a sense of urgency in as you sensed the end of this order was imminent, within a few years. So beside the emphatic, I suspect there was also a need for haste...
But here I am writing two millennia later observing not only my own imperfect nature, and that of my friends, neighbors and people I read of in the papers, or thrust in my face when I sign on to my internet host, but also among the animals who were born without a scheme of salvation, namely our two household cats.
To protect their identities, I will refer to the two female felines of ten years difference in age as Cat A and Cat B with the first of the two arriving in the household the earlier. It (A) was born to a stray in a litter under the back deck and was the last of the four to come into the house from the wild. A neighbor tending the house while we were on travel had accidentally locked (A) in the garage, before it made a decision to join the other kittens, consequently it has had both a mix of feral and cautious characteristics ( coat of arms: Why take chances?). Subsequently, it ran off the other cats with jealousy, greed, suspicion, hectoring...
Fast forward ten years and Cat A is a sadder and wiser cat, now very gentle, tenaciously tied to the house and householders. Since we were short of memory, we thought that in its solitude it might be lonely and would appreciate the company of another feline, a friend. When my wife at work ran across a coworker at a new job who was trying to find homes for newly weened kittens, I got word to expect a tabby (B) to accompany our earlier stealth-like ebony (A).
When they met they hated each other and B has been as tenacious as A in asserting its stake in the house.
While the older cat was reluctant to play at anything, the younger cat was jealous of everything and is currently trying to cut off the older cat's food supply by elbowing it out of its own dinner bowls while simultaneous gorging at its own.
I could elaborate, but you get the idea. Any passion reflected in the early chapters of Genesis can be seen in the animal world, whether animals are thoroughly freed of human nurturing or not.
So what's my point?
In the 5:1-21 all the ills of the HUMAN condition are attributed to one man and his sin, which spread death throughout the world. "One man's offense brought condemnation to all humanity." (5:18). "It was by one man's offense that death came to reign over all."
Interesting. In the first sentence I would take the consequences as being restricted to human kind, but the second sentence would allow interpretation for all creation, right? But then later on the discussion about salvation is restricted to humanity. And then, of course, there is discussion of law which did not pre-exist before Adam, but came along by some sort of creative process as well - to an imperfect world, of course, but we will have to pick up on this aspect of your system of beliefs another time.
Now in the original story to which you refer, there seems to have been a talking snake which already had a reputation for guile. I don't see you referencing the snake directly. And it would seem that your legal argument is that once Eve had consumed the fruit, Adam had compounded the problem in the Lord's eyes by becoming an accessory to her crime. So elsewhere, you refer to this case here and elsewhere as a conflict between God and Adam; not including Eve, Satan or a talking snake.
But granted, like all things read in Genesis, the final argument about the details always seem to come to that that is just how much we are told. Yet still, considering the outcome, and what you and others (billions) have had riding on this story, would it not have been more straightforward if the warning described about forbidden fruit made some mention of a talking snake? And then again, how could a talking snake appeal to the vanity of perfect creations? It seems that the only act of Adam in chapter 3 that placed him above the other animals in the garden was response to the dilemma of what Eve had already done.
I can imagine these questions coming up in your days on the road as an evangelist, but I suspect you will not be replying directly to this inquiry.
Anyone else have any comments?