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But, of course, this still does not fully justify Tillich's dictum. Provided what one means by "the fall" is our human exercise of our freedom so as to actualize the possibility of "original sin," instead of our other possibility of "original righteousness," one cannot say, as Tillich does, that "creaturely freedom is the point at which creation and the fall coincide" (256), if one means thereby that any exercise of "creaturely freedom" is eo ipso "the beginning of the fall" as well as "the end of creation." Why not? Well, first of all, because "creaturely freedom," properly understood, is an indefinitely more general concept than "human freedom," or "moral freedom" more generally, and it is solely the second, much more specific concept that is involved in the notion of "the fall" as clarified above. There may, of course, be an analogy of some kind between the actualization of original sin through the (mis)exercise of human or moral freedom and the consequences of the exercise of creaturely freedom more generally. But more than an analogy there cannot be -- and, frankly, it is not at all clear to me whether the conditions necessary to support even an anology analogy are present. Then, second, even the actualization of the possibility of original sin is an option of human or moral freedom and therefore by no means identical with any exercise of such freedom. To be human or moral is not eo ipso to be fallen, although it certainly is to be faced with the optio fundamentalis of either standing or falling, of either authentic or inauthentic existence. This must be insisted on even if every human or moral being who has ever existed has, in fact, misused her, his, or its freedom in an inauthentic, sinful way. In that event, one could indeed say that human or moral freedom is the point at which the creation and the fall coincide. But that would be a strictly factual, or ontic, in no sense a modal, or ontological, statement.

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