How do people explain sin, evil, truth, moral norms?
Stephen Wellum
Any sane person knows that there is something wrong with us. No one can honestly examine history, let alone their own lives, without being struck by the extent to which we as a human race have “missed the mark” and not lived up to our ideals. Reinhold Niebuhr keenly observed that “the doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.”[1]
The “human condition” has been the subject of countless books, films, and plays as people have wrestled with the reality of good and evil. One of my favourites is The Lord of the Rings, in which Tolkien explores the insidious power of the ring and the evil that lurks in every heart.
1. Reinhold Niebuhr, Man’s Nature and His Communities: Essays on the Dynamics and Enigmas of Man’s Personal and Social Existence (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965; repr., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012), 24.
However, although everyone admits that something is wrong with us, we do not explain the “human condition” similarly. Why? Because one’s explanation of the human condition depends on one's worldview.
From a Christian perspective, notwithstanding the diversity of worldviews, all non-Christian viewpoints articulate:
The human predicament is attributed to a “structural” or “metaphysical” defect rather than being a consequence of our “moral” rebellion against God.
This consensus largely stems from their collective dismissal of Scripture’s affirmation regarding God, creation, and, notably, the historical Adam and the Fall. This is the rationale behind the fact that all non-Christian perspectives tend to fail to grasp the severe and profound nature of the human predicament.
Consequently, this leads to an inevitable underestimation of the radical solution required to address this issue: the incarnation of the divine Son and His mission to redeem, restore, and reconcile humanity to God, thereby obliterating the dominion of sin within our hearts and lives. Therefore, it follows that all non-Christian interpretations of the human condition and its remedies ultimately constitute a denial of reality.
The Significance of Genesis 3 for Theological Anthropology
Scripture’s explanation of the desperate nature of the human condition is directly dependent on Genesis 1–3, especially chapter 3. Yet, in our day, there is probably no text of Scripture that is more scoffed at than Genesis 3. After all, what are to make of “talking serpents,” “forbidden fruit,” and “naked people?” Is this not the stuff of legend and myth?
After all, have we not read Charles Darwin, who supposedly undermined our naïve understanding of this text? In our day, John Haught reflects this sentiment when he asserts: “Evolutionary science . . . has rendered the assumption of an original cosmic perfection, one allegedly debauched by a temporally ‘original sin,’ obsolete and unbelievable.”[2]
Or, Paul Ricoeur states something similar: “The harm that has been done to souls, during the centuries of Christianity, first by the literal interpretation of the story of Adam, and then by the confusion of this myth, treated as history, with later speculations, principally Augustinian, about original sin, will never be adequately told.”[3]
2. John F. Haught, God after Darwin: A Theology of Evolution (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000), 141.
3. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 239.
But is this actually the case? Although there are many arguments against evolutionary theory, delve into the truth of evolution’s grand metanarrative that sees, which explains God, self, and the world is a matter of gigantic proportions. Evolutionary theory can’t account for ultimate origins, design, meaning, truth, rationality, moral norms, and human dignity, let alone what is wrong with us.
4. See J. P. Moreland et al., eds., Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2017).
This is why Genesis 3 can’t be dismissed so easily. In fact, in contrast to the mindset of our day, I contend that there is probably no text of Scripture that is more significant for our grasp of the true nature of our problem and the rationale for the Bible’s redemptive story than Genesis 3. Herman Bavinck astutely notes that without the Bible’s account of the fall, “this world is inexplicable.”[5] As such, Genesis 3 is crucial in describing how, in history, sin and death came into the human race and how the desperate nature of human depravity is the condition of all people (Rom. 3:23).
Furthermore, Genesis 3 reminds us that our situation is so awful that only God can remedy it if he so chooses to do so, which thankfully he has done. Indeed, apart from Genesis 3, we have no explanation of how humans were created “very good” (Gen. 1:31) but are now in their present state: abnormal, fallen, and cursed. Genesis 3 alone gives us the only valid explanation of our problem with the Bible’s glorious solution in our Lord Jesus Christ. Apart from this, all explanations of the human condition are superficial and inadequate and, in the end, yield no rational ground to think that our condition ultimately can ever be remedied.
5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003–8), 3:53. Italics removed.
Here are five reasons why Genesis 3 is crucial for understanding the nature of our human problem against non-Christian views. In so doing, we will discover how Genesis 3 is foundational for Christian theology and our understanding of why we need a Redeemer to rescue us from our desperate plight. It is not to be ignored.
Reasons why Genesis 3 is Foundational for Understanding Sin and Salvation
1. No Other Explanation for Humanity’s Fallen Sinful Condition
Genesis 3 alone describes how the entrance of sin and evil came into the world and the desperate nature of the human condition. Mark it well: Scripture and Christian theology take sin and evil very seriously, and both are explained in Genesis 3.
The opening chapters of the Bible remind us of how God created humans unique as his “image and likeness” (Gen 1:26), morally upright, and in the right relationship with him and one another. Yet these same chapters also remind us how quickly we went from this “very good” (Gen. 1:31) and “no shame” (Gen. 2:25) situation to being exiled from Eden. Apart from Genesis 3, we have no explanation of why humans are both significant and now fallen, corrupt, under God’s wrath, judgment, and the sentence of death (Rom. 6:23; Eph. 2:1–3). Genesis 3 is the only place in Scripture that describes how, why, and when this occurred in the human realm.
2. No Other Explanation for Sin’s Universality
Genesis 3 alone explains why our now fallen, abnormal condition is universal. In Scripture, Adam is not only the first biological man that all humans descend from; he is also chosen by God to be the covenant head of all humanity and thus our representative before God. By creation, Adam was created morally upright and able to obey God and thus to be confirmed in righteousness due to God’s covenant promise. Yet, sadly and tragically, by his one act of disobedience, Adam not only incurred God’s wrath and judgment for his own sin; he also acted on behalf of all humans. As the covenant head of humanity, God imputed Adam’s guilt to all of his descendants, resulting in our corruption and abnormality (Rom. 5:12–21; Eph. 2:1–3). For this reason, Paul can say that all humans, without exception (other than our Lord Jesus), “have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). Apart from Genesis 3 and Adam’s disobedient action as our covenant head, there is no way to explain the universality of sin and evil in us and in the world, which alone explains what we see around us and experience daily.
3. No Other Explanation For Why Sin is Not Essential to Humanity
In contrast to all non-Christian worldviews and sub-Christian views that deny the historicity of Adam and the fall, Genesis 3 refuses to equate finitude/creatureliness with sin. This point is momentous, so let’s develop it to grasp its full significance.
Scripture presents Adam as the first man of history and his fall as a historical event. This means that sin and evil are not part of God’s original creation. All that God created—including humans—was created good and morally upright (Gen. 1:31). Sin and evil, then, were introduced into the world by Adam’s moral rebellion against God. Or, to employ older language, sin/evil and its consequences are “accidental rather than essential to being human, a point that Scripture reinforces both in terms of the goodness of the original creation and the promise of glorification.”[6] As such, Scripture doesn’t equate our creatureliness with our sin/fallenness.
6. Kelly M. Kapic, “Anthropology,” in Christian Dogmatics: Reformed Theology for the Church Catholic, ed. Michael Allen and Scott R. Swain (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2016), 184.
However, this distinction requires a historical Adam and Fall as taught by Genesis 3. However, if Adam and his fall didn’t occur in history, then we have to equate God’s creation of us with our sin/fallenness; humans simply were created the way we presently are. Thus, we would have to conclude that our sin is bound up with our creation and that sin is more of a structural/metaphysical problem than a moral/ethical one. In other words, without a clear distinction between Adam’s creation and fall in history, sin is not accidental to us but essential or intrinsic to what it means to be human.
The implication of such a view is both disastrous and destructive of the entire teaching of Scripture, which I will note below. But thankfully, Scripture doesn’t teach that God created Adam structurally flawed so that what we presently are is what we have always been. As Andrew Leslie rightly reminds us: “[T]here is nothing inevitable about our God-given natures, no inherent design flaw, no hairline fracture, let alone any fatalistic divine determination, that would make our fall physically necessary or unpreventable, and therein somehow excusable.”[7] If this were not the case, our human problem would be comparable to the ill-fated Ford Pinto—a car that came off its 1971 assembly line structurally flawed.
7. Andrew Leslie, “Incurvatus Est in Se: Toward a Theology of Sin,” in Ruined Sinners to Reclaim: Sin and Depravity in Historical, Biblical, Theological, and Pastoral Perspective, ed. David Gibson and Jonathan Gibson (Wheaton: Crossway, 2024), 742.
Yet apart from a correct understanding of Genesis 3, we would have to affirm, like the Pinto, that humans came off God’s assembly line flawed, thus equating our finitude/creatureliness with our sin, making sin intrinsic/essential to us. But thankfully, Scripture rejects such an equation. Given that God created Adam well and that, in history, he disobeyed God, sin is not intrinsic to us. Instead, sin is the result of an act of the will. The nature of sin is not due to our finitude, heredity, environment, and emotional makeup. Instead, sin has everything to do with Adam’s and our willful transgression of God’s law (Gen. 2:15–17; 1 John 3:4).
This is all good news in contrast to the alternative and is also foundational to Christian theology. Let’s summarize its significance in three points.
Sin is Not Essential to Humanity
First, Scripture’s distinction between creation and fall in history allows us to view sin as ethical without reducing sin to our ontology or essence. Sin is an act of the will, not something intrinsic to our nature. In fact, if sin is intrinsic to us then any appeal to freedom is also undercut. The bottom line is this: when sin is reduced to ontology, it becomes “the very ingredients of being . . . [with] its seed and its root in the very creation.”[8] But thankful,y this is not the case, given the historicity of Adam and the fall.
8. Henri Blocher, Evil and the Cross, trans. David G. Preston(Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1994), 63.
God’s Righteousness is Upheld
Second, the Bible’s distinction between creation and fall also upholds the goodness, justice, and righteousness of God. From God’s creative hand, humans and the world were created good, not sinful, evil, and fallen. Thus, God is not to blame, and he is not responsible for the fallenness of this world; responsible creatures—including angels and humans—are. Yet if there was no historic Adam and fall as Genesis 3 describes, it would seem that God created us “flawed” from the start, thus making both sin part of our ontology and God responsible for it. Unequivocally, Scripture rejects the conclusion that God’s glory and goodness are upheld as non-negotiable. However, apart from the teaching of Genesis 3, these wrong conclusions would follow. Hence, Genesis 3’s importance.
Sin Can Be Reversed
Third, Genesis 3, with its distinction between creation and fall in history, also accounts for the Bible’s confidence that the problem of sin can be reversed. Why? If our sin is intrinsic to us, then what hope is there that we will be different in the future than we have always been? In other words, if we are intrinsically fallen and structurally flawed from the moment of our creation, then what hope is there that we will be any different in the future?
There would be none. However, Scripture denies this possibility because the problem of sin is moral, not ontological. This means that we can become what we once were.
By God’s effectual work of regeneration and Christ’s obedient life and death for us, we can be re-made and restored to the purpose of our original creation. The Bible’s story is terrific at this point: God created us good, but due to Adam’s sin in history, we are now fallen. But God can restore what was lost, not by scrapping us, but by transforming us to be what he created us to be in the first place (and even greater moral perfection in our glorification). Thus, given the Bible’s affirmation of a historic Adam and fall, Christian theology can affirm that sin is not part of our original, created nature, but that now—due to Adam’s sin—all humans are currently fallen. Yet, we may be redeemed and transformed by God’s provision of a Redeemer in Christ Jesus our Lord.[9]
9. Henri Blocher, Original Sin: Illuminating the Riddle, New Studies in Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 58–62.
4. No Other Explanation for the Resolution of Scripture’s Redemptive Story
Genesis 3 provides the rationale for the Bible’s covenantal story, leading us to Christ and the new creation. Without it, the story makes little sense. As Henri Blocher states, Genesis 3 not only “belongs decisively to the structure of Genesis and to that of the Torah”[10], but it is also uniquely situated in the entire canon to establish the nature of the human problem and prepare for God’s gracious provision of a Redeemer.
10. Blocher, Original Sin, 32.
After Genesis 3 describes the effects of sin on the human race, it moves forward due to God’s promise of a coming Redeemer (Gen. 3:15) to anticipate a solution to and reversal of our sin. As we move from Genesis 3 through the Old Testament, the universal effects of Adam’s sin are evident. Sin wasn’t limited to Adam’s action; it was passed on to his children by imputation and transmission.
For example, Cain kills his brother Abel (Genesis 4), and sin multiplies throughout all of Adam’s offspring. In Genesis 5, the constant refrain—“And they died . . .”—reminds us of Adam’s sin and that God’s verdict of death has not escaped anyone (Gen. 2:15–17; 3:17–19), other than Enoch, who is a glimmer of future hope (Gen. 5:21–25).
However, in Genesis 6–9, sin is so egregious that God brings a global flood. Then, in Genesis 11, we see that the human heart has not changed with the multiplication of Noah’s line after the flood. Humans continue to raise their fists in rebellion against God at Babel. If we ever doubt that Adam’s sin affected all his descendants, all we need to do is see how Adam’s sin is transmitted to all of his progeny throughout history.
Yet alongside humanity's desperate condition, we also have God’s promise to provide a Redeemer, a last Adam, who will reverse the effects of sin and death and bring about a new covenant, resulting in the forgiveness of our sins (Gen. 3:15; cf. Jer. 31:31–34; Heb. 8). This glorious plan of redemption unfolds step-by-step through the biblical covenants, ultimately culminating in the incarnation and work of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But why must God the Son become human? Why must he die on our behalf? The answer to these questions is answered in Genesis 3, and the entire context of God’s creation and the consequences of Adam’s sin on all of humanity. Adam, in his covenant headship, failed and disobeyed, thus bringing sin and death into the world (Rom. 5:12–21). But the divine Son, who assumes our human nature (John 1:1, 14), does so to undo what Adam did and to accomplish our eternal redemption, all because of God’s promise to reverse what Adam did in Genesis 3.
This means that the Bible’s entire covenantal story of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation revolves around the loss of goodness due to Adam’s sin and the restoration of goodness in Christ’s work. Without Genesis 3, we cannot understand the message of Scripture and our triune God’s plan of redemption.
The Folly of Denying Genesis 3
But note: once someone denies the historical significance of Genesis 1–3, especially Genesis 3 (as many current theistic evolutionists do), an alternative storyline must emerge. For example, Patrick Franklin—who is a theistic evolutionist and who denies the historicity of Adam and the fall—argues that “the incarnation of the Son was always part of God’s plan because union with Christ by the Spirit was always God’s goal, irrespective of the Fall.”[11]
In other words, as Hans Madueme astutely observes,
“Franklin’s ‘incarnation anyway’ scenario moves like a forward slash from creation to consummation. Sin and redemption are ‘intervening acts’ marginal to the primary plotline from creation to new creation.”[12]
11. Patrick Franklin, “Theodicy and the Historical Adam: Questioning a Central Assumption Motivating Historicist Readings,” Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 74, no. 1 (2022): 45. Emphasis mine.
12. Hans Madueme, Defending Sin: A Response to the Challenge of Evolution and the Natural Sciences (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2024),240.
But why does Franklin make this move contrary to Scripture’s own structure? The answer is simple but consequential: this move allows him to explain (without affirming a historical Adam or fall) how “human sin/fallenness does not drive the logic of eschatological consummation; creation does (along with incarnation, the divine assumption of humanity).”[13] Yet by such a move, Scripture’s creation, fall, redemption, and new creation plotline is now recast to one of “creation-incarnation-new creation.”[14]
However, this recasting of the Bible’s story is highly problematic for at least two reasons. First, there is no biblical warrant for it, especially if we read Scripture on its own terms and not through the extratextual grid of evolutionary thought.
Second, this alternative reading of Scripture uncouples Christ’s work from the fall, prioritizing Christus Victor over penal substitution. Unfortunately, this leads to a different understanding of the gospel.
13. Franklin, “Theodicy and the Historical Adam,” 47. Emphasis his.
14. Madueme, Defending Sin,240.
This illustrates why Genesis 3 is so significant for our understanding of Scripture, theology, and the gospel itself. As Hans Madueme rightly notes, when we lose Genesis 3 as history, we change “the overall shape of the canonical story and distort the interrelations of the doctrinal loci.
Cutting ties with the first Adam leads theistic evolutionists to redirect emphasis to the last Adam. Since the dogmatic pressure must be released somewhere, they compensate by overemphasizing Christology and soteriology.”[15]
But the cost is high. Suppose we get the Bible’s covenantal story wrong, failing to understand the goodness of creation and the tragic results of the fall. In that case, we will also fail to grasp why the incarnation is necessary and what Christ’s redemptive, new creation work is about. No wonder Genesis 3 is so crucial since it is foundational for understanding our entire vision of Christianity and the nature of the gospel.
15. Madueme, Defending Sin,243.
16. No Other Explanation for Christianity’s Uniqueness Among Other Worldviews
Genesis 3 is also significant because it sets Christianity apart from other worldviews in explaining sin and evil. As we have noted, all worldviews must explain sin/evil, but they do so differently. No doubt, there are questions and mysteries surrounding the “origin” of sin and evil tied to God’s eternal decree. But when we compare a Christian view of these matters to non-Christian views, we discover that these other views cannot explain the human condition as Scripture does, which results in their denial of reality along with severe consequences that follow.
In fact, because all non-Christian views reject a historical Adam and Fall, they make sin an evil part of our nature, which we have already noted leads to disastrous consequences.
Here are some examples of non-Christian views that are ultimately incapable of explaining the true nature of sin and thus unable to provide a solution to it. This reminds us that we need a sound theological anthropology of humans and sin, for without it, human thought independent of Scripture has no answers to the fundamental questions of life.
Naturalism—the idea that nothing exists beyond the material world—cannot explain the categories of good and evil. Thus, much of life is inexplicable, there is no hope for a solution to the human problem, and people are susceptible to dehumanization.
Eastern religions (e.g., Hinduism and Buddhism) and Western cults (e.g., Christian Science) argue that sin and evil are merely illusory due to their metaphysical belief that all is “one.”[16] In these monistic views, “god” transcends both good and evil; thus, all good and evil are ultimately the same. But the problem is that if “good” and “evil” are the same, we simply cannot account for misery, pain, suffering, and death, let alone the human heart. Such a view is a sad and disastrous denial of reality.
16. On sin as an illusion, see Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 13–14.
Other worldviews trivialize sin, another form of a denial of reality. Georg Hegel made “evil” a necessary step in developing history, a view taught by evolutionists.
Yet such a view cannot account for what we know to be the case: sin and evil are abnormal, hideous, and an intrusion that reflects what should not be. Again, it is only Genesis 3 that can account for what sin truly is, along with providing an answer to sin’s hideous nature in the sovereign work of the triune God centred in Christ.
Or think of various dualist views that think of sin/evil as an equal “power” in conflict with the “good.”[17]
Dualism, such as Gnosticism and Manichaeism, which greatly affected the early church, holds that there is a moral conflict on the basic metaphysical level. The universe has a “good” power and an “evil” power, which are equally matched. These two powers are intermingled in the world, and both are aspects of human nature.
17. On sin as dualism, see Blocher, Evil and the Cross, 15–16.
Again, such views are contrary to Scripture and offer no answers to the serious nature of the human condition. Evil is often tied to matter in these systems, thus devaluing creation and our physical bodies. This not only denies the goodness of God’s creation but also robs us of a Redeemer who assumed human nature.
In that, human nature redeemed us from sin, securing our justification and the reality of a new creation. Ultimately, such views deny the uniqueness, transcendence, self-sufficiency, and absoluteness of God since it posits another “eternal” thing that exists that is not subject to God’s sovereignty. Furthermore, like all non-Christian views, such views make sin a “substance”—thus rejecting the notion of sin as a “moral” evil—which entails that there is no such thing as human responsibility and, ultimately, no remedy for it.
Concluding Reflection
Any sane person knows there is something wrong with the human race, but it is only the Bible’s answer, grounded in Genesis 3, that truly explains what is wrong with us. All non-Christian views, in the end, are a denial of reality, and the consequence of such views is disaster, not only in failing to understand who humans are but also in providing no solution to the problem of sin. If we fail to understand the true nature of the human problem, as Scripture defines it, we will never appreciate the Bible’s only solution. In this regard, Genesis 3 is indeed one of the most significant texts in Scripture because apart from a correct understanding of it in its immediate context and in light of the entire canon, we will fail to appreciate our desperate condition due to Adam’s sin, and the glorious solution to it in Christ Jesus our Lord.
