Some years ago, John Spong, the former bishop of Newark, sought to ignite a “New Reformation” by proposing 12 “theses.” Spong is convinced that classic Christianity has been outpaced by modern thinking and the scientific revolution; in his view, the “pre-modern concepts in which Christianity has traditionally been carried will never again speak to the post-modern world we now inhabit.” Spong rejects the idea of the Incarnation, the atoning value of Jesus’ death, bodily resurrection and ascension, miracles, and the moral authority of scripture. In dismissing one after the next, he states each of these foundational convictions in as crude and unconvincing way as possible; each becomes a sort of straw man that no reflective Christian would recognize as their own understanding. In the end, his “Christianity for a New Millennium” bears little resemblance to the faith that most Christian believe and practice.
The third of John Spong's “theses” dealt with the primeval event that Christians call “The Fall,” described in the third chapter of Genesis. He says, “The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.”
There is nothing particularly original about John Spong's complaint about the Fall. People have been trying to sort out the seeming disconnect between Genesis and scientific views of human origins for almost two centuries. As a result, all too often, our attempt to hear and understand this crucial text has been sidetracked the question of whether “it really happened in this way.”
The question of how precisely the events described in Genesis correlate with the growing findings of geneticists, paleontologists and anthropologists is unanswerable. The Genesis account of the Creation and Fall is a story. It is not, and was never intended be, a precise scientifically and historically verifiable description of an objective sequence of events. It simply isn’t that sort of text. It uses narrative to tell us that there is something deeply and tragically askew in human nature that cries out for redemption and atonement.
The Fall is tied to an act of disobedience. The key to the story of Eve’s seduction is her motivation. The serpent tells Eve that she will not die when she eats of the fruit, but “when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” It is the prospect of “being like God,” that suddenly makes the fruit so attractive to Eve and “a delight to the eyes.”
What does it mean for the creation to claim the place the creator – to “be like God”? It is the attempt to be autonomous rather than interdependant, and to place oneself at the center of one’s universe in which everything is at one’s beck and call. Martin Luther spoke of sin as the moral condition of being “curved in on oneself” rather that oriented toward God and other people.
It has been said that “Original Sin” is the most verifiable of all Christian doctrines; one need only look at the New York Times, CNN, Fox News or whatever your favored source of information, to recognize the broken state of the world and the desperate need for a renovation of human nature. A little education or social reform simply is not sufficiently strong medicine; what is needed is the gracious intervention of the Creator himself.
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