The Transformation of Reason in Genesis 2-3: Two Options for Theological Interpretation (Critical Essay‪)‬

This essay will seek to identify a variety of interrelated yet distinct strands within Christian interpretations of Genesis 2-3 as a means of demonstrating the narrative reality of knowledge's ambiguity in the story. The paper will propose a heuristic schema based on two categories of hermeneutical options. Both depend upon the interpreters understanding of how Genesis 2-3 portrays the character of human understanding before and after the expulsion from Eden. My description of the first option, which for simplicity's sake I will term the "classical fall tradition," will begin by identifying the Pauline roots of what would become the Augustinian notion of "original sin." I intend to trace the impact of this doctrine through representative thinkers in order to show how this tradition gives rise to exegetical strategies that see in Genesis 2-3 the fall of human reason into a degenerate state. I will then investigate a second strand of interpretation that rejects the grounding assumptions of the classical fall tradition. Here I will give a brief description of the interpretive strategies favored by Enlightenment thinkers, in which the knowledge gained through humanity's act of disobedience opens up felicitous new avenues for rational human existence. I will then argue that the interpretive task pursued by many contemporary interpreters seeks to appropriate certain aspects of this characteristically modernist position within a post-Enlightenment context. These interpreters bring to Genesis 2-3 a perspective that emphasizes the fact that humanity's exercise of reason is always shot through with ambivalence (including the potential for disaster).