A friend wrote me yesterday:
Here's an interesting question for you...what exactly did Adam and Eve (and by extension parents) pass on to Cain, Abel et al?
Some of you might enjoy my ramblings in response (if not, scroll by, nothing to see here...😏).
Good morning! I'm assuming of course that you have something more spiritual in mind than genes (or for that matter jeans!). So you're getting at the notion of "Original Sin," i.e., inherited guilt, what makes us all sinners by nature, not deed. As to what "exactly" they passed on to us the simplest answer is of course the predictable fallback one, but it's predictable for a reason. It's "I don't know." It's predictable precisely because there's tons that, speaking purely for myself, I don't know. I think it's a safe bet, however, that I'm not alone in that regard. What mostly differentiates people is the degree to which they're willing to admit that there's tons they don't know.
So starting from the default "I don't know," I think I can safely add the "phenomenal" (meaning not "amazing" but "observable") aspect to my answer and try somehow to correlate it to the (let's admit it) very little that Scripture makes explicit on it. (If Scripture were perfectly explicit on this matter, along with an assortment of other questions the Church has been wrangling and warring over for hundreds of years, we wouldn't even have these questions, would we!)
The inescapable in life is that we all do sin. We all do do those things that are unworthy, cruel, manipulative, etc., in varying degrees, yes, but we all do them. At least once. Even if a little bit. Nobody has a clean slate ("All have sinned...."). And that's in keeping, appallingly, with what Adam and Eve did (all it took was once for them to be sunk).
In Romans it talks about how we all died in Adam. Something died there in the Fall, some kind of pristine unfettered access and interplay between the Holiness (capital H) of God and the holiness (small h) of Man.
I recently mentioned that word, or that phrase more precisely, "holiness of Man," at a Bible study and noticed that some instinctively recoiled as if I'd uttered heresy. Which betrays a disastrously stunted concept of holiness. I get that they unreflectively took me to be positing Man as some sort of holy-in-self being, a source or independent possessor of holiness, which is nonsense of course. God is holy and what He creates is holy in both reflection and expression of His holiness. Which isn't in the least startling considering how often God refers to the holiness of those things He has set apart, even in the midst of a fallen world, for His designs and purposes.
So our First Parents were created holy as the entire creation was, and exceptionally holy in their unique nature as the Imago Dei.
That holiness was forfeited in the Fall. And once forfeited it was well and truly gone. If their pristine avenue and interplay, for lack of a better word, with God was lost, it was lost to humanity and to the creation of which Man was appointed a lord and master. There's no detour around Man to God. Not for Nature, not even for the children of Man (Adam).
It's a perception that does seem very Pauline, doesn't it. We all "died" in Adam, we were all cut off from the highway, as it were. The route to God was cut off, the bridge was out.
What I'll say next is probably stretching the notion in a way that has holes in it (even if the holes are very tiny, any concept with holes in it is bound to fail as you inflate the concept, together with its holes, to cosmic proportions)--as I was saying, I'm sure the idea I'm going to express has holes in it, but Swiss cheese has holes in it too and still the parts that aren't holes taste pretty good.
So my hole-ridden concept is that, if the unutterably holy God created Man, the unholy Man "created" (procreated) his descendants. The holiness you might say Adam "got" from God, Adam's children could never get from fallen Adam. There's no detour, the highway has to be straight or it simply isn't.
We have all fallen in Adam our procreator, just as once all mankind (even if at the moment it consisted of only two) was holy in God its Creator.
This is only occurring to me just as I type it, this angle of creation and procreation combined with the notion of connection, avenue, access, even koinonia. Holy Adam's koinonia was with holy God. Fallen Adam's children's koinonia is with the fallen, and there's no way out unless a new Holy Adam is somehow able to make fallen Adam's children HIS children and the highway is restored.
So perhaps the question is not "What did Adam and Eve pass on to us?" as much as "What did Adam and Eve not pass on to us?"
A part of this that I observe as woefully, I'll even say catastrophically, unattended to in Christian "talk" is how Christ fulfilled (consummated) the holiness of Man. He was not only "perfectly righteous" as Man. Nor was He holy only as Son of God or God incarnate. Jesus was holy as Man, He was the Holy Man, consummately embodying the holiness innate to Man at the Creation. In Christ the holiness of Man is one with the holiness of God in perfect union, restored communion.
Jesus didn't only bring God back to Man. Jesus brought Man back to God, he became and lived what God wanted and appointed in Man. Jesus blazed, in his very life, soul and body, the trail of return to the Father: he became it. Not insignificant that the Hebrew concept of "repentance" is "return." We don't like to talk about Jesus "repenting" because of our somewhat shallow, narrow free-association of the word with sin, and of course Jesus never sinned (even though he openly and unabashedly submitted himself to John's repentance-baptism, and make no mistake, the baptism itself was intrinsically, not incidentally, a profession of repentance). In the deepest sense "repentance" is return. So while Jesus could never say "Sorry" for sins he'd never committed, he most certainly could, and did, blaze the trail of return to the Father (a return the Lord repeatedly spoke of with passionate longing) not only for himself but with him all who would finally be "in him" (the whole tenor and fabric of John 13-17).
