In sum, while Adam is, according to Calvin, a genuine historical person, there is also a genuine sense in which Adam constitutes a symbol of every man (and woman). Adam’s sin and God’s response to it serve as a (prophetic) picture of every individual’s response to his or her guilt and God’s own, more radical response – namely, that of bringing the sinner to the depths of despair by confronting him or her with his Law, only to raise the sinner to the highest peaks of hope by consoling him or her with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and his sin-atoning work.

Calvin takes as given the historicity of Adam and Eve and the events surrounding their creation and fall. He rebukes, on this score, the 3rd century theologian Origen and “others like him” who — finding little of value in Adam and Eve’s historical personages — “took refuge” in allegorical interpretation of the early chapters of Genesis. Such interpretation generally discovered nothing but moral(istic) import (in medieval technical terms, a tropological meaning) in the events depicted in these chapters.

Yet Calvin has no qualms whatsoever about discerning in our first parents’ rebellion and God’s response to the same a pattern which finds expression in every subsequent generation of rebels-without-good-cause doing their rebel thing against God. In other words, a careful consideration of Adam’s sin and God’s response to it has much to teach us not only about Adam’s sin and God’s response to it, but also about our own sin, our efforts to evade culpability for sin, and God’s work of exposing sin for what it is and then dealing with it far more effectively that we ever could.

What might we learn from Adam’s response to his own sin? We learn something about our persistent efforts to evade responsibility for what we’ve done and, when such evasion proves unsuccessful, to make satisfaction for our guilt on our own terms.

Efforts to evade culpability for sin generally involve a fair bit of finger-pointing at others. Thus Adam points his finger first of all at God and tries to blame him for his dire situation. Discovered by God in the garden (vs. 9) after trying to hide himself among the trees (vs. 8), Adam names his nakedness, rather than his crime, as the reason for his reluctance to face God. It was, of course, God himself who created Adam “starkers” (as my wife would say); thus, Adam’s naming of his nudity as the source of his shame was essentially an attempt on his part to “transfer to God the charge which he ought to have brought against himself.” It was, in other words, an effort to root “the origin of evil in nature,” and so to make God — the author of nature — morally responsible for Adam’s shame and everything which informed it.

When asked more pointedly whether he had broken God’s commandment (vs. 11), Adam merely doubles down in the blame game, simultaneously putting forward “his wife as the guilty party in his place” and advancing yet another “accusation against God,”inasmuch as Eve “had been given [to him] by God.” Eve, for her part, learns a quick lesson from Adam: “[Eve] is not struck dumb” (as she should have been by the gravity of her guilt), “but, after the example of her husband, transfers the charge to another; by laying the blame on the serpent she foolishly, and indeed impiously, thinks herself absolved.”

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