C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 50 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Teaching solo this session, Patton opens the most controversial issue in church history: what did Adam’s fall do to you? Before any theory is tested, he insists on feeling the force of the justice question, because we would never let a father punish his son for lacking an ability he was never given, and then he reads Genesis 3 as if for the first time, noticing how much the text refuses to explain. Listen for his unsettling claim that every one of us is born a Pelagian, and has to be taught otherwise.
Patton begins where the difficulty actually lives: our bone-deep convictions about justice. When a terrorist takes innocent lives, we hold him fully responsible, to the point of execution, precisely because we believe he could have done otherwise; a justice system assumes it without thinking. We likewise hold unbelievers responsible for rejecting Christ, calling it a choice whose judgment will be just. Then the counter-case: a father who spent a lifetime forging his son into a football player, raged when the boy failed in college, and, as Patton heard the story, rejection ended in the son taking his own life. Everything in us says the father was wrong, because no amount of training gives a man speed he was never given, and it is wrong to require of someone what he is unable to do. Hold that intuition, Patton says, because the fall of man will press on it hard: if God requires all people to believe, does that not imply that all people are able?
What we are entering, Patton says plainly, is the issue that has split the church for two thousand years, and has split Protestantism itself since its inception: when man fell, how far did he fall? What effect does Adam’s guilt have on us, and what effect his sin on our nature? He reaches for a line from one of his favorite songwriters, Bono, about a fall that was no jump, and asks: were you and I jumping in the fall of Adam, or did we simply fall? And he sets the guardrail for the coming weeks: the last sessions raised the value of man as image-bearer, and this unit will not be allowed to cancel them. The two must be held in tension, with honesty about mystery where Scripture leaves mystery: the secret things belong to the Lord, but the things revealed belong to us.
The passages are read slowly from Genesis 2: the garden planted in Eden, every tree pleasing to the sight and good for food, and in the midst, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, with no explanation of what that knowledge is or why God placed the tree there. Man is set in the garden to cultivate and keep it, given every tree freely, and given one prohibition with one penalty: in the day you eat of it, you shall surely die. The class wrestles with the why of the tree. It represents opportunity, and without opportunity for disobedience there is no real obedience, though Patton notes other commands could in principle have been disobeyed too. Some theologians go further: knowing is not the same as planning, but on their reading the fall belonged to God’s plan, because redeemed man knows a love in the giving of the Son that innocent man in the garden never could. We love because he first loved us, and the speculation, honestly labeled as such, is whether God created the opportunity for a greater love.
Genesis 3 opens with a serpent introduced without introduction, more crafty than any beast of the field, a word that in Proverbs can be a virtue and here bends toward manipulation. The exchange is studied closely: the serpent’s opening distortion, indeed, has God said you shall not eat from any tree; the woman’s reply, which adds a prohibition against touching; the serpent’s flat denial, you shall surely not die, with its half-truth that their eyes would be opened, knowing good and evil. Patton lists what he wishes the text told us: how Eve received the command, whether secondhand through Adam mattered, and where Adam was standing during the whole conversation. The text will not say, and building theology on speculation, he reminds the class with a grin at his own last-week speculation, is never profitable.
Why did the serpent approach the woman? The class ventures the answers: she was not the head, and a complementarian reading of male headship would suggest the attack deliberately bypassed the God-given order, so that if Adam had eaten first and she had followed his lead, the story might have run differently. Patton refuses to certify any of it beyond what Scripture states, and points to where Paul actually goes in 1 Timothy: it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman, being deceived, fell. What can be said is strategic: Satan struck the head of the race, because a fall in the first pair carried the whole of humanity, and from the moment the curse was pronounced, the rest of the Old Testament reads as Satan’s long war against the line through which Christ would come.
After their eyes are opened comes the sad comedy of hiding and blame: the man blames the woman God gave him, the woman blames the serpent, and, as the old line has it, the serpent did not have a leg to stand on. The curse on the serpent raises questions the first readers could not have answered: Israelites in Canaan had no developed doctrine of Satan, only an evil snake cursed to its belly. What connection Satan had to the creature we are not told. But inside the curse sits the verse the church calls the protoevangelium, the first gospel: enmity between the serpent’s seed and the woman’s seed, he shall bruise you on the head, and you shall bruise him on the heel, read by most as Christ wounded at the cross and Satan’s head crushed in the death and resurrection.
The curses themselves repay slow reading. To the woman: multiplied pain in childbirth, and a desire for her husband paired with his rule over her, where both terms carry negative weight, a desire that is part of the curse and a rule that shades into abuse, matters the course will take up in earnest when it reaches manhood and womanhood. To the man: cursed ground, thorns and thistles, bread by the sweat of the face until he returns to the dust he was taken from. Patton pauses over how strange this is to our instincts: asked to name the effects of the fall, we say sin and evil in the world, and we never say that work became toil and childbirth became agony, yet those are the curses the text actually specifies.
The first readers would have asked what we ask: God said in the day you eat of it you shall surely die, and they did not drop dead. Genesis 3:22 sharpens the puzzle: man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, and must be barred from the tree of life lest he eat and live forever, which means that even after the fall nothing in his nature had corrupted to the point of making death automatic; the tree could still have sustained him. And that tree returns: Revelation 22 shows the tree of life in the New Jerusalem, bearing fruit every month, its leaves for the healing of the nations, and the teachers take it as more than symbol: in the eternal state we live forever because we eat. The answer to the puzzle runs through the course’s settled definition: death is always separation, never extinction. The day they ate, their relationship with God was severed, and they hid from the God they had walked with; they died that day in the deepest sense, and died physically many years later.
Now the observation the whole unit will wrestle with. Nowhere in the curse does God tell Adam: your children will be born separated from me, inheriting a corruption that makes them sinners. Patton wishes it were stated plainly, and it is not. What Genesis gives instead is illustration, relentless illustration: from the next chapter to chapter 6, everyone follows Adam, murder in the first family, evil compounding, until God’s verdict that every intent of the heart is only evil continually. Nobody does what Adam failed to do; the exceptions, Enoch who walked with God and Noah found righteous, stand out precisely as exceptions. Patton notes how dispensationalists label the era the age of conscience, and admits the honest tally so far is a lot of I don’t knows: the doctrine of original sin will have to be assembled from the whole of Scripture, not read off the curse.
Terms are set before positions are argued. Original sin, in today’s usage, does not mean the first sin Adam and Eve committed but the broad effects of that first sin on humanity. Within it: imputed sin, also called original guilt, the legal declaration by which we are held guilty for what Adam did, guilt reckoned to us directly from Adam as in a courtroom, not passed down the family line; inherited sin, also called original corruption or the sinful nature, the corrupt tendencies we receive from our parents, who received them from theirs, all the way back; and personal sin, the individual sins you and I choose to commit. The chart in the notes draws it: corruption flowing down the generations from parent to child, and guilt imputed straight from Adam to each person. None of the three is simply a given: every one of them is exactly what the church has debated.
The debate resolves into three historic positions, to be examined in turn: some hold we are condemned only for personal sin; some, that we are corrupted but not so deeply that we cannot still choose good; and some, that we are guilty in Adam and corrupted beyond the ability to choose God at all. The first belongs to Pelagius, a British monk of the fourth century, and Patton insists on fairness before verdict: the church had settled the Trinity and was settling christology; anthropology was the next great question, and Pelagius had no shoulders to stand on. His teaching: man is inherently good; the fall condemned no one but Adam; the will’s disposition is unaffected, every person born as Adam was, able to choose good or evil; and the universality of sin is explained by bad example, begun by Adam and copied ever since. Its later adherents include liberal Christianity and the Socinians. The church condemned it at the Council of Orange in 529, and no evangelical wears the name. And yet, Patton presses, notice how natural it all sounds: we are born Pelagians, every one of us, and our whole experience of justice, parenting, and example argues Pelagius’s case for him. You have to be taught otherwise.
The session’s remaining minutes begin the defense in earnest. First argument: God does not hold people accountable for the sins of another. Jeremiah 31 repudiates the proverb of the day, the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are set on edge: in the days of true knowledge no one will say it again, for everyone will die for his own iniquity. Ezekiel 18 presses the same point at length: the son shall not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity, the righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the soul who sins shall die. Second argument: if sinful corruption is passed to all from Adam, then people carry an inherent disposition that denies true freedom, and God would be commanding what cannot be done. The Bible, the Pelagian argues, shows man freely choosing: Deuteronomy 30 sets before Israel life and prosperity, death and adversity, and commands them to choose. The full answer to Pelagius, and the Augustinian and Arminian alternatives, belong to the next session.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all seventeen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. Why does Patton open with the terrorist and the football father?
2. What question does Patton call the most controversial in church history?
3. What does Genesis 2 pointedly not explain?
4. What speculation about the fall does Patton relay, carefully labeled as speculation?
5. Which questions about the temptation does the text decline to answer?
6. Where does Paul actually go in 1 Timothy on the temptation?
7. What strategic observation is made about Satan’s approach to the first pair?
8. What is the protoevangelium?
9. What do the specific curses on the woman and the man actually name?
10. How does Genesis 3:22 complicate the question of whether they died that day?
11. What returns in Revelation 22, and how do the teachers read it?
12. What does Patton candidly admit the curse never states?
13. What is the difference between imputed and inherited sin?
14. What fairness does Patton insist on before judging Pelagius?
15. Which is NOT part of Pelagius’s teaching as presented?
16. Why does Patton say we are all born Pelagians?
17. Which passages open the Pelagian defense that God does not punish one person for another’s sin?
All seventeen correct. Lecture 6 is complete.
Patton says we are born Pelagians and must be taught otherwise. Where does your own instinct side with Pelagius, in how you think about fairness, judgment, or your children, and what would it take for Scripture to overrule an instinct that deep?
The curses name toil and pain in childbirth, yet we never list those when asked about the fall’s effects. What changes in how you face your work week when you recognize its frustration as part of the curse, and its redemption as part of the hope?
They did not drop dead, and yet they died that day. How does the definition of death as separation rather than extinction change how you read the rest of Scripture, and how you think about what Christ’s death actually accomplished?
The curse on the serpent carries the first gospel: God himself promises enmity between the serpent and the woman, and between his seed and hers, and that her seed, though bruised on the heel, will crush the serpent’s head.
Patton’s charge from the opening prayer stands over the whole unit: accuracy and graciousness together, remembering that good people across the centuries have held different views here, and that this question, however heated, is not among the essentials that decide fellowship. The reading of Genesis 3 done slowly, as if for the first time, is itself the week’s assignment. Next session the defense of Pelagianism is completed and answered, and the two great remaining views, the Augustinian and the Arminian, take the floor.