110508 The Womb

Just a reminder.  We haven’t always defined truth the way we tend to now.  In fact, our current approach is fairly modern.  When the Age of Reason or Enlightenment dawned, the Church was excited to discover a wonderful ally in science and its methods.  The Church even went so far as to embrace the scientific method as the primary approach to understanding truth as what can be validated or proven.  Unfortunately, science is indiscriminate, and began to question the existence of God and the credibility of the Bible.  The Church reacted.  Fundamentalism was born to protect the Church and her Bible.  Inerrancy and Infallibility began to be used to describe the Holy Bible.  All the while, truth was still “provable” if it was true at all.  Unfortunately, this extremely narrow definition has hurt the credibility of the Church, and has called faith into question.  As we continue, we must decide whether or not we are open to a broader embrace of truth than simply that which can be scientifically proven.  Otherwise, our heads just might explode along with our faith…

Before we take a look at a text that will no doubt be very familiar to you, let’s first read of its significance in the first century.  Take five minutes and read from Paul’s letter to the Romans beginning in chapter five, verse twelve, through the end of the chapter.  See you in a few minutes…

Clearly, something so significant happened in the beginning that God needed to deal with it much later, personally, in the work of Jesus Christ.  But to refresh your memory, flip to the beginning of the Bible and read the third chapter of the book of Genesis.  It will take you about three minutes.

If you’ve been living in a Christian tradition in the West that is rooted in Evangelicalism, this story reminds you of why we need Christ: sin.  In case we missed it while reading the Gospels, Paul pointed it out for us in his letter to the Roman church.  But to hold too firmly to this view as the way it has always been viewed would be a great mistake.  Our focus on Original Sin is thanks to St. Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century.  Before that time, Original sin was not the primary take-home lesson for believers.

So what did the first 2,000 years of people think about it?

According to Karen Armstrong, an internationally renown scholar, this story of beginnings helped people come to grips with some of life’s most basic questions.  Why is child-bearing so painful?  Why do men and women struggle to relate more intimately with God?  Why is life itself full of toil?

They weren’t looking to construct a problem that only a Christ (what’s that?) could solve.  They were looking for identity and meaning.  In the characters of the story they saw themselves…

In the snake is the rebelliousness and incessant compulsion to question everything that is crucial to human progress; in Eve we see our hunger for knowledge, our desire to experiment, and our longing for a life free of inhibition.  Adam, a rather passive figure, displays our reluctance to take responsibility for our actions.  The story shows that good and evil are inextricably intertwined in human life.  Our prodigious knowledge can at one and the same time be a source of benefit and the cause of immense harm…  The rabbis of the Talmudic age did not see the “fall” of Adam as a catastrophe, because the “evil inclination” was an essential part of human life, and the aggression, competitive edge, and ambition that it generates are bound up with some of our greatest achievements…

Today, because the modern West is a society of logos, some people read the Bible literally, assuming that its intention is to give us the kind of accurate information that we expect from any other supposedly historical text and that this is the way these stories have always been understood.  In fact… until well into the modern period, Jews and Christians both insisted that is was neither possible nor desirable to read the Bible in this way, that it gives us no single, orthodox message and demands constant reinterpretation. - Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, 44

Paul was doing what had always been done with texts, and what should continue to be done – he was helping his readers understand what was happening by drawing on a narrative about which everybody was familiar.  It can be safely assumed that Paul was not trying to give us a primary lens with which to view the story of Adam and Eve.  He was simply using it appropriately as a reference to help people see Jesus as our hope for living with God – a new order of things.

We are still looking for identity and meaning, and many of us are looking to our faith as our primary source for such meaningful pursuits.  The Bible becomes a narrative to help us along the way.  But as I’ve had my eyes opened over the course of my journey to how narrow my gaze has been trained, I confess that I wonder how much of the Bible have I missed because I thought I already knew it?

As we think about how Adam and Eve, in the womb, learned to navigate their first steps with stumbling and denial and even bravado, maybe we should take new notes.  Perhaps we need to engage the scriptures wholly differently – and no less sacred – asking the Spirit of God to enter into our dialogue as we learn from those who have gone before us even as we learn from each other and the present Presence who promised to never abandon his children.  Maybe then we’ll experience depth and beauty that have eluded us in our literal comfort.