Wisdom anthropology
I’ve always struggled with “the Fall;” the doctrine that the first humans were created to live in perfect union with God but chose instead to disobey, sentencing all future humanity to an estranged relationship with God.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t question that human beings live in a damaged, imperfect relationship with God. That much seems experientially self-evident. What I’ve always struggled with is the notion that it could have been otherwise.
God created human beings to be “like him” not equal to him. A logical corollary of God creating that which exists separate from himself is that while God is infinite, human beings (and all of creation) must be finite. But if we are finite, it seems to me that decay and death would be “natural” to our condition, not some kind of foreign intruder, the price we pay for sin as Genesis suggests.
But I don’t see how we could be created finite and death not already be baked into the ontological cake.
The same goes for sin. If the reason Adam and Eve sinned was because God granted them free will, which they used to disobey him, Adam and Eve would have already had to have been morally perfect to exercise their free will appropriately. In other words, that Adam and Eve would disobey seems inevitable. Again, it was all built into our finiteness.
And in his two-volume work Eccentric Existence, David Kelsey’s argues that it seems to be the perspective of the wisdom tradition.[1] When your launch point for understanding humanity, a field theologians refer to as anthropology, is Genesis (as it almost always is) you end up with some of the irreconcilable issues I just described. How is it that finite human beings could be infinite? And how is it that finite creatures with independent agency could not sin?
But when you begin your understanding of humanity with the wisdom tradition (or at least allow the wisdom tradition to seriously influence it), one consequence is that you don’t preoccupy yourself with “how we got here.” Psalm, Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes don’t seem to care what string of events led to human beings experiencing our humanity the way we do. They start with the experience itself—the joy, the pain, the struggle.
In other words, the Wisdom tradition doesn’t appear to assume that things should have or could have been otherwise. They take the human experience as a given. This is just how it is for finite creatures “under the sun,” which was always the inner struggle I felt when reading the Genesis story. My experience with sin and pain and death never felt foreign to my humanity, the consequence of some primordial human getting it wrong. Perhaps what the author of Genesis is doing is trying to explain what the Wisdom authors simply accept as their phenomenological experience: “God has dealt a tragic existence to the human race” (Ecc. 1:13).
That does not mean the author of Genesis is wrong to argue that something isn’t right, or even that something went wrong. Again, if God created human beings in his image to be loved by him, to love him, and to participate in cultivating life upon the earth, something clearly isn’t right. That much is experientially obvious.
But, again, that is the very thing that the Wisdom authors wrestle with, not, “How did we get here,” but “where is God in it?” Is that not Job’s existential “crisis?” Isn’t that what the teacher of Ecclesiastes is wrestling with? What is Proverbs if not a playbook for how to make the most of our tragic existence in this life by applying wisdom and avoiding folly? What are the Psalms if not honest cries to God in the midst of circumstances one cannot understand or bear?
As finite creatures, what if pain, suffering, decay, death, even sin are baked into existence? These things are because we are. They are the price of admission, so to speak. It could not have been otherwise. Some, like Ivan Karamosov, conclude that the price is too high. What kind of good God would create a reality where his creatures suffer so terribly? As the teacher of Ecclesiastes says, some who ponder these things come to hate life (Ecc 2:17). The question for them isn’t why does evil exist or why does God permit it, but why did God create in the first place?
But what if this is the real problem of Genesis and “the Fall,” not that we could have done otherwise and now suffer because we didn’t, but that we suffer the pain and evil of our finite existence without God’s company. In other words, we were always going to suffer. We were always going to die. But we were always meant to experience those things, as all things, in union with God who loves us.
And this is also the good news of the Gospel. God was not content to leave us to suffer our humanity alone. He came to be with us. God entered into the very finiteness he created and suffered it too. And in living, dying, rising, ascending, and gifting us the Holy Spirit, God is “with us.” We are still as finite as Adam and Eve, still as prone to weakness and sin, still awaiting our inevitable decay and death, but we do not suffer these things alone. God is not distant to our cries.
Existence can be tragic. It comes at times with immense pain. But I also experience existence to be beautiful. It’s worth the price of admission, so long as I’m not alone. In Christ I know I’m not. It is the pain of our experience that draws us into God, and it is in God where we experience healing and wholeness, where we do not die.
[1] See Richard Beck’s treatment of Kelsey’s argument on his blog Experimental Theology http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2026/01/on-finitude-and-problem-of-evil-part-4.html
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t question that human beings live in a damaged, imperfect relationship with God. That much seems experientially self-evident. What I’ve always struggled with is the notion that it could have been otherwise.
God created human beings to be “like him” not equal to him. A logical corollary of God creating that which exists separate from himself is that while God is infinite, human beings (and all of creation) must be finite. But if we are finite, it seems to me that decay and death would be “natural” to our condition, not some kind of foreign intruder, the price we pay for sin as Genesis suggests.
But I don’t see how we could be created finite and death not already be baked into the ontological cake.
The same goes for sin. If the reason Adam and Eve sinned was because God granted them free will, which they used to disobey him, Adam and Eve would have already had to have been morally perfect to exercise their free will appropriately. In other words, that Adam and Eve would disobey seems inevitable. Again, it was all built into our finiteness.
And in his two-volume work Eccentric Existence, David Kelsey’s argues that it seems to be the perspective of the wisdom tradition.[1] When your launch point for understanding humanity, a field theologians refer to as anthropology, is Genesis (as it almost always is) you end up with some of the irreconcilable issues I just described. How is it that finite human beings could be infinite? And how is it that finite creatures with independent agency could not sin?
But when you begin your understanding of humanity with the wisdom tradition (or at least allow the wisdom tradition to seriously influence it), one consequence is that you don’t preoccupy yourself with “how we got here.” Psalm, Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes don’t seem to care what string of events led to human beings experiencing our humanity the way we do. They start with the experience itself—the joy, the pain, the struggle.
In other words, the Wisdom tradition doesn’t appear to assume that things should have or could have been otherwise. They take the human experience as a given. This is just how it is for finite creatures “under the sun,” which was always the inner struggle I felt when reading the Genesis story. My experience with sin and pain and death never felt foreign to my humanity, the consequence of some primordial human getting it wrong. Perhaps what the author of Genesis is doing is trying to explain what the Wisdom authors simply accept as their phenomenological experience: “God has dealt a tragic existence to the human race” (Ecc. 1:13).
That does not mean the author of Genesis is wrong to argue that something isn’t right, or even that something went wrong. Again, if God created human beings in his image to be loved by him, to love him, and to participate in cultivating life upon the earth, something clearly isn’t right. That much is experientially obvious.
But, again, that is the very thing that the Wisdom authors wrestle with, not, “How did we get here,” but “where is God in it?” Is that not Job’s existential “crisis?” Isn’t that what the teacher of Ecclesiastes is wrestling with? What is Proverbs if not a playbook for how to make the most of our tragic existence in this life by applying wisdom and avoiding folly? What are the Psalms if not honest cries to God in the midst of circumstances one cannot understand or bear?
As finite creatures, what if pain, suffering, decay, death, even sin are baked into existence? These things are because we are. They are the price of admission, so to speak. It could not have been otherwise. Some, like Ivan Karamosov, conclude that the price is too high. What kind of good God would create a reality where his creatures suffer so terribly? As the teacher of Ecclesiastes says, some who ponder these things come to hate life (Ecc 2:17). The question for them isn’t why does evil exist or why does God permit it, but why did God create in the first place?
But what if this is the real problem of Genesis and “the Fall,” not that we could have done otherwise and now suffer because we didn’t, but that we suffer the pain and evil of our finite existence without God’s company. In other words, we were always going to suffer. We were always going to die. But we were always meant to experience those things, as all things, in union with God who loves us.
And this is also the good news of the Gospel. God was not content to leave us to suffer our humanity alone. He came to be with us. God entered into the very finiteness he created and suffered it too. And in living, dying, rising, ascending, and gifting us the Holy Spirit, God is “with us.” We are still as finite as Adam and Eve, still as prone to weakness and sin, still awaiting our inevitable decay and death, but we do not suffer these things alone. God is not distant to our cries.
Existence can be tragic. It comes at times with immense pain. But I also experience existence to be beautiful. It’s worth the price of admission, so long as I’m not alone. In Christ I know I’m not. It is the pain of our experience that draws us into God, and it is in God where we experience healing and wholeness, where we do not die.
[1] See Richard Beck’s treatment of Kelsey’s argument on his blog Experimental Theology http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2026/01/on-finitude-and-problem-of-evil-part-4.html
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