Our Bible studies often start with some form of ‘icebreaker,’ this one was “Reflection: From where does evil come?” The biblical answer, of course, is “trees”.
But enough of that!
This is a magnificent chapter. It shows us that evil: the antithesis of God, is not ontologically basic. It is not part of what is ‘really real’. This is close to Augustine’s view that evil is constituted by deficit; (if I recall his work correctly) but different in that the absence is not metaphysical: evil is existentially real and consists of real events that bring the reverse of benefit, but it represents the absence of love, and is constituted as the Bible sharply puts it, as the work of the murderer (John 8:44). It emerges in actions taken in relationship that come from a denial of the ‘imageness’ of God in us. So evil is the outworking of the ‘image of God’ undone.
The study goes on to weave the basket of deception, half-truths and manipulation that characterises evil: the practice of the rejection of God, love and life; and their substitute in self obsession, pride and lust for self benefit by loss for others.
‘Sin’ is popularly regarded as somehow ‘fun’ or for innocent pleasure; but it is not and profoundly so, as 1 John 2:15ff tells. This reminds me of a great phrase spoken by a Roman Catholic monk in a sermon I heard many years ago at St Finbar’s church at Glenbrook, NSW: he referred to the ‘glamour of sin’ in a sermon that exposed the glamour as entirely hollow and like a mirage turning to nothing as it’s grasped. And so it is, the core of sin being its alignment with death and detachment from God. As one of the study group put it “living our own way, not God’s”.
I saw a poster recently that asked why limit sins to seven (the ‘seven deadly sins’), and felt somewhat perturbed: sin is about anti-love, rejection and dissolution; for some reason (the blandishments of the evil one) it is thought to represent the best fun. But it does not; it represents the worst sadness that comes from a marred and sullied ‘very good’ creation. It ends in the dust of death, not the glow of life.
The great hope in this chapter of the Bible is that while their world crumbles around them as God is pushed away from them and his creation, God nevertheless limits the damage and shows shimmers of hope at every turn: the seed will crush the serpent’s head, God saves A&E from their exposed embarrassment and provides animal skins (the first death in the fallen world is used in an act, the first act heralding God’s mission of rescue).
I wonder if another act of love is God turfing A&E out of the garden of Eden, to prevent their coming to the tree of life: how sad to endure everlasting life mired in sin! Once again, God inverts our values and disasters and brings life…in this case our death is that which he will set aside in the Christ who is to crush the serpent’s head.
One little detail in this account that I like comes in Gen 3:6c, “and she gave also to her husband with her.” Do I see here that the whole episode in which Eve conducted the interaction with the serpent was done with Adam there? There is no hint in the pre-fall moment that Eve should make way for Adam, that Adam’s head-ness is betrayed by Eve’s exercise of her intelligence. Adam, of course failed to speak up, but God’s point of accusation against him has nothing to do with Eve speaking as a female, but as one speaking error, with him not testing the error and entering into a corrective dialogue. Male supremacy, if it is imagined elsewhere in the Bible, is certainly not a feature of the ‘very good’ creation. It is however, a result of the fall and represents brokenness, as does the woman’s corresponding (dominating?) desire for him. From a relationship of corresponding good, we have it collapse into a correspondence of exploitation.
A member of the group brought along a small book by Marcus Loane, where he supposes that chapter three is an extended allegory. I’m not sure if this is helpful. As with all points in these opening chapters, if they have the character of allegory or are symbolic, we are lost for a reference. Because they are ontologically basic, and we have no other knowledge of the matters exposed, we would be hard pressed to make any headway understanding them. I don’t think they have any real ‘work’ to do if they are not directly true to events that happened.
Does this then put me in the position of populating the genealogy of evil with talking snakes, and fruit that can either make or break? Maybe. Because we have no access to the pre-fall world, we must to some degree suspend analysis and seek in the text what we can learn, as though it refers to what really happened; otherwise we are in the dessert of reader-response hermeneutic going where we want to without check or balance.
Death in this chapter is brought upon us. The rest of the Bible is God’s action to undo its effects. Yet the consequence of interpretations that manipulate the direct meaning of the text in these opening chapters has the effect of sidelining the pivotal role of death in the relationship between God and creation (refer to Paul in Romans, where it is the whole creation that groans), because it puts death prior to the fall. Somehow this trivialises death, and makes it part of the ‘very good’, when we are told that it is the final enemy, with ramifications extending into animal life, Isaiah making peace between prey and predator a mark of the new creation.
