IB World Religions 1.6.2. the Human Condition: the Image of God, Free Will and the Fall Notes

1.6.2. The Human Condition: The Image of God, Free Will and the Fall

Created in God's image

1. Christians answer the question of the human condition by starting from creation. Genesis states that God made human beings in his own image, male and female, and called what he had made good.
2. The Latin phrase imago Dei names that claim. Christians read it not as physical likeness but as the capacities that reflect God, among them reason, freedom, moral judgement and the ability to love.
3. The image is held to be given to every human being and not only to believers. It is the ground of the Christian claim that a person's worth does not depend on their usefulness or their conduct.
4. Genesis also gives the first humans a task, to work the garden and keep it. Christians read that as stewardship, responsibility for the created world rather than ownership of it.
5. Human beings are described as creatures as well as images. They are made from dust and depend on God for their existence, so Christians treat the image as a gift rather than an achievement.

Free will and obedience

1. Christians hold that God created human beings free. Obedience is meant to be chosen, which is why the tradition treats love of God as something that cannot be compelled.
2. Free will is what makes moral responsibility possible on this account. A creature that could not do otherwise could not be commanded, praised or judged.
3. Genesis presents that freedom concretely. The first humans are placed in a garden with a single prohibition, so that obedience is a real choice rather than a reflex.
4. Christians have argued for centuries over how much of that freedom survives sin. Augustine, a bishop in North Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries, taught that the will is so weakened that it needs God's grace before it can choose the good.
5. His opponent Pelagius taught that people can choose good by their own effort, and the Church rejected that position. Most Christians since have held that freedom is real but wounded.
6. Denominations still weigh the two sides differently. Reformed churches stress that the will is bound until God frees it, while Orthodox and Methodist teaching stresses its continuing capacity to cooperate.

Adam, Eve and the Fall

1. The third chapter of Genesis tells how the first humans, Adam and Eve, eat the fruit God had forbidden them, at the prompting of a serpent.
2. Christians call that act the Fall. The story ends in shame, mutual blame, painful labour and expulsion from the garden.
3. The centre of the account for Christians is the relationship rather than the fruit. Sin is understood as rebellion against God's will, and its first effect is separation from God.
4. The consequences are described as spreading outwards. The chapters that follow move from the first murder to widespread violence, which Christians read as showing how one refusal multiplies.
5. Denominations read the story with different degrees of literalism. Many Evangelical Christians take Adam and Eve as historical individuals, while much Catholic, Orthodox and mainline Protestant teaching treats the account as conveying truth about the human condition in narrative form.
6. The shared claim survives that disagreement. Christians across these positions hold that human beings are estranged from God by their own disobedience, and that they cannot undo the estrangement themselves.

Original sin across denominations

1. Original sin is the teaching that the effects of the Fall reach every human being. Christians disagree sharply over what exactly is passed on.
2. Augustine gave the Western account its shape. He taught that all people inherit both the guilt of Adam's sin and the corruption that followed it.
3. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that original sin is the loss of the holiness humans were created with, a state contracted rather than an act committed. Baptism removes it while leaving concupiscence, a disordered pull towards sin.
4. Eastern Orthodox churches more often speak of ancestral sin. They teach that humanity inherits mortality and a weakened nature from Adam, but not his personal guilt.
5. Reformed and Lutheran churches stress how deep the damage runs. John Calvin taught total depravity, the view that sin touches every part of a person, so that nobody turns to God unaided.
6. Some Christians recast the doctrine. Liberal Protestant theologians often read original sin as a description of the universal human tendency to selfishness, and Quakers stress the inward light they hold is present in everyone.
7. The disagreement shows up in practice. Churches that hold infants are born in original sin baptise babies, while Baptist and Pentecostal churches practise believer's baptism for those old enough to profess faith for themselves.

The condition in practice

1. Christians treat the human condition as something to be examined rather than only believed. Most services include a confession in which the congregation admits wrongdoing aloud before God.
2. Roman Catholic practice adds private confession to a priest in the sacrament of reconciliation, followed by absolution and an act of penance.
3. The calendar carries the same teaching. Lent, the forty days before Easter, is kept as a season of fasting and self-examination in Catholic, Orthodox and many Protestant churches.
4. Christian ethics follow from the diagnosis. Because the tradition holds that every person is made in God's image and caught in sin, it teaches that nobody may be written off and no institution fully trusted.
5. The account points beyond itself. Christians hold that the breach cannot be repaired from the human side, which is why their answers to where humanity is going and how it gets there turn on what God is said to have done in Jesus.