John - it’s quite possible that I haven’t addressed the points you were making (though I thought I had!). Maybe that’s because what seems to me very simple and obvious becomes rather more complicated when viewed from your perspective.

I don’t see anywhere that God is separating out a ‘true humanity’ in Abraham’s lineage, and relegating the rest of humanity to destruction as a subhuman, degenerate species. What is striking about Abraham’s lineage is that they can be just as corrupt as the rest of humanity - Abraham included. If Israel was supposed to be the ‘true humanity’, then the project was a ghastly failure.

My understanding of God’s project, and particularly as it becomes evident in the NT, is that God’s people were intended to be the means of bringing God’s blessing to the world, and that Israel had totally missed the point by regarding herself as a superior nation, with the rest of the world written off as ‘gentile dogs’. You seem to have adopted their prejudices as those of the biblical writers.

On the other hand, God was offering blessing to the world in a particular way. It wasn’t just an open-ended, free-and-easy, do-as-you-please kind of blessing. "God so (‘heutos’ - in this way) loved the world that he gave his only son - that whoever believes in him should not perish (either in AD 70 or eternally) but have eternal life (life of the age - which means the life given uniquely in the Holy Spirit and that which continues into eternity)".

I think you underestimate (or make a caricature of) the nature and power of sin, as the bible presents it, and hence the consequences of Genesis 3 (interestingly not mentioned in your response). Take a look at what happened to Adam’s view of God, after eating the fruit of the tree, and to his relationship with Eve. As a psychologist, this should be of particular interest to you. Then take a look at the following chapters of Genesis. God continued to interact with man. When did mankind decide to interact again with God? I make it Genesis 4:26b, and if you do a bit of computation on the time scales, it comes to about 235 years after the fall. What does that say about humanity’s attitude to God?

So we are not looking at some kind of writing-off of humanity as a ‘degenerate subspecies’, but we are looking at traits within people, which if not corrected, are on a pathway of calamitous declension. Something like this had happened to humanity in the time of Noah "when every imagination of the thoughts of all his heart was only evil continually" - Genesis 6:5. The response of God is very revealing - "The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain" - Genesis 6:6.

Something similar was happening in Genesis 15:16 - "In the fourth generation your descendants will return, for the sin of the Amorites has not yet reached its full measure". Sin is active and progressive. On the other hand judgement is always delayed, to give time for repentance - Romans 2:4. But God’s attitude is always surprising, for while not diminishing the reality of his wrath over injustice, his attitude is not one of delight in the judgement of sinful people: "Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I take no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord. Therefore repent and live!" - Ezekiel 18:31.

Your idea of "a racist divide between the ordinary men and the nation of supermen" is certainly not one that I recognise from my reading of the story of Abraham and his descendants, and is a distortion of any reading of how God responds to the changed conditions and circumstances brought into the history of the world in Genesis 3 from those that had been envisaged in Genesis 1 & 2.

Concerning the fulfilment of the promise to Abraham in Christ, and its application to creation - the wider application of the promise is implicit in the promise itself, which was "all peoples on earth will be blessed through you" - Genesis 12:3, and that Abraham’s descendants would be as numerous as the dust of the earth/stars in the sky/sand on the seashore. The promise always was worldwide, and hence for all creation. Even Israel saw herself as, in some way, being a light to the gentiles ("a guide for the blind, a light for those who are in the dark, an instructor of the foolish, a teacher of infants" - Romans 2:19-20. When Christ, the promised seed, had come, what followed was the fulfilment of the worldwide promise made to Abraham by taking the message of the gospel of Christ throughout the world. You do not need to look for proof texts - the reality is in the acted-out drama of the NT.

It is in the light of the NT that OT phrases such as "be fruitful and multiply" derive significance. In what sense were Adam and Eve, and humanity, to be fruitful? In the fullest sense, by acting out God’s purposes throughout the world, and bearing the image of God throughout the world. This only became fully possible in Christ. What did God want to be multiplied throughout the world? In the first place, faithfulness to himself, which became explained and fulfilled in Christ.

Your various options presented in your final paragraph need to be seen against this backcloth. When they are so seen, the option which God is presenting, as seen in the light of the NT, is clear. And as an evangelist, I would say to you - get on board with God’s purposes instead of discussing the options!

John - no, I disagree that the prohibition aroused in Eve a desire to sin, or covet the fruit. You forget the involvement of a third party, a talking snake (or literally ‘shining one’ - which may or may not have been a literal snake at that point - but let that be). It was at any rate the snake, working on Eve’s mind and imagination, who suggested thoughts about the fruit which apparently had not occurred to her before, and enticed her to sin.

There are remarkable parallels between Romans 7:7-12, and Genesis 3:1-7, and it is difficult not to think that we are being invited to see Israel’s experience under the law as a recapitulation, in some senses, of Eden. There are also strong contrasts with Eden - notably in the predispositions of the Eden pair and Israel.

Did Paul intend us to believe that the law aroused sinful desires? This suggestion is an inference from Romans 7:8 - "But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire." I’m not sure that the psychological interpretation quite fits with what Paul is saying here. In the first place, the passage is highly metaphorical and hyperbolic, with its personification of sin. But it is sin, and not the law, which produces "every kind of covetous desire". I think it is pressing the issue too far, and certainly misinterpreting Paul’s consistent statements about the law, to say that the law aroused sin - as a kind of psychological phenomenon.

To provide a further gloss on the passage, I think Paul is saying in an arresting way that the law produced an awareness of sin, and also saying how extensively sin had run beneath the surface of his own life, and that of Israel, as it does in everybody’s life. Realisation of God’s moral requirements has this effect, not simply for Israel - or here, for Paul. Once awareness of sin is created, the ‘victim’ dies, (in a metaphoric sense), because his/her conscience, formerly free from the awareness of sin, is now weighed down by it. In a less metaphoric sense, the commandment puts the victim to death literally, since this is the consequence of the broken commandment, just as it was for Adam and Eve. They, and we, have been given the death sentence - which is both biological and moral.

So no, I don’t think Paul is saying here that the law stimulates the desire to sin; and our erstwhile parents did not have a latent tendency to sin which was aroused by the commandment. For that, we have to look at the snake’s nefarious participation in the narrative. Unless you want to be super-subtle and argue that the snake was simply a projection of the workings of the inner psyche of Adam & Eve. Hmmmm.  (I’m throwing you a psychological lifeline here, John).

It’s for these reasons that I can’t share the conclusion to your summary of Romans 5 - that we are just as fully human as Adam & Eve, and there was just as much proclivity to sin in them as there is in us. I think there were very significant genetic consequences to the primal sin - which, in addition to environmental and spiritual considerations (a reorientation in the relationship of God to humanity as a result of the fall), do have a material influence on us in relation to sin.

There is always something limited about any attempted analysis of precisely how sin is transmitted, however. It certainly isn’t primarily genetic, since sin is a moral, not a physical phenomenon. The reality is in what you see in the world, which I see in my own children, and in myself. We grow up in a world where the possibilities of peace and harmony are constantly distorted by the reality of conflict and disorder, and this is not just environmental, but deeply personal. The innocence of childhood gives way to the experience of adult life - for better and worse. Some of the profoundest and most moving expressions of human art and literature have taken this is as their subject.

I’m not entirely sure how you are interpreting the paired contrasts of Romans 5. Although Paul uses "the many" and "all" as qualifiers for both sin and redemption, at first almost bracketing them in their influence and extent, the precise comparison breaks down if pressed beyond its rhetorical function. Sin affects all, irrespective of their choice. The "free gift" may be available to all, but it is received only by faith - a qualification which Paul has made very clear elsewhere. 

The "free gift" is not, in that sense, an imputed  phenomenon (or reckoned, to use a better translation) in the sense that the beneficiaries have no personal part to play in receiving it. Likewise sin is not simply attributed even where the guilty party has no personal culpability. Paul emphasises that all are guilty, because all have sinned. If that is not made clear enough in Romans 5, it was certainly the theme of Romans 1-3, where there is no sense at all of collective imputation of guilt where individuals may have been personally guilt-free.

Statements made in a discussion like this need constant and careful qualification. So I’m not disputing that there was a collective guilt attributed to national Israel - even where individuals may not have had a personal part to play in Israel’s offences. The whole nation was awaiting a "forgiveness of sins" - which would be characterised by certain eschatological phenomena. There is a collective guilt attributed to humanity - in which the entire race suffers from the withdrawal or absence of certain kinds of benefit or blessing from God. But this does not remove the participation in that guilt through many kinds of personal sin - which are real, and not simply imputed or reckoned in a non-personal way.

Your discussion of Romans 5 takes the original discussion of Genesis 3 and Romans 7 into much broader territory, and while I have given my views, I may not entirely have captured your own. 

That there is no ‘true’ self, and that we are mere social constructs, would be an interesting development in the psychological sphere of what has been asserted in the postmodern literary, philosophical and theological sphere. In the short summary you have given though, I find myself wondering: if there is an ‘unrealistic, idealised image I have of myself’, which accompanies the ‘social construct’ of myself, who has created this idealised image? It must derive from something other than the social construct, or the idealised image against which it sees itself falling short?

I don’t think, therefore, that Paul could be said to be offering a ‘new self’ which would fill the vacuum of self at the centre. In fact, I think the concept runs counter to what we have of a biblical notion of self - which is that dust + spirit created living, conscious self - not inner vacuum. Further, the biblical evidence could be said to show that there is great variety of created personality amongst human-born people - and that while personality may have had the capacity of growing in maturity and wisdom, or regression and foolishness in terms of moral character, the essential person did not change. The record that different species were created according to their kind seems to me have bearing on the creation of human personality - and the very concept of creation itself - which is that personality, like species, is not infinitely fluid.

I also take this view from observation - that temperament tends not to change in its essential characteristics, and even that there may be a biblical basis for temperament: such as in the ‘gift’ list of Romans 12, which could be said to describe something more like a gifting of temperament which is basic to personality than the ‘charismatic’ gifts of 1 Corinthians 12. There are prophetic types, serving types, teaching, encouraging, giving, leading, compassionate types. The sevenfold list suggests completion - that most types of inherent gifting will reflect one of these categories more than others.

There are very practical ramifications to such a view of personality, for while in certain personal development and life coaching schemes there is a school of thought which says that you can become whatever you want if you adopt the right mind set and techniques, a biblical view of personality might say that we are uniquely gifted, and personal development depends on recognising the broad area of gifting and working with it, rather than attempting to foster something which is not inherent to the gifting.