Christianity Today

What Jesus comes to accomplish is the possibility of freely engaging in a relationship with God that is its own reward: something not in tension with our negative freedom, but rather chosen out of it. The problem in the Garden was NOT that a certain type of freedom was actually bad. That freedom was a gift reflective of the dignity of the created creatures God made us to be. The problem wasn't the gift of freedom or it's use. That same freedom was used wonderfully everyday as Adam and Eve chose what to eat and how to spend their time. The problem on the day they chose to eat from the tree in the centre of the Garden was not the exercise of a bad kind of freedom. It was, rather, with what they chose: to eat what wasn't good and what God had warned them would cause death.

The fruit in the Garden of Eden is the scriptural basis for Free Will: the gift of the inviolate freedom of the individual to choose other than God. That freedom, 'negative freedom', is a statement of the dignity God gave his created people in his garden. Free Will is the gift God has given every person. No person, state, or other human power has any right to challenge or inhibit that freedom. Our cultural trends are not towards promoting individual free will or negative freedom (freedom from), but rather are towards what we'd call positive freedom (freedom to). The attempt to use the power of the state or other means to create opportunities for people to do things (i.e. to make them 'more free'), even at the expense of the God given individual negative freedom others enjoy. The trendy freedom narrative actually held today, for example, is that the limits of poverty can be overcome by coordinated human intervention. But the only Christian answer to poverty is freely chosen charity.

Chapters, that is, of Genesis.

There's no ducking the point if one takes the first eleven or so chapters as something more than fairy tale respecting man, his nature and purpose. From innocence to command, from exposure to evil, thru temptation, beyond commission in violation to condemnation, something ongoing, there is no excuse for failing to appreciate God's finding that man's imagination, absent His grace, inclines toward's evil, whether in the choice or from the choice, whether willfully or from a deformity of understanding, ignorance is and remaining no excuse. For the normal believer in Jesus, we know because the Bible tells us so.

Now Gordon, a response only a learned theologian could understand (and wade through). But for us normal believers in Jesus--huh?--come again?