Returning to the Garden

A disclaimer: I am dealing with quite mature, explicit, and sexual themes in what follows. 

In the beginning…

Nothing.

And even when the stars were assembled,

Even when the fundamental forces were gathered,

even when the light burst out from the darkness…

Only the angels were present to watch.

 

Up came man from the dust.

Complete and lonely in the garden.

 

And then!

Where there was One,

and then where there was two…

Came a third of that same flesh.

 

The two were naked and unashamed in the garden.

The two were together in the garden.

 

God walked with them in the cool of the evening.

 

Did they recreate that oneness in the garden?

Did Adam’s hand fall to the place where his rib had been?

Was there an emptiness inside that was only quelled…

when the two became one flesh, again, in the garden?

 

Did they chase after this after the Fall?

We all chase after this after the Fall.

 

We glimpse what we had in the filth.

We glimpse what we had in this path to destruction.

We chase after the oneness.

We forget the flaming sword.

 

There is a path we can walk down.

There is a way to retrace that oneness.

It is a gift.

It can look

so much like

the ways that lead us astray.

Heaven in a Body

“Surprised by Hope” by NT Wright is doing more than playing with my head.  It’s exploding my brains. 

He articulates some things that I’ve been trying to put words to.  I’ve bumbled around with ideas about how embodied and physical Christianity is.  I’ve babbled about how  our traditional disembodied ideas of heaven don’t seem biblical.

He pulls all this together.  I’ll share some quotes later.

Today, I was reading a passage where he repeated one of his main points.

The idea is that Jesus didn’t actually defeat death if the afterlife is this nonphysical place.  He accomodated, death, perhaps, but he didn’t defeat it, if we wander around, ghost-like, after death.

Rob Bell, Wright himself, and others emphasize the idea that Revelations describes the final end that we were promised in the Garden of Eden.  The whole of human history was just a back-pedal, a delay, in reaching our final destination. 

This seems so dead on to me: Adam and Eve would have participated in the city described in Revelations.  They would have gotten to it much sooner than the serpent.

And so it struck me, as I was reading the book today:

We have no problem imagining an embodied, physical existence for Adam and Eve.   Many people agree that through Jesus we’re heading to the final destiny intended for Adam and Eve.  But people struggle with the idea that we’ll be physical beings in this eternity…

This all leads to the question: If Adam and Eve hadn’t fallen, at what point would they have lost their physicality?  If Adam and Eve are physical… if the final desination is non-physical… if Adam and Eve were supposed to end up there.  They’d have had to suddenly (or gradually, I suppose) become ghost-like and nonphysical.

Adam named Eve

Adam gave Eve her name.  According to the NIV, the word “Eve” might have meant living things.  This seems pretty likely, since the text says that Adam gave her this name because she’d be the mother of all living things.

I’m not convinved that everything in Genesis has a niave, surface kind-of meaning.  But I am convinced that everything in it has meaning.  And so I’m struck by several things about the fact that Adam named Eve.

The most interest thing about Adam’s naming of Eve is that it happens after the fall.  According to Genesis, it was Adam’s job to name all the creatures in the garden.  Presumably, he eventually would have gotten around to it.

But it’s interesting that he hadn’t already named Eve.

A common understanding of the fall is that both Adam and Eve were decieved by the serpant.  The problem with this understanding is that it flies in the face of what Paul tells us in the New Testament.  Paul speaks of Eden andsays “Adam, since he was not decieved…”

My friend Garret (who can be found at “outnumbered by 5″ on the blog roll) has suggested that Adam’s sin was in allowing this all to happen.  Others have suggested similar arguments: Adam was supposed to be protecting Eve, Adam was the one who had directly from God about the expectations in the Garde)

Did Adam basically ignore Eve in the Garden?  He should have not just stood idly around, when the serpent was seducing Eve.  But on the other hand, Genesis makes it clear that he was physically present; Eve gave him some right after having some herself.

On the other hand, what if Adam was not yet up to the task of naming her.  Naming a thing gives us power over a thing.  It implies we are understand the fullness of what a thing is.

Eve (along with Adam) was created in God’s image.  Perhaps the idea is something like “You know, that thing over there, I can see calling it a tiger.  This tiger-thing, it’s pretty cool and interesting… But my help mate– wow.  I don’t even have a word to describe her.”

(Yes, I know that  he didn’t speak English and wouldn’t have used the word ‘tiger’.  Whatever word she used, the point still stands.)

Most of us accept the idea that Adam and Eve were changed after the fall.  Perhaps the fullness of who Eve was, perhaps this was much more clear to people before the fall.  I wonder if the image of God within us would be much more plain to us, if we could see each other the way Adam and Eve saw each other before the fall.

Perhaps if we could see each other through those nearly perfect, pre-fall eyes, we would say “Wow, there is no way that I can put a word to stand for the glorious image of God that is in you.”

After the fall, Adam names Eve.

Is this because it’s easier now?  Because he’s no longer seeing her the same way?  There are all kinds of reasons that Adam would no longer see Eve the same way.  He can no longer see her as clearly; his eyes have been “broken” by the fall.  The image of God within her has been muddied, distorted, hidden, because she has fallen, too.   And just a short time before, Adam had already used Eve as an object.  He had thrown her under the bus.  When God asked why it happened, Adam tried to blame it on Eve.

And so perhaps a deeper truth in all this is that man’s objectification of woman was one of the tragedies that resulted from the fall.  Adam treated like Eve as an object when he tried to use her to take the blame for the whole thing.  He demonstrated his ability to think of her like an object when he named her.

And at the same time, perhaps mixed up in all this, is a pathetic and woefully inadequate attempt at making up for the sin.  Perhaps it’s the first time in all of scripture that people demonstrate legalism in an attempt to make up to God when they should demonstrate a change of heart.  Naming Eve is like Adam saying “See, God, I can do what you told me to do.  This woman is the only thing still with me that was in Eden… but I’m still doing my job, following my mission, I’m still naming things.”

Many people believe that Adam and Eve were meant to populate the world from the Garden of Eden.  Perhaps in the specific choice of the name “Eve”, Adam is holding on to his last little bit of hope.   Making new life is still possible.  There is still hope in carrying on.  At least one aspect of what they were supposed to do, they can still do.

Trees of Life

For a while, I’ve had this interest in the tree of life that appears in Genesis.  I never really connected it to the pair of trees of life that occur in Revelation.  Interpretations of Revelations are so hard to understand, and so divisive, and frankly, in my opinion, have given rise to so much silliness that I probably don’t pay it the attention it deserves.

But it’s a pretty interesting thing, the way it’s described in Revelations”a pure river with the water of life, clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, coursing down the center of the main street.  On each side of the river grew a tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, with a fresh crop each month.  The leaves were medicine to heal the nations.” (22: 1-2)

I’m open to the possibility that these “trees” aren’t actual trees.  There’s certainly lots of fodder for symbolism here.  The number 12 seems to represent, through out the Bible, people who are supposed to be doing God’s work in the world.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jewish people trace their ancestory through the 12 tribes to the original 12 ancestors.  In the New Testament, Jesus has 12 disciples.   Through out both testaments, but particularly from Jesus, crops, fruit and the like are also a symbol for mantaining a connection to God.

At the bare minimum, the trees could be understood to mean that Christ-followers are the crop which healed the world.

I think there’s a lot more going on than this.

I’ve been noticing a theme lately.  This theme is that the New Earth is what Eden was meant to become.  It’s easy for me to think, somehow, that the New Earth is a bit of a consolation prize.  Perhaps it’s easier for me to wrap my brain around a God who wants to punish us.  Maybe it seems like there are so many things that are just ruined forever and the best we can do is cope with the aftermath.  It’s possible that I am not fully adressing how very much God loves us, and how indomimatable his spirit is.

Whatever the reason, it’s not my natural tendency to think that what we will end up with is what was supposed to happen.  It’s not easy to recognize that the whole of human history was just this temporary diversion, this speed bump.   The more I read and pray and think the more I recognize that God won’t be thwarted.  The end that will happen will be the end that was meant to be.

The scriptures give a variety of instructions around offering the first fruits to God and around people not eating the fruit of young trees.  I wonder if God started Eden with only one tree of life expecting that it would be left alone.  I wonder if he thought that the right naturally processes were underway for the second one to pop up without his direct intervention, the same way that other fruit trees spread.  (Fruit falls, is eaten by a wild animal, seed is excreted with a bunch of natural fertilizer from the animal, wind covers the seed, seed grows.) 

I can’t say for sure that the reason stated above is the reason we’re told not to eat the fruit of young trees.  And of course, the instruction to do this hadn’t been handed down to Adam and Eve.  I suppose that the whole point of the fall is that sometimes God isn’t going to give us all the details.  If we want to live in harmony with God we need to be o.k. with this.  He certainly didn’t owe Adam and Eve and explanation for why they shouldn’t eat from the tree.  Genesis says that one reason for this is that they would live forever.  Ultimately, it is of course the principal of the thing.  But I wonder if there was more.  On a pragmatic, and perhaps trivial level, I’m wondering if the issue of original sin was about interfering with God’s forestry plans.

The statement around what the trees can do is pretty interesting stuff to.  In Genesis, the tree of life leads to eternal life.  In revalations, it leads to healing.  These two uses aren’t particularly contradictory.  In fact, on the New Earth, we’re already eternal. 

This leads to all sorts of questions, some gory, some quite practical, about what that eternal life will be like.   We’ll be capeable of getting sick or hurt.  Otherwise, the medicines from the tree would be quite irrelevant.  But we also live forever…  This leads me to wonder what if the fruit wasn’t around?  What if we used the whole crop and we had somebody who suffered some sort of horrible accident: an explosion, hideous burn, etc.   The New Earth is supposed to be a place where all our tears are wiped away.  But I think I’d shed a few tears if I was crushed or blown to pieces or burned all over my body and I had to heal up.

I suppose this is part of a wider question about how it all will work… Can we have excitement without tears?  With an eternity that stretches out before us, will we be motivated to do anything?

Old Age in Genesis

Genesis reports that the first several generations of humans lived for many centuries.    I’ve heard people before notice that each generation lives a few years shorter than the generation before.  The idea is that Adam was nearly genetically perfect and each generation after got further and further and further from his genetic near-perfection.

The thing that strikes me as a little odd about this idea is that it seems to suggest that the fall gets progressively worse over time.  I have no particular reason to think that we ought to be able to recover from the fall on our own: there’s no good reason to think things ought to get better.  But it’s a little strange to ponder the idea that things are slowly getting worse. 

It would seem like Adam and Eve– who after all made that fateful decision– ought to experience the effects at least as much as the rest of us.

I suppose somebody could argue that in the Garden they had some sort of advantages that lead to them later in life living longer than everybody else.  The problem with this idea is that every single generation lives shorter than the life before.  It’s not like there’s a sudden drop off.  It’s this gradual shortening of life spans, across dozens of generations.

It’s almost like the fall set loose some sort of symbolic toxin or radiation or cancer.  It’s progressing, getting worse with each generation.  On a literal and practical level, perhaps the shortening life spans are a result of increasing human foolishness, greed, and selfishness.  Each generation honored its elders less and took increasingly poor care of them.  Or each generation was marred by increasing violence making it increasingly likely that people would die at increasingly young ages.  Or each generation simply made less healthy decisions.

These don’t seem all that likely either, though, because the bible does not report these specific things (not taking care of the elderly or increasing violence) and because the drop off is so steady.

An interesting thing is that all these guys are (by our standards) incredibly old when they have our first children.  Like nearly a century old in most cases.  Presumably they aged slower as adults or simply stopped aging at some point  (Otherwise, can you imagine what it would be like to be 200?)  I wonder if they aged slower into adult hood.  If they lived five times as long as us, did it take five times as long to reach adolesence?  Would they emerge from puberty at age 90?

I feel so not up to the task of parenting sometimes.  How awesome would it be if I was able to have five times as much life experience under my belt before I became a dad?!?  This is again, assuming that I don’t get the other less-fun symptoms of being that age.  And sometimes I mourn for all those ages that are behind me.  It’d be awesome to get to spend more time in some of those ages.  (Allthough, junior high was the deepest pit of hell.  I wouldn’t want to extend that by a factor of 5)

I make no secret of the fact that I’m ambivalent on the question of whether or not these stories literally happened.  But I do notice that there is something interesting on a more symbolic level.  (This does not contradict a literal reading, it might complement it.)

One of the ways I make sense of the bible’s talk about sons inheriting the sins of the father is by adressing the fact that we see this all the time anyway.  It seems unfair, but it’s undeniable that if I make a lousy decision in many cases my kids will pay the price for it, too.  I break a law and go to jail, they end up growing up with out a dad.  I become addicted to drugs they have to deal with all the stupid things I did under the influence.  I get a divorce and they grow up with all the challenges a divorce brings.

The question I never considered before this morning was this: who pays more, the father or the son?

Perhaps the idea that is illustrated in these shrinking life spans is that sometimes the sons will pay a much higher price than the father.  Maybe it’s more difficult to grow up without a dad than it is to go to jail.  Maybe some sin has a snow ball effect, and we start just a little ball of the stuff rolling down hill.  It’s a knee-high ball for our kids.  Our grand kids cope with a snow ball the size of a house.  Our great grand kids face a full blown avalanche.

Theology and Sith

There are all these Christian themes running through the Star Wars movies.  People have written bazillions of books.  I didn’t think any were all that impressive.   I’m feeling kind-of nerdy (and arrogant) tonight.  I think I’ll blog about them.

I think that these become more obvious in the more recent movies.  The most obvious connections are cosmetic ones. There are these little explicit nods to Christianity that are hard to miss.  For example, Anakin is a product of an immaculate conception.  The number for the plan that will destroy the jedi is order 66– only, of course, pretty close to the number made famous in revelations as the number of the beast.  In the most recent movies, the force is even sometimes referred to as “the living force”– reminiscent of Christians referring to the “living God.”

Slightly deeper is ideas that run a little deeper than mere nods.   The favoring of the spiritual over the material for example.  The Star Wars movies paved the way for The Matrix in their declaration that the physical world is much less important than the spiritual reality which lies beneath it.   Consider, for example, Yoda’s chiding of Luke when his lack of faith leads to his failure to rise the X-Wing fighter out of the muck.  Or consider Ben Kenobi’s victory through surrender.  (More on this in the next post about this topic.)

(Just for the record, I have some misgivings about the understanding of the physical world vs the spiritual world.  Nonetheless, the orthodox Christian position has usually taken this route.)

A second paralell, also on this deeper level, occured to me recently.  One of my favorite scenes in all six movies is the one in “Revenge of the Sith” where Palpatine is talking to Anakin in that bizzare opera house.  He’s laying the ground work for his eventual corruption of Anakin, planting some seeds of doubt about the Jedi, some seeds of faith in the Sith.

I don’t know if this is why I liked the scene before I consciously realized it.   Here’s what I do know about that scene, and really, the whole series of movies.

It’s really about the fall from the Garden of Eden.

Like Adam, Anakin is tempted.  (Interestingly,two of the first three letters are the same of both names.)  Clear parameters have been lain out for him.  (In Anakin’s case, by the Jedi.  In Adam’s case, by God.)  The temptations of both Anakin and Adam are closely related to the God-like power of immortality.  (Remember the tree of life in the Garden of Eden?)  Both Adam and Anakin are tempted by a figure that takes advantage of greed, pride, and fear.

Like Adam, Anakin loses what he most sought.  Vincent Antonucci, in his excellent “I became a Christian and all I got was this lousy T-shirt” observes that Adam’s crushed community with God is the obvious ramification of the fall.  But his crushed relationship with Eve is also worth noticing.  Anakin, of course, loses his Amidala just as Adam loses the community he once had with Eve.  (We see this in Genesis by the way he tries to throw Eve under the bus as soon as God comes ’round.)  The God- Jedi paralell is here, too: Anakin loses the Jedi just as Adam lost his close connection with God.

I think there’s all sorts of interesting paralells between Luke and Jesus just as there are between Anakin and Adam.  I’ll probably “go there” in my next post.