With New Eyes

Well, I've finally succumbed to the inevitable and acquired a Greek New Testament (three, actually). I just got several more Greek resources today and should be starting my Greek classes this month. I'm terribly excited to learn the language and get that much closer to reading the New Testament as it was originally written.

I've already started reading the book of John and discovered some other, unexpected benefits to reading it in another language. Amazingly, I can understand it pretty well due to picking up the alphabet from majoring in math, learning words from English roots and word studies, and having the ESV translation in parallel. But whereas I'm an extremely fast English reader, not having studied Greek I read at about the painstakingly slow rate of a first-grader. But in the Greek, new things keep jumping at me from the text; sometimes in John I feel like I'm meeting Jesus for the first time at 23. I never knew how much I was missing reading the Bible in English until I stopped.

One chapter that made a big impression on me in Greek was the story of Jesus healing the man born blind (τυφλος) in chapter 9. Jesus approaches this man and his disciples ask if his blindness is due to his sin or his parents'. (After all, everything that's wrong in the world is because of sin, right?) Jesus rebukes them and explained he is blind so that "the works of God might be displayed in him." He then performs a rather strange miracle involving making mud with spit and washing the man's eyes with it before telling him to wash in the Pool of Siloam, where he is cured of his blindness.

Then people who know him ask him what happened and, when he explains himself, he is brought to the Pharisees. They immediately use the fact that Jesus healed him on the Sabbath to discredit him and refuse to believe his testimony that Jesus is from God, despite His miracle. Finally, Jesus reveals Himself as the Son of Man to the man and he believes; Jesus ends with the cryptic line, "For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind."

Like I said, when I read this story in Greek, it forced me to slow way, way down and savor every verse (even every word) until I started noticing all kinds of things I'd always glossed over before. I was struck by how the Pharisees discredit the man and refuse to listen to him they have already made up their minds that Jesus is a "sinner" (meaning He doesn't conform to their strict interpretation of the Law) and can't possibly be from God for this reason.

Now, of course Christian teachers frequently look at the Pharisees as an example of what not to do--they are consummate legalists, they care more about the fact that Jesus healed the man on the Sabbath than that He healed him of blindness, they have replaced the law of God with manmade laws that only they can live up to  so they can look down on everyone else as "sinners", they are so pridefully focused on their own moralistic performance that they are blind to the works of God through Jesus among them, and so on.

But by only looking at the Pharisees along the works-versus-faith dimension, we miss something of crucial importance. We think that because we do follow Jesus and are justified by faith instead of trying to be justified by works as they did, that we've learned our lesson from them, when often we haven't. In fact, when we think such things, we are looking down on the Pharisees for being legalists just as they looked down on people for being "sinners". That was what made an impact on me in the Greek: how totally analogous the two situations are.

How often do we pray (or at least think) like the Pharisee in 18:11, "God, I thank you that I am not like other people--Pharisees, legalists, or the self-righteous." If we focus in on the Pharisees' legalism, we can totally miss the wider and more serious issue of their pride. Justification by faith instead of by works is no sure protection against boasting, as I often hear Calvinists saying or implying. It is possible to fully believe that you are justified entirely by faith apart from anything you have done and still be a proud, self-righteous prick--if, like the Pharisees, you divide people up into "us" and "them" categories by standing before God, whether "them" means "legalists", "the unsaved", or something else. It's ugly when Christians treat nonbelievers like this, using their sin as an excuse to discard their objections or specific situation and plow their gospel presentation straight through their defenses. It's even worse when Christians treat other Christians like this over theological disputes.

Jesus' final exchange with the man is interesting:

Jesus said, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.”
Some of the Pharisees near him heard these things, and said to him, “Are we also blind?”
Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains.

The word Jesus uses for "guilt" is αμαρτιαν ("hamartia"), which is normally translated as "sin". (You can imagine why translating it this way might cause theological problems) I think what Jesus is saying is that, by claiming to be able to see (that is, claiming spiritual insight or moral authority), the Pharisees have in fact blinded themselves to who Jesus is--in contrast to the man born blind, who took Jesus at His word and can now see Him with his eyes and as the Son of God. If we come to Jesus seeing, we are blinded to the glory of who He is, but if we come to Him blind, he opens our eyes to see Him.

Let me try to apply this chapter as incisively as I can:

• Is there anyone you look down on--for personal, cultural, or theological reasons?
• Is there someone (or a group of people) that you disagree with but think you don't have to listen to or consider for some reason? (Maybe because they're "wrong" and you're "right")
• Do you claim to have spiritual "sight"? If so, does this responsibility terrify and humble you as it should?

Evil, suffering, and all that fun stuff

My friend and ministry partner Mike asked me a few weeks ago to do a post on the "problem of evil", one of the most common objections raised to Christianity. It goes something along the lines of, "How can a Good, all-powerful, all-knowing God allow such evil and suffering to happen in the world? It's a question raised by sincere believers, wavering doubters, and hardened skeptics alike, a question with which every theistic belief system since time immemorial has had to wrestle with. In the wake of the recent Boston Marathon bombing, I thought to myself, "Now is the perfect time to get working on this post, to try in my own way to make some sense of this tragedy". Then I soberly reminded myself: in this fallen world, it's always the "perfect time" to think about the problem of evil.

In this post I will, unsurprisingly, be looking at evil from a Christian standpoint. A bit more rigorously, the objection can be stated as the impossibility of reconciling the following three seemingly paradoxical premises:

1. God is good and loves/cares for people.
2. God is all-powerful, able to stop evil and suffering.
3. Evil and suffering exist.

Wrong Ways

Before starting my investigation, I'm going to start with some examples of how not to answer the problem of evil.

• Deny the first premise; God is not really good or doesn't really love/care for us. If you do this, you have thrown anything recognizable as Christianity out with the bathwater. This may seem obvious, but the classically Calvinistic response that "We all justly deserve eternal torment in Hell anyway, so anything better that we receive is really an expression mercy" flirts with this possibility. Or, alternately, the extreme voluntaristic view that anything God does (including inflicting suffering) is automatically good and praiseworthy because He's God. Anyone who espouses this view has probably never tried to tell someone who is truly in grief that their situation is really proof of God's love. If we try to look at suffering as mercy because it's "better than we deserve", the term "mercy" becomes meaningless to us.
• Deny the second premise; God is not really able to stop evil and suffering. This option is not as popular and, like the first, if accepted it does not point to a God worthy of our worship. The philosophical "free will defense" espoused by Plantinga and others is related to this, arguing that it is possible that God logically could not have created creatures with free will who never sin. Not only does this argument offer no comfort for anyone who is actually suffering, it also dangerously implies that we will either continue sinning or forfeit our free will in the paradise promised us in Revelation.
• Deny the third premise and assert that evil and suffering don't really exist. For obvious reasons, this option is untenable for anyone not living under a rock.
• Sidestep the question altogether by parrying it into an argument for the existence of God by arguing that the existence of evil points to the existence of a perfectly Good standard of morality. Notice how this doesn't answer the question at all.

There are two "right" ways to answer the problem of evil--the philosophical way, and the pastoral way. Answering the problem of evil on philosophical terms is (relatively) easy; the pastoral answer I can only blindly guess at here.

Philosophical Answer

The productive ways I have seen of answering the problem of evil all generally take aim at its implicit assumption that God being "good" or "loving" means that He must prevent evil or suffering--or more generally, that He exists for the sake of our comfort and our interests. (Which is really selfish when you look at it closely) In other words, people smuggle into the first premise an external or preexisting definition of "good" or "loving" and then expect God to conform to it. Seeing that He does not, they conclude that it's illogical to believe in a good or loving God.

But being a faithful Christian means believing that God is love and that no one is good except God alone. It means laying aside our preconceived notions of "good" or "loving" and looking to God, and especially to Christ, for their definitions. Instead of expecting God to conform to our standard of goodness, it means earnestly seeking to conform to His standard of goodness. It means accepting that God is good and then asking the critical question, "How is God good in the midst of suffering?" People have spent their entire lives trying to answer this question. But the first step is believing that an answer exists.

C.S. Lewis has a lot to say about this question. The apparent meaninglessness of life and the uncaring nature of the universe were the main reasons for his atheism before his conversion, and afterward he wrote The Problem of Pain about what he had learned. In this book he looks at what we mean by "good" or "loving" and how God can be these things even while allowing suffering. He says about the problem of evil (emphasis added):

The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word 'love', and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. 'Thou hast created all things, and for they pleasure they were and are created.' [Revelation 4:11] We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the Divine love may rest 'well pleased'. To ask that God's love should be content with us as we are is to ask that God should cease to be God: because He is what He is, His love must, in the nature of things, be impeded and repelled by certain stains in our present character, and because He already loves us He must labour to make us lovable.

In other words, to state that God's love for us is incompatible with human suffering is to misunderstand the nature of God's love for us. God's love does not consist in simply leaving us as we are and making us as comfortable and free from pain as possible there. God wants us to be truly happy--and, being wiser than we, He knows that the only way that this can happen is by our loving Him, the source of everything good.

When a rich father dotes upon his child, giving him everything he asks for no matter how trivial or unhealthy and satisfying his every desire, do we think this is the greatest expression of love a father can have for his child? Of course not; the child is "spoiled", and unless he keeps getting spoiled he's going to have a rough time growing up and adjusting to life in the "real" world. What the spoiled child wants, or thinks he needs, is not what he actually needs. Given how often in scripture God's love for us is analogized as a father's love for his children, it's important to see how this truth has parallels with God. Is it possible that just as a responsible parent knows his child's needs better than the child, God knows our needs better than we do--well enough to know that they can't be met within a painless life?

The Christian doctrine is this: greater communion with God Himself is the greatest need of humans, but left to their own devices, no one will seek Him out but will instead reject Him; we call this tendency sin. So in order to truly love us, according to His definition of love, God needs to change our hearts and desires, to reorient them from innumerable lesser pleasures to Himself; it is the only way for us to be truly happy. He makes no guarantees that this process (called sanctification) will be pleasant. In fact, in my own experience pain is a necessary part of growing closer to God. I've found that I never care less about God than when everything in my life is running smoothly. Living a carefree life full of earthly comforts and no need for God is like eating a diet of candy; it feels good in the short run, but ultimately leaves us hungrier than before. In this metaphor, God is the wise parent who we're eventually glad made us eat our vegetables.

In a better-known quote, C.S. Lewis says that "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."  Sometimes pain is the only way God has of getting through to apathetic or hostile souls and reshaping them into something lovable. He continues: "No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul."

The conclusion of my post series on the Fall, which I wrote while this post was on hold, turns out to be very relevant here. I concluded that "the road to glory in Christ is paved with suffering". In other words, just as Jesus achieved His greatest glory through suffering on the cross, so Christians should expect to come to know Christ and share in His glory by first sharing in His sufferings. You might object that this isn't fair to non-Christians, whose suffering would then seem to profit them nothing. But this isn't God's fault; from His perspective, pain is an invitation to be adopted as sons and daughters and begin the process of soul-refining that it makes possible. And be honest--if only Christians suffered, no one would ever want to be one and God's desire for humanity would be entirely frustrated. Suffering can be thought of as one way God knocks for us (Revelation 3:20), inviting us to an existence infinitely greater than the jealous pursuit of mere comfort.

Free Will

I will say something about the importance of free will here. Unlike Alvin Plantinga, I do believe that God "could" have made humans sinless, but with free will, but I know better than to question why He didn't, and instead set things up so that our greatest good is so often achieved through suffering. The whole "free will defense", the argument that in our present reality God couldn't stop evil without stepping on peoples' wills, is not comprehensive. Yes, it directly applies to acts of malicious evil like bombings or mass shootings, but not  to natural disasters, disease, animal attacks, or accidents.

But free will applies in another way to these instances of suffering. We ask, say, "Why does God allow millions of children to starve in Africa?", while missing another question that begs to be asked: "Why do we?" America alone easily has enough money to end world hunger or many other common causes of suffering. This isn't meant to make anyone feel guilty--of course no one person should expect to be able to make such a difference, unless you're a billionaire--but it does speak to people who see things like world hunger simply as evidence that God is heartless.

As I argued in the ending of my series on God's providence, God seems to have (unwisely?) delegated some of His sovereignty and work in the world to us, the church. This is what I mean by it being a scary level of responsibility: on some lower, immediate level, it is up to us to decide whether God (or rather, His body the church) is loving or heartless. This should make us think twice before questioning whether God cares about human suffering, because often we condemn ourselves in the asking.

Pastoral Answer

If you have voiced the problem of evil not merely as a philosophical objection or reason not to believe but as a heartfelt cry to a God you worry doesn't really care, the material in the previous sections may have been interesting, but I don't expect it helped much. Believing the general principle that God can and does use suffering to bring lost souls to Himself is little comfort in specific instances of suffering. In fact, I'm not sure there is a blanket "pastoral answer" to all suffering that makes everyone who hears it automatically feel loved and comforted. Fortunately, the Bible is much, much more than a philosophical foundation for belief; it contains many examples of people enduring suffering before God and their reactions, which can and do still comfort people today.

Planful Suffering

One "right" way to respond to suffering is to try to personalize the philosophical answers about it or make them relevant to the sufferer; the classic response that "God has a plan" is an archetypal example of this. There is no "one size fits all" response that is guaranteed to speak to a specific situation. Some other possible ways this response may be phrased are:

• "God is in control" (again appealing to the present situation being part of His plan in some hidden way, Romans 8:28)
• "God never wastes pain" (expressing hope that God will make something positive out of the situation, as in 2 Corinthians 1:4)

Of course, true as these things may be, it's rarely a comfort to know God has a plan without some idea of how this plan may involve ____, and without this explanation these answers sound vague, trite, and platitudinous. So a constant appeal to a higher plan--typical of the "healthy souls" observed by William James--cannot be the only recourse for Christians in trying circumstances. In fact, I would say it shouldn't even be the default response.

In an effort to not sound uncaring or platitudinous, lots of Christians adopt pastoral responses to suffering and evil that focus on its origins and coming demise.

• Appeals to spiritual warfare/blaming evil in the world on spiritual forces, citing Ephesians 6:12 (which begs the question of why God is letting them win battles and, if taken too far, can become a denial of premise 2 of the dilemma)
• "It will all be over someday" (appealing to the promises in Revelation 22:3 of the end of sin and pain)

But these explanations don't always work. In recent news, I saw a much bigger response from Christians to the Boston marathon bombings that killed three than to the Texas fertilizer factory explosion that took more than ten times as many lives and caused much more damage. People are shocked by the senselessness of two brothers killing innocent people at a marathon and Christians, having the "easy" explanation of sin and the "fallen world" for this tragedy, swoop in and offer their witness. But even more senseless catastrophes like the factory explosion (being an accident) have no easy target for blame, so most Christians are silenced. Could this be a sign that the Fall narrative is insufficient as an explanation for suffering?

Planless Suffering

The alternative to trying to seek comfort in a vague knowledge of "God's plan for suffering" is simply not trying. This doesn't mean denying that God has a plan but simply being honest and admitting your inability to make any sense of your situation, your inability to rejoice or find comfort in God, or even your inability to feel Him at all. This sounds like it would be profoundly unsatisfying and bordering on a denial of faith--but this is the response of the "sick soul" observed by William James, which Richard Beck found was correlated with a less defensive, more healthy and honest Christian faith and which was characteristic of Mother Teresa's private spirituality.

There is also an abundance of examples of the planless response to evil in the Bible, especially in the Psalms. Psalm 13 is a short and sweet example of this:

How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?
Look on me and answer, LORD my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,
and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.
But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.
I will sing the LORD’s praise,
for he has been good to me.

The big difference I see between Psalm 13 and the planful responses above is that David makes no claim to any special knowledge about God's doings or reasons--which is all too often the case with us as well. It is deeply personal, an honest cry for help to a God who he continues to trust and call on even though He seems to have forgotten the psalmist's plight. Obviously, calling for help to a God who seems to have forgotten you involves a certain amount of internal tension, but David's trust in his God goes deeper than his present situation. He realizes the importance of that word seems. It's exactly how I felt when I kept praying and waiting for God to resolve my hangups with the Bible, even though He had stopped making sense to me because of those hangups. So great is David's trust in God that he is able to continue rejoicing in Him even in the presence of his enemies. (See also Psalm 23)

An even rawer example is Psalm 88, which is filled with rays of sunshine like "I am overwhelmed with troubles and my life draws near to death", "You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths", and "darkness is my closest friend". But even this psalmist hasn't stopped hoping in God: "But I cry to you for help, LORD; in the morning my prayer comes before you"

Or consider the entire book of Job, possibly the best treatment the Bible has on suffering, the story of a righteous, wealthy, and happy man who loses everything he has except his very life. Though in the story Job's plight is revealed to be the result of a bet between God and Satan, Job has no knowledge of this and is left to ask God, "why"? As his friends keep insisting that he must have done something to deserve his fate, Job gets defensive and increasingly self-righteous (32:1), eventually demanding that God explain Himself to him. Finally, in chapter 38, God responds, not with a mindblowing, comprehensive explanation of His ultimate purpose in suffering but with a withering series of questions reminding Job of his smallness and ignorance of God's ways. This turns out to be just what Job needs to cure him of his self-righteousness (42:1-6). So Job's real problem wasn't his plight--it was his sinful attitude, and this is what God addresses. (This fits in very neatly with C.S. Lewis' answer above)

You'll notice (I did, at least) that all of my examples of "planless" suffering were from the Old Testament, and the verses backing up "planful" suffering were from the New. Does this mean that because Christ has come and we live in a different part of history than David and Job, that we should expect the crystal-clear picture of suffering that Paul seems to promise? Not necessarily. Sometimes we're like Paul in his letters, receiving marvelous visions and explanations for our hardships (see 2 Corinthians 12), but much more often we're like David in his Psalms.

I will attempt to put these two kinds of responses together into my best attempt at a pastoral response to the problem of evil. (If you want a better one, ask a pastor) Above all the most important response to suffering is to keep trusting God, as we see David do--not merely "believing" in Him in some ethereally vague sense, but actually trusting that He is real and interested in your welfare, enough to keep petitioning Him. If you get glimpses of a larger purpose behind your suffering (like my realization that my struggles with doubt were preparing me to help others with theirs), rejoice in them, but don't expect them as something God is supposed to show you or, even worse, try to manufacture them as a way to comfort yourself. This does mean living with existential tension rather than trying to minimize it with coffee-cup Bible verses quoted out of context. I'll close with this beautiful quote from a talk by Pope Francis I that I found today that I found relevant:

Being patient: that is the path that Jesus also teaches us Christians. Being patient ... This does not mean being sad. No, no, it's another thing! This means bearing, carrying the weight of difficulties, the weight of contradictions, the weight of tribulations on our shoulders. This Christian attitude of bearing up: of being patient. That which is described in the Bible by a Greek word, that is so complete, Hypomoné, in life bearing ever day tasks; contradictions; tribulations, all of this. These - Paul and Silas - bear their tribulations, endure the humiliation: Jesus bore them, he was patience. This is a process - allow me this word 'process' - a process of Christian maturity, through the path of patience. A process that takes some time, that you cannot undergo from one day to another: it evolves over a lifetime arriving at Christian maturity. It is like a good wine.

Story and Wonder: What Harry Potter taught me about heaven

Warning: This post contains spoilers from, of all things, Harry Potter.

In my posts on the Fall, I mentioned that the eschatological hope (that is, "Heaven") for Christians is much more than playing a harp or singing "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come" for all eternity. But what is it, then? Peter says to "set your hope on the grace to be brought to you when Jesus Christ is revealed at his coming." (1 Peter 1:13) For me, at least, this is impossible if "grace" in the culminated sense Peter uses it remains an abstract quantity that we have some of now but will have more of later--or if it's expressed in painfully simple ways like "doing nothing but praising God for eternity". These images of grace do little to inspire hope in me--yet the Bible doesn't take the time to go into much detail on what, exactly, we're supposed to be hoping for. I think some imagination is called for.

C.S. Lewis' picture of eternity as not static but continually-increasing joy, wonder, and fullness hits me much more deeply and powerfully, and therefore I think it's closer to the truth. But even aware of this picture, for years another doubt nagged at me. I had trouble imagining how eternity could be anything other than terribly dull without any conflict. After all, what good story today is without some kind of conflict, whether it be person-against-person, human-against-nature, or good-against-evil? The Lord of the Rings with no conflict would just be a series of fantastical travel observations. Many stories would have even less left than this. The central storyline of the Bible is a sort of conflict (one-sided though it may be) between God and sin. Yet part of what the Bible does say about heaven is that all these conflicts will be done away with, along with suffering, crying, pain, etc. (Revelation 21:4) This sounds great, but what could be left to spice up this dull, conflict-less existence?

But I've realized there is something else that can captivate us in a story, to say nothing of real life, at least as much as conflict: wonder. That is, the kind of awe-infused, starry-eyed, joyful apprehension of something whose grandness makes us feel very small. I felt glimmers of it it last week on my trip to England when I was hiking in the picturesque Cotswalds, walking through Christchurch great hall (which served as the inspiration for the great hall in the silver-screen Hogwarts), or stepping into the cavernous St. Paul's Cathedral in London.

It's funny I should mention Hogwarts, because I was about to tie this line of thinking in with Harry Potter anyway. As I have mentioned to many of my friends, I don't like the Harry Potter books--but that's only part of the story. I don't like books four through seven--but I did, and still do, enjoy the first three. The reason for this is the near-total change in tone that takes place throughout the series. In the beginning of the series, there is a continual sense of wonder pervading the story as Harry, raised among muggles, becomes resituated in a world literally pervaded with magic. Rowling does an excellent job of allowing us to share in this wonder along with Harry. Yes, there is conflict even in The Sorcerer's Stone--but this conflict only really takes over the plot from wonder toward the end, to tie everything in the first book up in a satisfying conclusion. (It's been years since I've read the books, so I'm probably generalizing)

But later, an especially in book four and beyond, the tone shifts completely. The central focus shifts from wonder to conflict--it's no longer about Harry making his way through the wizarding world, but about defending it from Voldemort. As the stories grew darker to increasingly resemble the kind of action movie they were later made into, as beloved characters started dying left and right, the part of me that so enjoyed the first few books was increasingly frustrated and, at the end of book six with the death of Albus Dumbledore, gave up all hope, heartbroken.

You could argue that J.K. Rowling simply wanted the stories to grow up with their readers (tell that to an 11-year-old whose parents just got him a set of all seven books to read at once), but I grew right up along with everyone else and still vastly prefer the first three books over the last three. Apparently I still prefer wonder over conflict for telling a good story--and I don't think I'm alone, even among adults.

My experience teaching preschoolers in Sunday School gives another perspective on this. Kids have much lower standards for things worthy of their attention. My kids can endlessly entertain themselves with markers and blank construction paper, some blocks, or a bin full of dress-up clothes. When I read to them, the books in our room can have some extremely simplistic conflict to them, or not; it doesn't make a huge difference to them.

Obviously I'm not a developmental psychologist, nor have I received any education on how to work with kids, and I can only guess at what's going on in their little heads, but it seems safe to say that kids see the world in a very different way than we do. When the idea of operating a dump truck (even a toy one) is exotic and exciting enough to grab your attention week after week, life doesn't need conflict to be exciting.

We have become accustomed to the world around us in a way that kids haven't, yet, and often this can mean  we cease to be driven by wonder as they are. Let me offer the hypothesis that this will change in heaven. By knowing Christ and through the paradigm shift that occurs, we begin to get glimpses of a vast spiritual reality (that is, the "face of God", 1 Corinthians 13:12) that was previously obscured by the blindness of sin--a landscape worthy of literally endless wonder even for a cynical adult like myself. This was especially evident to me as I was rereading the ending of The Last Battle and tying it in with Romans 8. What if it really is that good?

The idea of eternity as continual wonder with increasing knowing of God makes no sense if we think of "knowing God" in a propositional sense; that is, simply knowing He is perfectly good, loving, just, &c. and having this knowledge confirmed beyond all doubt. In fact, I've never found mere propositional knowledge of God to be the least bit useful in a devotional or worship sense. Psalm 46:10 says, "Be still and know that I am God", but somehow meditating on a tautology doesn't do it for me. (Maybe I'm not "knowing" hard enough, or doing it wrong) I think it means something else. Maybe we shouldn't expect thinking about spiritual truths disconnected from our everyday reality to change our lives. Theology was never meant to be lofty and abstract, but concrete and firmly rooted in a particular context.

Just before Psalm 46:10, verse 8 says to "come behold the works of the Lord". We come closer to the face and knowledge of God not primarily by philosophical meditations (though these can also help in putting things together) but by seeing Him at work in and through our own experiences, the people around us, even ourselves--portraying God in mighty actions first, descriptive words second. In the Old Testament this is often done by celebrating the story of the Exodus or military victories as God's doing (the premodern worldview of the Ancient Near East saw everything that happened as the will of God/the gods). In the New Testament people know God primarily by way of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Maybe the purpose of the Bible is to allow future generations of Christians to have that same experience of the cross on which all of history turns.

A Challenge to Complementarians

Last night my New Testament class studied Paul's "pastoral epistles": his letters to Timothy and Titus. Overall, I'd say these are very practical, less theological letters chock-full of wisdom that has been teased out into practical, contextualized application for some early church leaders. This study included a protracted but unsurprising discourse on some of the verses many Christians would most like to remove from their Bibles, 1 Timothy 2:11-15:

A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. But women will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

It's easy to see how this instruction could rub people the wrong way today. What does one do with this verse and others like it in Paul's epistles like 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 and Ephesians 5:22-24? Some simply denounce Paul as a misogynist. For those unwilling to write off scripture in such a away, Paul's remarks on women have become increasingly problematic to interpret and apply as our culture has drifted farther and farther away from them.

The point was then raised that for the Christian, there are two basic ways to respond to 1 Timothy 2:11-15: say it's culturally contextualized and no longer applies to us today and then square that with his statement that "all scripture is God-breathed and useful" in 2 Timothy 3:16, or believe that it does still apply today and try to figure out what on earth that application might be.

"It does apply"

I'll focus on the second option first; that is, holding that Paul's statements on male-female relations, difficult as they may seem, can and should still be applied in some way to the church today. This is roughly equivalent to the line of thinking known as complementarianism, which is basically summed up as saying that men and women were made by God with different giftings and abilities and to have different roles in the church and in the home, even though they are of equal value in God's sight. This view is behind restrictions in many denominations on women being pastors or elders (or priests), as well as the view on marriage advanced by Mars Hill Church in Seattle and many others. It is mainly contrasted today with egalitarianism, the view that men and women can serve equally in the church, if not in the home.

I'd like to make more of a term I read in Brian McLaren's book A New Kind of Christianity that may be my favorite word of the year: "orthopathy", from the roots "orthos", meaning right or correct, and "pathos", meaning feeling or passion. It clearly parallels "orthodoxy", or "right belief". When I read that word, it clicked in my mind as if to fill a hole in my thinking I hadn't known was there. Merely having that word as a counterpoint, I realized how much effort Christianity has historically put into orthodoxy (enough to wage wars over it) and how relatively little it's put into orthopathy, even though the number-one command placed on Christians is to love (Matthew 22:34-40) Romans 13:8-10), not to believe the right things. Or maybe we just don't notice orthopathy because, when done right, it leads to harmony and health and never controversy and division.

And so, though a healthy desire to let the Bible speak as God's word and take seriously what it has to say is very good and essential for those who seek to apply 1 Timothy 2:11-15, it isn't enough. This application must be done in love, and as an expression of love for God, for His church, and for one's fellow believers. (See 1 Corinthians 13:1-3) This turns out to be very difficult. Whatever we say about men and women being equal in God's sight despite their different roles, it can be very hard for women barred from ministry for theological reasons to see it as an expression of love and not discrimination--especially because Paul never states any comparable restrictions on the roles men can occupy (childbearing is off-limits to men for more pragmatic reasons). This testimony on Jonathan Martin's blog shows how complementarianism can be deeply hurtful rather than loving.

I'll admit my biases: my mother is an elder, a role for which I believe she is very much qualified, at the church I grew up in, which also has a female pastor for whom I have great respect. These facts make it impossible for me to make a blanket statement that women are never supposed to hold positions of leadership in the church, much less claim that egalitarian churches are false churches populated by false Christians or demand that my mom step down and switch churches. I can't say there is nothing to the complementarian view because God obviously has made men and women different, but as in all things, love, even more than sound doctrine, must be the driving force. Combining these two goals in the area of gender is a difficult and thorny but necessary task that, as a single 23-year-old blogger with a severe tendency to shoot his mouth off, I am in no way qualified for.

"It doesn't apply"

Meanwhile, for those who would assert that though this passage was a binding command to Timothy, it was based on cultural factors specific to his time and place (like the fact that women had been barred from temple worship and hadn't received any theological instruction that wasn't filtered through their husbands and so were ill-equipped to teach or lead men, or simply the prevailing roles assigned to men and women in the first century which have since drastically changed) so it doesn't necessarily apply today have two main things to explain:

• The aforementioned 2 Timothy 3:16, which states that "all Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness," which seems to preclude "contextualizing away" difficult passages in this way.
• Paul doesn't justify his instruction here with any cultural or pragmatic explanations, but with the order of creation, which seems pretty timeless.

The usage of 2 Timothy 3:16 here to argue that this passage can and does still speak to our culture means interpreting the verse so as to say, "All commands in scripture retain some relevance or weight for readers in every context, even though it might change over time and place". So in other words, 1 Timothy 2:11-15, being scripture (2 Peter 3:15-16), is therefore useful (in some way) for teaching, rebuking, correcting, or training, so we must find a way to hold to it and can't simply set it aside as no longer relevant.

In the next chapter of his second letter, Paul tells Timothy to "bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments" (4:13). This was a command when it was written, but has not been relevant as a command for over 1900 years. (Though, surprisingly, it can still be useful for preaching and teaching, as this sermon by John Piper shows) So though 4:13 does still have something to offer as a window into Paul's life, its original relevance as a command is completely lost. A similar point could be made for Paul's requests to greet certain people at the end of his letters.

Therefore, in the presence of such a counterexample it seems unjustifiable to interpret 3:16 in such a universal way (such that one counterexample, which we have found, invalidates it). With 4:13 as a precedent, I conclude--with fear and trembling--that it is possible for certain commands in scripture to pass out of relevance for believers today. If 1 Timothy 2:11-15 has not, it will take a different argument than using 3:16 in such a blanket fashion to explain why.

After his instruction to women, Paul writes, "for Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner". The common-in-Paul conjunction "for" indicates that this, an appeal to Genesis 2 and 3, is the reason or substantiation he's giving for his previous instruction.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that Paul's reasoning in this instruction is at least a bit foreign to modern readers. Who, after reading the account of Genesis 1-3, would conclude from the order of creation and sin that women should never teach men? It's one example of a fact that Peter Enns likes to point out: Paul uses scripture in ways that would make modern interpreters cringe. He rips parts of the Old Testament out of their original context and meaning to relate to Christ (2 Corinthians 6:2, Galatians 3:11 and 16) and even changes the original text (Romans 11:26-27) to serve his point.

Modern interpreters who tried these kinds of tricks would quickly lose their credibility. Does Paul get a free pass because he's Paul and he was writing scripture (even though he didn't know it at the time)? Are we supposed to do as Paul says, not as he does in regard to hermeneutics, even as he sets himself up as an example for other believers in his letters (1 Corinthians 4;16, 2 Thessalonians 3:9)? It seems to be the case that Paul interpreted his Bible (well, Old Testament) by a different set of rules (shared by other writers inside and outside the canon) than we do today. In his book Inspiration and Incarnation Peter Enns wrestles with the tension between Paul's methods and the ones we consider "correct" today. To summarize extremely, he denies that there is just one correct "method" for interpreting scripture; Paul's hermeneutic is as contextualized as ours is, but they must both have in common the new reality of Christ as their center.

I think Paul is doing something similar in backing up his instruction in 2:11 with the creation order and Fall. To give his words more weight, he seems to be taking Genesis 2 and 3 and interpreting them in a novel (but credible, for his time) way so as to resolve a practical issue Timothy is having. His use of Genesis seems much more like a rhetorical device than an unbreakable chain of logic.

We affirm that the Bible speaks the true words of God, but the simple word "truth" can carry a surprising number of associations, not all of them correct. I think when we say that the Bible contains God's "truth", we tend to think of truth in a Platonic sense--eternal, immutable, and pure. (Because, after all, this is what God is like, right?) And certainly some Biblical truth, like the very nature of God, is like this, even as the way in which we handle and approach it may change.

But I don't think practical instructions, like 1 Timothy 2:11-15 belong in this category. Is it possible that  Paul's directive for women to be silent in church is not in itself eternally true, but the result of applying an unchanging need (harmony and sound teaching in the body of Christ) to a specific situation Timothy was facing (women having a different social status and less education than men)? And that our application of the same need, our situation being very different, will therefore look different? In this sense, 1 Timothy 2:11-15 has not, in fact, passed out of relevance for us today, only Paul's situation-specific application.

A Challenge

By now you've probably realized which way I'm leaning in regard to interpreting 1 Timothy 2:11-15. But please don't hear this post as simply, "I'm right and complementarianism is wrong". The fact that I had to delve deeper into the mind of Paul than I had any right to go in order to reconcile his command with what I consider to be Christlike love troubles me and shakes my confidence. To any complementarians reading this who would say that women still shouldn't hold positions of authority in church, I'm not telling you to drop your view, but I would challenge you to do two things:

• Simply acknowledge the very real tension that exists between following Paul literally here and loving our sisters in Christ who have a desire for ministry. Simply saying, "Paul said it, Paul is scripture, so we'd better do it that way" treats the Bible like a simple instruction manual when it is really much, much more than this.
• Consider that you could, at least in theory, be wrong in applying Paul this way, and what the implications of this would be.

The Fall, Part II: Improving on Perfection

In my previous post I wrote of the problems I see both scientific and theological with continuing to hold the traditional narrative of the Fall. The idea of modifying or giving up such a central doctrine to the church no doubt makes you uneasy, as it does for me. But the decision must be made on the merits of the actual facts, not on the arrogant assumption that we already have complete doctrine on this or any issue and therefore any possibility of change can be shoved aside. Or again, the thought of changing doctrine based on evidence external to the Bible (nevermind that I spent most of my time on Biblical evidence) may seem like relinquishing the teaching we've been solemnly told to hold onto in favor of the newest ideas.

A precedent

And yet sometimes this change is necessary. Take the development of the theory of heliocentrism, the belief that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around. The Polish Catholic priest and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus was the first to develop a geometrical theory of heliocentrism, which he published in the year of his death and which, dedicated to the Pope, was initially attacked by reformers including Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin, only banned by the Catholic Church over 50 years later. The few who read it mostly used it at the time as a more elegant mathematical model than the Ptolemaic system, rather than a representation of the real Solar System.

Then in the 17th century, the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei sided with Copernicus' theory based on data from his own astronomical observations and was subsequently tried as a heretic and placed under house arrest. In the face of seemingly clear verses to the contrary like Psalm 96:10 or Ecclesiastes 1:5, he asserted, based on evidence that at the time was completely extrabiblical, that the earth moved and the sun stood still--and has since been completely vindicated. Let this be a warning for us not to assume a hierarchical view of the truth that places the words of the Bible (as we read them) over and against all possible qualifiers to those words, no matter how much doctrine we've built on top of them.

There is another lesson to be learned from heliocentrism. For millenia believers saw one particular interpretation of the Bible (geocentrism) as the only faithful reading, with all others as heresies. But once the assumptions making it up were dropped, people discovered new readings, new theologies previously unthinkable but at least as powerful and faithful to scripture. I've been going through a similar journey in regard to the evidence of sin that for most people is answered by the Fall.

Some Qualifications

I've become aware that in my previous post I was definitely critiquing one specific version of the doctrine of the Fall, the one I've grown up with. My friend Mitch pointed out that there are ways to modify it to get around some of the problems I mentioned. For example, it need not include the Platonic definition of perfection, instead being cast more as a fall from innocence and the beginning of a journey to greater maturity. It also readily accommodates a less dualistic view of sin and evil. Considering the Fall as a fall from an innocent, intimate relationship with the Creator to a drastically less-innocent, less-intimate or even hostile one sidesteps both problems, though it somewhat blunts the explanatory power that proponents of the Fall narrative as I originally described it like it to have.

So it becomes necessary to distinguish between nonessential or peripheral problems with certain versions of the Fall narrative, like its definitions of "fallen world", "perfection", or "evil" from what I consider to be the essential ones that can only be resolved by changing the doctrine into something altogether different. These are:

• Its incompatibility with a nonhistorical Adam/evolution. If you don't believe in evolution, this need not be a problem, but as I pointed out last time, I think denying evolution usually involves an unhealthy view of truth that "ranks" truth from the Bible-as-we-interpret-it about other sources of truth, when God made us to use them all.
• The light in which it casts the nature of God. Even if you aren't troubled by the conflicts of the Fall with science, and even if you make sense of it as a fall from innocence rather than Platonic perfection, it's essential to have a theology of the Fall/redemptive history that sees the present human condition as more than a mere setback or failure in God's plan, as if God were working against Himself or unable/unwilling to "do anything about it" just yet. It is this understanding that I'll attempt to develop in this post.

First, there is the matter of the text of Genesis 3 itself. I'm unwilling to simply say that science has declared it "obsolete". But if you no longer read it as a literal-historical account, what do you do with it? I see at least two possibilities.

The Historical Dimension

For the post-exilic Israelites who compiled Genesis and much of the rest of the Old Testament, the purpose of the "historical" writings was never just to describe what they believed actually happened. As I mentioned in my review of Medieval Views of the Cosmos, a common theme of premodern thinking about the world and cosmos was that the way things "actually were" wasn't as important as what they "actually meant" here and now. In the case of the Israelites, this meant that the way they "did" history wasn't the objective, journalistic method we're accustomed to today. History did not exist in a vacuum but was always interpreted and applied to present situations.

So, for instance, the creation account in Genesis 1 is not just an ancient way of explaining how the world came to be (which it certainly could be) through story rather than rigorous theology or the scientific method, neither of which the Israelites had access to, but a statement about the God who made it to be in contrast to the gods of other nations--a God who is not controlled by external rules or powers but sets up life and nature exactly as He wills, a God who needs nothing from humans but creates everything to supply their needs, a God who does not create out of chaotic struggles and cosmic battles but peacefully and according to an orderly plan. It's really helpful to read about Ancient Near East history and religions because it helps all the implicit contrasts being made between the true God and pagan gods that would have jumped out at the OT's original readers.

When reading from the Jewish perspective, another application of Genesis 3 becomes almost blindingly obvious: the parallels with their more recent history of exile. A story of people enjoying a carefree life of ease in a God-given paradise, in harmony with God and each other, but who disobey and are thus exiled from paradise and the direct presence of God would obviously have resonated with Israelites who had recently returned from an analogous experience. Maybe in previous generations, the story of the creation and Adam and Eve (which was likely transmitted orally for centuries before being "officially" written down in the book of Genesis) may have been told in different ways so as to speak into other situations.

At any rate, interpreting Genesis 3 as the definitive origin of sin, death, and evil in the world seems to be taking the text well beyond what it is actually meant to say, greatly spiritualizing and universalizing its simple words. The things it consciously sets out to explain (pain in childbirth, marital strife, and the difficulty of work) are much more earthy and close to home, readily identifiable for any reader, not just theologians.

The Personal Dimension

I also think the Fall narrative does have something to say about sin, even if it isn't a literal-historical account of where it came from. Just as it describes the pattern of disobedience that led the Israelites into exile, I think it also describes how sin works in human hearts, at least on a subconscious level. The fact is that God desires to live in close relationship with us, to be our Father, our source of security and meaning, but we continually reject His offer, disobey Him, and so fall out of this relationship, whether by actually deceiving ourselves like Eve or simply by apathy like Adam. So Paul says, "For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive." (1 Corinthians 15:22) As Adam "died" (broke his life-giving relationship with God), so do we. A literal-historical reading of Genesis 3 is not necessary to draw this conclusion.

The process of sin we see in Genesis 3 may not seem familiar or immediately "grab" you because it is analogous to our sin on a deep level we may not be aware of; obviously very few people sin today by eating forbidden fruit. As Jeremiah 17:9 says, "The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" Certainly not us! So in this reading, Genesis 3 offers us a window into something that we do every day (turn from God to idols in our hearts) and may not even be aware of.

The Road to Glory

But alternate readings of Genesis 3 are far from a full alternative to the grand edifice of doctrine that is the Fall. Traditional theology has turned a simple story in a garden into a comprehensive account of why the world isn't as it should be, and even if it was never meant to explain this, another theology that fails to answer this question will be unsatisfying by comparison. So, if the explanation for sin, suffering, and death isn't an original sin, what is it? To explain, I'm going to look to a text in Romans (yes, the same letter that gets used as a proof for the Fall and literal existence of Adam) that I had previously never made much of, but that jumped out at me as I was reading it in light of this question. Romans 8:18-22 reads:

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children 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 will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

Paul has just finished an exposition of what it means to life to God, by the Spirit, as adopted sons and daughters, instead of against God, by the flesh. So in verse 17 he says, "Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory." To which I wrote, in my Bible, "the road to glory in Christ is paved with suffering". Union with God--the healing of sin--means being so identified with Christ that we share both in His sufferings and in the glory that they achieved for Him. Jesus was exalted to the highest place and given the highest honor precisely because He completely humbled Himself by dying (Philippians 2:6-11, Revelation 5). Could the same be true for us who are in Christ?

Paul certainly seems to think so. Verse 18 is tremendously heartening: the glory that will be revealed in us is so unimaginably grand that it makes all the pain and suffering in the world seem insignificant by comparison. Again, I try to avoid simply thinking of "glory" and "suffering" as quantitative things, as if they were being weighed on a scale. Paul says the suffering is "not worth comparing" at all to the glory. I think this points to a difference between them not so much in quantity but in kind. In the same way that the new Narnia at the end of The Last Battle was greater, fuller, more real than the old, so I think Paul is saying the glory in store for those who are in Christ eclipses their present suffering.

In 8:19, Paul brings all of the creation into the equation, waiting eagerly for the children of God to be revealed. The word for "revealed" here is αποκαλυψιν, "apokalypsin"--the root of our word "apocalypse", which in its original sense means not a catastrophe or the end of the world but a revealing. So something--the children of God--is hidden now and will be revealed, and the hope of all the struggling creation is in this supreme revelation.

Then verses 20-21 are the ones that really struck me: "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 will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God." Not by its own choice. NOT BY ITS OWN CHOICE. The narrative of the Fall says that the current, broken state of the world is our doing through Adam--that God made everything totally good and it would have continued that way forever had Adam not gone and messed everything up. Not here.

Instead, Paul says, the current "frustration" of creation is the will of God, the means by which "the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God." This seems almost inconceivable--that the frustration (or "futility") could be intentional, until you recall what Paul was just saying about Jesus achieving glory through suffering. This is how God has apparently set up glory to work--for Jesus, for us, and for all creation.

Or consider Isaiah 45:7, where God boasts, "I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things." This verse isn't speaking in the primeval, metaphysical origin-story sense of the Fall narrative, but it establishes calamity as something that God is able to do and use--I don't think He suddenly received license to use it for His purposes after humanity established the precedent of the creation being "frustrated" by sinning. The more natural reading is that light and darkness, well-being and calamity are both tools at God's disposal to accomplish His will in us.

Hitting home

I'm worried, both for myself and for my readers, that this concept of suffering not just being an obstacle or something to be conquered in Christ but as a means to glory in Christ that makes us "more than conquerors" (Romans 8:37) may seem strange or abstract, disconnected from our own experience, and therefore hard to accept. As we learn spiritual truth, or theology, it's essential that we learn to "see" it playing out not just in our intellect, but in our lives. So, searching my own life for an example of this concept of glory-through-suffering, I realize that I've had a ridiculously easy life, and I'm bizarrely disappointed.

In the very beginning of his second letter to the Corinthians, Paul says, "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God." In other words, whatever we've been through in life, God uses to equip us to comfort others who are going through similar situations. For me, at least right now, that situation seems to be doubt. In a journey that's surprisingly well-documented on this blog, God saved me from an overly logical, modern way of trying to read the Bible that was crumbling under its own impossibility and set me on a journey, which I'm still on, to appreciating His word in a new, better, more vivid way. Now I'm quite concerned for others who may be barred from greater faith in God by what they've made of the Bible, and I try to do something about it here.

Of course this example won't demonstrate my point to everyone. Maybe it only works for me. This is an important implication of theology not just being a field of study that is about abstract concepts "out there", but is meant to deeply affect and change the one studying it. You probably have your own, better story demonstrating the truth of the statement, "The road to glory in Christ is paved with suffering" to you personally, even if you need to take time to think of it.

Improving on perfection

Last time I explained why the Platonic definition of "perfect" Christians often bring into the Fall narrative is unbiblical and is, in fact, vastly inferior to the notion of "progressive perfection" embodied by, say, the ending of The Chronicles of Narnia. I have a bit more to say on the subject of perfection. One text that came to mind last time that I didn't touch on was 1 Corinthians 13:10, which in the ESV reads: "but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away." This is interesting: Paul contrasts perfection not with imperfection, evil, or brokenness, but "the partial". Other translations like the NIV and KJV call it "what is in part". The word for "the partial" is μερος, not a value judgment but simply the word for "part". It is used largely in a nonspiritual context to mean a region (or "part") of a larger territory (Matthew 15:21, Mark 8:10), a piece of fish (Luke 24:42), or some parts of Paul's message (Romans 15:15), among others. It definitely doesn't mean "flawed", "marred", or anything else we'd expect to be contrasted with "perfect".

This is a clue that the word Paul uses for "perfect", τελειος, has different connotations than our English word "perfect". The NIV translates it as "completeness" meaning the state of lacking nothing, and I'm inclined to think this might be more accurate to the underlying meaning. Instead of a flawless vase without a single scratch on it, this definition of "perfection" is more like a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces in place. James 1:4 makes the connection even more explicitly: "And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing." "Perfect" and "complete" are used nearly synonymously, both reinforced by "lacking in nothing".

This definition of perfection as fullness or completeness is perhaps compatible with Platonism, but it is much more so with perfection as a direction or endless story, especially if we consider that τελειος also means having reached a final goal or purpose (τελος). It has allowed me to see God's plan of redemption not as the recovery of a tragically lost state of flawlessness, but as a purposeful, intentional journey to fullness and maturity. The same word, τελειος, is also repeatedly translated to mean "mature" (Ephesians 2:13, Philippians 3:15, Colossians 1:28, Hebrews 5:14), in the sense of growing from an immature child to a fully-rounded adult.

Verses like James 1:4 and Colossians 1:28 do seem to present this perfection or maturity as a destination that we will fully reach at some point. But even this doesn't mean a return to Platonism. The difference being that being complete, lacking nothing does not preclude continued growth in joy, in love, or any of the other wonderful things we become by union with Christ. Yes, we are called to be perfect as God is perfect (Matthew 5:48)--but what if God's changelessness (Malachi 3:6) is not a direct consequence of His perfection as we usually make it out to be?

If we see creation as an ongoing venture in which we are graciously allowed to take part rather than a one-and-done affair, we can drop our expectation that God must create everything exactly as it should always be.  Instead of creating a perfect little line of porcelain statues that need to be protected from breakage or corruption, maybe creation is more like planting a garden and watching it grow. (A metaphor which enjoys Biblical corroboration, 1 Corinthians 3:7)

This also alleviates the paradox of God coming to earth and carousing with sinners when God is supposed to be far too "perfect" to tolerate the slightest imperfection or allow it into His sight, as though imperfection were an infectious disease. (Nevermind Job 1 and 2) If anything, the "disease" goes the other direction--God comes to us so that we may be "filled to the measure of all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3:19), and there isn't the slightest risk of us harming His own perfection, any more than empty vessels are a danger to an ocean. How could there be?

The purpose of imperfection

Finally, more directly to the question of how the world got to be the way it is, this definition of perfection frees us from the necessity that God must have created everything perfect, because the opposite of perfect is sin or evil with which God can have nothing to do, so if there is sin it must be because the creation has gone horribly wrong, and on and on... Again, the bare fact of Romans 8:20 stares us in the face: the "frustration" creation is going through is not because we went and messed everything up, it is "the will of the one who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God."

Does this mean that God intentionally created sin? No, because sin is not an external metaphysical concept that can be created or destroyed, but the result of beings created with the ability to choose using that ability to turn away from the God who gives them life. Sin is a reflection of our own incompleteness and present disunion with God, of which we are being cured by His continuing act of creation. And one day, not by an act of destruction but by the restoration of this union, we are promised that sin will be no more.

What about death? (Physical death--which I see as distinct from "spiritual death", which is sin and separation from God) I see it as a member of the "old order of things" that is on its way out (Revelation 21:4). Again, even if physical death and spiritual death are dissociated from each other, the question is begged, "why would God create the world with something as awful as death in it?" From an evolutionary perspective, it's undeniably true that death has been around for longer than there have been humans to sin.

Let me ask another question/analogy. Why did God give the Israelites, His chosen people, the law, which turned out to not make anything perfect (Hebrews 7:19) and withhold Christ from them for so long? This question was at the center of my struggle to see the Bible in a new, better, more coherent way, because in my old paradigm it seemed like an undeniable failing on God's part. But when we stop seeing imperfection as toxic or evil or a broken vase and start seeing it as incompleteness or immaturity or an empty cup to be filled, we can stop expecting God to get rid of it all instantly. We start to understand how God can reveal His word, His law, His very self to people progressively rather than all at once. And we see how God can create the world to operate in one way (with physical death) while promising to change it to operate in a better way. (Isaiah 65, particularly v.20, even hints at an intermediate stage between these, a new Jerusalem with no weeping or crying but where people still die at a ripe old age)

The culpability question

One more loose end that I felt I couldn't end this series without tying up. I mentioned in passing earlier that Romans 8, the chapter that has been foundational to my new understanding of sin and the human condition, is in the same book as Romans 5, the foundational text for the doctrine of the Fall. What's up with that? Verses 12-21 read:

Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—
To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come.
But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!
Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

First of all, I'll point of that Paul's purpose here is not to explain the origin of sin but to contrast Adam's sin with Christ's righteous sacrifice, which can be accomplished by a reading with or without a historical Adam. But even then, he does seem to assume the traditional Fall narrative, that Adam brought sin into the world. So who is responsible for the "frustration"--God or Adam?

I don't think Paul is one to make such a clear distinction--later in Romans 8 he writes, "And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him". Later in verse 36 he makes it pretty clear that "all things" here does include human acts of sin, evil as they are. A human act can be a crucial step in a divine plan of which its agent has no idea.

So I think Paul would agree that Adam's sin is no hangup to God's hope that "the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God"--in fact, God uses the suffering brought about by sin to bring this liberation to pass. This fact is true whether or not sin originated in the garden of Eden. It's also worth noting that Paul doesn't make any causal connection between Adam's sin and the "frustration"; that is an interpolation. He may even have seen it going the other way, the Fall being part of the frustration by which God perfects the creation.

Conclusion

And so I've answered, at least for myself, one of the big questions raised by my continued thinking about human origins. But I pray that this series was not done simply for the sake of logical consistency. A quote I heard in a Jonathan Martin sermon has been kicking around in my head like crazy the last few days: "Innocence for the believer remains the only condition in which intellectual truths can occur. Wonder is the precondition for all wisdom." The purpose of all theology is to inspire greater faith, greater joy, and greater wonder in the theologian and others--to let God be God in the arena of the mind, not to put Him under a microscope. I think that has been accomplished, especially in my exploration of Paul's concept of glory-through-suffering that is so easily forgotten in middle-class America. If my thoughts don't accomplish this for you, pay them no further mind and find your own way for Genesis 3 to leave you on your knees.

The Fall, Part I: Another look at a theological keystone

As many of you may be aware, in recent months and in the course of rethinking a lot of how I view Scripture, I have arrived at a view of creation that accords most satisfyingly with both the Biblical and scientific evidence but, inconveniently, disbelieves in the existence of a historical Adam that most Christians hold so dear. Though I had felt somewhat pushed toward this conclusion for years by the evidence, I had resisted because of its theological implications--especially the perceived necessity of a real, historical Adam to the narrative of the Fall, one of the central doctrines of the Gospel message at my church.

So in this post and the next, I'm going to examine the doctrine of the Fall. First, let me state what I perceive to be the dominant evangelical narrative of this doctrine, as clearly and charitably as I can.

God created the world not just "very good" (Genesis 1:31), but perfect, exactly in accordance with His will. As the culminating act of His creation, He made man (2:7) in His own image and likeness (1:26) and put him in a garden He had planted (2:8) to live in and enjoy the perfection both of the Earth and of an unbroken relationship with his Creator. God later creates a woman (2:22) to end the man's aloneness, which was not good (2:18), and the two live a truly perfect life in perfect intimacy with God and each other that we can only vaguely imagine (2:25). He gives them one command: to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or they will die (3:17).

But this state of perfection was not to last. Satan, an angel who rebelled against God (Isaiah 14:12-15) and was cast from heaven (Luke 10:18), appears in the guise of a serpent (Genesis 3:1) and deceives or tempts the woman with half-truths and lies (3:1-5) into breaking the command and eating the forbidden fruit, along with her husband (3:6). Immediately everything changes; they feel shame for the first time (3:7) and break their perfect intimacy with God by hiding from Him (3:8). 

When God confronts their act of disobedience, they try to shift the blame and make excuses for their behavior (3:11-13), but God will have none of it. He curses Satan to eat dust and promises his future defeat by Christ (3:14-15), curses the woman with pain in childbirth and strife with her husband (3:16), and the man with toil (3:17) and the promise that, though in mercy he won't die immediately, he will certainly die and return to dust (3:19). Finally, he exiles Adam and Eve from the garden, leaving them to make their way in the outside world 3:23).

Because of this singular act of disobedience, the "Fall of man", all of humanity and, indeed, all of creation lies under the curse of sin. Adam, acting as the representative of mankind, brought sin into the world and into the hearts of all his descendants (Romans 5:12, 19), and now death reigns over creation until Christ does away with it (1 Corinthians 15:26, Revelation 20:14). Now no one is righteous (Romans 3:10-18), everyone rejects God and embraces sin, and pays the penalty for sin with their life (6:23). Come soon, Christ, and rescue us from this fallen world of sin and death!

The number of verses that can be cited to back a doctrine is no sure proof of its correctness. I am now going to proceed to, as carefully and honestly as I can, point out the problems I see with this narrative, not out of a desire to undermine peoples' faith or replace sound doctrine with fabrications, but out of a sincere love for the truth and a desire to appreciate and love God more by greater knowledge of the truth. (I hope that by the end of the second post, you'll agree)

Scientific Problems

I'm going to start with the problems this narrative has relative to evidence external to the Bible, both because there are fewer and because I know it may be less convincing to many evangelicals. The fact of the matter is, the above narrative is simply incompatible with any kind of belief in evolution, even if you believe as I do that evolution is the mechanism God used to create the diversity of life on earth today. The reason is that this narrative incorporates and assumes the theology of young-earth creationism (YEC)--that is, the literal (as modern science) interpretation of Genesis 1 that believes God created the earth and cosmos in six literal days about 6,000 years ago.

What do I mean? Even if you hold to an alternate interpretation of Genesis 1 (for example, as literary framework), the Fall narrative still assumes--no, demands--a literal interpretation of the rest of Genesis that casts Adam as a flesh-and-blood individual who lived around 6,000 years ago. And this Adam must be the ancestor of all modern humans (otherwise, how could his original sin have spread to everyone?) Given that we know modern humans as a species are much older than that (the patrilineal ancestor of all modern humans is estimated to be between 237,000 and 581,000 years old) and the lack of evidence for such a population bottleneck, this becomes a difficulty.

There is also the fact that the Fall narrative strongly implies that death did not exist in the world until about 6,000 years ago, which, as I have already pointed out, is manifestly false and leads to Ken Ham-like fantasies about humans and dinosaurs coexisting (because they couldn't have died before then).

When Christians notice these incompatibilities between their interpretation of Genesis and modern historical knowledge, the natural tendency is to allow the Bible (or their interpretation of it) to "trump" whatever non-Biblical evidence appears to contradict it. Besides the stereotype of conservative Christians as backward and ignorant and all the regrettable conflicts over the teaching of evolutions, there is another problem to this selective approach to evidence. It assumes a very hierarchical view of truth where "God's truth" as revealed through the Bible supersedes all other forms of truth. I simply don't think this is how God made us to deal with truth. I believe God gave us senses and inquisitive minds to explore, grapple with, and discern truth in whatever form it is presented whether in the world around us, through science, music, and others. Denying truth acquired via science or other methods because it doesn't fit into your theological system is a denial of the rational faculties God has given us, and it does a disservice both to us and to the people we're supposed to be witnessing to.

Biblical Problems

Now we get to the crux of the issue. Christians have been denying the scientific evidence in favor of their chosen hermeneutical frameworks for centuries, but there is no defense against intrabiblical problems with the Fall narrative but to sweep them under the rug or claim that they aren't a big deal. I am going to attempt to bring these problems into the light. Foremost is that it smuggles in a great deal of philosophical assumptions that are, in fact, not Biblical at all. Two of the main ones are what I will refer to as Platonic idealism and dualism.

Platonic Idealism

At the risk of undermining my credibility, I will admit that Brian McLaren did a great job of unpacking how Platonism has contributed to our understanding of the Fall in A New Kind of Christianity. He argues that the basic evangelical narrative of the gospel can be summarized in the following "six-line diagram" (I used slightly different labels for the lines than he did):

So God creates the perfect, paradisical garden of Eden. When Adam and Eve sin, creation falls from this state of perfection into imperfection, awaiting the redemption of Christ to restore perfection, or else people who reject Christ will continue to descend infinitely into damnation. (There is some slippage between talking about all of creation or individuals)

McLaren argues, and I agree, that a nonbiblical, Platonic definition of "perfection" is being used in this narrative. Namely, perfection as a static state, a point from which any change must be a change for the worse. While the belief that this definition of perfection applies to God is uncontroversial (including to me), the Fall narrative generalizes it to apply to the newly-created world.

But upon looking closely, this view of the unfallen world as Platonically perfect starts to look fishy. God creates the world in about six discrete steps--in a kind of story, which is impossible with Platonic perfection because stories involve change and change from a state of perfection must be a change for the worse. Was the world 1/6th perfect after the first day, half-perfect after the third, finally reaching perfection after the sixth day? Why not simply create the perfect world in an instant and skip the untidy imperfection? So it's a stretch to apply God's variety of perfection to the created order.

I will develop what I believe to be a more Biblical view of perfection more in the next post, but for now let me propose that perfection may not be a state but a direction, continued to infinity, and the eschatological hope of Christians is not a return to a static state of perfection or an end to history but an eternal, increasingly-glorious ascent or the beginning of the very best part of history. Not a final arrival but the beginning of an endless new journey, a new story better than any we've known before. Honestly, who really looks forward to playing a harp and singing "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,' who was, and is, and is to come" for all eternity? Actually reaching Platonic perfection is as impossible as counting to infinity--but what the endless counting is the whole point?

Lest you get discouraged, let me share some C.S. Lewis as he generally manages to make much less of a mess of these topics. Specifically, the very end of his landmark fiction series, The Chronicles of Narnia. After the Narnian version of the last judgment, our heroes pass through a stable door to a new Narnia. With the call "further up and further in!", they begin to explore this new Narnia, which resembles the old but where everything is bigger, grander, more colorful, "more like the real thing". The old Narnia was only a shadow of this one. "The new one was a deeper country; every rock and flower and blade of grass looked as if it meant more." So the unicorn cries,

"I have come here at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the last I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it looked a little like this."

Then, traveling to the east, they reach a garden that looks small from the outside but, within its gates, is another, even truer version of Narnia further up. And they realize that they could keep going up, climbing the mountains of Aslan forever, and it would keep getting better forever. The book ends with the following:

And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of their real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

Lewis absolutely nails how perfection-as-endless-story is infinitely better and more joy-worthy than perfection-as-static-state. This is an eternity I can put hope in; this, I believe is the merest glimpse of what God has in store for those who love Him.

Dualism

Another issue with the Fall narrative is that it sees the Fall as a kind of ungodly act of creation--the "creation" of sin and evil, which were previously unknown in the world. Let me submit that this concept of humans creating sin by an act of disobedience reeks of dualism--the view of evil as an external force "out there", existing independently and in opposition to good.

The dualistic perspective envisions a spectrum of good and evil, with God at one end and Satan on the other. In other words, it sees good and evil as external realities or categories that people, angels, and God fit into. Before the Fall, there was no spectrum and everything was perfectly good; afterward, the "Evil" side of the equation came into being and people slipped down away from Good and into Evil. In other words, the Fall of man (or, a bit more accurately, the Fall of Satan) marks the creation of Evil. God, being fully good, could of course not have created Evil; it had to be created by the choice of a free agent, and God promises to totally destroy evil in the end.

I don't think this is the view of good and evil we see in the Bible. Here is a bit of what the it does have to say. 3 John 11 says that "Anyone who does what is good is from God. Anyone who does what is evil has not seen God." In Luke 18:19 Jesus says, "No one is good—except God alone." As I see it, there is no spectrum--there is no "out-there" concept of Good or Evil, there is only God-who-is-good, and varying shades of unity or disunity with Him. Being united with (or "from") God is good; being separated from God is evil.

In other words, I would flip around the Fall's narrative of Evil being created and needing to be destroyed. Rather, I see sin as an act of de-creation and disunity, an offense to God's desire to create and unify. God's solution, then, is not to destroy Evil but to re-create what sin destroys or dismantles and to unite a straying world back to Himself, because to be separated from God is destruction. (See Jesus' prayer for the world in John 17)

A caveat: Paul does speak of sin "entering the world" in Romans 5:12. Does this mean he sees sin as a separate metaphysical concept in opposition to God? I don't think so. Personifying sin is not the same thing as setting up a dualistic system around it. His usage here is not incompatible with a definition of sin as rebellion, disobedience, and separation from God.

The nature of God

The basic "fact" of the Fall has led to many well-known difficulties in its reconciliation with God's sovereignty and goodness. The Christian-turned-agnostic singer-songwriter David Bazan expresses his incredulity about the Fall in the songs "Hard to Be" and "When We Fell", the latter of which has the line, "Did you push us when we fell?" It's a valid question: why would God permit, determine, or cause (depending on your view of His sovereignty) the Fall? The third of these choices, representing the hyper-Calvinistic view that God actively engineers or causes everything to happen, becomes untenable because He can't be held directly responsible for the Fall and still be considered good--I wrestled with this issue in my series on providence.

Meanwhile, the first choice, God passively allowing or permitting the Fall, makes little more sense. It makes Him seem strangely apathetic or absent at the moment of the "original sin", only showing up after the fact and asking what happened. This goes beyond simply respecting peoples' free will. Why would God give Adam one clear command and then so cavalierly step aside to let him break it? What parent would stand by to allow his child to freely wander onto the highway? I'm not saying this question is unanswerable within the Fall narrative, but the very fact that it so powerfully casts His goodness and agency into question should cast suspicion on it.

And again, even the second choice, representing the view of God's providence I arrived at last year, of separating God's determining all things from His directly acting in the world, has trouble. Again, if God created the world in a state of perfection that could not be improved on, there is nothing that could possibly be gained from determining that it would fall from that state--the best one could hope for would be a return to that initial perfection, calling into question the point of the Fall in the first place. The only answer I know of is a vague appeal to some quantitative understanding of God's "glory"--"He allowed the world to fall so He could redeem it and get more glory for Himself"--but expressing spiritual concepts like grace, righteousness, sin, or glory as if they could be weighed on a scale or wrapped in a box is another Western fallacy. (See the long Eastern Orthodox quote in this post) Certainly it's hard to see the Fall as anything other than a failure or setback to God's plans that He has to react to and recover from; how could He have planned it?

I have to wonder if the narrative of the Fall is so popular with Christians because of its austerity, its bleak, guilt-ridden view of humanity that paints us as the reason everything is wrong in the world so therefore we have that much more need of a Savior. Funnily enough, this is also a big reason why atheists believe their perspective of the world as a meaningless collection of molecules is true and Christianity is false. It's a fallacy to assume a correlation between the palatability of a theory and its truthfulness. A theology of sin that makes us feel worse about ourselves is not the more true for it.

Defining a "fallen world"

The term "fallen world" seems self-explanatory at first: God made the world good, it got messed up to include sin and death, and now we wait for it to be redeemed. But in an evolutionary view of history it's not so simple. In the timeline of the universe we have from science, when did the earth become fallen? Is it meaningful to refer to the primordial soup of subatomic particles that was the early universe as "fallen"? What about the very early earth as a lifeless ball of cooling magma? Did the earth become fallen when the most basic organisms starting evolving and, therefore, dying? Or when more advanced organisms capable of experiencing pain came along? Or when the earliest humans came along to do something we might consider "sinning"?

Or, rather than temporally, think spatially, much like C.S. Lewis in the Space Trilogy. Does the "Fall" extend beyond the upper atmosphere? What does it mean for the rest of the universe to be "fallen"? Is it even meaningful to speak of a difference between a "fallen" Jupiter and a "redeemed" Jupiter? Can a world with no life be "fallen"? Hopefully you can see from this how the term "fallen world" can seem more universal than it has any right to be.

Other disconnects with the Biblical data

The Fall narrative is an example of how differences can arise between what the Bible actually says, and what we say it says, without our even noticing. Some specific examples:

• Nowhere (except possibly in the very end, Revelation 12:9 and 20:2) does the Bible identify the serpent in Genesis 3 with Satan. As far as Genesis 3 itself says, it's just a talking snake. (The word-for-word ESV says, "Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field...", assuming that the snake is supposed to be just another beast of the field)
• The absence of death or suffering is also an interpolation. Did Adam or the other animals age? What about plants--were there convenient paths so everyone could be sure to avoid stepping on anything and crushing it? Did Adam's cells die, or was his biology totally different than ours? The text itself doesn't say, but it's necessary to assume to support the idea of a deathless paradise. You could argue that "for dust you are, and to dust you will return" (3:19) implies that nothing died before the curse, but again, it's only talking about Adam (or maybe humans), and the statement is used as a justification or reason for what God had just said; a reminder, not new information.
• The link between Adam's sin and the human condition is made only by Paul. Jesus never mentions Adam; he is only mentioned in the Old Testament as part of a genealogy in 1 Chronicles 1:1, never as an explanation or ground for anyone's sin. These are significant and conspicuous omissions if Genesis 3 is supposed to be the definitive explanation for the origin of sin and death. Certainly this connection is not made in Genesis 3 itself; it has to be read back in.
• Even more tenuous is the link between Adam's sin and the more general concept of a "fallen world"--the existence of things like animal suffering, natural disasters, disease, and so on. As far as I know, the Bible never links any of these things to human sin, and indeed, the idea that Adam's sin could, say, alter the underlying tectonics of the earth to make earthquakes and volcanoes possible is bizarre, to say the least. The Bible does say, however, that God can and does make these things happen. (Isaiah 45:7) Hmm...

The fact is, the theology of original sin and the fallen world I described above is not stated nearly as clearly in the Bible as much theology would have you think; most of the narrative is not actually told in Genesis, but is laid on top of it from elsewhere. For the most part, the Bible simply doesn't concern itself with how creation got to the messed-up state it's in, and it certainly doesn't pin it on humans. I don't think the purpose of Genesis 3 is to answer that question in the universal way the Fall narrative makes it. Much more, the gospel takes "the way things are" as a fact and presents God (as most truly shown in Jesus) as the answer, the solution, the redemption plan. We're called to "deny ourselves" to follow Jesus (Matthew 16:24), and this can look like learning to set peripheral questions like this aside and trust Jesus as the Answer instead of demanding the answers from Him.

Perpetually incomplete theology

By this point, you're probably either listening raptly and disappointed you have to wait for the second post, or worrying for the fate of my soul. The doctrine of the Fall is close to the core of much of Christian theology, at least in evangelicalism. The summary of the gospel my church frequently runs through goes Creation-Fall-Redemption-Glorification. Calling any link of this chain of reasoning, including the Fall, into question, is seen as little different from doubting the depravity of humanity, the gospel, or the very truthfulness of God. Let me be clear: I am not, in any way, questioning the very, very clearly-established fact that people are uniformly evil (disunited with God) by nature and that it leads them to sin. You have to believe that this reality is not the same as the doctrine of the Fall. The here-and-now fact of human depravity is independent of its origin.

As Christians, it's easy to go from believing you have been given the truth of God, humanity, sin, redemption, et cetera to adopting a very defensive "gatekeeper of truth" posture where any perceived threat to the "closed-hand issues" of faith is marginalized, ignored, or attacked because what matters most is holding onto the truth we've been given and defending it from the lies of sin. The realization that our theology is always incomplete should keep our eyes and ears open to truth from all sides. The danger of dividing everyone into "good guys" and "bad guys" is that it always assumes, uncritically, that you're with the good guys. I don't mean this personally, but the kind of thinking that leads to writing off theology that, say, questions the traditional doctrine of the Fall differs only in quantity from the kind that led to Westboro Baptist Church protests, the persecution of Galileo, or the Diet of Worms in that they all equate theological disagreement with danger.

It's much easier to question, tear down, and destroy than to answer and build up. Simply questioning and attacking the Fall narrative is of no help if you don't provide an alternative. Next post, I will attempt to do that--to show that there are Biblical ways of explaining the human condition other than "God made it, we broke it, God will fix it".