See also: Fall of Man
📖 Biblical Definition
The Fall of man is the historical event recorded in Genesis 3 by which our first parents, Adam and Eve, by eating the forbidden fruit in disobedience to God’s express command, fell from the estate of innocence in which they were created into an estate of sin and misery, bringing guilt, corruption, and death upon themselves and upon all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation. God had created man upright and placed him in the garden under a covenant of works, granting all things but one tree, and warning that in the day he ate thereof he would surely die. Tempted by the serpent—who questioned God’s word, denied His threatened judgment, and impugned His goodness—Eve, and then Adam with full knowledge, took and ate, grasping at a forbidden autonomy, to be as gods, knowing good and evil. By that one act the covenant was broken and the whole frame of human existence ruined: shame and fear entered, fellowship with God was severed, the ground was cursed, sorrow and toil and death came in, and Adam’s sin and its consequences passed to all mankind, of whom he was the federal head. The Fall is no myth or mere symbol of every man’s individual lapse, but a real, datable, catastrophic event in space and time, the historicity of which the whole structure of biblical theology requires—for as the disobedience of the first Adam plunged the race into ruin, so the obedience of the last Adam, equally historical, raises His people to life. Deny the Fall and you lose the coherence of redemption itself.
📜 Webster 1828 Definition
Webster 1828 defines FALL, in theology, as the apostasy; the act of our first parents in eating the forbidden fruit; also the apostasy of the angels.
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FALL, n. — ...8. The act of falling; apostasy; the act of sinning, or of departing from the faith or from rectitude. The fall, by way of distinction, denotes the apostasy of Adam, or his disobedience in eating the forbidden fruit, by which he and his posterity were involved in sin and misery.
FALL, v.i. — ...To sin; to transgress the law of God; to apostatize.
📖 Key Scripture
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 — "And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food... she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat."
Romans 5:12 — "Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned."
Romans 5:19 — "For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous."
⚠️ Modern Corruption
The Fall is corrupted into myth—treated as a mere symbol of universal human frailty rather than a real, historical event—a move that unravels original sin, the need for redemption, and the parallel of the two Adams.
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The characteristic modern corruption of the Fall is its demotion from history to myth. Under the pressure of evolutionary naturalism and the higher criticism, Genesis 3 is widely read as a symbolic tale—a poetic way of describing the universal human experience of moral failure, the “everyman” story of how each person loses his innocence, rather than a real and singular event in which a real first man, in a real garden, broke a real covenant at a particular point in time. Adam becomes a literary figure, the Fall a metaphor, and the entrance of sin and death a mere description of the human condition as it has always been.
This mythologizing is no minor adjustment; it unravels the whole fabric of biblical theology. If there was no historical Adam and no historical Fall, then sin did not enter the world at a point—it was simply always there, woven into creation, which makes God the author of evil and abolishes original sin. And if the first Adam is a myth, the apostle’s entire argument collapses, for Paul yokes the historical disobedience of the one man to the equally historical obedience of the one Christ: as in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive. The two stand or fall together. A symbolic Fall can only yield a symbolic redemption. The church must therefore hold the Fall as a true event in space and time, the hinge on which the doctrines of sin and salvation alike turn.
🔗 Greek & Hebrew Roots
The event centers on the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the transgression (Hebrew pāsha’) of the one command, by which death (mâveth) entered.
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Usage
"The Fall is a real, datable event—not a myth of universal frailty—by which Adam plunged the race into sin and death."
"Deny the historical Fall and you lose original sin, the need for redemption, and the parallel of the two Adams."
"By the Fall our first parents passed from the estate of innocence into an estate of sin and misery."