Coming Clean

Original Sin, Part I: In the Garden of Eden, Honey

“And now, please rise for our opening hymn, uh…’In the Garden of Eden,’ by I. Ron Butterfly.” Cue the Organ music … annnnnnnd … oh, right, this is suppose to be a serious post … Roger, I owe you a story, bud. I’m thinking …

The theology of Original Sin simply says one thing: Adam’s sin has removed mankind from God’s presence – from communion with God.

Right … but that’s the short version. For the purpose of making it a little more meaningful, we need to unpack that simple statement.

In the Garden of Eden
Prior to the Fall, mankind – Adam and Eve – lived in communion with God and all of His Creation in the Garden of Eden. In the simplest sense, this means that Adam and Eve lived in a manner that was consistent with God’s creative purpose. All they did was right and pleasing to God. But living in communion with God and Creation goes beyond just following some set of rules. Living in communion means you give all of yourself over to those things. You give God all that you are. You give Creation all that you are. You receive from them what they gift to you – you don’t take what is not yours and not given.

And that’s the setup for the Fall. God had given Adam and Eve everything in the Garden except the fruit off of one tree – the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. Being as the whole of Creation is suppose to be represented in the Garden, you would have to conclude that there was plenty of other food around – the restriction God had placed on Adam and Eve was no real burden on their part … just an observance for obedience.

The Serpent then comes along and tells Eve (and Adam) that eating the fruit would make them like God. Eve (and Adam) like this idea. They like the idea of being like God. They also know that God has said eating the fruit is an act of disobedience. When they take the fruit and eat it, they in effect prefer themselves over God. They eat the fruit hoping to elevate their place in Creation to that of (or at least like) God’s place – a place that God had not given them.

In eating the fruit, however, they find that they are not elevated. Instead, they become aware of the fullness of freedom, that of acting outside of obedience – and so they become aware of evil. They gain that knowledge of what evil is and the vulnerability it preys upon – thus, they don’t need to be told they are naked, they know it and dress in fig leaves and hide. They also become aware that life wasn’t simply pleasant before, it was good … and their disobedience has created something in them that isn’t good.

When God finds Adam and Eve in hiding afterwards, the first question He asks them is, “Who told you that you were naked?” It’s a redundant question. God knows how it is they know they are naked. The question is a grace, a freely given opportunity, for Adam and Eve to repent. Instead of answering wholly truthfully by accepting responsibility, Adam denies the fullness of the blame proper to him and says, essentially, “Eve made me do it.” Eve then gets the same opportunity … but instead, “The Devil made me do it.” And certainly, the Devil did instigate the whole affair and certainly did not speak truthfully – God knows this character, he has already made any choice he would make, repentance is beyond him, and so God does not question him.

So it came to pass that mankind came to be at spiritual odds with the Devil and his minions, mankind is promised a redeemer from the Devil and his minions and the suffering resulting from his deception, women suffer greater pain in childbirth, women are subjugated under their husbands, and mankind’s communion with Creation is broken. Worst of all, Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden, from communion with God. All that was wholly good was lost, but all that is good was not destroyed nor abandoned.

More to come …