I revisited Athanasius’s On the Incarnation in light of Advent this year. A particular passage struck me with a question that I hadn’t considered before. When addressing Adam’s fall, Athanasius says this: 

“If then there were only the offense and not the consequence of corruption, repentance would have been fine. But if once the transgression had taken off, human beings were now held fast in natural corruption and were deprived of the grace of being in the image, what else needed to happen? … For His it was once more both to bring the corruptible back to incorruptibility and to save the superlative consistency of the Father.” [1]  

Why is it that Adam couldn’t repent? What made the fall so significant that it corrupted humanity to the point that God had to become a man to create a new humanity? It seems that the disobedience in Adam and Eve being sealed in the eating changes the fundamental nature of humanity. In eating, the spirit, flesh, and soul are united in rebellion so that mankind is entirely corrupted. 

Our pious sensibilities may be hesitant to say the fall hinges upon eating. The scholastic mind wants to parse and dissect the sin of Adam and Eve in order to point out the fruit was desired before it was eaten, so that’s the real sin. Or perhaps, the real first sin was Eve adding to God’s command and saying they should not eat OR touch! That viper of legalism was the stumbling block from day one!  

There is a gaping hole in these arguments. God makes it manifestly clear that man is judged for eating the fruit. It is when they eat that death enters. 

Genesis 2:17 “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” 

Genesis 3:6-7 “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.” (In the eating their eyes are opened) 

Genesis 3:11 “And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?” 

Genesis 3:17 “And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life” 

Eating is so central to the narrative of the fall that the verb “to eat” is used in some form 18 times. (If we want to geek out on numerology that is 6 times 3, six being the number for man and three being the number of God, man sins against God in His entirety.) Eating becomes central even to the curses delivered considering the sin. The serpent is cursed to eat the dust of the earth (another correlation to man, since man is made of dust). The man will eat bread by the sweat of his brow now. There is even a whisper of eating in the woman’s judgement. Her desire for her husband reminds us of her desire that led to eating the fruit. 

How can eating be so powerful? If we start from the ground floor, eating is central to life. Eating is how we survive. Eating is also the central mystery of how we survive. Somehow, we take dead stuff and put it into our bodies and that makes us live. This is divine math. Not only does eating satisfy our need to survive, it also creates society and community. We date through eating, celebrate anniversaries through eating, a bride and groom “eat” one another at the altar in their first kiss, we potluck in order to grow in unity. Eating incorporates the world into us. We eat and take into us plants, birds, fish, animals. We become priests of the universe through eating. Eating makes us human. Eating is also central to worship, because you don’t just become what you eat, you become how you eat as well. 

For Adam and Eve, it isn’t merely that they ate, it is that they ate in disobedience. They ate against God’s recipe. In eating in disobedience, they become disobedience embodied. They commune with sin, and thus it becomes part of them. This is the reason people died in the church at Corinth. They ate the body of blood of Jesus in communion unworthily. It was in how they ate that dammed them. They ate selfishly, not discerning the body, not sharing, getting drunk, excluding the poor. But they don’t die because they are selfish, they die and get sick because they eat in an undiscerning manner. It is in the eating that judgement visits them. In the eating they take into themselves judgment. 

1 Corinthians 11:29 “For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body.” 

It seems the potency of eating is directly connected to our composition as humans. Watchman Nee, the Chinese Pastor and Theologian, posits that were a trichotomic creation. Rather than seeing ourselves as flesh and spirit, Nee says we are flesh, soul, and spirit. I am not going to make an argument for Trichotomy, that deserves its own essay, I am merely asserting it, and you will have to deal with it. One verse to hang our hat on at present is 1 Thessalonians 5:23: 

“And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ” 

Clearly the body, soul, and spirit are seen as distinct aspects of humans. For Nee, the soul is created by the union of the flesh and the spirit. We can see how complete the fall is in eating. In Genesis 3:6 Eve sees the fruit is good for food and a delight to the eyes (flesh) and it can make her wise (spirit) so the soul acts in the eating, thus all three aspects of humanity are corrupted in the act of eating since eating requires all our faculties. Nee also notes that a spiritual man, is governed by the spirit given by God and is thus dependent. When mankind received instruction from the serpent, not God, they saw they could become independently wise and thus sealed themselves off from the life of God. [2]  

The way back from corruption to incorruption then requires a new Adam that renews our dependence on the Spirit. A man that teaches us how to eat. We must become sons of the new Adam, Jesus. The Adam that resisted dining on the serpent's terms. In the new Adam we can eat in obedience. We can eat by giving glory to God, abstaining from gluttony and the like. We are nourished on spiritual food, so our flesh, soul, and spirit are remade into an incorruptible human. 

This redeemed way of eating is shadowed in the Church before Jesus. During the Passover, the Israelites had to eat precisely in order to be preserved from death and delivered into life. The eating that sustained them in the wilderness was dependence on manna and water from the rock of Christ and eating and collecting according to the instructions God gave. They ate in worship proper during the peace offering which they could eat a portion of after their sins had been covered in prior offerings, and their vicarious self ascended to God’s throne in the ascension offering. The way back into the garden, into the life of God is to be through the mouth. The way we live is by eating at God’s table, with God’s recipes, upon God’s invitation. 

This is made explicit in the New Covenant. We see Jesus as the blessed man from Psalm 1 that is a tree planted by streams of water bearing fruit in his season. Jesus is the true tree of life, which is why he tells us in John 6:53 this highly offensive command: 

“Then Jesus said unto them, ‘Verily, verily, I say unto you, except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you’.” 

Jesus is the Passover lamb that must be eaten in entirety, He is the peace offering we share with God, He is the bread from heaven that we can eat and live, the Rock that waters us, the true fruit of knowledge and of life. We even see a similar sequence of a redeemed feast when Jesus institutes the covenant meal. He takes the broken pattern of how Adam and Eve ate, and restores it to how the godly will eat. 

The Incarnation is necessary because our total corruption entered through feasting with death. The old Adam was bound to death through satanic feasting. He eats with the serpent at the serpent's behest. In order to escape death, we must be brought into the life of Trinitarian feasting. The Father provides, the Son cooks, the Spirit hosts, delivering to us the immortal medicine born in a feeding trough. From birth to death Jesus is food. Therefore, we are invited to taste and see that the Lord is good. Not think and know. The Christian life is a life. Not a set of ideas, or propositions. It is participation in the person of Jesus. It is a feast. It is in the eating and drinking that we experience the kingdom. The recentering of communion in our worship will train us to hunger for the final advent. The final marriage supper. Every time we take the bread and wine, we eat covenantal history. We feed on Christ and become more like Him. 

Footnotes: 

[1]: Athanasius, et al. “7.” On the Incarnation, St Vladimir's Seminary Press, Yonkers, NY, 2011, pp. 56–56. 

[2]: Nee, Watchman. The Spiritual Man. Living Stream Ministry, 1998. 

All scripture references King James Version.