may be better ways of looking at Christianity’s history that can have corrective value for the fall paradigm. The fall paradigm automatically creates a barrier between the church today and our heritage because it assumes that we developed independently of, and even in spite of, the early post-apostolic church. There are many reasons why the fall paradigm fails to convince some people of its viability.5 First, it is an overly simplistic way of reading history. History tends to be messy, and a reading