The Churches and Modern Thought

§ 5. The Overthrow of the Doctrines of the Fall and Original Sin

No Biblical standpoint is more directly opposed to modern evolutionary views than the doctrine of the Fall and Atonement. We have seen, in the chapters on the Higher Criticism and on Comparative Mythology, that the Bible story of Creation is nothing but a borrowed legend; and we have now seen that it could not in any case be true. If it were, Evolution would be untrue. Now, the account of the fall of man is an exceedingly important portion of the Bible, the whole fabric of the Christian faith being constructed upon it; and there is no doubt whatever that the average Christian realises this, and continues to believe in the “Fall.” He may accept the doctrine of the evolution of the physical nature of man; but he flatly denies that his intellect and moral attributes were a part of the process, although such authorities as Darwin, Huxley, and Romanes clearly point out that man’s intellect and moral sense have arisen from lower stages of the same faculties in his primate ancestors.

The conservative Christian believes that man was originally endowed with a lofty moral nature; that he succumbed to temptation; that he became a degraded being; that he has been working out his punishment ever since; and that his hope of escape from the curse laid upon all mankind lies in the atonement made by Jesus Christ. Even if inclined to have views less strictly in accord with the Christian teaching of the past eighteen hundred years, he still believes that all this is true in some sort of allegorical sense which cannot be exactly defined. Lastly, there is an ever-swelling host of perplexed Christians who, in their heart of hearts, feel much as Mr. Blatchford does when he says: “God is all-powerful. He could have made Adam strong enough to resist Eve. He could have made Eve strong enough to resist the serpent. He need not have made the serpent at all. God is all-knowing. Therefore, when He made Adam and Eve and the serpent He knew that Adam and Eve must fall. And if God knew they must fall, how could Adam help falling, and how could he justly be blamed for doing what he must do? God made a bridge—built it Himself, of His own materials, to His own design, and knew what the bearing strain of the bridge was. If, then, God put upon the bridge a weight equal to double the bearing strain, how could God justly blame the bridge for falling?”182

The average divine, whatever his denomination, is usually in no hurry to accept Evolutionist theories of the Fall, or, if he does, he keeps it to himself. Dean Wace thinks the tale of Eden and the Fall is partly historical, partly allegorical, and, in any case, true to Christian experience; and Cardinal Newman considered that the whole orthodox Christian scheme stood or fell with a belief in some great “aboriginal catastrophe.” Progressive divines teach, on the contrary, that the narrative of the Fall is not to be understood as literal history, any more than the visions of the Apocalypse are to be understood as a literal description of heaven. “For us,” they say, “the underlying truth, and not the outward form in which that truth is clothed, is the essential thing.” [As our first parents are represented as being in a state of guileless simplicity, and subsequently falling in with the tempting serpent, who, in obvious contrast with their untried innocence, is described as a being of special subtilty, the “underlying truth” appears to be that, with God’s cognisance, man is continually being taken advantage of by a crafty spirit of evil; or, to keep more closely to the religious evolutionist’s idea, man’s better nature, implanted by God, is being continually got the better of by animal instincts implanted by –?] These enlightened clerics are in a somewhat delicate position, and none probably recognise this more than they do themselves, as testified lately by the fact of over a hundred of their number distributing a manifesto to all the clergy of the Church of England, in which they express a desire to receive authoritative encouragement to face critical problems with entire candour.183

The gravity of the situation and the divergence of the new from the old teaching are summed up by the Church Times in the following pertinent remarks:—“It is impossible for Christians to affect nonchalance as to the result of the controversy between anthropologists like Lubbock, Lyell, Huxley, Haeckel, and Fiske, who assert the human race to have continuously (with whatever relapses) progressed out of brutish and squalid barbarism, and those who, like the late Duke of Argyll, Lang, Tylor, Hartmann,184 Renouf, and most missionaries, maintain that savagery is a declension from higher things, and that ‘man’s natural state is civilisation’—not, of course, the civilisation of Paris and London, of trousers and half-penny papers, nor yet Rousseau’s anarchic golden age, but creation in God’s image after His likeness. It is said that we need believe no more about our first parents than that they were innocent—i.e., had not yet made trial of good and evil; that the ‘former Adam,’ even after he had ceased to be a pithecoid hanging by his tail from boughs, and long after his mollusc185 stage of existence, was still as primus homo, a demi-witted creature, burrowing in holes, gnawing roots, grunting, grimacing, snarling, shuddering; not even a noble savage, but bestial and grovelling. As moral consciousness slowly woke in him, he misused his powers; but such a ‘fall’ was really an advance. Such is the latest version of Paradise lost—of that great disinheritance, that moral and spiritual catastrophe, which, St. Paul avers, was the entrance of death into the world by one man, and which, he seems to say, dragged down the lower creation when the son of God, ‘paragon of animals, noble in reason, infinite in faculty,’ fell in Eden. We do not urge that the two teachings cannot be reconciled; but it is clear that the immense difficulty is not to be dismissed by saying that the Bible is a mosaic, not Mosaic, or that it does not profess to instruct us in anthropology.”186

There is a downrightness and lucidity about this criticism of advanced theology which one cannot but admire, although one may not be able to share its optimism as to the chance of the two teachings ever becoming reconciled. How can they? Consider the unsatisfactory nature of the following speculations by means of which the clerical evolutionist hopes to surmount the stumbling-block of the Fall.

Dr. Gore, Bishop of Worcester, now of Birmingham, who is an adherent of Evolution, speaks mysteriously of a “fall from without.”187 As the question is of enormous importance to the truth of Christianity, I propose to examine Dr. Gore’s thesis at some length. He grants that the idea of special creation is inconceivable, and that our race has an animal ancestry, and then gives us the following description of primeval man, which (shades of our forefathers!) he assures us is according to the Bible and the enlightened ideas of early Christianity: “Man began at the bottom, immature, in the fullest sense of immaturity, totally undeveloped, but with a capacity for development.” A correspondent of Dr. Gore’s, anxious possibly to be let down gently in the matter of his ancestor, suggested “immature, but not deformed.” This Dr. Gore accepted as a good phrase. Most of us would think that when our ancestor was at the stage, say, of the ape-like man he would be deformed according to existing notions of the human form divine, while, if only at the protoplasm stage, the question of form would hardly matter.

It has been explained to me by a clerical biologist that the Bishop meant that the Fall was not a fall from a completely developed form to one less developed, but that there was perversion of the development, so that a rudimentary life which might have been developed one way has developed along a less favourable path—a common occurrence in ontogeny. However that may be, and whatever the physical or mental state of this creature at the time he “fell,” was his previous state one of beautiful innocence and purity? What about those inherited animal instincts? Dr. Gore goes on to say that “humanity might have, with infinitely more rapidity, developed upward; it has been delayed, retarded by sin.” Granted; but at what stage of development did this poor wretch ever get a proper chance? The Christian faith inculcates that there is no chance for him without belief. What belief did this immature man have to guide him?

However, let us see what more Dr. Gore may have to tell us on the Fall and Atonement. The words already quoted are from his second lecture to the Birmingham working men. In his third and last lecture he says: “He (God) appointed that man alone of creatures should have a twofold nature—that he should have fellowship with physical nature, but also that he should have fellowship with God. He (man) fell through a suggestion from without, and preferred wilfulness to obedience; he thus fell into sin, and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. Note that, if sin is said to have caused death, Christ is said to have abolished death. ‘He that believeth on Me shall never die.’ It is death as men have known it, the end of their hopes, that sin introduced and Christ abolished.”

Here, then, is the Bishop’s answer regarding the “Fall” question. There has been a “fall through a suggestion from without,” whatever that may happen to mean. I should have thought that, if there was a fall at all, it was through a suggestion from within, much as Canon Wilson puts it.188 Bishop Gore, however, probably feels that it has to be from without to agree with the Bible story of the temptation. We are told nothing further about this mysterious “without,” and I ask: “Could anything be more vague and unsatisfactory than this explanation of the Fall?”

Assuming that determinists are wrong, and that the Creator is not responsible for the shortcomings of His creatures, the only fault for which primeval man could possibly be held to be answerable is that of not controlling his animal instincts so soon as he commenced to be conscious and could no longer claim the excuse of innocence. Probably he did his best, and began to improve himself ever so little. In that case, as the Church Times sapiently remarks, there was no Fall, but an advance. Or, adopting a compromise suggested by an American divine, he fell upward! If he did not strive as much as he might have done, there was, at all events, no sudden leap over a precipice; for the gift of increased consciousness, such as the human being now possesses, must have evolved very gradually. However, the creation of the world and all that therein is was also exceedingly gradual, and yet the pious find themselves able to consider the Bible account to be an accurate though allegorical representation of the process; so there is really nothing to prevent them from considering the account of a remarkable incident in a certain garden during a hot summer’s day, shortly after man put in his appearance on this globe, to be a true representation of the perverse conduct of their ancestors through countless ages.

For this so-called “Fall” we are to be visited with a death which will be the end of our hopes if we do not believe in Christ. This, then, is the new threat held over the unbeliever: he will forfeit his right to immortality. As it is in place of the old-fashioned consignment to hell, we may hope, for the sake of the human race as a whole, past and present, that the new Christian dogma is nearer the truth than the old. Most of us, however, will, I think, come to the conclusion that there has never been a “Fall” at all in any sense. Dr. Gore in one breath asks us to think man so much above the ape that his spiritual powers cannot have been evolved; yet, when science points out that they were evolved—that man rose so much above his relations—he still speaks of a fall! It is an outrage to our common sense. And, if there were a Fall, may we not say with the Persian poet?—

Archdeacon J. M. Wilson tells us189 that “We are taking our part in the long struggle of good against evil. This has been often pictured to us as the struggle of God against some Personal Power of Evil which we call Satan, the fact of struggle suggesting two rival powers. But the evolutionary way of regarding it presents the struggle as one of the divine element in man struggling to overcome the purely animal inheritance of lust and passion inherited from a far by-gone stage.” Dr. Wilson, therefore, believes, as every thorough evolutionist must believe, that we have to look to an animal and not a human ancestor for the ultimate origin of what we call sin. But we want to know where the “Fall” comes in, and this he has explained elsewhere,190 in what seems to me to be the only possible way open to an evolutionist. He says: “Man fell, according to science, when he first became conscious of the conflict of freedom and conscience; and each individual man falls as his ancestor fell.” Dr. Wilson does not attempt to make out that there was any particular “fall” at any particular period in man’s history, such as Dr. Gore apparently still clings to; but he plainly tells us: “I do not mean to say that there is a particular moment at which men fell: it is not so. It is a continuous struggle of good and evil.” He continues: “I see in this nothing to conflict with a legitimate interpretation of the story of the Fall in the third chapter of Genesis. Such a narrative is not an illusion, still less a mere fiction; it is, as all teaching of spiritual truth must be, a temporary and figurative mode of expression.” In other words, Dr. Wilson considers these early chapters of Genesis, and probably a great deal more of the Old Testament and some of the New, to be only an allegory. With regard to the Atonement difficulty, Dr. Wilson’s argument is simply that “We need only to look at the world as it is to see the struggle of the two-fold nature in man; to see that it has need of a Redemption, of a Saviour.” Few, I fear, will accept this latest explanation by a learned and earnest believer. Theologians, in Dr. Wilson’s opinion, have made a grievous mistake when they say: “If the story of the Fall is not literally true, then it is literally false, and with it goes the need of a Redemption, of a Saviour.” Yet most people—and these will include the whole body both of the old-fashioned orthodox and of the unbelievers—will certainly side with those “grievously mistaken” theologians.

To many of us there seems no need whatever to have recourse to the supernatural in order to account for the origin of sin. It is not one of the mysteries of life. When we know who our ancestors were, and hence why we possess certain instincts, it is quite unnecessary to predicate a “Fall.” Details of the Rationalist’s view of sin (and of the reasons for morality) will be found in the last chapter of this book.