The Wrong Side of Infinity

Adam committed sins in the Garden of Eden.  As I have written before, it is only reasonable (if we are to assume that the figures of Adam and Eve are relatable to us as humans) for us to understand the first humans' estrangement from God as existing from the very beginning, from when Adam has it said of himself, "It is not good for the man to be alone,"--though God was available to him.

It is also only reasonable for us to understand Adam (with an existence of finite length and of limited capacities) to have committed only a finite sum of sins.  Otherwise we might, if we chose, conjure up some notion that Adam committed an infinitely grave sin--deserving infinite punishment--in rejecting the infinite blessing of communion with God.  Such conjecture is not foreign to the realms of religious thought, though it would be fatuous to pretend that such an Adam of superhuman experience-capacity and superhuman actualization was really different in godling-quality from some "Child of the Son-God" pharaoh-ancestor.

No, the Adam of Genesis was a human being, committing sins of finite (albeit great) import.  Such might be said of us all, and no matter how great the number of our species might be eventually, still the weight of our sins is finite.  Such a realization must put the lie to the meaningless contention sometimes made, that Jesus on the Cross suffered the "equivalent" of an eternity of suffering for each of the saved.  How is there an isolatable "equivalent" to an infinity?

If we as unsaved humans are to experience eternal damnation, such must be understood as the out-workings of an internalized attitude of rebellion against God--not as a roiling stew-pot of infinite, unending punishments for finite sins, but rather as a clash of wills playing out as the result of earthly resolves.  For all of its otherwise unearthly aspects, the story of The Rich Man and Lazarus has its foundation in their earthly lives, and has its playing-out in the coherent--though mistaken--willful contentions of The Rich Man.

The sad part about our contentions about the degree of Jesus' salvific sufferings is not in how our imaginations run away from us--whipping up "The Passion of the Christ" imageries in what was a rather routine (thought holiday-shortened) crucifixion, possibly in raw terms harder on the Thieves--but rather in how we have sheltered our imaginations from the possibility of Jesus' sufferings through all of time.  The Jesus of the Cross, after all, is the Jesus of Creation, and in the recesses of the Creation in Genesis we can see--or, rather, not see--the very beginning of time.  The Jesus who felt the agonies of every creature (laid out most distinctly in the observations of evolution and its eons); the Jesus who knows of agonies or not in the pre-biotic gasses, dusts, and molten stones; the Jesus who knows of agonies or not in a yawning, aching truly infinite prospect of time not beginning and not ending--this Jesus is the Jesus through whom Creation was made.

This time-surpassing agony of Jesus is that which we can call "infinite," and if such speculation on our part might be mistaken, it would at least be prudent and sincere.  Contrast this speculation to that of The Rich Man (lecturing the heavens on the proper provisions for saving the lost) or to that of the theologians who will lecture the Crucified Jesus on the work he is performing for the saved.