The Two Trees of the Human Predicament

Last fall I did a series entitled "A Theology of Everything" in a personal attempt to gather and harmonize some theological commitments concerning creation theology, theodicy, soteriology, and eschatology. None of it was particularly original. The goal for myself was smoothing out locations were I felt there were some frictions in my own suite of convictions.

One of the big points I made was that the human predicament is both moral and ontological. It's an important insight as this twinning is often missed. Or, at the very least, one side of our predicament is emphasized at the expense of the other. For example, soteriological visions like penal substitutionary atonement tend to reduce salvation to human guilt and forgiveness. This moralizes salvation, which leads inexorably to moral influence views of the atonement. Salvation becomes "being a good person." Full stop. Jesus "shows us how to be human." And that's all he does.

To be sure, salvation concerns human guilt. And salvation also concerns sanctification, becoming more and more conformed to the image of Jesus who is "the Human One." But what is left out of this picture are the ontological effects of the Fall. Our vulnerability to death and the groaning of creation. For the church fathers this ontological predicament was front and center.

And yet, some read the ontological concerns of the church fathers over against the juridical vision of salvation, to the point of denying any juridical content in either the Bible or patristic tradition. This is also a distortion. To be sure, the law and order imagination of modern Christians is very different from the covenantal imagination of Scripture. Still, the Torah contains the category of law and covenantal infidelity and infractions create hazards and consequences, the Deuteronomic curses among them, that demand cultic attention and atonement. To erase the categories of sin and mercy from our soteriological vision is to dump much of the Biblical imagination into the trashcan.

So, sin and death go hand in hand, the moral and the ontological are braided together. Salvation concerns the whole of it.

A clear and concise picture of the dual aspect of the Fall are the two trees in the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Tree of Life concerns the ontological. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil concerns the moral. Sin enters the world when Adam and Eve eat of the the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This is the moral catastrophe of the Fall which introduces shame, guilt, and hiding from God. The moral fall has ontological effects. Adam and Eve are separated from the Tree of Life. This introduces death into our lives along with the groaning of creation.

In short, the Fall involves two trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. One tree symbolizes sin, the other tree symbolizes death. Salvation, therefore, involves both trees. The moral and the ontological are twinned.