Children and Childish People

Our adulthood is just glorified adolescence.  We never reach the endpoint of our development, and this is never more apparent than when we try to pontificate about the great truths of existence.  Take "perfection," for example, when we try to assert that our ability to understand perfection implies that--despite our own imperfection--we are able to conceptualize "perfection," and so therefore (as the reasoning goes) the only way we might hold a concept of perfection is if that concept was handed to us from above.

Of course, such reasoning is childish, in that it conveniently accords to the reasoner an unquestioned capacity to understand "perfection."  Could not God create a race with a more refined understanding of perfection than we possess?  Could not God create such increasingly-refined races in an infinite progression, rendering with each step the immediately-preceding race benighted as far as this topic goes?  Would not the serially-surpassed races be exposed one-by-one as worshippers--not of God, but of their conceptions of God?

Such mistaken thinking is emblematic of adolescence.  Throwing off slavish adherence to the parentally-imposed worldview, the adolescent concocts a personalized one.  We might pretend that the adolescent has his or her "whole life" for the concoction, but in reality no one is more pressed for time than a young person.  Hence the adolescent tendency either to embrace bizarre worldviews or to embrace bizarrely unrealistic expectations of the fruits of established worldviews.  Hence the adolescent tendency to try to wish a reality into being--a tendency that finds its deepest refuge in untestable realms like religion.

It is extremely important for us to understand that the human race consists only of two types of people: children and childish people.  These two categories are reflected in Adam and Eve.  Even before the (thoroughly over-hyped) Fall, they were as children of a benevolent father.  They were fully capable of rebellion, such as in Adam's unfulfillment with communion with God, or Eve's disreputable conversation with the snake (which would have been sinful even if she had not tasted of the fruit.)

Even the text's description of Eve's motives is consistent with an early adolescent's stretching of wings.  Eve wanted to taste of the enticing fruit, and she wanted to acquire wisdom that she understood she did not possess.  The descriptions, courtesy of subsequent commentators, of Adam and Eve rising up in diabolical defiance of God, are not supported by Genesis.  They just acted like very young adults.  They were punished in the same way that very young adults are punished by God today--by being made subject to the physical, mental, and psychological traumas of adulthood.

The Jesus who admonishes us to be childlike also takes a matter-of-fact approach to Genesis.  The first narrative description of Eve as a mother (with all of its attendant agonies) comes with the Curses; the first mention of sexual desire comes with the Curses; the first mention of sex-based domination comes with the Curses; the first description of a sweating, straining Adam comes with the Curses.  Before the Fall, Adam and Eve had no shame before each other, and after the Fall come both Adam's naming of Eve as a mother, and the first narrative reference to the sex act.

Jesus takes it as a given that the redeemed state of humanity does not include marriage.  Can there be any reasonable doubt that the overriding physical manifestation of the Fall was puberty, and can we not as a species accept that the "death" inherent in the Edenic curses is the bittersweet reality of each generation ceding its life to the next?