I have found myself after years with a simple thesis about the relationship between humanity and God, and it differs from the standard Christian conception. Christian theology notwithstanding, the story of Eden is not the story of the beginning of sin in human history. The story of Eden is the story of how we humans began to address ourselves to existence without intrinsic connection to the ministrations of God.
The Eden story is not a story of the beginning of sin in humanity any more than it is a story of the beginning of Creation. A "story" has some sort of narrative, not merely the description of a set of initial conditions. The "story" of Creation that we remember from Genesis might have to do with seven days, but in reality the existence of "Creation" is the described milieu of the beginning--the narrative is about how God shaped Creation, not about its ineffable inception. Similarly, the humanity described unmistakably as alienated from God is Adam described as not properly oriented to be "alone"--though he was not alone, as he had God with whom to commune. This Adam, placed in a garden of trees enticing to look at, is no more described at the first as free from sin than he is described from the first as needing to learn to be enticed by beautiful trees.
Christianity is wrong. Humanity did not "Fall" into sin. Sinful-from-the-beginning humanity fell into the cursed state that haunts us still. Humanity fell into the grip of the predisposition to seek--if even we display the inclination--to pursue the good by our own means and to shun the evil by our own means. That is the fruit of the forbidden tree, and the thrust of Jesus' teachings is to direct us to the necessity of asking God for what we lack. The merest speck of faith on our part would allow us to command into existence a worldly state free of all afflictions--or Jesus is a liar. Yet we persist in the same state of being "alone" from God as Adam was from the first, and--as Jesus tells us--we do not get from God what we want, because we do not ask.
It is this thesis that binds the teachings of Jesus together with the Genesis lessons to which he refers us. We are taken up with concerns about "how" to make our states--or, in more generous moments, the states of humanity or of Creation--the way we think they ought to be. Jesus tells us "how"--by asking God, and in the purest manifestation of such supplication we would let God tell us what is good for us, rather than trying to figure it out ourselves. "How" would become then as irrelevant as would become the "what" questions we might have about what we want, or should want. Yet, Adam-and-Eve-like, we lean on imperfect human perception of the good things and the evil things--and, in the scope of God's "very good" Creation, even the most prosaically favorable or unfavorable things are morally-charged.
Christianity, then, sets about its various prescriptions for dealing with sin, which is understood mistakenly to be the fulcrum of the Genesis narrative. Sin, as a danger to our souls, is not the fatal pollutant in its infinitesimal manifestations that Christianity imagines it to be. By "imagines it to be" I am attempting to relate the most crucial fact of the matter. Of course absolute freedom from the stain of sin is required for salvation--but imagining that we could understand the "how" of attaining such a state is a sinful and therefore self-defeating conceit to begin with. The sheep and goats of the final judgment both are depicted as bewildered by the grounds for their salvation or damnation, though Jesus has delivered the story beforehand.
God can take care of the necessity of freedom from all sin, but that is not a charge that he lays upon humanity. Cain is not warned against the merest taint of sin (or in his resentment of his rejected sacrifice he would be damned already.) Cain is warned against letting sin, lurking at his doorway, have its mastery over him.
And from both Genesis and the Gospels it would be ludicrous to decree that humanity is not able--and therefore charged--to struggle against the mastery of sin. Of course, at this point the Churches in a misapprehension of piety and humility will offer sacraments or grace-pronouncements (for surely humanity cannot prevail in this struggle without some ineffable prescription), but such attempts to attack the root manifestations of sin are precisely the manner of ill-directed attempts to sort out good and evil that the First Couple invited foolishly upon themselves. It is as appropriate to stand in amazement that anyone would want to reject the mastery of sin as it is to stand in amazement--denomination-like--that God would be merciful enough to sinful humanity as to offer any of the multitudinous salvation-prescriptions of Christianity.
And amazement that God would "somehow" set about to care for humanity and Creation is one step back (or at least one attempted step back) from the how-trap into which fell Adam and Eve. Nothing stabs into the conceits of the interpreter of Scripture more than the maddening absence of "how's" at precisely the points they would be expected (though--fear not--there commentators enough to volunteer conjectures.) Enoch walked with God. How?! No application of logic will admit of any conclusion other than that Enoch had traversed in proper reverse the moral decline of the first humans. How?! Why does the scripture not tell us?
That humans might be translated in a moral sense back to the relative innocence of the early days of Eden is a prospect suggested several times in the Gospels. Jesus sends his disciples out to find houses of good repute in which to sojourn, and to heal the sick and raise the dead (though presumably not back to everyone's ancestors Adam and Eve, which would certainly challenge any prevailing notions of salvation-economy), and to pronounce judgment on the righteousness--or not--of households and towns. They are to do all this, how?! They are to limit the scope of their ministrations, how?! They are to render such judgments, how?! It is said in the gospels that Jesus gave the disciples such power, and they are told in detail what to take with them and what to do, but they (as far as we are told) are not instructed how to perform such miracles.
Being so empowered, the disciples go and do as they are instructed. At one juncture, on their return Jesus says that he saw Satan fall from heaven--can it be imagined other than what is being related is a revisiting of the great pivotal moment of humanity's interaction with the Tempter? Jesus' approach to salvation is to demand the impossible--he demands that his followers (deprived of any special empowerment) display a necessary faith, and then he tells them that they possess faith less than the size of a mustard seed, and if they possessed even so much faith, they would be able to move mountains.
That humanity needs to be saved, and most crucially saved from sin, is pivotal in the teachings of Jesus. The pervasive quality of sin in humanity ("Ye, being evil . . . ") is something Jesus deals with, and the faith required (with the faith-driven tasks required) is something Jesus deals with, but he does not tell us how.
What Jesus does tell us is that the "how" of salvation must be understood by us as connected intrinsically with our descent from our Father, and that it must also be understood--and I use the term "understood" here with the implication of humility supplied by Jesus--to be something as plain to us as anything else. This is the crucial concept--as "plain to us as anything else." Jesus tells us that we are descended from, and required to appeal to, our birth from "above" (or "again," the implication is the same.) We are born from above, if we will but accept it. The "how" is immaterial, and our conceit that we might understand the "how" is a deadly trap.
This must be understood alongside Jesus' assertion that we can "understand" our earthly parentage no more than our heavenly parentage. Jesus does not say that we understand our situation on earth, and can extrapolate therefore from that situation to make an analogy to our relationship to God. Jesus calls to our attention the wind, and that we can never know where it comes from and where it goes. Assuredly, we can work out modern meteorology and its most minute components in physics--to a point, an ever-receding point. Ultimately, we do not understand the things of heaven, and we do not understand the things of earth.
We think we understand things. We think we know good and evil. Jesus wants us to understand some things, the best way we can. Jesus wants us to believe, and he wants to help us in our unbelief. All of the challenges and dangers of addressing the teachings of Jesus are before us--nothing I have written here purports to change that. What I do say is that our ancestors--and we with them--were plunged into despair and tribulation not out of a nature of admixed good and evil (for such is the state of all the non-divine, being at best "very good), but rather we were plunged into despair and tribulation by attempting to understand that which we know must be ineffable, whether because it is in the first instance divine, or whether it is--as everything--relatable to an origin in the divine.
Every moment is an invitation to us to try to understand--or to try to remember that we can never understand. Every moment is--in its appearance and unique quality--as much supernatural as natural. Every moment is a beckoning to us to reach like the first humans for what we imagine we can grasp in our understandings, and every moment is a beckoning to us to embrace the awe that is as near to us as our everyperson's first childlike awe. Jesus does not demand of us experiences we have never had--he demands of us a recollection that our moments of least understanding were our moments of greatest sincerity.
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