Sorry it’s been awhile since the last post. I think I was kind of holding myself to the lengthy standard I set with my first few posts and couldn’t seem to find enough free time to post anything as substantive as I wanted to. So I’ve decided to just divide my latest thought into several installments in the interest of getting something up. So you’ll have to stay tuned for a few days to see where this is all going.

I’ve been reflecting more on the dichotomy I’ve cited a few times between personal holiness and public justice, two important aspects of Christian practice which have a disturbing tendency to get severed from one another. In broad terms, religious and social conservatives tend to embrace the personal holiness side of things, while religious and social liberals tend to be more concerned with social justice. Rather than ranting about contemporary Western political and religious schisms, however, I thought it might be illuminating to examine this issue from a broader biblical and historical perspective to see how these two sides of the Christian life are supposed to be held together and how they have become so estranged from each other over the centuries.

So for starters, let’s look at the creation narrative in Genesis 1–2. Interestingly, it seems that the only instruction God gave Adam and Eve concerning personal holiness (or, if you like, their relationship with Him) was a negative one—do not eat the fruit of this one particular tree. There is nothing else in the creation accounts related to what we typically conceive of as “morality” or even what we conceive of as “worship.” Of course, the reason for this is clear enough—without the knowledge of good and evil that would come from disobeying God’s command concerning the tree, there was no distinction between “moral” and “immoral” behavior (at least not in a way that would have been comprehensible to Adam and Eve). In other words, God could not logically have said to them, “Do not do this, because it is evil and will corrupt your holiness before me” because the categories of good, evil, holiness, and sinfulness were simply not part of their consciousness before the Fall. Obedience to God’s single moral commandment concerning the tree had to be based instead only on the preexisting relationship of love and trust that they enjoyed with Him. This “relational obedience,” in turn, served as their appropriate act of worship and functioned as the only form of (what we would consider) “holiness” before God that was available to them at the time.

However, God also gave the first humans explicit instructions that governed their relationships with one another and their stewardship of the natural creation—things that would now tend to fall more under the “social justice” umbrella. Adam and Eve were called to ”become one flesh,” (a phrase which suggests not only physical intimacy, but also emotional union and loving care for one another) and to be fruitful in order that the earth might be populated. They were also given oversight of the plants, animals, and natural environment. Thus, Adam and Eve’s life prior to the Fall was marked by the existence of a web of caring, appropriate relationships that linked them to God, to one another, and to the entirety of the nonhuman creation. In such a situation, both holiness before God and just engagement with other people and with the rest of creation seemed assured.

The Fall, of course, damaged all of these relationships, making Adam and Eve aware of the difference between good and evil and granting them the ability to choose between them. (I realize that wording it in that way may sound heretical from a Reformed perspective, but I think that the biblical emphasis on making choices between good and evil, especially in passages like Deuteronomy 30:11–20 and Joshua 24:14–25, supports this wording). Not only was their relationship with God and their intimate access to fellowship with Him negatively affected by disobedience, guilt, shame, and fear, but their relationship with each other seems to have been damaged by blame and mistrust. In addition, they were forced to confront the new realities of physical pain, toil, and mortality, and to enter into conflict with a nonhuman creation (plants, animals, soil) that would now often work against them. 

Thus, the Fall clearly had profoundly adverse and far-reaching effects both for humanity’s exercise of holiness and obedience before a sovereign God, and for its compassionate care for others and for creation. While personal sin (anger, jealousy, pride, lust) certainly has its roots in the Fall, so do broader social and systemic evils (war, poverty, hunger, environmental degradation). So why, in our contemporary context, is there so often a lack of agreement among believers about how (or even whether) our concerns for these two sets of issues should be effectively combined? How did the two get separated to such a great extent? Stay tuned…