Evolution of influences

To support this argument, the author refers to the composition of Clement of Alexandria, writing in the 2nd century afterward Christ. Her documentation is ground on the available historical records. What makes her construct uniquely useful is that it focuses specifically on the meet of the unveiling story on the development of Christian morality and values, and on the effect of the sponsorship of Christianity by the roman Empire after the regeneration of the emperor butterfly.

The author shows the historical and theological struggle among the various interpreters of the fundament story. One especially eventful deviate took place as Christianity moved from an outsider religion to a religion set with the power of the Roman rulers:

We drop seen how Christian perspectives on liberty and the power of the will changed as the situation of Christians changed from that of persecuted sectarians to that of the emperor's coreligionists (127).

The big change which took place in the interpretation of the creation story as Christians moved into a position of power in the Roman Empire was that for the first time they began to consider that they could bring intimately moral reform in this temporal world.

Before that time, "The enormous majority of Christians of the first few centuries . . . probably did not hypothesise that such moral equality could be implemented in society" (52). But once they gaine

Of course, Pagels cannot answer the basic question which comes immediately to mind: What would have changed in the world, or at least in Hesperian civilization, if the more liberal and freedom-oriented interpretation of Genesis had triumphed? And another important question: Was the triumph of Augustine's conservative interpretation inevitable, given over the descent between the Roman Empire and Christianity after the conversion of the emperor?

Pagels, Elaine. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. New York: Vintage, 1988.

The result of this triumph, Pagels says, is that today the world still feels the impact of that strict interpretation of the story of creation:

On angiotensin-converting enzyme hand, theologians see in it the declaration that human beings must be individually responsible for their decisions and their morality. The implication of such an interpretation is that at their fundamental core all human beings are neat and simply must align their own individual wills with the unblemished will of God in order to express that commodity in effective action.

What we see in this analysis is a great deal of such contradiction. For example, Augustine offered two important ideas which jump in stark competition with one another. First, he believed that humanness was not as free as it once was believed to be, based on a strict interpretation of Genesis, among other books of the Bible. At the same time, he believed humanity had power over nature.

I wish to point out another element of Augustine's morality that accompanied this enormous transformation: the holistic view of nature that came to dominate Christian thought, and whose first principle is that human beings wield---or once did, through Adam---great power over nature (an apparent paradox, given
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