Christian faith is centered around salvation in Jesus, but the need for salvation is contingent on the fall of man. Both the historicity of the fall in Adam and Eve’s original sin recorded in the Book of Genesis and the nature of salvation from the sin and death it introduced to the world have been the focus of intense attack since the mid-nineteenth century. Hans Madueme, Professor of Theological Studies at Covenant College spoke at the annual L’Abri Conference in Rochester Minnesota on February 13 on the nature and historicity of the fall.
The Fall of Man and Its Effects
Biblically, the fall of man introduced both moral and natural evil into a completely good world. Both are very evident in the world that we live in. Madueme began by quoting horrors from Brothers Karamazov. In it, Dostoevsky refers to crimes of the Turks and Circassians, including murder, rape, nailing prisoners to fences before hanging the next day, ripping children from their mothers’ wombs, tossing children into the air and catching them on the point of a bayonet, sadistic pleasure in others’ pain. He said the novel is “hard to read in many places” as it describes “staggering cruelty.” He referred as well to the work of Marilyn McCord Adams in our own generation, and her effort to understand “horrendous evils” in the light of Christianity. Some include “the rape of a woman and axing off of her arms, psychological torture whose ultimate goal is the disintegration of personality, betrayal of one’s deepest loyalties, cannibalizing one’s own offspring,” etc.
Madueme observed that studies have been done of Nazi officers, and “people who ran the concentration camps were often ordinary folks, like you and me.” He said that “evil lurks within each one of us,” ready to manifest itself in the right circumstances. This reality, he said, should be called “moral evil.”
He then referred to the English novelist, Charlotte Brontë, who along with her five siblings died before the age of 40, as well as the early death of her mother. Her father died last of all several years later. This is an example of natural evil. The reason for evil in the world given by Christian faith, both natural and moral, is the fall of man. Madueme focused on the centrality of the fall of man to Christian faith, and the challenges to it in our day.
Christian faith of course says that evil originated with Adam and Eve, when they accepted the denial of God’s Word proposed by the serpent, and ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The early chapters of Genesis chronicle the spread of evil throughout humanity, sin’s presence, its consequences, and the spiritual struggle of human beings with God. This is central to the Biblical narrative, Madueme said. Thus, the original sin in the Garden of Eden “led to the moral evil that haunts our lives to this very day.” Sin resides in us and manifests itself in our lives. He quoted the common saying that original sin “is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.”
Scripture makes clear in the key passage in Romans 5:12-21 that action on the part of one man had consequences for all of humanity. It is one man who makes all of humanity sinners, and one man who makes salvation and eternal life available for all of humanity.
Modern Challenges to the Doctrine of the Fall
But today, under the impact of secular thought, the doctrine of the fall of man “is judged to be intellectually not credible.” Many do not believe that ordinary life shows human depravity. The corruption and/or condemnation of all humanity from one person’s action is judged unfair. Perhaps above all, conventional natural history holds that humanity did not originate from a single, specially created pair of humans.
If evil did not originate from a single couple, there are a variety of secular theories to account for it. There are psychological explanations of human behavior and what ultimately drives our behavior, such as cognitive psychology (evil resulting from “cognitive biases and learned behavior”), or Freudianism (evil resulting from unconscious desires). There are sociological explanations (the structures of society determine human behavior, and thus evil). “The two basic options [are] evil comes from something inside of us or evil comes from something outside of us.” These theories hold “that there is no moment in history when something went wrong, evil has always been there.” Evil is thus inherent in the creation, impugning the creator, if there is one. This problem “haunts the theology of Friedrich Schleimacher, Paul Tillich, and other theologians.” Reinhold Niebuhr held that sin resulted “from the tension between human freedom and human finitude.” Thus, there is no possibility of a pre-fall human existence; “to be human is to be a sinner.” This, Madueme said, still leaves the creator responsible for sin.
The advent of Darwinism in the nineteenth century meant that another explanation of sin “has become increasingly common.” This is the approach of theistic evolution. It is popular among some Evangelicals because it’s possible to say “we believe in the Bible, and we believe in evolution too.” Many of these persons, however, “reject the historical Adam and Eve; they also reject the historical fall.” On this view, sin must be a biological reality. It is finally held that “to be human, is to be sinful.” From this perspective, Jesus must either have been sinful, or not fully human. Salvation from sin by a sinless Christ fully human and fully divine is not possible.
But Christians are committed to the integrity of Scripture, and “Scripture is very clear on the historicity of Adam and Eve.” It is quite difficult to reconcile a historical fall with an evolutionary origin of humanity. Madueme gave as an example the recent book of Peter Enns The Evolution of Adam. Enns “concedes that Jesus and Paul believed in the historical Adam.” And both believed that Adam and Eve fell. But Enns believes that “Paul and Jesus were ancient men … they made all kinds of mistakes …. today, we know more about ancient history than they did.” Enns said that we can believe them about salvation, “but we can reject what they thought about Adam.” But, Madueme said, “Paul makes a big deal of the connection between Adam and Christ.” This is key to the doctrine of salvation in Scripture. Madueme noted that according to Reformed theologian Herman Bavinck, the two great doctrines of Christianity are the fall of man, and the resurrection of Christ.
Death Before the Fall
Madueme then moved on to issues that are even more controversial among Christians. He noted that in evolutionary theory, death is “normal,” indeed it is essential for evolution to occur. But Scripture attributes death to the fall of Adam. Death is an enemy in the Bible, not a normal part of life, and “the last enemy to be destroyed is death.” If “death is normal,” then it “diminishes what Christ did for us.”
He conceded that Scripture does sometimes speak of death “in neutral or even positive ways.” This is determined by people’s temporary situation at times. But death is not inherently good. “The reason we die is because of sin.” In the Biblical view “death will be swallowed up forever at the eschaton.” Madueme sees a conflict in old earth and theistic evolutionary doctrine in thinking that decay and death were present long before the fall but will not be in the new heavens and new earth. While the new creation will indeed be better than the pre-fall creation, the symmetry of no death before Adam’s sin and no death in the eschaton is destroyed if there was no fall. Appealing to Gen. 3:17-19 (the curse on the ground) and Rom. 8:19-22 (the whole creation groaning) he maintained that the fall of man affected all of creation, the entire universe. Thus, “natural evils are a consequence of Adam’s sin.”
Alternatively, Christian theologians attempt to defend the idea that the creation of man occurred after evil and death were present in the world. Madueme said that there are three ways in which this is attempted. The first is “the only way argument.” Natural evil is held to be necessary for the creation of man. But “it’s hard to see from Scripture why we should accept this view at all.” How could God not create a world without natural evil if he is omnipotent? Secondly, there is an appeal to the fall of Lucifer and the angels who followed him. This holds that it was the angelic fall that introduced natural evil into the universe. Madueme agreed that the angelic fall was a real historical occurrence. But he thinks that Scriptural support for natural evils being introduced generally to the cosmos by the angelic fall is lacking. A third argument is to accept the view of modern science that natural evils are simply natural, and “really not evil at all.” But he said that this third view is incompatible with God’s goodness. Col. 1:19-20 seems to connect the final defeat of evil with redemption from the cosmic consequences of Adam’s sin, Madueme noted.
This Biblical worldview clashes sharply with modern science, Madueme said. How should Christians respond, he asked. First, “avoid the temptation to be anti-science.” With conservative Christians, there is much “anti-science or anti-expertise” sentiment since the coronavirus shutdown, he believes. He noted the many early modern scientists who were Christians, “and much of science presupposes basic theological truths.”
But when any scientific doctrine contradicts truths clearly expounded in Scripture “we cannot be neutral … We must humbly and respectfully disagree.” He conceded that “the scientific consensus” is against a literal reading of the Bible’s account of creation, but Christians must resist this. This is necessary because of “the deep theological integrity of the doctrine of the fall.” It is not a minor doctrinal claim “based on one or two passages of Scripture.” Thus, “as weighty as the scientific issues are,” accepting the current consensus threatens the story of redemption, and the doctrine of the triune God connected with it.
For people committed to “mainstream, classical, orthodox Christianity” the theological issues “are far weightier.” He quoted I Cor. 15:22 (“as in Adam, all die, so in Christ will all be made alive”). If we hope for eternal life based on the truth of the Bible, then we must acknowledge that Adam’s sin was the source of both moral and natural evil.
What we are presented with is a test of commitment to Biblical authority. “If we hold to Biblical Christianity, there will sometimes be tensions with the scientific consensus.” He appealed to the resurrection of Jesus as something contrary to a contemporary scientific view of the world, and “yet it is at the very heart of our faith.” He pointed to homosexuality and gender ideology as other conflicts between science and faith (although here it is conflict with an ideologically dominated science. Richard Dawkins, among others, disagrees with gender ideology).
Madueme said that he is “keenly aware” of problems Christians and non-Christians would have with his insistence on a literal reading of the Genesis account of creation and the fall. But he said that he would “take solace from Blaise Pascal … who speaks for all Christians who struggle with the doctrine of the fall and its implications. Pascal writes ‘what sort of a monster then, is man? What a novelty. What a portent. What a chaos. What a mass of contradictions. What a prodigy … there is nothing that shocks our reason more than to say that the sin of the first man was the cause of the guilt of those who were so far from source of infection that it seems impossible that they should be contaminated by it … yet without this mystery, which is the most incomprehensible of all, we should be incomprehensible to ourselves.”
Questions about the Doctrine of the Fall
A questioner asked about theistic evolutionists who believe in a literal, historical Adam. Madueme said that many of his objections to contemporary science’s account of natural history wouldn’t apply to such a doctrine of theistic evolution, although this is not a doctrine that he holds himself. He did note that B.B. Warfield, in the old Princeton theological tradition, who helped develop the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy common among many Evangelicals, believed in a historical Adam, in conjunction with affirming biological evolution.
Another questioner asked if conservative Christians are overprotective in the education of children, teaching the Biblical account of creation, but not mentioning the severe intellectual challenges to it, so that they are in fact more vulnerable to doubt and apostasy than if they had been exposed to the conventional scientific account of natural history. Madueme agreed that Christian children should not be insulated from the challenges of naturalistic science and its account of natural history, and that this strategy of preserving Christian faith can indeed lead to apostasy. But students must be told that God’s Word is the lens through which they ought to see the world.
It was asked why the doctrine of the fall is good for humanity. Madueme said that the gospel is the good news, and it does not make sense without the doctrine of the fall of man. Also, a clear understanding of the fall increases our understanding of the human predicament and the glory of God’s salvation.
It was also asked whether Eve was as much involved in the original sin which has been transmitted to humanity as Adam. Madueme said that Romans 5 and other passages in the New Testament refer to the sin of Adam. He said that the command was actually given to Adam as the first human being. Thus, Adam was made a representative of humanity, not Eve.
Conclusion
This writer certainly agrees that the doctrine of the fall is crucial to the Christian story of redemption, and Madueme convincingly showed that the historical Adam is vital to it. The issue of suffering, decay, and death before the sin of Adam is difficult, although the serpent was present before Adam’s sin. But the size and age of the universe as conventional science maintains cannot reasonably be resisted. An even sharper problem is Christ’s imminent return, predicted in the New Testament, but which cannot reasonably be taken two thousand years later as necessarily referring to our day (although we must believe that Christ will return to earth). This latter problem, of course, has nothing to do with science.
On both issues, the maxim used by orthodox Christians, “Scripture interprets Scripture” is indispensable in understanding difficult passages. Orthodox Christians have found different interpretations of Scripture to give the narrative of creation, fall, redemption, and consummation – which Madueme rightly referred to in his lecture as the Bible’s central story – a reasonable meaning. The Biblical narrative indeed presents many difficult problems. It is by the faith that God has given us, and the intellectual and charitable gifts given in differing measure, that we can find the narrow path to salvation and life.
A further lecture on contemporary challenges to the doctrine of the atonement will be reviewed in a subsequent article.
It can be viewed here.
More from IRD:
Dealing with a Loss of Faith – Part 1
The Postmodern Crisis of Meaning
Comment by David on March 17, 2026 at 8:57 am
The Hebrew scriptures are full of hereditary guilt. Humankind and various ethnic groups are condemned for generations because of the actions of one or more persons. There are some exceptions to these unjust actions:
“The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.”—Deut. 24:16
The origin myths of many cultures feature a primordial couple. Human fossils are uncommon, and their early discovery in East Africa gave rise to the idea that this place was the origin of modern humans. Since then, more evidence has arisen, including the discovery of the currently oldest human fossil in Morocco.
“Taken together, this evidence suggests that modern human origins can’t be traced back to a single point in time. Instead, it seems the traits and cultures of different ancestral populations combined over thousands of years, giving us what we now know as Homo sapiens.”—Natural History Museum, London
Adam and Eve is a cute story, but one which has some nasty aspects. It sounds too much like leaving a box of matches in front of small children and telling them not to touch it. Of course, Adam and Eve were told they would drop dead the day they ate the fruit. This did not happen as the serpent truthly declared. In the story of Gilgamesh, he is offered a magic herb to preserve youthfulness, but a serpent stole it before he could eat it. Genesis has a share of pagan stories woven into it.
Comment by Robert Landbeck on March 17, 2026 at 10:12 am
The very big problem with any discussion or doctrine of the Fall, at least from my perspective, is that precisely what that first disobedience and God’s first command/law given to Adam from which he disobeyed, was? Nor is it known with any clarity what the full extent of the explusion from the Garden and sight of God actually means in real terms. These two problematic questions are not resolved within the sciptural record, either canonical or non!
It remains implausible to me, that any return to the grace and favor our Creator is even possible without these insights. For any ‘return’ must be predicated on a renewed obedience to the original first command, which remains unknown. And no amount of theological discourse has yet to penatrate this mystery.
Thus the legitimacy of any religious claim is contingent upon the validity of theology as a valid human intellecutal endeavor. I would expect this conundrum to be resolved at the second coming. But what that might mean for existing tradition remains unknown.
Comment by Gary Bebop on March 17, 2026 at 12:02 pm
Much appreciation to Rick Plasterer for summarizing the scholar’s presentation for us. I look forward to the next discussion. Keep the faith, stay strong.
Comment by Mark on March 17, 2026 at 4:52 pm
I’m always disappointed with how modern-day evangelical Protestant theologians try to water down 2,000 years of Christian theology into a neat, carefully-pruned package that leaves little to no room for debate. He could have at least discussed in passing the differences between Western Christian theology of penal atonement and the Eastern Christian model of Christus Victor. But that would not fit with his agenda here. Instead its in his best interest to present “orthodox” Christians as always being of one mind on this notion.
He could have acknowledged the writings of early theologians like Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine who offer alternatives to the theory that evil comes into the world through Adam and Eve’s eating of the fruit of knowledge. Augustine believed the tree itself was not a vehicle for evil to come into the world at all. Instead he believes Adam and Eve already had evil desire in their hearts and God only placed the tree before them with the command not to eat from it in order to expose the evil that had already taken hold in their hearts. Augustine always associates sin with wrong desire. Therefore the couple had to already have evil within them to make them desire the fruit. He did not believe a literal six day creation either.
I don’t agree with a lot of Augustine’s ideas, but I will say the Bible itself presents challenges to Madueme’s conclusion that evil, as well as death, is in the world only because of the original sin of Adam. Doesn’t mere the presence a tree called the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil suggest the pre-existence of evil prior to the Fall of Man? The tree is part of the world, is it not? It’s physically planted in the earth, its roots run deep, and it presumably began as a seed placed there somehow. The serpent’s mere presence and role in tempting humanity for which he is punished by God also suggests earlier origin of evil. At most perhaps the account in Genesis points to a world in which evil already exists, but which humanity is blind to or otherwise unaffected by somehow. After all, it is called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, not simply the Tree of Evil. But these deeper questions about the what the text is really saying wouldn’t fly with someone like Madueme.
For a man who claims to take scripture seriously and literally, I’m not seeing much evidence of direct engagement by Madueme here with the text itself. Instead he seems content merely to repeat the interpretation of others and present it as beyond doubt. He doesn’t seem nearly as concerned with whether this is a true and clear interpretation of the text, but rather is more worried about the implications on the Church and the status quo of Evangelical Protestant thought if any other possibilities are considered. This is primo traditio masquerading as sola scriptura. He’s certainly is not the first, nor will he likely be the last theologian to make this mistake.
But these are the kind of questions Madueme would prefer we not to dwell on because as he readily admits, his neat and tidy theology of the fall of man is like a house of cards. You remove one component and the whole thing might fall apart. This isn’t how faith is suppose to work. This is the type of faith Job’s friends had, one that seems sure of everything, but forbids doubt of anything. That’s why evolution, modern geology, and cosmology must all be tossed into the fires of perdition he says, not because a lack compelling evidence for these things, but because he can’t hold his house together while letting these ideas inside.
Comment by Sam Tippetts on March 17, 2026 at 7:19 pm
Thank you for this. In my own wrestlings in this area I have come to agree with Professor Madueme. Here are some reasons why I know longer accept the Darwinian narrative:
“But in the past decade, without much notice by general audiences, a more wide-ranging debate has arisen from different areas of biology as well as from history and philosophy of science, about whether and in which ways evolutionary theory is affected, challenged or changed by the advances in biology and other fields. As usual in such cases, more conservative perspectives and more progressive ones are in conflict with each other, with differences ranging from minor to intense. A rising number of publications argue for a major revision or even a replacement of the standard theory of evolution [2–14], indicating that this cannot be dismissed as a minority view but rather is a widespread feeling among scientists and philosophers alike.” [1] Gerd Müller, Royal Society, 2016
“I have lately read Morley’s Life of Voltaire & he insists strongly that direct attacks on Christianity (even when written with the wonderful force & vigour of Voltaire) produce little permanent effect: real good seems only to follow from slow & silent side attacks.” [2] Charles Darwin, private letter, 1873
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes…will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” [3] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871
“Ota Benga was kidnapped from what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1904 and taken to the US to be exhibited…More than a century after it drew international headlines for exhibiting a young African man in the monkey house, the Bronx Zoo in New York has finally expressed regret….The Bronx Zoo’s founding principals were among the most influential disseminators of specious racial inferiority theories that resonate still.” [4] BBC, 2020
“…former footballer Fabrice Muamba said his son faced racist abuse in a school rugby game. Mr Muamba tweeted that his 12-year-old son “received monkey chants” from opponents at Manchester Grammar School after scoring a try. ‘Racism is learnt; be careful what you are teaching your children,’ he said.” [5] BBC, 2021
“From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’” Acts 17:26-28
[1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsfs/article/7/5/20170015/64164/Why-an-extended-evolutionary-synthesis-is
[2] https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/letter/?docId=letters/DCP-LETT-9105.xml
[3] https://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?itemID=F937.1&viewtype=text&pageseq=1
[4] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-53917733
[5] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-58536338
Comment by David on March 18, 2026 at 8:21 pm
Mark: The first “evil” discovered by Adam and Eve after eating the fruit was that they were naked. This, of course, was none of their doing.
Sam: Darwin did his scientific work prior to the US Civil War. Science has moved on from that era, and we know things today that Darwin did not know. The advent of molecular genetics in the 1980s allowed scientists to see the mechanics of evolution. Small mutations can have major effects. Today, ancient DNA up to a point can be recovered and compared to modern creatures. Unfortunately, DNA begins to degrade at death as it is not constantly repaired as in life. There is, for example, no dinosaur DNA that can be studied, Jurassic Park notwithstanding.
Africans have been compared to apes for many years because of their dark skin. However, apes have straight hair, narrow lips, and short legs, unlike Africans. Whites are actually closer to apes in these features. We know today that light skin evolved from two different mutations: in Europe and East Asia. This happened after the appearance of the mutation causing blue eyes in the area around the Black Sea, such as Ukraine.
Evolution is the basis of modern biology. Darwin did not get it entirely correct, just as Franklin’s ideas regarding electricity were not always correct. Their social attitudes were part of their eras. They were, nonetheless, important figures in the advancement of knowledge.