I have heard the story of the Fall retold many different ways. In a 2014 sermon, Matt Chandler put Adam in the driver’s seat, actually baiting Eve into her act of disobedience to God. It was a broad caricature pandering to the female half of his audience rather than a faithful retelling of the Genesis account. Another sermon I heard two Sundays back minimized Eve’s part in the Fall to such an extent that the speaker never once mentioned her name.
Hey, in our militantly feminized modern church environment, I understand the temptation to soft-pedal a woman’s involvement in plunging her race into centuries of sin.
Let’s be real: Eve was not to blame for the Fall of man, but she played a critical role in the drama. Stressing Adam’s responsibility for the Fall follows the teaching of the apostle Paul, but eliminating Eve entirely from the story is a bridge too far.
Eve’s Sin and Adam’s
I’ve been thinking about this subject a fair bit lately, and Doug Wilson happened to touch on it in a blog post this morning entitled “Empathy, Effeminacy and the Fall of Man”. Like me, Doug distinguishes between what happened when Eve ate the forbidden fruit (the first sin occurred) and what happened when Adam did (the human race fell). That’s right. We need to make that distinction. Paul writes, “by a man came death”, not “by a woman”. Both sins involved the consumption of forbidden fruit, but the motivations were strikingly different. For one, Paul tells Timothy “the woman was deceived and became a transgressor”, but “Adam was not deceived”. Eve believed the serpent’s lies and began to think about violating God’s command. The writer of Genesis spells out her motivation for us: she “saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise”. Indulging the serpent’s argument and contemplating the fruit led to the first sin of mankind.
But that was not the Fall. The Fall came through Adam, when the federal head of the human race abdicated his responsibility for the spiritual leadership of his wife and became a follower. God spells out the mechanism of Adam’s transgression as well: “You have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it.’ ” Again, in Romans, Paul writes, “Sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin.” Eve possessed independent agency, but not the authority to bind the human race or bring sin into the world. Adam did. So the sins of Adam and Eve were similar, but their motivations and consequences were very different indeed.
Untethered Empathy as the Primal Sin
Doug Wilson attributes Adam’s participation in Eve’s sin to a feeling of identification with Eve, an excess of empathy, and it inspires him to conclude, “Untethered empathy … is the primal sin, the root of all our sin.” Possibly. And yet ...
The idea of untethered empathy and identification as the root of all evil is not Doug’s, and he plainly says so. It actually comes from Milton in Paradise Lost, who wrote:
“I with thee have fixed my lot, certain to undergo like doom. If death consort with thee, death is to me as life; so forcible within my heart I feel the bond of Nature draw me to my own; my own in thee, for what thou art is mine. Our state cannot be severed. We are one, one flesh. To lose thee were to lose myself.”
I like the way Milton framed it too, but where Doug fixes on the line “so forcible within my heart I feel” [See, empathy!], as a son of Adam, I detect something a little more selfish in my forefather’s choice, possibly because I’ve felt the impulse in myself. It’s right there in Milton’s last line: “To lose thee were to lose myself.” I think Adam feared the possible loss of fellowship with Eve more than the consequences of disobeying God. Perhaps empathy led Adam to identify with his wife in defiance of heaven. But perhaps the choice was simply pragmatic: I can’t deal with what might happen to our relationship if I don’t comply. If so, taking the fruit from Eve and eating it was not just a failure of leadership, but also a failure of faith in God to deal fairly and reasonably with his sinning wife.
We Can Be Like They Are, Come on Baby
In The Smiths’ There is a Light That Never Goes Out, Morrissey sings:
“And if a double decker bus crashes into us,
to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten ton truck kills the both of us,
to die by your side, well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine.”
Is that empathy exactly? I’m not sure, but in my early twenties, I could definitely relate to the feeling he tried to express there, as could many of my peers. The song remains a favorite today. Even if I had never been in quite that state myself, I could at least imagine it and aspire to want someone so much that death by her side was preferable to carrying on without her. Romeo and Juliet are romantic because they went out together. The scene just doesn’t play quite the same way if Romeo enters the vault to find Juliet has committed suicide with his dagger, and instead of drinking the poison and joining her in death, shakes his head and intones, “What a stupid move, woman! Oh well, on to the next one.”
The thing is, that wasn’t the choice Adam faced. Eve was still standing, and the God who had created both remained to be consulted. The Fall was the consequence of a choice Adam made alone, but he didn’t have to. The end of the story had yet to be written. But self-destructive impulses have a surprising level of appeal to us. We have to be careful about that. Necessary sacrifice is noble. Unnecessary sacrifice is just vanity and a failure of imagination.
Empathy or Cowardice?
Having decided that untethered empathy is the primal sin, Doug goes on to describe how it impacts marriages today:
“Our current crisis of untethered empathy is following this same pattern. In countless homes, in a multitude of therapy sessions, in the dictatorship of how pretty much anything ‘makes somebody feel,’ a central driving problem is men following their wives instead of taking godly responsibility. Men who know better will often go along with absurdities rather than draw a line, an action which they know will result in a scene.”
See, I don’t think that’s empathy at all. I think it’s fear and lack of faith. Failing to draw a line and to lead one’s wife is not a product of excessive identification with and empathy for her. Rather, it’s the product of a fundamentally selfish, short-sighted outlook in which the man prioritizes his own desire for peace and the illusion of harmony in his home over the long-term spiritual development of his wife.
I wonder if that’s not what happened to Adam. Instead of turning to the Lord for help, he asked himself the question “Where does our relationship go from here if I don’t eat that fruit like she did?” Then he chickened out and let a woman lead the human race instead of doing his job.
That’s not empathy. That’s cowardice.
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