8 and how did it change? First, Adam and Eve sinned in act when they ate the forbidden fruit (Gen. 3:6). We are told that “their eyes were opened” — a change had occurred inwardly. Second, they covered their nakedness because now they “knew” good and evil experientially. In fact, we are told that they would know good and evil in this way. It is also telling that they both evaded responsibility for their act, an indication that the results of their disobedience effected a real change in them internally (Gen. 3:10, 12– 13). Sin now was part of who they were. They were not merely externally punished. How did it affect them and all their progeny down to us? We are told that before grace has been given, we are “darkened in our understanding,” (Eph. 4:18). “The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving” (2 Cor. 4:4); Paul acted “ignorantly in unbelief ” before his conversion (1 Tim. 1:13). Here we see the noetic effects of sin, the effects on the mind, which is not able, apart from illumination, to understand the true nature of reality or knowledge. The will is also affected. Our desires became evil (Gen. 3; 1 Pet. 4:3; 2 Pet. 2:10, 18), our intentions became directed toward evil (Gen. 6:5; 8:21). Human choice is disabled when it comes to choosing actions or words that please God. To summarize, after the Fall, the image of God is “defaced,” though not obliterated. The effects of that marring are profound, not just for the spiritual life of each individual, but also for every institution individuals “touch” during their lives — family, church, political and economic institutions. As one writer put it, “The Fall, in bringing corruption into the world, made necessary [the] institutions which should correct and control the sinfulness of human nature.”1 The Augustinian-Reformation View According to Augustine, man after the Fall, though still in God’s image, was “not able not to sin.” Augustine was the most influential theologian in the West until the Middle Ages. The Reformers, however, later revived his anthropology. For instance, Martin Luther and John Calvin both taught that man was originally created in the image of God, but that the image had been severely damaged by sin. Calvin, for example, citing Romans 3, wrote that Paul is “indicting the unvarying corruption of our nature” and that “so depraved is his nature that he can be moved or impelled only to evil.”2 This leaves little doubt. Sin permeates every aspect of the human life to some degree or another. Again the implications are profound. 1 A. J. Carlyle, A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West, 6 vols. William Blackwood, 1950, vol. I, 120. 2 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), edited by John T. McNeil, translated by Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. Westminster Press, 1960, II.iii.2 and II.iii.5.
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