Category Archives: Adam and Eve

If God is Trinity, then Freewill for Humanity is Guaranteed

07 Sunday Jan 2024

Posted by in Adam and Eve, Freedom, Genesis, Scripture, theology, Trinity

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When we talk about detailed theology—not bland generalities—of Christianity like the Church Fathers, we arrive at some decisive conclusions on the freewill/determinism dilemma. I’ve solved this dilemma in a scholarly article going to publication soon, but I wanted to piecemeal it out in my blog too. For those uninitiated, Calvinism holds that humanity’s freedom to choose God is nonexistent (a form of determinism). This means that when God saves someone, He changes their nature so that they are enabled and will choose Him. Those holding that freewill exists for humans usually think that God provided a prevenient grace (a grace prior to saving grace) that allows humans to choose God, but it does not compel them to choose God.

To be clear, I think both sides are wrong even if it sounds like I am siding with those holding to freewill. My trinitarian theology precludes both based on Genesis 1:27 – 28. God makes humanity, male and female, in His image: “Let Us make . . . .” When the disciples ask Jesus to show us the Father, Jesus replies, “Have I been with you so long and you do not recognize me.” The inner life of the Trinity (John 17 really gets at this in a grand way) is one of love, joy, and freedom; recall although Jesus says He was charged to give His life by His Father, He quickly adds, no one takes His life from Him. The Trinity is an interrelationality qualified by love, joy, and freedom; humanity is made in this image—incidentally, this makes sense of God’s image entailing both male and female, and then the entire idea of a family unit.

Most of us know it already, but healthy human life is not coercive. In fact, most love that is forced is rejected, met with scorn, or the “forcer” now sits in prison. This makes sense if humans are made in the image of God, and if we are designed to represent it and respond positively to it. The takeaway is that freedom is constitutive to love. There is no fully mature love that does not entail freedom. Said differently, love without freedom, based on the Trinity, is no longer love. Our prisons are full of the truth of this claim.

This means that if humans are made in God’s image, the ability to freely choose to love God must be. The Persons of the Trinity freely choose to love One Another; God’s image bearers must be able to do the same. Love is so central to God: humans made in His image must represent this central feature. The New Testament is sometimes called the Testament of love because of the dominance and centrality of love as its major theme. God is love, as John writes. It is a sizable issue to say that God made humanity in His image, but humanity cannot love like God can love, freely and without compulsion. Obviously, our human experience teaches us that I can love like God loves, choosing who I will love freely and without compulsion. Calvinists might say that we can do that only towards other humans but not towards God. This seems so strange though; what is qualitatively and clearly a better form of love can be given only to other humans and not to God. Others might object that “the fall” eliminated human ability to choose God—I wonder where in Genesis 1 – 3 it is discussed that this is a consequence of the fall?

I’m sure there are questions swirling in your mind, but I can’t layout the whole solution here. If God is Trinity, and humans are His image bearers, then humanity must be able to freely choose to love God. The Trinity’s love is eternally a love centered on another Person of the Trinity, freely and without compulsion yet decisively “other-focused.” This means that humanity’s love must entail this ability to center its love on a Person of the Trinity if humanity will represent this central feature of God as image bearer. Notably, Genesis 9:6 reminds readers that humans are made in God’s image and therefore certain evils must be punished severely, and this is long after the so-called fall of mankind. If the image of God prevailed after the fall, then capacities proper to it retain too. This is why the whole framework of Arminianism versus Calvinism simply does not work. Both positions concede that humanity lost abilities it had presumably in the garden paradise of Eden. It is strange, isn’t it, that the garden of Eden is thought of as a paradise when we know there was a heavenly rebellion of angels going on in the background (or at the same time)? Further, how does a paradise have an option for evil (tree) and a serpent (profound evil) there to push them into taking that evil option? If this is paradise, I am not sure I like the parameters.

If God is Trinity, then humanity must have the capacity to freely love the Trinity. This is central to who God is, which means that humanity must be imbued with the ability to do this as an Image bearer. If the only love humans can give God is of the compelled type, I am shocked that humans rotting in prison are there now. If compelling others to love you is most representative of how God forces humanity to love Him, why do we imprison humans for forcing love on others? I am not misrepresenting here: I was a Calvinist for a long time. Based on that framework, humans only choose God because God first changes their nature to make it happen. Calvinists are emphatic that humans do not have choice and can do nothing else to solicit this change in nature performed by God. In short, humans are not responding to God’s overture of love; instead, God is responding to God by putting an overture of love out there but only allowing Himself the ability to respond to that overture. Many may not have studied Islam like I did in my dissertation, but the Calvinist position here is frighteningly similar to how Allah loves. The larger point, and I will close on this, if love of the compelled type is how God interacts with humanity, it is a radical departure of the love God shared eternally in the Trinity. That is a huge problem.

Dr. Scalise

Reflections on Is Time the Curse (Part 1)

16 Monday Oct 2023

Posted by in Adam and Eve, cosmic origins, Difficult Questions, Difficult Texts, Dimensions, entropy, futility, law of thermodynamics

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After writing part 1, while meditating on those matters, it dawned on me that I should address that question of what time is. Needless to say, I most certainly will not solve the question of what time is. My admitting this though draws out a central point, one which I want to underscore. I hinted at this in part 1: before the fall and curse, time was perhaps nothing more than “difference” or the “experience of difference.” To be clear, no one knows precisely what time is. Time is sequence, simply put, and sequence implies difference. In the number list, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and so forth, we spatially observe sequence, and we know that 1 is not 2, and 2 is not 3: they are different, hence sequence implies difference. I am going to venture a risky claim: I believe that all our understanding of time is nothing more than using our understanding of “spatial movement” as an analogy. This analogy of how objects move across a space is what we have direct knowledge of (non-analogous or univocal); we take that and make it abstract, taking it as an analogy to help us understand the passage of time.

A brief review of what an analogy is will help: an analogy is an idea, image, or reference that we apply to something it does not directly refer to. There has to be a certain “sameness” for the analogy to work, but there are ways that the analogy does not apply, what we call the disparate aspects of the analogy. The saying for someone having a tough day after dropping off crying kids and going to work only to be scolded by their boss, “Today’s a bear,” is an example analogy. “Today” is creating pain in this person in the same way a bear would create pain. The disparate aspect is that the bear would cause physical pain while “today” is causing psychological and emotional pain.

Thus, it is not that we know nothing about what time is; it is that our knowledge of time is analogous and therefore admittedly partial. My question, “Is time the curse?” is not particularly outrageous against this backdrop. If we knew what time was, saying that ‘this is that,’ that time is curse, would be more difficult. The only immediate experience of time that anyone has is the current experience of change, or the current experience of difference. To talk about “timelines” and imagining going into the past or future is all imagination. No one has experienced this. The Bible does focus on the curse and the results of the curse: more often than not it is called “futility, vanity, or corruption.” The Bible implies or directly speaks to limitation of time on human life, like in the curse narrative (Gen. 3:16 – 18), but the focus on various biblical texts are ideas like “futility, curse, vanity, or corruption,” not time. If I am accurate in what I am saying, asking “Is time the curse” moves the conversation away from centering on time and more onto central matters the Bible concerns Itself with. If time is little more than experiencing the present passage of change/difference, then the curse just put a limit on how much a person gets to experience this change or difference.

Is talk of “time” — or the scientific discourse we put around the utilization of time — a deceptive sleight of hand? Demonstrable is the pragmatic value of using time for industry and technological innovation. We cannot argue against that. The advancement of technology, however, fails the ultimate test of pragmatism if it cannot overcome entropy, death, corruption. My point is this: if we zoom out enough, and have a broad enough view, we will see that the final outcome of technological advancement is death, entropy, and corruption. Will the entropic heat deprivation of the universe (see 2nd law of thermodynamics) take 10 billion years or only 8 billion? What’s more, does it matter if it takes more or less time if the ultimate conclusion — after all epilogues have been written — is an energy depleted void? From this perspective, technological advancement will be estimated to be nothing more than enhancing human comfort and passing the time with mere toddler bobbles and trinkets.

If I am right, trying to solve this “time problem” is really trying to solve or remove God’s curse. Humans have a delimited window of existence: delimited from the original intent of God to have humans live in a context of ongoing, endless life. This changed after Adam and Eve disobeyed and God cursed humanity. To remove entropy, death, and corruption, is really to overcome God’s curse, not time. Of course, trying to find one’s way into God embrace with our own devices is not new: I would argue that it is a mark of “human-devised-religion.” God closed the door that gave humanity access to an endless infinite future; it reasons that only an Infinite Being (God) would be able to resupply access to this infinite future. The Gospel inverts how this problem gets solved: instead of using the devices of cursed, non-infinite humans to try to gain infinity, the Gospel’s solution is that the Infinite One enters this cursed world, not to defeat time, but to defeat death, entropy, and corruption. The Infinite One solves the curse imposed by the Infinite One. In other words, God decided He was not satisfied with how the human story unfolded and could have ended, and so He wrote another chapter, with a “happily ever after” segueing humanity to this open future infinite.

Dr. Scalise

Trinity and the Family Analogy

27 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by in Adam and Eve, Christ and Culture, Expecting Parents, Gender Issues, Homosexuality, Human Experience and Theology, Pregnancy and Theology, Trinity, Trinity and Pregnancy

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The Trinity is a rational doctrine, which can be understood by selecting facets of one aspect of a creature, another facet from creation, and yet another from somewhere else in this world. Then, the necessary step to make it “rationally conceivable” is joining these disparate features from within creation and seeing them together. I am not advocating that the Trinity can be divested of its mystery, but I am contesting the notion that the doctrine of the Trinity is absurdity or inherently contradictory.

With this said, Genesis 1:27 – 28 and Genesis 2:24 point out that God’s self-chosen analogy for Himself is the human family. We first find that both “male and female” constitute the “Image of God” (Imago Dei). These two, who constitute God’s image, are to “become one flesh,” which is an activity representative of the “Image of God.” Yes, sex is representative of God although sadly bastardized into a solely unclean thing in our culture.

Man and woman produce offspring: this child is the active union of the mother and father. Moreover, children exhibit characteristics of his/her parents whether or not he/she has ever met his/her parents. Nurture is not the source, therefore, of a child’s likeness to his/her parents; nature is. Striking indeed is that a woman and a child share the same space while the woman is pregnant with the child. The father, of course, is manifest in the child as well since his very being (genetics) comprises this child together with the wife. So what do we have? We have one person, the child, who is of the same nature as the parents (genetics/biologically), one person (child) sharing the same space as another person (mother), and, lastly, the mother and child are distinct persons.

Thus, in the very being of the child, the father and mother are present, both biologically and in character traits — although it will take many years to see this clearly. A pregnant woman might be the best analogy for the Trinity, requiring the least amount of adaption.

The Trinity is three distinct Persons who completely share the same “divine space,” and who are one in nature; a pregnant woman represents two distinct persons who share the same space (not completely though), and who are one in nature with even the third person (father) represented.

Conclusion: God self-chosen analogy gives the best representation found in a singular place, and that analogy is male and female involved in the procreational process, i.e., sex.

Dr. Scalise

Revisiting Foh’s View of Women vying for Dominance over Man in Genesis 3:16

27 Monday Oct 2014

Posted by in Adam and Eve, Biblical Interpretation, Christian Ministry, Exegesis and Interpretation, Gender Issues

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“Is Foh’s view of Gen. 3:16 still the correct view to hold or are the more modern interpretations of the verse better fitting? Is man’s ruling over woman a result of the fall, or the fact that woman was made from man as a help mate mean man’s ruling over is part of God’s original design. I hope this isn’t too much of a curve ball question!”

A friend of mine asked the question above. Foh’s interpretation of Gen. 3:16 in 1975 was a break with the traditional understanding of “Your desire will be for your husband, but he will rule over you.” It seems that the majority view down through history was that the woman would desire her husband to an unhealthy extent, supplanting her desire for God with her desire for her husband. Since this sentence appears in the curse, whatever the desire is or how it manifests, it cannot be good or healthy. Foh looked at the only other two verses in the OT that used the same word for “desire,” which in Hebrew is teshokah: Gen. 4:7 and Song of Solomon 7:10. We may dispense with Song 7:10 because the supercharged sexual talk just before it all but guarantees a translation of the word to bring out this heated passion: “I am my beloved and his passion is for me.” The underlying meaning of the Hebrew word is “urge,” obviously denoting a certain “forcefulness” as illustrated in Song 7:10. This is not to say that the Beloved was domineering in his “urge,” but the potency of sexual desire with two willing partners (as in Song 7:10) is plainly an “inexorable drive.”

More important is the Septuagint’s (Greek OT) translation of the Hebrew term into Greek because obviously Hebrew scholars around 200 B. C., still speaking Hebrew and fluent in Greek, would know better than us — in most cases — what the meaning was. It is apostrofe, and roughly is the idea of turning aside, turning back, or turning against someone. I have to opt for a negative meaning for Gen. 3:16 since it is a curse, and so “turning against” fits nicely. Further, the same negative meaning fits the context of Gen. 4:7 as well, where God says that sin lies at Cain’s door. “It turns against you, but you must rule over it” (trans. mine from Greek).

Even if the Christian church has traditionally not understood Gen. 3:16 to have the meaning of “your desire (forceful urge) will be for/against your husband,” the earlier Hebrew translators and interpreters of the Septuagint’s Gen. 3:16 opted for a Greek term that, taken negatively, displays hostility and dominance. What cannot be missed is the contrastive and hostile aversion man has to woman and woman to man: “Her domineering urge will be against him, but he will rule over her” (Gen. 3:16, trans. mine from Hebrew). With this preface, I am ready to answer the above question.

What enters at the fall and is enforced by God’s curse is the manner of male and female relations. When God says that “he will rule over her,” the Hebrew term is the verbal form of king (Mashal), but it is neither of the terms God used in the original mandate to man and woman to “subdue” the earth and have “dominion over it” in Gen. 1:28. Something has changed; now woman wants to lead, taking the dominant role, and, it seems, that man is equally as hostile in return, reigning like a monarch over her. They have turned on one another. What was an original peace, that is, a co-rulership as both man and woman were given God’s command to subdue and have dominance (Gen. 1:28), has now become a perpetual vying for position. All this to say that Foh’s insights largely stand. The only nuance I am adding is the fact that man’s “ruling like a monarch,” which is to say, in an autocratic fashion, is the outcome of the fall and God’s spoken curse. Woman was created for man’s assistance, but there is little doubt, from a high view of God’s image in both man and woman alike in Gen. 1:27 – 28, that man and woman were to rule together, in harmony. There was a order to the rule, man then woman, but not a superiority or dominance just as there is an order to the Trinity, Father then Son, but not inequality among any of the Persons of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit.

For my questioner, if you have a specific contemporary interpretation of the text you’d like me to take a look at, post it on my wall, and I will revisit this topic again.

Dr. Scalise