Meta-historical fall

[1] Theologians and philosophers writing about a meta-historical fall in the modern era draw from metaphysical categories in related early patristic thought as well as Christian and Jewish Gnostic systems.

English theologian E. L. Mascall wrote in 1943 that the Christian tradition has always understood creation as one "non-temporal act of the divine will" through which the entire "temporal created order is maintained in existence.

[22][23] With a variation of this concept in the terms of analytical philosophy, Hud Hudson considers in a 2014 book how the hypertime hypothesis might inform the human fall's relation to empirical history.

[25][26] Theologian and patristic scholar John Behr summarizes Origen as teaching that our beginning in this cosmos and its "fallen time" should be understood as a falling away from the heavenly reality to which we are also invited to return.

Hart writes that this idea of an atemporal fall can be taken to the extreme of a fully dualistic gnosticism, but that this dualism can also be seen as provisional so that the good, true, and beautiful in this fallen world is understood as fractured and captive portions of God's creation.

[43] Anglican priest Peter Green wrote a book in 1920 proposing, on the grounds of modern science, that the human fall did not take place in this world but was a "pre-mundane event.

"[44][45] Orthodox Christian Bishop Basil Rodzianko argued in a 1996 book that the fall and exile of the first humans from paradise should be understood in connection to the Big Bang and the formation of our current universe.

He was influenced by Russian religious philosophers Nikolai Berdyaev and Evgenii Troubetzkoy and contended that every Christian writer before Augustine believed that all creation was "altered drastically after man's disobedience.