and then:
"...made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh..." (2:22-23).
It has, of course, been pointed out that--in the conventional sense--Adam and Eve did not die when they ate of the forbidden tree. This might be laid to God's mercy, although such a contention does not do much for arguments in support of God's justice or truthfulness. That will always be a puzzle for mortals.
It is always possible to approach this puzzle in an un-conventional sense, and in a moment I will try to do so, though admittedly getting the reader to embrace such an approach is something of a take-it-or-leave-it or take-it-if-you-can proposition.
Needless to say, the denominations--sometimes backed by temporal power--are somewhat less likely to assume a take-it-or-leave-it attitude. We are told that Adam and Eve "died" spiritually (and, as my very blog description relates, I assent in some degree to that notion.) Of course, the denominations have fixed themselves on the idea of "The Fall"--humanity's descent into a sinful state by the breaking of a commandment.
This idea of "The Fall" is somewhat problematic, and I don't mean simply in terms of the age-old observation that there is something backward about condemning the first couple for eating a fruit that would infuse them with the knowledge that they ought not to eat that fruit. What is truly problematic about the conventional approach to "The Fall" is that this approach thrusts Adam and Eve into a state in which they possess a sinful nature--this sinful nature being such that every thought and action on their part is tinged with evil. If such evil is now entirely pervasive in human nature, and humans are rightly to be punished with eternal damnation for that befouled nature itself (manifested by all sins from the greatest to the least--the magnitude does not matter), then why were Adam and Eve not wholly condemned by their behavior before? After all--as the theologians have never rightly addressed--Adam was not content or even oriented to enjoy simple eternal communion with God from the first. That is where Eve came in. Adam's was, by any unsparing assessment, always a "sin nature."
The key to the un-conventional approach that I will present lies in the revealing statement from Adam presented above: "...made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh..." (2:22-23). Along with Adam and Eve in the garden was the snake, a creature vastly different from the first couple. You know the rest, leading up to God asking the terrified Adam, "Where art thou?"
God interrogates Adam first, and then Eve, and then turns to the snake. It would be too much to imagine the snake--inextricably bound with the person of the Devil--retorting to God, "Why are you angry with me? I didn't eat the fruit! I spoke ill of you to the woman, but she responded in kind, and you would not be punishing anyone if she had merely entertained the notion of defying you and eating the fruit, and refrained from the act itself!" It must be asked, however, what it is that the snake might be charged with. The snake might be charged with deceit, or with impiety, but such would have been always its nature.
The most important answer about the snake's offense is indicated in God's first warning to Adam about the tree: "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" (Genesis 2:17). The snake was contriving to bring about the death of humanity, and to do so through lies. Or as Jesus describes when speaking about the explicitly named devil:
"He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him" (John 8:44).
The snake was committing murder; that is in the Genesis story. Moreover, Eve, when she gave the fruit to Adam, was committing murder. And Adam, when he chose to condemn himself--to murder himself--was engaging simultaneously in the murder of Eve, his "bone of bone and flesh of flesh." By the end of the Garden of Eden story, all of humanity has murdered each other.
That is what it is to be human, and that is the death-like quality of what we insipidly call "life." We are all under sentence of death, and rightly so, since we are all murderers. I realize that there is a take-it-or-leave-it quality to the approach I have offered about the first couple's post-Eden survival, but nonetheless here it is: Adam and Eve did not die physically as a result of committing their murders in the Garden because there were no innocent victims. Adam and Eve were just like us: all murderers and all murder victims.
Needless to say (I hope) bad deeds are not acceptable and not all bad deeds are as bad as murder. I submit, however, that the cause of improving (or at least maintaining) human behavior is not furthered by the conventional Adam-and-Eve-died-spiritually notion. At the "Fall," Adam and Eve did not at that moment become evil or die spiritually; Adam and Eve in that episode were thrust out of the Garden and into the state of humanity that has existed throughout all subsequent history. This state of humanity is one in which we are all murdered, all murderers, and all sustain ourselves through murder.
Supply-side economics be damned; we all have what we have because it is being denied to another,
and that at a cost--either total or incremental--to the lives of those who are thus deprived. Such are the accounts Jesus gives, though they are enough to make professional theologians writhe in anguish:
"Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented" (Luke 16:25).
The fact that the denominations will not grapple directly with the ubiquity of human murder means that the denominations are self-defeated as voices for the teachings of Jesus. In the teachings of Jesus the saved soak themselves in the knowledge of their own deadly sinfulness and exult in the comfort of a God who will value the repentant longings of the worst of sinners. In the denominations the ostensibly saved soak themselves in sacraments or sacrament-like invocations, all the while praising God for crediting their protestations of their undeserving natures as substitutes for striving for righteousness.
God is not fooled. Jesus is not fooled. And only a fool would truly believe that humbly submitting to a sacrament or feverishly reciting a believer's prayer can substitute for the surging and resurging realization--latent in all human interactions, in all times and cultures--that we live at the expense of others, and that the ultimate image--the image that defies imagination--of those victimized others is the face of God.
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