The problem is that the idea of not having an inerrant and hence perfectly uncontestable final authority makes many Christians uncomfortable, and sets many to wondering how rejecting inerrancy limits the Bible's value and usefulness. This talk is meant to address two concerns related to that question. First, I will summarize my belief in the Bible's origins and nature; second, I want to present a case study of the resultant hermeneutic, with a brief and tentative exposition of how I interpret the passages that have resulted in the doctrine of the Fall.

Basic assumptions

The participants in any debate come to the table with a number of presuppositions and assumptions. I don't believe it's possible to nearly divest oneself of them all, but I would like to be as honest as possible in divulging the ones I've identified and consider relevant.

First, I affirm that God intended the whole canon of Scripture for His Church’s use. Throughout history, God has interacted with His creation, revealing Himself to mankind and guiding it towards better and better understandings of Himself and His ways. Rather than entrusting this cross-generational, accumulative knowledge of His truth solely to word of mouth transmission, He called men to testify to these truths using a somewhat less mutable mode of transmission: the written word. This impulse to testify with the pen manifested itself on each occasion in a form of literature familiar to its authors and original recipients. God naturally had interest in seeing that those writings most profitable for His Church be recognized as such and dubbed with a notable authority and accessibility; this concern was addressed with the canonization of Scripture.

By "authority", I simply refer to the unique status of certain works of literature that were plucked from the rest and elevated to a special status. This status is rooted in the principle Paul articulates about the Old Testament in 1 Tim. 3:16-17: “All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.” The church's successive efforts at canonization extended the virtue of profitability for theological and pragmatic insights to the New Testament, and this gave the whole Bible (more or less as we have it) a Providential seal of approval that I refer to as “authority”. I make no claims about the Bible being “authoritative” in the same exaggerated degree that most evangelicals do, because this is surely an overextension of Paul's principle: he could very well have stated the supremacy of the Scriptures' authority if he wished, and I see it as a clear abuse of his measured description of their usefulness to claim that he meant to establish the “verbal, plenary” view of inspiration.

The inerrantists agree with the presupposition of Scripture being authorized by God. Many argue that this presupposition is proved, or at least affirmed, by the alleged fact that the Bible is completely without error of any kind; if the Bible is not inerrant, these often see no other possible basis for believing in its authority. While it is true that inerrancy would constitute almost undeniable evidence of the Bible's authority and its teachings' validity, nonetheless, denying inerrancy does not negate either, especially when there are other grounds for belief in them.

Specifically, another of the philosophical underpinnings of my view already alluded to, is very similar to one that has long been the guiding force of Catholicism, and its surest justification. The role of the Community of Believers in parsing and passing on divine revelation is the basis for Roman Catholic ecclesiology. Protestants have customarily been horrified by the Catholic rejection of sola scriptura in favor of scriptura et traditio. A Catholic puts Holy Scripture alongside Church tradition because the two are in origin and essence indistinguishable: Holy Scripture is itself a form of Church tradition, the testimony of ancient believers affirmed and handed down by subsequent believers. By this same standard of approval, we rightly esteem Scripture as having seniority because the same timeless, Providentially-guided body that created it has ranked it so.

Case Study: The Fall

The traditional doctrines of the Fall and of Original Sin teach that the first man's first sin caused a rupture in the whole race's ability to interact with God. How the death that Adam experienced because of his sin was passed on to all his descendants has been explained in various ways; the federal view says that Adam's fall from God's favor was effective for all humanity because he was the "head" of the race. Another view is that the Fall corrupted Adam's very genetic makeup, causing humanity to be a slave to its own sinful and fallen flesh, which explains how it was passed on to his children, and thus the whole race.

Regardless of how every human is born sinful, most Christians believe that God considers all humans straight out of the chute as culpable of sin, a stance of separation from God called "Original Sin". This position explains why every human sins, and why we automatically start out life estranged from God. That we all sin and by nature act in ways that do not please God from early childhood at least is apparent to most (excluding, perhaps, some strains of hyperpreterism!). For this reason, it is accurate to say that unredeemed mankind is, as a race, "falling", but as for "fallen", what did we fall from? Or, more importantly, what caused this Fall? Do we - or perhaps I should say, did those prior to AD 70 - each come into the world as a slave to sin because of one sin that we did not commit? My intention here is not to mount a polemic. Allow me to present you with an alternative interpretation based on a view of the Genesis account as etiology.

I hope it is obvious to all why we should recover the mindset of the author and the original audience when interpreting Scripture. We must do the same when reading the writings of NT authors, who were in many cases themselves interpreting the OT. Comparing early Genesis material to ANE mythology or any other ancient genre would have been even further off the radar screen of a first century Jew in the Greco-Roman world than it is for so many 21^st century interpreters. For the ancient Israelites, the mythology in Genesis was the mythology to end all mythology, intended by the compiler(s) of the Pentateuch to replace and render all competing mythology in the land obsolete. The sole artifact of the genre was crystalized in the form we see in Genesis such that later Hebrews would have no knowledge of its origins. The NT writers would not have thought of doing comparative literary analysis on genres no longer familiar. Nevertheless, anyone who looks long at ANE literature and then looks at Genesis 1-11 will see a striking similarity in certain aspects of style and substance. Paul, as a learned Hellenistic Jew, probably saw the Fall story as history in much the same fashion as those of us in the modern world tend to. Yet none of the stories of Genesis were written in that mode that fits the modern view of “history”. The genre of historiography has evolved even since it became a conscious concern during the Hellenistic era, and the narratives of the Old Testament were written quite independently of this movement.

The theological insight we look for in a given Old Testament narrative is related not to what the story says directly, but rather to what the story was meant for. Moreover, if we believe God chose the stories to be included in the Bible, we must assume that His sovereign hand ordains them beyond the author's intent, so that although the author's intent is valuable for understanding it in its original context, its continuing, cross-contextual usefulness is assured only through God's intent for it. Thus there are often at least two strata of meaning, the author's and God's, although these do at times coincide. In the event of successive authors and redactors, as with the case of the Genesis mythology (the cultural myth and the version adapted by the creator[s] of the Pentateuch), there are more strata still.

The NT writers used the OT in ways that we would often not feel comfortable doing. Specifically, Paul for example read all kinds of typological observations into the Scripture, as part of the interpretive tradition among Jewish scholars of that time. I personally think there is a lot of truth to be distilled from a healthy appropriation of typology. Typology does not require that the story containing the types be historical. We can see Christ's substitutionary atonement in the ram in the thicket, whether or not there ever was an actual ram in an actual thicket discovered by a man named Abraham under the precise cirumstances mentioned in the story. In 1 Tim. 2, Paul draws a typological parallel to substantiate his take (v. 11) on how women should act in worship services. Although he may have taken it for granted, the historicity of the events referenced is not required for his analogy, because as he himself admits, his position is based on a principle he sees in the Genesis story. Typology is the art of recognizing and applying patterns, and Paul asserts that he sees one in this controversial passage.

Now let's take a look at the most seminal passage for the whole discussion on the Fall and Original Sin.

Romans 5:6-19 (NIV)

⁶ You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷ Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. ⁸ But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

⁹ Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through him! ¹⁰ For if, when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life! ¹¹ Not only is this so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

¹² Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned— ¹³ for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law. ¹⁴ Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who was a pattern of the one to come.

¹⁵ But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! ¹⁶ Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. ¹⁷ For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

¹⁸ Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. ¹⁹ For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

Here (as well as in 1 Corinthians 15) Paul draws the parallel between the first Adam and the last Adam, Jesus, because he saw symmetry between the two. Notice, though, that the validity of Christ's work for all is not stated to be dependent on sin coming through one man, as is often construed. Paul's analogy seems a somewhat rhetorical anticipation of the objection, "How can one man's work create life for all?" Paul's response to this theoretical objection is that, if one can accept that sin entered the world through one man, one can also understand that one man could bring life to all. The symmetry he saw between the two was no less valid for one of the characters being non-historical. Suppose we substitute for the Fall story another myth altogether. I often point out that Paul's parallel between Adam and Christ is to some extent duplicated (albeit less elegantly) with the following statement: "For as from one vessel (Pandora's box) all evil entered the world, so from one vessel (the tomb of Christ) sprang the remedy for all evil into the world." It's a rough substitution, but does the obviously mythical referent in the comparison (much less the unfortunate clunkiness of the parallel) lessen the truthfulness of the parallel? The analogy to Adam adds the credibility of typology to Paul's contention that Jesus' redemptive work was for all. Using typology to justify a position is propositional and not authoritative, because at best all that can be done is the citation of precedent and an assertion that the principle holds for the present issue. When one cites typological analogy, he asserts that the type and the matter at hand share a pattern, not that the type existed solely to foreshadow and thereby prove the matter at hand, nor does it demand the historicity of the allusion. In short, it doesn't matter whether Paul believed an historical character named Adam literally fell and passed death down to all his descendants in some genetic or federal fashion through resultant "original sin". Adam's sin did not necessitate Christ's work: every man's sin necessitates Christ's work. In contemporary rabbinical fashion, Paul deftly creates a typological comparison in inverse position: one was a death-giving person, and one a life-giving person.

Etiologies, myths intended to explain the causes and origins of various things, are the most common sort of mythology. Our modern culture, while looking on myths as useless lies, continues to seek the answers to the whys and hows of everything: we tend to look to science and history, facts that tell us what created current situations. But what about cases in which those details are obscure or unrecoverable? Are we content to shrug our shoulders and say, "It's just unknowable"? Not usually: there will be no end to speculation about those things, whether the subject is cosmic (what is the meaning of life?), or more incidental (why did that politician change his stance on that issue?). This discontedness to resign oneself to mystery is one of the very things that has occasioned the birth of etiological myths across the world.[1] Humans have always been speculative. The difference between the ancient and the modern motivations for and method of speculation about unknowns is that the ancients used mythological stories in order to apply meaning to the subject of their speculation and we tend to use scientific enquiry to sever meaning from the subject, and are thus generally skeptical that any meaning can or should be applied. The ancients were content to be ignorant of the mechanics of how, as long as they knew why. Modernists feel satisfied to have discovered the natural causes, the how's, and seem convinced that this abolishes meaning. The theory of evolution was very early on hijacked by atheists who thought that explaining how things happened obliterated even the possibility of any why's (let alone the necessity of the big Who). This nihilistic naturalism is incompatible with a Christian worldview in which all that matters, at the end of the day, is meaning.

Another way of making this distinction between the ancient and modern mindsets is articulated by John Walton, a professor of Biblical Archaelogy at Wheaton. He and others who study ANE literature and culture have noticed that while the modern world tends to think that structure determines function, the more common conviction in a pre-scientific world was that function is a consequence of purpose: the universe runs because it is supposed to, not because its physical make-up or structure determines it. Again, how it happened was seen as nowhere near as important as why it happened. The ancients concocted fanciful, fantastic, mythological explanations of how as place-holders, vehicles to the destination of finding meaning and purpose in the events described. Unfortunately for them, the pagans were as unable to know why as how the universe was created, because they had no special revelation of God. Enter Genesis 3.

The third chapter of Genesis is etiology at its finest: why men have to toil by the sweat of their brows just to make a living, why women have such horrendous pain in childbirth, why people feel shame at nakedness, and, as a dead-ringer for etiology, it explains why snakes don't have legs. It also seeks to explain why there is sin in a world that a holy God created. The value of mythological etiology is that it does not need to use facts to illustrate meaning. We see the truth of the God-man struggle illustrated in the story of the Fall whether or not that struggle was the cause for our world being less paradisiacal than we might wish. Of course there are other truths and observations about God's nature embedded in the Fall narrative, many of which I haven't personally teased out. But we risk missing out on them if we insist on interpreting the stories of Genesis as impeccable 20th century-style historiography.[2] Suffice it to say that the Fall narrative is no more a revelation about the historical causes for man's natural state of rebellion and the hardships of life than it is an explanation of why snakes don't have legs.

How do we decide what truths the etiologies were meant to convey? As you may suspect, this cannot be answered in an easily quantifiable manner. However, a principle I already alluded to helps guide us. Remember, the main purpose of the Bible, Genesis to Revelation, is to reveal Jesus as the Door between man and his estranged Creator. It follows, then, that the key without which we cannot decode the Bible's truth is its testimony to the work and words of Jesus. The Old Testament is a window to truth, a window of glass peppered with cracks and imperfections, streaked with the incomplete understanding of its authors and dusty by the great antiquity of its origin. The New Testament is a window newly washed, benefiting from the more immediate proximity of its Witnesses to the Truth, Who was Jesus Himself. Naturally, the truth we see revealed in the New Testament would thus be the more essential for life and godliness, which is another reason I extend Paul’s description of the usefulness of the Old Testament to the New.

Let me be clear: I am not trying to make the meaning of Scripture unjustifiably vague, as "liberal theologians" often appear wont to do. I think it important, however, to correct the common misconception that the story of the Fall is an allegory, the type of story in which every detail maps into some spiritual truth. Instead, the details must be taken as strokes in a larger picture, finding the concepts they were seeking to convey, the notions they wished to counter, or the themes they were trying to address. The original legends and mythologies, whether or not originally intended by the proto-Israelite sages and storytellers that first formulated them, were used to explain how things could have gotten so screwed up from a presumed pristine beginning. They could not imagine a God that would have created a world that did not meet the ideals they held. Moreover, the presentation of the story of the Fall was incorporated into what we now call Genesis, fitting into a larger thematic emphasis, what Boadt describes as “a four-part story of sin, God's warning punishments, divine mercy, and then further sin.”[3] This pattern plays prominently throughout the OT books. This was a didactic method intended by the authors to warn and advise the original audience. Paul's analogy of Adam and Christ is, in effect, doing the same thing that the person(s) who added the Fall story to the Genesis material did, using it to illustrate the cycle of grace  sin  punishment  grace. After all, that pattern is in fact an accurate representation of how we perceive the individual's life experience: a man is born (the gift of life a grace in itself), a man sins, the penalty of expulsion from God's presence is exacted, and God offers the fallen man the grace of being born again. Every human is Adam. Paul, however, noticed the end to this cycle with Christ succeeding where everyone else fails: His punishment and God’s resultant grace is efficacious for all, and removes us from the consequences of (and perhaps, some argue, the inevitability of) the calamitous God/man struggle.

These early Israelites understood God does not create things that are not good. We see this belief explicitly stated seven times in the first chapter of Genesis. The world was indeed sinless (i.e. was not at odds with God and His purposes) until sentient beings with God-consciousness chose to do what they knew was wrong. This is where God's intent for the Genesis mythology enters despite the authors’ misconceptions: whether or not there was an original paradisiacal state, we do see that mankind falls because it chooses its own interests over God's. We are all Adam and Eve: all fall prey to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.

Some may object that, if the Fall is simply another exposition of the God-man struggle, it reveals nothing new and therefore rings hollow, inconsequential. First, I respond that this is not the story's only value, only that this emphasis was one of its primary purposes. Second, for the original audience, it was indeed a revelation, albeit an incomplete one. Appealing to later revelation to explain earlier revelation of less apparent interpretation is a fundamental principle of hermeneutics. Jesus is the Word of God, revealing God and His ways to man far better than the OT could ever do. Augustine was dead-on when he said, "The New Testament is in the Old Testament concealed; the Old Testament is in the New Testament revealed." Sometimes what we get from Genesis (and the Old Testament in general) has to be read back into it from what we know about God revealed perfectly and definitively in the message of Jesus. Far from superfluous, these early glimpses at truth reveal a continuity of testimony to a timeless revelation.

The problem with a viewpoint like the one presented here is that there is much more ambiguity about spiritual truths behind passages than is usually posited by Fundamentalists. We usually prefer to have systematization, and as little confusing ambiguity as possible. But, as I always say, God could have chosen a much less leaky vessel than men through whom to communicate His truths to us, but He obviously chose to do so. I choose to embrace the mysteries as mysteries, even as I always seek to unravel them.

My current position on the issue of the Fall and depravity works in tandem with my conviction that the vast majority of scientists Christian and otherwise have not all gone off their rockers, and neither are they opposing God with a massive conspiracy. In short, I believe that the prevailing scientific consensus on the origin of species is on its way to accurately describing how we got here. Despite warrantless accusations to the contrary, science does change, evolving as it is challenged and improved upon, so I'm not about to say that the current understanding of the mechanics of evolution is complete or wholly accurate. Neither would any evolutionist. But most of the basic premises are not likely to need overhaul any time soon. The God that used evolution to birth, nurture, and shape His creation is a patient, masterly, and above all, sovereign God. Natural processes are not naturalistic, not godless, and not ultimately susceptible to the winds of change: the earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof. When our ancestors were microscopic organisms, He knew each of our names, and knew how He was going to get us here. I find this scheme even grander and more miraculous than Creationism.

What about the Fall? If no one human is the cause for our sinful natures, what is? Depravity for me is summed up by self-centered living, which is inexcusable for a species that has achieved consciousness of the divine. We are all sinners because we all start off life living for ourselves, which, after early childhood and the awareness of Otherness sets in, becomes sin. Sin is a state of estrangement from God. Over long eons, God brought His children up biologically so that mankind became sentient and came to know that it had a Maker. At that point, God chose a different means to mature our species. We still struggle to subdue and tame our own biological impulses that lead to our detriment and God's displeasure, but we master them not through natural selection, but by the overcoming power of the Spirit of God. Christianity is the next phase in the evolution of God's creation.

After all, one common interpretation of the Fall is that every human is born with original sin, but retains free will so that they are responsible for the actual sins they commit. What if I told you that "original sin" is a biological defect? What if that tendency to look out for ourselves was created in us? Are animals living for their own sustainment, in some cases killing other animals not only for food but to extend their territory, and otherwise simply living for themselves, are these animals thumbing their nose at God? Would we consider this self-centered living to be rebellion against the Creator? Is God going to hold them accountable for their actions? No. Why? Because God has not revealed Himself to these animals and told them that self-centered living is against His plan for them. The survival of a being without God-consciousness is dependent on this sort of behavior, a behavior we would call narcissistic in humans. God brought our forbears along in this way until a point at which we became aware not only of ourselves, but of something – Someone - higher than ourselves. It was at this stage that we became human. However, whether there was a stage of humanity that was aware of God and not in rebellion, as C.S. Lewis believed, or whether, as I suspect, the very first humans aware of God were unable to walk with God in full communion, the fact remains that self-directed living was no longer acceptable, and has remained thus as the bane and chief failing of our species.

The Fallout

I may be accused of devaluing the place of history in unforgivably post-modern fashion. Actually, I view history, and specifically the history of our Lord made flesh, as the centerpiece of the faith. The record of His actions in the Gospels (perhaps this is why we have four of them) and Acts are actual photographs, whereas everything else in the Bible ranges from stylized and caricaturized medieval paintings to the crudity of cave drawings in comparison. The Old Testament and the epistles are but interpretations, each part a believer's honest but ultimately subjective impression of the Lord Who appeared.

The actions and teachings of the historical person of Jesus comprise easily the single most reliable and important subject of Scripture. No one person can recover all the truth within a passage of Scripture; indeed, some passages seem to defy any attempts at extracting spiritual insight. Yet if all else were to fail, we have been entrusted with the largely historical testimony to the Word incarnate. This is why He and only He is the Word of God. Even if (and I emphatically reject this) Paul is wrong in all his intepretations, we believe that Jesus the Son of God died for our sins and rose after three days! This is the basis of the faith and of the gospel, which is the only truth that someone needs to enter a relationship with God. This, not the inerrancy of the Bible, is the bedrock of the faith, and it is very nearly idolatry to place undue faith in any other device.

I am deeply disturbed by one reaction my view of inspiration receives: indignation that leads to a virtual charge of blasphemy. Articulating a view of Scripture that denies inerrancy and affirms its nature as a work of literature is considered by many to be tantamount to heresy. Those who aver that the whole Bible is divinely-revealed truth come dangerously close to heresy; the Bible is a testimony to the history of revelation by men of God given to us, in which we do catch many a glimpse of divinely-revealed truth. My belief in the limitations of revelation is also why I cannot be a part of the Catholic Church: because (even redeemed) humanity is flawed and fallible, no segment or institution of humanity, however historically well-grounded, can wield authority to the degree that Catholics claim for their leadership and tradition.

I have come to the unsettling conclusion that Christians want the Bible to be proved completely and utterly inerrant so that this will justify their beliefs to themselves and unbelievers. Any claim that questions inerrancy is seen to undermine the credibility of the whole Bible. In effect, it's the equivalent of a two-year-old who's been given one piece of candy and who, when denied another piece, throws down the one he has in defiance. We want our Bible to be the Word of God, dadgummit, and we won't settle for any less! I'm convinced that another reason many Christians cannot let go of their belief in inerrancy is that they prefer to be on the us side of an us vs. them debate, and if need be they will manufacture such a debate: they hold unpopular beliefs because they think that what is true must necessarily be unpopular among unbelievers, and because inerrancy, young earth creationism, and certain other doctrines are hated by non-Christians, this somehow bolsters their odds at being correct. These sorts of mindgames are needlessly devisive, and prohibit anyone who is not predisposed to explain away and deny the warts they see when they look at the Bible from drawing close enough to hear the words of truth and life contained within.

A Necessary Qualification

I have been asked, "Is there a legitimate reason that we can or should use these stories differently from the way the apostles and writers of scripture did?" There is, in fact, very good reason: our mission is to interpret correctly, no matter who interpreted incorrectly. There is an underlying assumption in that question that everything the NT writers believed was accurate - but I would turn around the question and ask if there is a legitimate reason that we should take their word on how to use these stories unquestionably. Were they not fellow travelers? Their close exposure to the Word Himself didn't automatically correct all the misconceptions they might have held about the OT. Do we really believe these men were infallible? Listen, we're preterists: most Christians who lived through the destruction of Jerusalem apparently did not even notice the coming of the Kingdom of God, the consummation of human history, right under their noses! Even in the NT, we are forced to re-evaluate the authors’ understandings and intents and not incautiously accept everything they believed. Of course this can be taken too far, and so let me temper this with a necessary qualification.

Because I have spent so much time talking about the errancy of Scripture, I fear that some will exaggerate my view out of an overreactive reflex. I am not saying that most or even much of Scripture is incorrect in scientific or historical detail. On the contrary, we have no reason to doubt that they truly believed everything they said, and moreover, that the NT writers especially had very good reason to believe it. They had no reason to fabricate any of the science, history, or doctrines expounded in the New Testament out of thin air. They were liars and hypocrites indeed, if these men whose leader proclaimed Himself the Truth willfully disregarded truth in order to concoct testimony and gain a following; if deceivers, they were underachievers, because there are definitely points at which their fabrications could have been a bit more comprehensive and coordinated. No, for honest testimony related by humans capable of unintentional error, our Scriptures certainly bear the expected signs. We should not expect to see error without having good cause.

Commonly, we see those who have what may be truly called a low view of Scripture making attempts to blame unpopular doctrines on an author’s erroneous beliefs (e.g. Paul on feminism or homosexuality). We cannot guard strongly enough against throwing something out just because we don't happen to like it or understand it. When certain of the Witnesses’ theological beliefs appear erroneous, surely it is arrogance to do anything but assume ignorance on our part unless we know a reason why they would have been sincerely and honestly misled on those issues. I can't think of a reason to discount Paul's views on walking in the Spirit. Nor can I imagine why his view of eating food offered to idols might be incorrect. The assertion that by Jesus the worlds were framed cannot be attributed to anything but revelation or speculation, and that last possibility is too incendiary to be entertained without its own evidence. There is, however, good reason to believe that Paul was mistaken about the Fall, because the reasons Paul would have believed the story was historical are apparent: it was the belief of all Jews at the time based on a Hellenized interpretation of the erstwhile Ancient Hebrew myth adopted as Hebrew Scripture.

If we can't trust their historical, scientific facts, how can we trust their spiritual teachings? If an accomplished professional plumber wrote a plumbing handbook in which he shared his vocational expertise, but peppered it throughout with his speculations on the history of plumbing, his views on politics, etc., would inaccuracies in these last two cast doubt on how he says to proceed in choosing piping for your new bathroom addition? Of course not – you bought the book because you wanted to know about his area of expertise, and the value of his book for its primary purpose rests ultimately on his credentials as a plumber, and would not be tainted by the fact that he has erroneous beliefs in unrelated subjects!

Similarly, the men who wrote the Bible were experts, licensed to practice by God Himself, and the theological Better Business Bureau called the Church has given them its seal of approval. Note that these commendations stop shy of making the Witnesses infallible. Yet it is foolishness and arrogance to claim that they were wrong on any spiritual matter without good cause.

Conclusion

This view is one that makes the acknowledged and calculated leap of faith that men have met God and that God has wanted to leave us a record of their interactions. With that in mind, of course there is the possibility that we may go too far and take their word for something that they were incorrect about. But one of the benefits of having an inspired Scripture is that even when we accept every thought within it uncritically, God is still able to communicates a truth practical for our Christian life. I view this serendipity as part of God's commitment to ensuring all Scripture as profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness; behind every misconception of a truth there is nonetheless a real, unassailable truth; behind every blurry view of an object, that object exists regardless. This is why we are able to note something like the God-man struggle pattern out of Paul's likely belief in a Fall that probably never happened in the way he envisioned it.

[1] People even today have been known to set out to write their own etiologies. For example, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote a remarkable set of etiological myths in the first few chapters of the Silmarillion, but what we glean from his stories tells us mainly about his view of God and the universe, and not at all about the true-to-life historical particulars of our own universe, or the purpose of man in this world, etc.

[2] Notice I say 20th, not 21st century - one of the blessings of post-modern thought is its mistrust of the morally naked empiricist epistemology. We are gradually moving away from historiography as the modernists did it, which is bad for historiography, but good for understanding ancient storytelling.

[3] Lawrence T. Boadt, Reading the Old Testament.