Surprisingly, it was the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant who coined the phrase “the crooked timber of humanity.” Whatever one makes of Kant’s philosophy, he seems to retain at least some of the Lutheran pietism that he so admired in his parents. Kant’s phrase echoes what Christians throughout history have professed: with the rebellion of Adam in the Garden of Eden, human nature was altered from its inherently good created state of loving God and loving neighbor to loving ourselves first and foremost and turning aside from the law of God.
We are all sons and daughters of Adam in that we have the same created nature, but we have also inherited the same “crooked timber.” But that nature is not inherently evil. Our created nature is good. When God created the world and human beings in His image, male and female, he saw that his creation “was very good” (Genesis 1:31). But post-fall, humans are born “crooked timber.” Our desires have been disordered so that God is not our first love, and loving our neighbor is a challenge because our sinful nature within divides us and mixes up our motives. One needs only look at the world around us or turn on the daily news to see the results of our rebellion against God’s law. The internal chaos we sense within becomes a hot mess when you bring humans together in community. After the fall in Genesis 3, we see the murder of Abel by his brother Cain as sign of things to come. St Paul in Romans 5 describes life after the fall as the reign of death, both physically and spiritually. As bleak as this all may sound, and highly offensive to modern ears, it’s the truth.
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