From Bondage to Liberty in Religion: A Spiritual Autobiography

by George T. Ashley

And if death only entered the world because of sin, why does all nature die? Man alone was capable of sin, and according to the story, man alone sinned,—unless we include the serpent. Yet, not a beast of the field, a fowl of the air, a fish of the deep, nor a reptile or creeping thing of all the earth has ever lived but that it died, or will die. Not a tree has ever grown, not a plant has ever opened its leaves, blades or petals to the sun; not a seed has ever germinated, nor a flower ever bloomed that was not doomed to die. Did all this come upon all nature because Adam ate an apple? Would all the beasts of the field and the birds of the air, paraded before Adam that he might name them, be still living with him in the Garden of Eden, if he had not sinned? Would all the plants and trees and flowers that grew and bloomed in the Garden of Eden in the days of Adam and Eve's innocence be still there, with the same leaves and blooms, just as they were, if man had not sinned?

These questions I know look silly. But if we are forced to accept the premise, we must be prepared to accept the natural conclusion to which it leads. And if death—physical death—as orthodoxy has always taught, entered the world only because of Adam's sin, it naturally and inevitably leads to the conclusions I have indicated.

Another question presents itself. Can perfection, or that which is perfect, fall? If either man or angels were created pure, perfect, holy, and in the image and likeness of God, how can such a being fall? It seems to me that it would be just as possible for God himself to fall. The very fact of the fall,—if such a fact exists or ever existed,—of either man or angel, is in itself conclusive proof of some moral imperfection or weakness somewhere. That man is morally imperfect is freely conceded. In plain words, he is a sinner. But was he ever otherwise? The farther back we trace him the worse he appears on the general average. All the Bible outside of this one story in Genesis, as well as all history attests this fact. Then may it not be a fact, that while man is a sinner, he always has been so; that he never fell, for he had been nowhere (morally) to fall from but always has been and still is morally imperfect and incomplete, but ever striving onward and upward?

But supposing this story of the fall to be true, what was the penalty for it,—physical death, as we have seen, or eternal spiritual death, or both? After all the preaching and writing about eternal death, damnation, hell-fire and brimstone as a result of Adam's sin, I could not find any such doctrine taught in the story of the fall, nor anywhere else in the Old Testament, and but very vaguely, if at all, in the New.

The story in Genesis cannot be construed by any reasonable rules of interpretation to mean or involve any other punishment on Adam or his posterity, for his sin, beyond physical death. "Dust thou art and unto dust shalt thou return" is the final climax of the penalty. There is no hint, so far as I can understand it, of immortality or any future life. There is not the remotest hint of it in this story. All the punishments for sin from Adam to Noah, and long afterwards, culminated and ended, so far as Genesis is concerned, in physical death. The Hebrew Hades, Sheol and Gehena, were creations of a much later period.

And who, or what was the serpent? A real snake, or the devil? I know the current belief is that the serpent is a mere figure for the devil, or that at least the spirit of the devil was incarnated in the serpent. But there is not a line of Scripture to support either assumption. In the story itself it is stated only that the serpent was "more subtle than all the beasts of the field." He is classed with them, not above them, except in subtlety. The whole fabric upon which this idea of the identity of the serpent of Eden and the devil is based seems to be a single verse in Revelation (xii, 9): "And the great dragon was cast down, the old serpent, he that is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world; he was cast down to the earth, and his angels were cast down with him." There are one or two other passages in the same book that speak of "that old serpent, which is the devil and Satan," but they have no more connection with or relation to the story of Eden, than Homer's "Iliad" has to the nebular hypothesis. And yet upon these few passages is built up the whole fabric of the identity of the serpent of Eden and the temptation, with the devil, Satan or Lucifer, that is so graphically portrayed in "Paradise Lost." This whole story of the serpent in Eden is very likely but an adaptation, in another form, of the old Babylonian myth of "Marduk and the Dragon."

All this shifting of the penalty for Adam's sin from physical to spiritual death and identifying the serpent with Satan, was an after-invention, to try to make it harmonize with later developed doctrines of immortality. Any candid reader can see that no such interpretation can be placed upon the natural and simple language of the story itself. In fact immortality for man, according to the story, is forever inhibited, according to verses 22-24. After eating the forbidden fruit the only way to immortality was to "eat of the tree of life." And to keep Adam from the "tree of life," of which he might "eat and live forever," God drove him out of the garden and placed the cherubim over it with a "flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." According to this story, man is not immortal at all, and the only way to attain it is to get by the cherubim, or scale the walls of the garden of Eden and get to that tree.

I was now ready to determine for myself that this whole story of the Garden of Eden was a myth, legend, or some oriental allegory, the true purport and meaning of which is now wholly unknown; beyond the reasonable conjecture that it originated with some very ancient oriental philosopher, in the childhood of the human race, and is an allegorical portrayal of his attempt to solve the problem of the origin of evil, of suffering and death in the human race.

THE FLOOD

But I pursued my course of reasoning and investigation further. I approached the period of the flood. The infinite and omniscient God is revealed as disappointed with this creature that He had made "in his own image and likeness." He gets angry with him for his perversity, declares He is sorry He made him, and resolves to destroy the whole race, except one family whom He proposes to preserve for seed for a new start; together with every beast, fowl and creeping thing of the earth, except one pair of each for seed. Think of an infinite and omniscient God, who knew all things from the beginning, all that man would ever do, before He created him, now looking down from heaven on his work, confessing it to be a stupendous failure, getting angry and repenting that He had made man or beast; and now resolving to take vengeance by drowning the whole outfit! If man was so perverse that he needed to be destroyed, why wreak vengeance also on the animal creation that had not sinned? And if the animal creation must be included in the universal destruction, why do it by a process thru which all marine life naturally escaped, while all terrestrial life was destroyed? Then why save any seed of such perverse stock? Was not God acquainted with the laws of heredity that had worked so perfectly in transmitting the sin of Adam down thru all the generations thus far; and did He not know the same thing would continue in the "seed of the race" after the flood? If He really desired to correct the mistake He had made, why did He not destroy the whole race, root and branch, while He was at it, renovate the earth and start with a new creation of better stock?