Theopedia

The Fall

“By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.”

— Romans 5:12

Definition

The Fall is the traditional name for the first sin of Adam and Eve: their disobedience to God’s command in the garden of Eden, recorded in Genesis 3. Through it sin and death entered human history, and the harmony between God and man that Genesis 1-2 describes gave way to guilt, corruption, and expulsion from Eden. The Fall is the hinge of the biblical storyline: it explains why humanity needs redemption, and it sets up the promise, given in the same chapter, that a deliverer would come.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states the Fall this way:

“Although God created Man upright, and perfect, and gave him a righteous law, which had been unto life had he kept it, and threatned death upon the breach thereof; yet he did not long abide in this honour; Satan using the subtilty of the serpent to seduce Eve, then by her seducing Adam, who without any compulsion, did wilfully transgress the Law of their Creation, and the command given unto them, in eating the forbidden fruit; which God was pleased according to his wise and holy Councel to permit, having purposed to order it, to his own glory.”1

The confession then states the immediate result:

“Our first parents, by this sin, fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and we in them whereby death came upon all: all becoming dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.”2

Three things stand out in this formulation. First, Adam did not fall from a neutral or ignorant state: he was created “upright” and given “a righteous law” that promised life for obedience. Second, the sin was willful, not coerced: Satan tempted “by the subtilty of the serpent,” but Adam transgressed “without any compulsion.” Third, God permitted the Fall according to his own “wise and holy Councel,” ordering it to his glory without being its author. The confession’s third paragraph goes on to describe how Adam’s guilt and corrupted nature were conveyed to his posterity; that doctrine of imputed guilt and inherited corruption is treated in full under original sin and total depravity rather than here, since this article’s concern is the Fall itself, not everything that follows from it.

This formulation rests on the older idea of a covenant of works: God’s arrangement with Adam, promising life for perfect obedience and death for transgression, with Adam acting not privately but as the appointed head of the whole human race.3 Charles Hodge summarizes its terms: “God entered into a covenant with Adam… The promise annexed to that covenant was life. The condition was perfect obedience. Its penalty was death.”3 The prohibition on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was not itself the whole of Adam’s duty; it was “the outward and visible test to determine whether he was willing to obey God in all things.”4 Because Adam stood as the race’s representative, “everything promised to him was promised to [his posterity]; and everything threatened against him, in case of transgression, was threatened against them” too.5

Biblical Basis

Genesis 3 gives the narrative itself. God had placed Adam in the garden “to dress it and to keep it” and forbidden him one tree, “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:15-17). The serpent questioned God’s word to Eve, denied the threatened penalty (“Ye shall not surely die”), and promised that eating the fruit would open their eyes and make them “as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:1-5). Eve ate; she gave the fruit to Adam, who was with her; he ate as well (Gen. 3:6).

Charles Hodge traces the effects that followed directly on the act: “An immediate sense of guilt and shame. The desire and effort to hide themselves from the face of God. The denunciation and immediate execution of the righteous judgment of God upon the serpent, upon the man, and upon the woman. Expulsion from the garden of Eden and prohibition of access to the Tree of Life.”6 He reads the couple’s psychological state after the act as total: “shame, a sense of degradation and pollution… dread of the displeasure of God, or a sense of guilt, and the consequent desire to hide from his presence. These effects were unavoidable. They prove the loss not only of innocence but of original righteousness, and, with it, of the favour and fellowship of God… He was entirely and absolutely ruined.”7

On the nature of the sin itself, Hodge locates it in the temptation’s three moves: “doubt, unbelief, and pride were the principles which led to this fatal act of disobedience. Eve doubted God’s goodness; she disbelieved his threatening; she aspired after forbidden knowledge.”8 The tempter is a real serpent used as Satan’s instrument, not a figure of speech: the New Testament identifies “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” with the tempter of Genesis 3 (Rev. 12:9; 2 Cor. 11:3; John 8:44), a point Hodge treats as settling the question against readings that reduce the serpent to Eve’s inward deliberation.9

Even in pronouncing judgment, God gave the first promise of rescue. To the serpent he said the seed of the woman would bruise its head (Gen. 3:15) - what has traditionally been called the protoevangelium, or first gospel. Hodge writes that “immediately after the apostasy of our first parents it was announced that the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent’s head… In this protevangelium, as it has ever been called, we have the dawning revelation” of the Redeemer who would undo what Adam had done.10

Paul draws out the Fall’s scope for the rest of the human race. Herman Bavinck observes that while “the universality of sin derives from the fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve” is “clearly implied in Genesis 3… it is especially the apostle Paul who spells this out in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15”: “Adam sinned; consequently sin and death entered the world and reigned.”11 Paul states the same point by contrast in 1 Corinthians 15:22: “as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”

Historical Development

The church has read Genesis 3 as an account of a real, historical event involving a real first man and woman, not as myth or extended metaphor. Hodge sets the case for historicity against ancient Near Eastern creation myths: where those accounts are “the product of rude speculation,” the Genesis narrative is “simple, intelligible, and pregnant with the highest truths,” and it stands as an integral, historically-framed part of a book “confessedly historical.”6 He notes that Jesus and the apostles “refer to them not only as true, but as furnishing the ground of all the subsequent revelations and dispensations of God” - the doctrine of redemption itself, in Paul’s Adam-Christ parallel, assumes a historical Fall.6

The doctrine of the covenant of works, on which the Reformed confessions build their account of the Fall, was articulated most fully in seventeenth-century Reformed federal theology and carried into both the Westminster Confession and the 1689 Baptist Confession that depends on it. Hodge, writing in that tradition, treats Adam’s headship as settled Christian teaching: “it has therefore entered into the faith of all Christian churches, and is more or less clearly presented in all their authorized symbols.”12

Alternative Views

Mythological or non-historical readings. Since the nineteenth century, under pressure to reconcile Genesis with post-Darwinian accounts of human origins, some theologians have read Genesis 1-3 as myth or symbolic narrative rather than history - an account of humanity’s moral condition told in story form, without a first historical couple or a datable fall. Craig Carter describes this as the live “flashpoint” in current debate: “Was there a first human pair who sinned and through whom sin entered the world? Was there a historical fall?”13 He identifies this mythological reading with an older nineteenth-century move to “harmonize” Genesis with evolutionary science, and argues that it comes at a cost: giving up a real, transcendent Creator distinct from the created order and, with it, the doctrinal weight the rest of Scripture places on Adam’s fall as a historical event.13

The confessional, literal-historical reading. Against this, the Reformed confessional position - reflected in Hodge’s treatment above - holds that Genesis 3 records an actual event: a real serpent, a real temptation, a real transgression by a real first pair, with consequences for their literal descendants. Hodge acknowledges a mediating position that grants the passage’s historicity in general while treating some details, such as the serpent’s speech, as figurative for an inward process of temptation; he rejects this middle position specifically because the New Testament writers “recognize the serpent as present, and as the agent in the temptation and fall of our first parents,” which rules out reducing it to a psychological event.14

Objections and Responses

Objection: it is unjust for one man’s sin to affect the whole race. This objection concerns the doctrine of the imputation of Adam’s guilt to his descendants, which this article does not attempt to defend in full; see original sin and imputation of Adam’s sin for the confessional answer. What belongs here is narrower: the confession itself locates the event’s justice in Adam’s role as appointed representative, not an arbitrary substitute - “they being the root, and by God’s appointment, standing in the room and stead of all mankind.”15 Hodge makes the same point from the other direction: the same principle of representation that some find troubling in Adam is what makes Christ’s obedience count for his people; “as we fell in Adam, we are saved in Christ. To deny the principle in the one case, is to deny it in the other.”5

Objection: treating Genesis 3 as history requires ignoring modern science. This is the substance of the mythological-reading position described above under Alternative Views, not a separate argument; readers weighing it should consult that section and the sources cited there rather than a one-line rebuttal here.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 6, “Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and of the Punishment thereof,” para. 1. Text confirmed against independent transcriptions of the confession. ↩

  2. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 6, para. 2. ↩

  3. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 115. ↩ ↩2

  4. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:117. ↩

  5. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:119. ↩ ↩2

  6. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 121. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  7. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:127. ↩

  8. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:126. ↩

  9. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:125. ↩

  10. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 483-484. ↩

  11. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 12, “The Fallen World.” ↩

  12. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:120. ↩

  13. Craig A. Carter, “Creatio ex nihilo and the Rejection of Mythology,” in Contemplating God with the Great Tradition: Recovering Trinitarian Classical Theism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021), chap. 8. ↩ ↩2

  14. Hodge, Systematic Theology, 2:122. ↩

  15. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 6, para. 3. ↩