Doctrine of Man - Part 20: The Fall of Man & the Nature of Sin

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and "shelter-in-place" recommendations, Dr. Craig gives this lecture from the safety of his home office.

"Defenders" is Dr. William Lane Craig's weekly Sunday school class on Christian doctrine and apologetics. This video is part 20 of his locus on the Doctrine of Man.

We welcome your comments in the Reasonable Faith forums:

[jathusanjeyakumar]

Thank you Dr. Craig. A student of yours from Sri Lanka

[The_Advent_c]

Thank you for your thoughts on the fall👍

[sharonphilips]

Have learned a lot from you Doctor.God bless you for uploading all these classes.May you reap all rewards eternally !

[sila]

Yeshua is haMashiach is Yahovah, halleluYah ✝️

[bertrandruskin]

I am always interested Dr Craig in your theological teaching but the argument presented by others that Adam and Eve were mortal even before the fall is a difficult one to square with the Biblical narrative that declares God is Life itself. Creation is a physical expression of the nature of God. Life is an attribute of God and there is Life only because there is God. Creation would therefore have been an expression of life- all creatures granted permanency. The universe existing until the world had been filled as God commanded Adam and Eve. A requirement we are closer nowadays to fulfilling than ever before in the history of mankind which is one indication that the world is coming to an end. The restorative act of the Lord Jesus dying and rising again would not necessarily have required a physical death if Adam was to die anyway, it would have necessitated only a spiritual death and resurrection. The Bible's view that physical death is a punishment, therefore would be wrong, and that death was a necsssity, and our physical deaths are no longer as a consequence of sin.

[jeffscottkennedy]

This reading seems foreign to the intention of the Genesis text. Also, the Rom. 5 passage clearly states that death came through the one man’s sin. The contrast in the passage is between life and death, and a major component of The Christian view of life is bodily resurrected life, which unwinds the curse of bodily, permanent death.
Love Dr Craig but he is off base on this one.

[thenowchurch]

One cannot force themself to believe something.
Therefore unbelief cannot be a sin in itself.
Rejection of knowledge would be the sin.

[felixwalne]

I too agree, the Bible is multi dimensional, Genesis is both symbolic and historical, we might say it is the theological interpretation of events that have historicity. Gen 2-3 for example presents Adam and Eve as a sort of microcosm of the human condition

[woohoo]

It’s not going to get any easier to defend Genesis as a literal historical account of origins. But I’m sure they’ll keep on trying ....

[thenowchurch]

Craig you are ignorant or being disingenuous about the teaching of Paul Tillich.
For him, God is the Ground of Being BUT also the Infinite.
The Infinite by definition must contain person and therefore his God is not
exclusively impersonal.
To portray his theology as if it is some new age pantheism is a low move.