DD:
LT wrote: ... right up to the point that he sinned. DD wrote: We have no way of knowing how long that was. It could have been 5 minutes or 5 years.
Surely that's irrelevant. If he was righteous before the fall, it doesn't matter if it was for one minute or any time longer, as he was righteous.
I don't think he was " unrighteous " or "righteous". He was just innocent (in their case I guess ignorance really was bliss). In order to be "unrighteous" he would have to know what right and wrong was. Until he ate of the fruit he had no way of knowing anything about that.
Is righteousness a standard of man or God? Internal or external?
If it's external, surely it makes no difference whether or not he knew what was right?
Is righteousness judged by actions/thoughts, or by personal conscience?
Let me ask you, if Adam had looked at the fruit and thought about what it would be like (lusted?), to be like God, knowing good and evil, and choose not to eat it, would God have found him guilty or punished him (in light of Mat.5:28)?
I agree that it is theoretically possible that he might have been doing something wrong from the moment he lusted after the fruit (even if that was only in the moments before he actually ate, be that one minute or longer - see, I can play fair ). The text tells us that he sinned by eating. It was when a law was transgressed that the punishment fell due. I understand that there was no law against looking at the fruit, only eating it (or in the case of Eve, potentially an extended clause against even touching it), I would have to sidebar the fact that there's a difference between lust and temptation, though I don't want to muddy this conversation by bringing that in, at this point.