Meta-historical fall

The meta-historical fall (also called a metaphysical, supramundane, atemporal, or pre-cosmic fall) is an understanding of the biblical fall of man as a reality outside of empirical history that affects the entire history of the universe. This understanding of the human fall is a minority view among Christian theologians and associated by some with what they consider heresies, such as belief in the pre-existence of souls. 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. The idea was revived by German philosophers such as Jakob Böhme, Friedrich Schelling, and Julius Müller that influenced the English poet and philosopher Samuel Coleridge as well as Russian philosophers and theologians Vladimir Solovyov, Nikolai Berdyaev and Sergei Bulgakov. Among the church fathers (especially Origen, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Evagrius Ponticus, and Maximus the Confessor), the fall was widely seen as a movement into our present biological condition as well as into our current experience of time, and this understanding has been developed by modern scholars such as Sergius Bulgakov who argue that the Fall should not be seen as a historical event but as a "meta-historical" one. Sergius Bulgakov, in The Bride of the Lamb (published posthumously in 1945), said that "empirical history begins precisely with the fall, which is its starting premise." Noting that his "doctrine of a supramundane fall" was defended in The Burning Bush (1927), Bulgakov described how Adam's original sin, in which we each participate personally, "did not take place within the limits of this world" but outside "at the threshold of our entry into the world" and clarified that "the idea of [human] pre-existence in the sense of a time preceding our aeon was condemned by the Church" as Origenism and should be recognized as "essentially incompatible with a healthy ontology." Baptist theologian David L.