Fr. James Nkemngong Ajombu
The narrative of the creation of the human person and the subsequent fall from grace that preoccupy the first chapters of the book of Genesis is not an ancient myth in the hands of theologians, neither is it just a tool through which theologians struggle to explain the origin and life of the human person. The theoria (contemplative vision or theological understanding) of the fall and the ensuing consequences expressed in Genesis 3:15, could function as a credible foundational framework to support scholarly investigations about the anthropological concerns of the human person in ancient times and in our epoch.
Two questions are critical to unpacking Genesis 3:15 as an illuminator to Romans 7:23: Why does the human person experience inevitable internal struggles in the face of choosing between good and evil? What could be the ready remedy of this anthropological internal war?
Understanding the intricacies of Genesis 3:15
The climatic pivot of the fall narrative is the divine judgment against the serpent expressed in Genesis 3:15. “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel” (Genesis 3:15). Read through the lens of early patristic exegesis, the pronouncement is a fundamental declaration of war which established an unbridgeable rift within the human person between the reign of deception and the redeemed human lineage. The text institutes a divinely ordained friction wherein divine judgment incurs a necessary struggle against cosmic and moral evil. Irenaeus of Lyons (c. 130–202 AD) through the recapitulation theory[1], is crucial for connecting Genesis 3:15 to the cosmic battle between Christ/Mary and Satan/Eve. He views the verse as God turning the tables on the deceiver.[2] Further, with a typological and messianic patristic lens, Genesis 3:15 St. Irenaeus explicitly links the recapitulation of Christ to the prophecy in Genesis 3:15. He argues that Christ is the seed of the woman who reverses the disobedience of Adam and tramples the head of the serpent. Jesus is the Ultimate “Seed”. The singular pronoun used in Gen 3:15, “he will crush” points typologically ahead to a specific individual descendant of the woman-Jesus Christ. Again, the phrase the “strike to the heel” could be understood as mirroring the suffering, crucifixion, and temporary death of Christ. However, the resurrection constitutes the “crushing of the head,” delivering a fatal blow to the powers of sin, death, and Satan. This interpretation alludes to Pauline passages like Romans 16:20: “The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet” and Colossians 2:15.[3] Joseph Ratzinger observes that in the Creation and Fall, the divine imposition of enmity is paradoxically an act of mercy. Left to itself, fallen humanity would naturally capitulate entirely to the deceptive autonomy offered by the serpent. The introduction of enmity prevents a seamless, unholy alliance between the human heart and the powers of chaos. It splits the human subject down the middle, introducing a sacred friction.[4] God therefore institutes a permanent state of conflict between the serpent (and what it represents) and humanity. Ratzinger would think in this context that this hostility which God mandated between the Serpent and the Woman, prevents humanity from entering into a total, seamless union with evil. It introduces a conscience-awakening resistance against the dominion of the deceiver.[5] This opens us to understand the internal war of Rom 7:23.
Getting into the mind and context of Rom 7:23
Romans 7:23 stands out as one of the most intense psychological and theological descriptions of human struggle in the New Testament. St. Paul emphatically states: “But I see another law at work in me, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within me” (Romans 7:23, NIV). In the context of Paul’s broader argument, this verse describes the lingering, internal aftermath of Fall described in Gen 3, illustrating how the cosmic “Fall” is experienced subjectively and individually within the human heart and will. St Paul uses the word nomos (law) not just to mean Mosaic legislation, but as a governing principle or power. He sets two forces against each other: The law of my mind which could be understood as the renewed intellect, conscience, and desire that delights in God’s moral standard (Romans 7:22) against the law of sin understood as the internalized, corrupted principle of self-reliance, inherited from the disruption of Genesis 3. Pressing on, St. Paul describes the war between the two internal parties. The Greek term Antistrateuomenon (making war against) used here implies a military campaign or hostile invasion. Sin is not treated merely as a bad habit, but as an active, occupying power present within human nature. This is precisely why there is a war because sin cannot be an ally to the original good nature of man. St. Paul describes himself as being made a “prisoner” (aichmalotizonta-literally, taken captive as a spoil of war). This directly mirrors the human predicament in Eden: once the deceptive autonomy was chosen, the human person immediately found himself subjugated by the very forces it invited in. Viewed through the Ratzingerian lens, the internal fracture described in Romans 7:23 is not merely a psychological defect, but the structural reality of a human subject colonized by its own self-divinization.[6] Rom 7:23, therefore paints a future picture of the realization of the judgment that was passed in Eden in Gen 3:15.
Connecting Gen 3:15 to Rom 7:23
To bridge texts of the Old Testament such as Gen 3:15, with contemporary experiences as expressed in Rom 7:23, it is important to turn to theological anthropology. How can we explain the transition from the status integritatis (state of original justice or holiness see CCC 374–376) to the status naturae lapsae (fallen nature)? The link between Genesis 3:15 and Romans 7:23 offers a paradigm for understanding this condition across epochs. While Romans 7 is often parsed through the lens of moral psychology or biographical struggle, reading it in direct light of Genesis 3:15 reveals that Paul’s “law of sin” is the subjective, localized experience of the cosmic hostility declared in the Garden. The existentialist theologian Paul Tillich in his magnum opus, interpreted the Edenic narrative of Gen as a transition from “essence” to “existence.” Connecting Gen 3 to the condition of modern man, Tillich argued that modern man’s relentless pursuit of self-actualization and technological mastery, paired paradoxically with acute collective anxiety, mirrors the exact psychological fallout of Eden. Modern man’s systemic social injustices and ethical blind spots are manifestations of this inherited, baseline fracture.[7] When we read Genesis 3:15 as the divine inauguration of a cosmic battlefield, the theater of war shifts from external mythological space to the interiority of the human soul. The “enmity” declared between the serpent’s seed and the woman’s seed becomes the internal civil war described in Romans 7:23. The serpent’s seed signifies evil; the woman’s seed is “the good.” Understanding that these opponents will be at war until the woman’s seed crushes the head of the serpent, allows us answer to the question: why does the human person experience inevitable internal struggles in the face of choosing between good and evil? St. Augustine saw Rom 7:23 as the proof text of concupiscence-the disordered, internal friction where human desire is fractured, wanting what is good intellectually but pulled downward by an inherited, rebellious impulse. Every human person no matter the creeds and ranks, faces concupiscence which St. Paul described in these words, “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do this I keep on doing” (Rom 7:15). St. Paul further asked and answered a question which gives a consoling solution to the fundamental problem he expressed about the human heart. St. Paul asked: “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Rom 7:24–25).
Leaning on Christ: the way out of the Anthropological struggles of man
Just as Adam and Eve could not stitch together their own permanent covering in Eden (requiring God to clothe them, Gen 3:21), Paul realizes that the internal prison of Rom 7:23 cannot be escaped by human willpower alone. The immediate pivot in Romans 8 introduces the Spirit as the counter-power to “the law of sin and death” (Rom 8:2). This divine intervention prevents humanity from falling into an unrecoverable, permanent alliance with evil. The conflict may occur often, evil may seem to win sometimes but the definitive defeat of evil has been accomplished by Christ. The Church affirms that modern humanity labors under an intellect darkened by the fall and a weakened will (Gaudium et Spes no. 13). Augustine argued that the attachments of the human heart to worldly things are so deeply rooted in our fallen nature that we are entirely incapable of freeing ourselves. It is “impossible” for man to save himself, but God’s grace makes it possible by transforming the human heart so that it wants to detach from the world.[8] Christ is a visible expression of God’s grace. For the human person to defeat evil permanently in his internal conflict, for good to be victorious, radical recourse must be made to God’s grace, to the one who has conquered evil definitively; Christ. We must lean on Christ the Victor if we are to conquer evil and survive the war within us.
Conclusion
The connection between the condition of the human person in Gen 3:15 and the modern man of the twenty-first century is unbroken. Genesis 3:15 provides the metaphysical blueprint of the struggle, and Romans 7:23 properly articulates this psychological and moral friction. Far from being antiquated myths, these texts offer an unerring mirror of the human condition, diagnosing the deep-seated root of modern restlessness and pointing toward the ultimate restoration found only beyond human self-salvation in the person and mission of Christ.
Bibliography
Augustine of Hippo, The Grace of Christ and Original Sin (De gratia Christi et de peccato originali), 1.13.
Catholic Church. (1994). Catechism of the Catholic Church (2nd ed.). Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
Irenaeus of Lyons. (1885). Against Heresies (Book V, Chap. 21). In A. Roberts & J. Donaldson (Eds.), The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Vol. 1). Christian Literature Publishing Co. (Original work c. 180 AD).
Joseph Ratzinger, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3,San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997.
Joseph Ratzinger, In the Beginning…: A Catholic Understanding of the Creation and the Fall, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995.
Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957.
Vatican Ecumenical Council II. Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World). December 7, 1965. In Acta Apostolicae Sedis 58 (1966): 1025–1120. English translation in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, edited by Norman P. Tanner, 1111–1212. London: Sheed & Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990.
[1] The Concept of Recapitulation is rooted in early Christian patristic theology, primarily formulated by Irenaeus of Lyons based on Ephesians 1:10. This theory views Jesus Christ as the “Last Adam” who undoes and reverses the disobedience of the first Adam. By living a perfectly obedient life and conquering death, Christ “recapitulated” (summed up and re-staged) all human history, leading humanity back to eternal life and communion with God. Cfr.
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses). Specifically look at Book V, where he details the mechanics of the anakephalaiosis (recapitulation) of humanity in Christ. (Standard critical edition: Sources Chrétiennes series, or translated in the Ante-Nicene Fathers collection).
[2] Irenaeus of Lyons, Adversus Haereses (Against Heresies), Book III, Chapter 23 and Book IV, Chapter 40.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Joseph Ratzinger, Creation and Fall: A Theological Exposition of Genesis 1–3 (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), pp. 101–105.)
[5] Joseph Ratzinger, In the Beginning…: A Catholic Understanding of the Creation and the Fall. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995.
[6] Ratzinger, Joseph. In the Beginning…: A Catholic Understanding of the Creation and the Fall. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1995.
[7] Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 33–44.
[8] Augustine of Hippo, The Grace of Christ and Original Sin (De gratia Christi et de peccato originali), 1.13.