The prelapsarian order enjoys a diversity of interpretations in the modern imagination. For some, it represents a prosperous symbiotic relationship between an originally vegetarian human civilization and creation: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it” (Gen. 2:15). For others, it is an innocent, utopian vision of relationships between the sexes, men and women “naked and unashamed” before each other (Gen. 2:25).
How about a politically themed exegesis, one in which man fulfills the imago Dei through prudential governance? So posits professor of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa Donald S. Prudlo in Governing Perfection. “In the beginning, God administered,” Prudlo cleverly states in his introduction. The preeminent origin of the order discernible in the universe and in human nature, he argues, is the government of God.
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