Kierkegaard’s Complaint: Putting Adam ‘Fantastically Outside’ of History Becoming Adam Podcast – Becoming Adam, Becoming Christ

Was Adam directly created from dust and placed in a sinless, deathless paradise? If so, how does he represent me before God? What does a perfect man in a perfect environment have in common with anyone?







Listen or Read. Your Choice.















Our focus in this

episode is original sin and the Fall, which we’ll view through the eyes of an

often-neglected source, Soren Kierkegaard.







Kierkegaard is

most famous for his concept of the “leap of faith.” The phrase is often taken

to mean that Christians believe in God without evidence, but that’s a

misunderstanding. In Kierkegaard’s thought, “the leap is the category of decision.”

Faith, for Kierkegaard, is much more than intellectual agreement with Christian

doctrine. He regards faith as a passionate commitment to follow Christ, despite

the paradox of the incarnation and the affront of the crucifixion. Only from

that lived experience do we discover true knowledge of God. In the language of

common sense, the proof is in the pudding.







What’s less well

known about Kierkegaard is that he also viewed original sin as a “leap,” for it

too belongs to the category of decision. In The Concept of Anxiety, he

explored the question of whether original sin is identical to “the first sin,

Adam’s sin, the Fall.” [1]

His interest was not the bare fact that “sin came into existence, but how

it can come into existence.” In other words, why would Adam and Eve sin?

What could possibly motivate them to transgress?







A friend recently related a story about reading a picture Bible to his 6-year-old daughter, and after Adam and Eve were thrown out of the garden for eating the fruit, she blurted out, “I just wish Adam and Eve hadn’t done that.” Kierkegaard refused to accept her verdict. It minimizes our own guilt, and it divorces Adam and Eve from the rest of humanity.







In the first paragraph of his treatise, Kierkegaard complains that traditional conceptions of original sin introduce “a fantastic assumption, a state which by its loss involved the Fall.” What was that state? Most of us have heard it from childhood: Adam and Eve were created perfect and lived in a sinless, deathless paradise. Everyone agrees that such a situation doesn’t exist today, but as Kierkegaard pointed out, the theologians “forgot that the doubt was a different one, namely, whether it ever had existed — and that was pretty clearly necessary if one were to lose it. The history of humanity acquired a fantastic beginning. Adam was fantastically put outside. Pious sentiment and fantasy got what it desired — a godly prelude — but thought got nothing.”







The history of humanity acquired a fantastic beginning. Adam was fantastically put outside. Pious sentiment and fantasy got what it desired — a godly prelude — but thought got nothing. Soren Kierkegaard







Consider the fantastic

ways literal Adam has been portrayed. The prominent Young-Earth Creationist Ken

Ham says the garden was perfect, without thorns or thistles, and Adam’s work

there was “pure joy.” Moreover, Adam didn’t have to learn to speak, and he had

no trouble remembering all the names he gave the animals, since he was “much more

intelligent than we are.” Ham claims Adam possessed every talent possible

rolled into one person. Adam was a brilliant artist, a musical prodigy, and a mathematical

genius with a photographic memory. [2]







From the other end

of the spectrum, Catholic theologians have heaped even greater superlatives on

Adam’s head. Writing on the a href="http://www.thomisticevolution.