Responses
Patricia: Sight (10/1/04)
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Ok, so I had a random thought a day or so ago that I'm now pursuing to see if it might have any validity. I'm very interested in everybody's thoughts about this.
I was pondering atonement, since Eric had asked me to write a blog about it. My starting thesis, as I've told some of you, is that atonement is not the point; it is simply a means to God's larger end, namely relationship. That's interesting, but I've spent some time pondering it and am now wondering if maybe I should go further.
In my view of things, God suffers, and he does so because he longs for relationship with us. He intentionally gives us the power to impact him, because without that power we would not have real relationship. Inherent in that power is the reality that, at least some of the time, we will use that power to betray him, and thus cause him pain.
The traditional viewpoint on atonement is that "God cannot tolerate the presence of sin, since he is holy, so atonement is necessary if relationship is to be established." Is that something we can draw directly from the Bible, or something we have surmised? Is it possible that God would have been willing to tolerate the pain - to suffer in silence for us - and that atonement is really for us? When we think of atonement as "forgiveness of sins," is that so that God can tolerate to be with us, or that we can tolerate to be with God?
Certainly, it seems that forgiveness is central to our relationship with God in this existence. So I don't think that we should even consider forgetting about sin; we are forced, for whatever reason, to face it in our current situation. But why?
The fact that the fruit was the fruit of "knowledge of good and evil" is significant. Certainly, by my old (and I think the traditional) view, Adam & Eve sinned first not by eating the fruit, but by choosing to eat it. Yet God's command focused on the fruit. Likewise, when God confronts them in the Garden, he doesn't ask about their choice; he instead asks them about the fruit itself. Why ask about the 2nd sin and not the 1st?
So the idea I'm throwing around is that perhaps Adam was sinful BEFORE the fruit, and that God overlooked that state and let him live in blissful ignorance of it. But, once Adam becomes aware of his own sin, then God is forced to introduce the topic into the relationship and to deal with it. This changes, perhaps, how we view the exile from the garden:
Genesis 3:22: "And the Lord God said, 'The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.'"
This can be viewed as a punishment for sin. But it can also be viewed as a merciful act of God: "Adam must be allowed to die, so that this issue may someday be resolved between us. It would be (quite literally) hell for him to live forever with our relationship broken like this."
So, I went looking at Romans for some clues. I read 5:12-6:23, 7:7-25, 8:18-21. In the past, I've gone back to read Romans to see if my "heresies" had any validity and saw old passages in an entirely new light. Much the same is happening now. You start with 5:12-13, which is Paul's thesis about Adam, sin, and death:
"Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned - for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law."
Wow. There it is. "sin is not taken into account when there is no law." My old theology said that this was sort of an approximation - that God would punish sin, but would be gracious about how he did it. But one might also read it as God entirely overlooks sin when there is no law. 'Law,' especially as Paul uses it later, means "something from God which shows us what the standard is, and which thus makes us aware of the capacity to deviate from the standard." In this sense, the first revelation of Law is certainly the fruit; it is the first time that mankind becomes into "knowledge of good and evil."
This brings us to another troublesome passage: 5:20 says "The law was added so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more." This states that God intentionally piles on more and more Law onto us, so that our trespasses might increase. God is widening and deepening our knowledge of him. When this passage says that the "trespasses increase[s]," does that mean that we sin more because of the Law, or that we are aware of sin more because of the Law? I'm not sure yet, but I think that both possibilities fit with this idea I'm playing with. Either way, God is taking affirmative action to widen the gap between himself and sinful man.
7:25 gives another key statement: "Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed, I would not have known what sin was except through the law." It's the fruit again, and the commandments that follow. They let us know about an existing condition. He continues: "For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, 'Do not covet.' But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire." So we have to be careful here. No matter what our original condition - whether that was innocence or sin - in our current state we run after an abundance of new sins. We are truly fallen, and truly depraved, no matter what we used to be.
Yet Paul continues on, and makes things complex again: "For apart from the law, sin is dead." (Dead in what sense? Powerless? Inert? Condemned?) "Once I was alive apart from the law;" (WOW) "but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life and I died. I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death. For sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, deceived me, and through the commandment put me to death. So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good."
The next verse is again key: "Did that which is good, then, become death to me? By no means! But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful." What I read from this is that the commandment/law uncovers sin for what it is, brings sin to its natural conclusion, but the point being that sin be revealed and rejected. It seems to me that the phrase "sin might become utterly sinful" means that the existing condition (sin) is developed to the point that its existence is intolerable (utterly sinful) and therefore must be resolved.
You get another statement of existing sin, and how that creates a dilemma, in verse 18: "I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out." Again, you have the idea that man has become aware of a terrible, intolerable reality - something that absolutely must be dealt with. This turns him to God in desperation in verses 24-25: "What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God - through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
Now, these passages are easily understood under conventional ideas of depravity. But that's our current state. What was our original state? The question remains: was there a Fall, or was it a Revelation? I want to look at 8:19-21, where Paul talks about the state of Creation. "The creation waits in eager anticipation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself might be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God." Notice that the *purpose* for the frustration was that it "might be liberated from its bondage to decay." That means that decay was part of the prior state of Creation. It is not part of the Fall. Thus, pre-Fall Creation is not yet what God intends to someday make it, and its frustration is (at least partially) part of a plan to bring it into a beautiful completeness.
Now, when we go back to Genesis, we have a clear statement that "the ground" was cursed because of Adam. However, the curse is not "decay." Instead, the curse is "painful toil" "thorns and thistles" "sweat of [Adam's] brow" and death. Interestingly, eating "plants of the field" may also be part of the curse. The idea of working a field, rather than cultivating a garden, may be part of the curse.
Now, when Adam is cast out of the Garden, he loses eternal life, because he can no longer eat from the tree of life. But in context of Paul's statement that "decay" is the sad original condition of Creation, we might be able to say that he too comes under decay when he is cast out. Perhaps Eden is the place of eternal life and ordinary Creation is the place of decay?
I think what I'm getting at in all this is the idea that perhaps the Fall was not a "deviation" from the Plan so much as it was the necessary first step towards something that God wanted to see. In this metanarrative, God creates us with the capacity to sin, and for all we know we may have actually sinned against him in that state. Yet the Suffering God chooses to overlook all that and have relationship with us regardless. He is willing to stay in that relationship as-is; yet he longs to have a relationship that is not marred by sin.
When Adam eats of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, everything changes. Adam suddenly becomes aware of what he is and his capacity to reject God. And he looks at the past 5 minutes, and realizes that that is exactly what he has done. He is terrified to face a righteous God in his state, and hides.
God re-enters relationship in vulnerability again. He seeks out Adam (although he waits for Adam to reveal himself), and converses with him. Adam is terrified, ashamed, and lonely, now knowing who and what he is, yet God deals gently with him. Rather than have Adam permanently trapped in his state of sin, God promises a redeemer, and then provides the ultimate redemption: death.
As time progresses, God continues entering into the lives of mankind, teaching them about himself and about themselves. He offers commandments so that they may become even more fully aware of the depths of their own depravity, and provides (temporary) sacrifices as a way of making the guilt tolerable.
In time, when mankind is ready to understand the need, God provides a final sacrifice in Christ. Christ takes on death on behalf of mankind, paying a price that no depraved man was qualified to pay. In his death, Christ offers a complete solution for the problem of depravity. Mankind is forgiven, and can be with God again. The Spirit is sent to dwell with men and to give them a foretaste of the completion to come.
In Heaven, then, is a new reality. It is not a restoration of what Eden was, but instead a new thing that God has always longed to have. Mankind, and the Creation that he rules over, has been brought through the trial into something new. Creation is no longer subject to decay; man needs no longer be subject to death. And most importantly, the relationship between God and Man is no longer marred by sin (knowing or unknowing). Man is brought into a "new thing" which, apparently, could not have been accomplished any other way.
The beauty of this metanarrative, in contrast to the ones I've generally held, is that it is an entirely forward-pointing one. If there was a Fall from perfection, then we have to deal with the idea that some men were created only to live under sin and then be sent to Hell. But if this idea I have is true, then the Fall was not so much a step backward that God must fix but a necessary (though very traumatic) step forward. The apple, then, becomes symbolic not of moving away from God, but of the first moment when we became aware of the possibility of moving toward God. Before the apple, we did not know that we were sinners. After the apple, we know, and we have for the first time a real opportunity to do something different. And when God provides Christ (and then, later, the Glorification), then we are empowered to do that thing that our true selves long to do: to somehow be with God (again) (and better).
Thoughts? |
