Where Did It All Go Wrong?
The Story of Our Calamity, In Scripture and Reality
Things are very bad, you are not crazy for thinking this.
In Florida, a legislator promotes the idea that legalizing child labor will strengthen our “weakening” nation.1 The Kentucky legislature is also seeking to legalize murder against the unhoused.2 This, in addition the livestream genocide of the Palestinians, which plays out before our eyes every day. We no longer have to ask “how did it happen?” in regards to the fascism of the past. It’s playing out every moment and now we say, “This is how.”
In the preface to The Great Divorce, CS Lewis wrote this;3
I do not think all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, but never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, ‘with backward mutters of dissevering power’ - or else not.
The practical implications of ‘original sin,’ the idea that the fall of humanity left a stain that imbues every one of us with an inherent quality which merits eternal punishment, is that any suffering inflicted upon us is better than we deserve. The only consideration in this view is the nature of the ‘mercy’ inflicted upon the faithful. The historical impunity which shields Institutional Christianity grew up from the seed of this implication.
I look at the story of humanity’s fall, and I see a story of the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural ones, and a memory of the sense of loss that went with it, first told by those who remember that transition. More importantly, I believe that the text of the story depicts our fall as a breach of trust between men, women, God, and nature. We’re not born with a stain on us, but we’re born into long, tangled history of the consequences which are the result of that fundamental alienation.
The ministry, the execution, and the ressurection of Christ represent God’s actions to repair that breach. The miracle was that, upon experiencing the bottom-end suffering inflicted by an omnipresent imperial power, absolutely depraved in its own impunity, he looked upon the people whose crafts resulted in that suffering, and made this judgement, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He is now Immanuel, God With Us.
The severe punishment by the cosmic despot doesn’t reflect the character of the God depicted in the Pentateuch either. Jacob loved to scheme and finesse, while technically still following the rules. He made his fortune and even received divine blessings this way. Eventually, God gets in his way and says, “Fight Me.” Instead of turning him into dust, - as He easily could have done - He dislocates Jacob’s hip and then names him Israel, “Wrestles with God.”4 Our tendency to struggle against God is a quality which endears us to him. Feeling safe to do so in our prayers is a sign of trust and faith. It’s a part of closeness to God, and is one of the ways we do our part to repair the breach. In that spirit, I make my dispute over the traditional interpretation of humanity’s fall in The Garden of Eden, according to my Unverified Personal Witness.
The Big Fall
Once of the classic, whimsical expressions regarding the paradoxes of faith says, “Could God make a boulder so heavy, that he couldn’t lift it?”
My answer to that one is simple, “He already did, and their names were Adam and Eve.” When he made humans, he said “Let us make them in our image, after our likeness.”5 We are made as God in miniature. Each of us live in a mind which is an infinite universe of our own creation, and we are sovereigns in that space. Just like government propagandists and corporate advertizers can coerce, cajole, threaten, blackmail, and beg, but are unable to reach inside your head and change your mind for you, - not for lack of trying- God also cannot control your thoughts and make your decisions for you. It’s impossible for Him. It’s the boulder He made, which He cannot lift.
He made us like this, in order that we would rule benevolently over the material world, as we did in creations past. In the center of the garden, there was a tree which has become the center of ageless thological contention. In this sense, my own dispute constitutes my participation in this tradition, rather than a refutation of it.
The tree at the center of Eden, whose name is The Knowledge of Good and Evil,6 could have been humanity’s first sacrament, after a long stay in Eden, learning the arts and sciences which enabled them to gain a full understanding of the world, so that they might understand the what the gift of mortality entails, the opportunity for liberation. Humanity would have become worthy to assume responsibility for the creation God made for them. Instead, they took the fruit without a full understanding of what it meant, which resulted in particular natural consequences, rather than a prescriptive punishment.
God explains the plain consequences of the fruit’s consumption - the loss of immortality and eventual death of the eater7 - but Adam and Eve must learn its purpose through experience by trial and error in Eden, as part of their Divine Education.
Most Christian theologians identify the serpent of this story with Satan and Lucifer. I think that it reflects a mistaken attempt to extract a perfectly coherent narrative across a library of books with various authors, whose composition occurred over the course of around a full millenium, having undergone multiple translations and redactions in the process. I identify the serpent as the narrative does. As an intelligent being who resented humanity’s likeness to God, and acted to place a wedge between them for petty reasons, rather than as the first assault by the forces of ultimate cosmic malevolence in Satan’s unending war against God. The foundation of the serpent’s lie was that he took advantage of humanity’s desire to be more like God. He told Eve that eating the fruit would make her and Adam ‘Like God.’8
The naivete of Eve and Adam allowed them to fall for this. The deception of the serpent served to mystify and obfuscate humanity’s relationship to God. That is; they were already like him, they were literally made in his likeness. First, the serpent broke its trust with God and humanity by tempting Eve, and humanity broke their trust with God by eating the fruit. God comes looking for Adam and Eve, only to find they have hidden themselves. (Here, God displays the customary physicality and temporal presence which is typical of God in pre-Moses narratives where he is called Yahweh.)9
When God confronts them, Adam and Eve threw each other under the bus, creating a fundamental breach of trust between them as well.10 Having prematurely taken the fruit, God expels them from Eden in judgement over their breach in trust with Him. Then, in an oracle judgment, God explains the consequences that will result from their actions. That is, pain and hardship through labor in the field, and through childbirth. The serpent’s crime against all creation results in its alienation from the rest of nature, and emnity between it and all humanity.11
Why do I say that the judgement oracles are a description of the natural consequences resulting from humanity prematurely taking responsibility for creation, rather than a prescribed punishment? This is because, in the course of human history, we’ve gained the knowledge which has lessened the severity of those consequences. Medical knowledge allows us to mitigate the pains of childbirth, and industrial technological knowledge allows to mitigate that of hard physical labor. If this was a God-prescribed punishment, it’d be impossible to mitigate.
That we’ve figured it out, shows the potential of what we could have been, had we waited to earn the gift of mortality. Instead, we had to learn under duress. In our fallen state, entangled in the results of mutual betrayal, across stretches of time which even our collective memory cannot reach. Though we have the ability to mitigate, and even eliminate, many sources of our collective suffering, we insist that the suffering must continue.
The lies of the ruling class, that workers must be coerced and disciplined into labor for our own good, - one could say, in order that we may reflect God’s industrious nature - with the petty objective of increasing the mass and volume of their useless hoards of wealth, perfectly reflect the nature of the serpent’s lie. The obfuscation and mystification of the simplicity involved in mitigating our suffering can only hold as long as we assume the authority of the Lie.
After all, we are the boulder God made, which he cannot lift. The Lie can only rely on those forms of coercion which have a basis in illusion. When the mask becomes useless to them, it drops. We are currently witnessing it. The vile brutality which emerges is a tactic of desperation.
The Memory of What We Lost
Though this is obviously a mythological story, I think it contains our earliest emotional memories of catastrophic societal change, originally told by the first people experiencing it. The millenia-long game of telephone involved in its transmission to us has not diluted our fundamental sense that somthing serious has gone wrong, its truth is more apparent than ever.
The only question is whether we choose to further entangle ourselves in sin, or whether we choose to heal the distrust between each other and God, through solidarity.
Twitter, More Perfect Union (@moreperfectUS), posted Jan 23, 2024, https://x.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1749885068133450171?s=20
CS Lewis, The Great Divorce, Harper Collins Publishing (2001), p.viii
NET Bible, Genesis 32:22
NET Bible, Genesis 1:22
NET Bible, Genesis 2:9
NET Bible, Genesis 2:15-17
NET Bible, Genesis 3:1-5
NET Bible, Genesis 3:8-10
NET Bible, Genesis 3:11-13
NET Bible, Genesis 3:14-19