Adam and Eve and Everybody Everywhere

In every culture, the dominant race is seen more favorably than the rest.  This has been verified by studies that track people’s impulse reaction to pictures of people from different races with various adjectives attached to them.  In the United States, whiter people are seen more favorably than other skin tones.  Even by those with darker skin tones.  Of course, we are all equal, but it is interesting how our vision gets shaped by our environment, often unbeknownst to us.

The reality of our vision being shaped by the dominant influences in which we are immersed is true in the church as well.  There are some concepts that have been stated so loudly and proudly that many simply assume that the statements must be true.  Not only to we find ourselves trusting what the loud, proud voice says, but we also have a tendency to distrust and perhaps even feel threatened by voices that speak to the contrary.  Sometimes the line get blurred so much that we feel like our faith is on the line.

One excellent case in point has to do with the first three chapters of the first book in the Bible.  A loud and proud voice in 1895 stated that true Christians believe that the scriptures (Bible) are inerrant.  This was one of five points that came to be known as the fundamentals of Christianity.  While the movement had been growing for nearly a century at that point, it was in the early 1900’s that the word fundamentalist became part of our religious vernacular.  Fundamentalism is the foundation for Evangelicalism which has been a dominant religious and political force in the United States for a long time.

According to the fundamentals, then, if you are a true Christian, you believe that the Bible is incapable of being wrong.  Marry that idea with a Greek-oriented, Western mindset that increasingly oriented toward a truth-defined-as-facts disposition, and you have this: what the Bible says is – and has to be – literally (factually) true.  When we read the first three chapters of Genesis, then, we must believe that God created the world in seven days, created a guy named Adam and his wife, Eve, and, well, you know the story.

But what if the original writers of Genesis – and their audience – lived long before 1895, and long before the Greeks were even a thought?  Does that make any difference?  Of course it does.

I have dedicated my life’s work to be a pastor, helping people come to greater faith in God through the ups and downs of life.  The Bible is the text I use every week – I’m a big fan – I’ve read it many times.  But I think that, while their intent may have been honorable, the early Fundamentalists were simply wrong about some key issues, one of which is certainly the way they tried to keep scripture intact.  Just remember as you read on that I love the Bible, God, and am a  dedicated follower of Jesus.

But I don’t think the world was created in seven days like the Bible says.  And I don’t think there was an actual guy named Adam or a woman made from his rib named Eve.  Yet I believe the stories are true nonetheless.

Many scholars believe that the stories that we find in Genesis had been passed down through the oral tradition for centuries, and were finally compiled somewhere between 1000-600 BCE.  When those stories were put on the scroll, those who wrote them down left their fingerprints on the text.  As was common in that time, they also crafted the stories at times to address issues of their day.  The first chapter of Genesis was likely written in 600 BCE, which may conflict with what your study bibles say.  The reason there is confidence in this has to do with the priestly language that is used here and in other passages.  The author was not trying to be scientific.  He was trying to make a bold theological statement, which he certainly did.  In a world where myths were abundant about how gods created the world through their fierce battle with each other, the priestly author told a different story from the Jewish perspective.  There is only one God.  God is benevolent, blessing the creation God alone made, and when God created humanity in God’s own image, it was God’s crowing achievement.  This was a very different theological expression, and it would have certainly grabbed the attention of those who heard it.  The truth the author was trying to communicate is what I believe.  Seven literal days was not the truth he was trying to get across.  If he were asked about the literalness of his writing today, I am sure he would shake his head and say, “You have totally missed the point!”  I don’t know how God, the Creator, created.

The first chapter of Genesis was not intended to be a historical account of the beginning of life but a meditation upon the nature of being itself. – Karen Armstrong, In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis (26)

The weird thing about Genesis is that right after we read the 600 BCE version of creation in chapter one, we then find ourselves immersed in an older story of how God created everything.  In the early part of the fifth century, St. Augustine wrote and shared his doctrine of original sin – Adam and Eve’s “catastrophic fall from perfect innocence to chronic guilt” (Armstrong, 30) .  His doctrine has been one of the strongest lenses through which we view the Adam and Eve drama.  For some, the Adam and Eve story happened to set the stage for Jesus to come and rescue them (and us) from sin.  Some see Paul’s use of the story affirming such a view.  But Paul referenced Adam as a means to help some Jewish Christians see their Gentile Christians as equals because of the work of Christ.  Paul likely knew he was using the text in ways it probably had never been used before.  The question is, what did the writer of this story intend to communicate?

Arum and arumim.  The second story, written by a person who referred to God by the name Yahweh (in contrast to Elohim, the name preferred by the first story’s author), throws us right into the middle of a portrait of God very different from the first.  Humanity is created differently, and unequally.  The potential for sin is simply there with no explanation – different from the very good picture we see in the first chapter.  God isn’t in as much control, either, as a walk-talking serpent thing wanders about, and a tree exists, the fruit of which is lethal.  Our fundamental-affected eyes want to see this story as the entrance of sin into the world, but that’s not really how the author portrays it.  Rather than seeing this as a story simply for theological reflection – how do we get rid of sin? – the ancients would reflect on the story and consider the fact that sin is a reality in our world.  The knowledge that was sought was not so much an attempt to dethrone God, but to become more like the God who gave humanity life and breath.  Who doesn’t want to realize their potential?  If there is wisdom to be had, why not go for it?  The Hebrew word used for crafty is arum.  The Hebrew word used for naked is arumim.  Crafty and naked don’t seem in any way connected.  In an oral tradition, however, even though the words have different etymologies, the oral similarity would not be missed, and the connection would be made.  We are not so different than the serpent.  We have the creative capacity for revising what we’ve heard, for justifying poor choices.  And our nakedness – read vulnerability – makes us woundable.  Our innocence can be lost.  Wisdom sought for seemingly good purposes – we tell ourselves – can bite us hard.

The man and woman had acquired a new knowledge of their frailty in what was becoming an increasingly difficult world. – Karen Armstrong, In the Beginning: A New Interpretation of Genesis (39)

Here in the US, we don’t really like not being God, not being completely autonomous.  We generally don’t take well to authority.  It’s un-American!  But, as Eve learned, seeking blessing often comes with consequences. A lust for life can be an expression of rampant egotism and a desire for self-aggrandizement which takes no care for the rest of the world (Armstrong, 41).  Community broken.  Innocence lost.  Unity messed up.  Blame gaming.

Everybody sooner or later sits down to a banquet of consequences. – Robert Louis Stevenson

The original audience weren’t so much concerned with the problem of sin as much as the reality that sin is a problem.  Sin separates us from God, from each other, from the garden.  Sin leads to desert places where life is harsh.  Sin leads to loneliness.  Sin destroys intimacy and unity.  Adults would reflect on the deep implications of this story and affirm its truth.  Parents would do their best to communicate the truth of the story to their kids, helping them to realize that too many cheeseburgers will catch up with you.

The Bible makes it clear from the very beginning that it will not give neat, tidy answers to questions that simply do not admit of a simple solution.  Instead, the authors make us wrestle with the complexities of the text, and in the process we come to realize at a deeper level than before that there is no easy, straightforward path to enlightenment.  We cannot treat the Bile as a holy encyclopedia where we can look up information about the divine, because we are likely to find contradictory data in the very next chapter. – Karen Armstrong, In the Beginning, (28)

Hinge Tacos

The following is a lift out from Phyllis Tickle’s The Great Emergence, as printed in Sojourners magazine.  Tickle’s book is excellent and insightful as it sheds light on why the Church is what it is, where it is, and what questions will be faced going forward.  I found the book helpful in understanding my personal theological progression, and informative about where CrossWalk is on her journey.  After reading the book, I am all the more excited about CrossWalk’s position to be a powerful, hopeful, and helpful instrument of God in Napa and beyond.  Our curriculum from kindergarten all the way through high school – and lots of the stuff we offer for adults – is right in line with where I believe God is moving.  Enjoy the article – or better yet, the book – and look forward to great things to emerge in our future!

From Sojourners:
Rt. Rev. Mark Dyer, an Anglican bishop known for his wit as well as his wisdom, famously observes from time to time that the only way to understand what is currently happening to us as 21st-century Christians in North America is first to understand that about every 500 years the church feels compelled to hold a giant rummage sale. And, he goes on to say, we are living in and through one of those 500-year sales.

While the bishop may be using a bit of humor to make a point, his is nonetheless a deadly serious and exquisitely accurate point. Any usable discussion of the Great Emergence and what is happening in Christianity today must commence with a discussion of history. Only history can expose the patterns and confluences of the past in such a way as to help us identify the patterns and flow of our own times and occupy them more faithfully.

The first pattern we must consider as relevant to the Great Emer­gence is Bishop Dyer’s rummage sale, which, as a pattern, is not only foundational to our understanding but also psychologically very reassuring for most of us. That is, as Bishop Dyer observes, about every 500 years the empowered structures of institutionalized Christianity, whatever they may be at that time, become an intolerable carapace, or hard shell, that must be shattered in order that renewal and new growth may occur. When that mighty upheaval happens, history shows us, there are always at least three consistent results or corollary events.

First, a new, more vital form of Christianity does indeed emerge. Second, the organized expression of Christianity that up until then had been the dominant one is reconstituted into a more pure and less ossified expression of its former self. As a result of this usually energetic but rarely benign process, the church actually ends up with two new creatures where once there had been only one. That is, in the course of birthing a brand-new expression of its faith and praxis, the church also gains a grand refurbishment of the older one.

The third result is of equal, if not greater, significance. Every time the incrustations of an overly established Christianity have been broken open, the faith has spread—and been spread—dramatically into new geographic and demographic areas, thereby increasing exponentially the range and depth of Christianity’s reach as a result of its time of unease and distress. Thus, for example, the birth of Protestantism not only established a new, powerful way of being Christian, but it also forced Roman Catholicism to make changes in its own structures and praxis. As a result of both those changes, Christianity was spread over far more of the earth’s territories than had ever been true in the past.

OVER THE COURSE of previous hinge times, the church has always been sucked along in the same ideational currents as has the culture in general, especially in matters of governance. The result has been that, at any given time, the political structure of one has always been reflected in and/or exercised influence upon the organizational structures of the other.

Gregory the Great, in wrapping up the chaos of the 6th century, created a church run by monasteries and convents, a system that was in every way analogous to the manors and small fiefdoms of Europe’s Dark Ages. The Roman Church, in emerging from the Great Schism, positioned the exercise and definition of authority in a single position, the papacy, and the council of appointed cardinals surrounding that throne. As a pattern, it was a religious expression of the system of kings and lords growing up in the centuries of pre-Reformation culture.

The Reformation, with its shift to the democratic theology of the priesthood of all believers and its insistence on literacy for the sake of sola scriptura, created a governance exercised by elected leaders subject, in theory anyway, to the will of the people whom they served. Modern Pro­testant bodies reflect this flow of authority for the same reason that America itself does. Both are products of the same stimuli and circumstances. Given all of that, what logically can be expected of the Great Emergence, especially in terms of authority in religion?

When one asks an emergent Christian where ultimate authority lies, he or she will sometimes choose to say either “in scripture” or “in the community.” More often though, he or she will run the two together and respond, “in scripture and the community.” At first blush, this may seem like no more than a thoughtless or futile effort to make two old opposites cohabit in one new theology, but that does not appear to be what is happening here. What is happening is something much closer to what mathematicians and physicists call network theory.

That is, a vital whole—the church—is not really a “thing” or entity so much as it is a network in exactly the same way that the Internet or the World Wide Web or, for that matter, gene regulatory and metabolic networks are not “things” or entities. Like them and from the point of view of an emergent, the church is a self-organizing system of relations, symmetrical or otherwise, between innumerable member-parts that themselves form subsets of relations within their smaller networks, in interlacing levels of complexity.

The end result of this understanding of dynamic structure is the realization that no one of the member parts or connecting networks has the whole or entire “truth” of anything, either as such and/or when independent of the others. Each is only a single working piece of what is evolving and is sustainable so long as the interconnectivity of the whole remains intact. No one of the member parts or their hubs has the whole truth as a possession or as its domain. This conceptualization is not just theory. Rather, it has a name: crowd-sourcing, and crowd-sourcing differs from democracy far more substantially than one might at first suspect. It differs in that it employs total egalitarianism, a respect for the worth of the hoi polloi that even pure democracy never had, and a complete indifference to capitalism as a virtue or to individualism as a godly circumstance.

The duty, challenge, joy, and excitement of the church and for the Christians who compose her, then, is in discovering what it means to believe that the kingdom of God is within one and in understanding that one is thereby a pulsating, vibrating bit in a much grander network. Neither established human authority nor scholarly or priestly discernment alone can lead, because, being human, both are trapped in space/time and thereby prevented from a perspective of total understanding. Rather, it is how the message runs back and forth, over and about, the hubs of the network that it is tried and amended and tempered into wisdom and right action for effecting God’s will.

Thus, when pinned down and forced to answer the question, “What is Emergent or Emerging Church?” most who are part of it will answer, “A conversation,” which is not only true but which will always be true. The Great Emergence could not be otherwise.


Phyllis Tickle is founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly. This article is adapted from her book, The Great Emergence: How Christ­­ianity is Changing and Why, with permission from BakerBooks. Copyright 2008.