Genesis 3

So much packed into so few words, and so difficult to interpret! We seem to love nothing more than to project our vision of the ideal man on primitive peoples. As we saw already with Harrison Ford's old movie The Mosquito Coast, so also with Jean M. Auel's Earth's Children series, we can't depict primitive Man without imbuing him with our vision of how we ought to be, how we were before society encrusted us with its crippling notions of right and wrong. In Auel's case, those encrustations prevent us from having lots of freewheeling, well, if you've read the books you know what I mean. But the first to do so was the Bible, and no one has ever done it better. Here's the text:

Now, the snake was the most subtle of all the wild animals that Yahweh God had made. It asked the woman, 'Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?'

There's a real chicken-and-egg problem here. God told Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit. If they've never sinned, how can they feel tempted to disobey? The serpent breaks the cycle.

The woman answered the snake, 'We may eat the fruit of the trees in the garden.
But of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said, "You must not eat it, nor touch it, under pain of death." '
Then the snake said to the woman, 'No! You will not die!
God knows in fact that the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good from evil.'

Here we have the basic temptation of mankind, to make gods of ourselves, to put ourselves in a position that only God can occupy. Whether it's the sin of pride, where we claim credit for the gifts God has given us as if we had invented them ourselves; or the sin of passing judgment on others, where we place ourselves on the throne of God as if we were qualified to judge the hearts of others; this is the sin that underlies all the others. It's been discussed so much elsewhere that it hardly needs expansion.

The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye, and that it was enticing for the wisdom that it could give. So she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it.

Again, the paradox of a complete innocent succumbing to temptation is mind-bending, but we mustn't tarry.

Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they realised that they were naked. So they sewed fig-leaves together to make themselves loin-cloths

Shame, self-consciousness, etc.... This is another of the most commonly commented-on verses.

The man and his wife heard the sound of Yahweh God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from Yahweh God among the trees of the garden.

Now this is wonderful. What was the state of mankind before the Fall? What was his true, uncorrupted nature? He walked with God in the garden of Eden, "in the cool of the day." It is sin that prevents us from meeting God face to face. People wonder why God doesn't show himself more clearly. Rather, they should ask why they place the barrier of sin between themselves and God. The experience of the saints bears this out.

But Yahweh God called to the man. 'Where are you?' he asked.
'I heard the sound of you in the garden,' he replied. 'I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid.'
'Who told you that you were naked?' he asked. 'Have you been eating from the tree I forbade you to eat?'
The man replied, 'It was the woman you put with me; she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.'

Love this; they've only just started sinning and they've already learned how to pass the buck.

Then Yahweh God said to the woman, 'Why did you do that?' The woman replied, 'The snake tempted me and I ate.'
Then Yahweh God said to the snake, 'Because you have done this, Accursed be you of all animals wild and tame! On your belly you will go and on dust you will feed as long as you live.

There's a bit of How the Rabbit Lost His Tail fairy tale charm here, but since the serpent represents Satan it also contains a real curse for the fallen angels.

I shall put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; it will bruise your head and you will strike its heel.

This is the verse that is always said to be a foreshadowing of Christ, the woman a type of Mary and her offspring Jesus. I guess because of Paul's use of Adam as an anti-type of Christ (if that's the correct word). Thus Jesus crushes the head the Satan the serpent.

To the woman he said: I shall give you intense pain in childbearing, you will give birth to your children in pain. Your yearning will be for your husband, and he will dominate you.

To the man he said, 'Because you listened to the voice of your wife and ate from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat, Accursed be the soil because of you! Painfully will you get your food from it as long as you live.
It will yield you brambles and thistles, as you eat the produce of the land.
By the sweat of your face will you earn your food, until you return to the ground, as you were taken from it.'

To our modern ears whenever Scripture speaks of men dominating women the verses fairly shout at us off the page. But this author isn't saying that the true nature of women is to be dominated by men. Rather, he's saying that the state of powerlessness of women in this ancient pastoral community is one of the curses resulting from the Fall. It's part of the suffering introduced into the world by the sins of mankind.

I hesitate to raise the subject, in the event that someone someday actually reads this post, but it seems to me that those who claim the Genesis story is sexist because it blames the woman Eve for the Fall more than the man Adam have it backward. It seems to me that the author of Genesis looked at the state of women in his society and concluded that their suffering was somewhat greater than the suffering of men, and so gave them a 'first among equals' status in the story of the origin of sin.

Overall, we see here that pain and suffering are the results of sin. As we saw in the post on Buddhism and Original Sin, this is similar to the conclusion that Buddhists have come to with their concept of dukkha, that suffering in the world is the result of a human nature that is out-of-joint, that is not aligned with its true self.

For dust you are and to dust you shall return.'

This is a verse of breathtaking poetic beauty.

The man named his wife 'Eve' because she was the mother of all those who live.
Yahweh God made tunics of skins for the man and his wife and clothed them.

This is touching. God doesn't just toss Adam and Eve out on their ears, yell 'Good riddance,' and slam the door. He clothes them - prepares them for live in the outer world - before expelling them.

Then Yahweh God said, 'Now that the man has become like one of us in knowing good from evil, he must not be allowed to reach out his hand and pick from the tree of life too, and eat and live for ever!'
So Yahweh God expelled him from the garden of Eden, to till the soil from which he had been taken.
He banished the man, and in front of the garden of Eden he posted the great winged creatures and the fiery flashing sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.

Obviously Christians see in the tree of life a type of Christ, who mankind cannot now access until properly prepared.

This leads to the question of how we go about fixing the state of brokenness in which we find ourselves. As Huston Smith says in World's Religions, "For the rift to be healed we need to know its cause, and the Second Noble Truth identifies it. The cause of life's dislocation is tanha....Tanha is a specific kind of desire, the desire for private fulfillment." Therefore a project of finding disciplines that will enable the annihilation of desire is the answer.

This is not the conclusion one would draw from the Genesis story however. Genesis tells us that the fallen nature of Man is a result of sin, and sin came about because of the loss of innocence - the knowledge of what is good and what is evil. That is a jinn that cannot be put back in its bottle; there's no point trying to unlearn the difference between good and evil. The only direction we can go from here is forward, which is why Christ had to come into the world. Only God himself could pull off the impossible task at hand: to lead us out of our current state of brokenness and into an even greater destiny than we would have had in our previous state of innocence, that of true adopted children of God.

What is original sin?

As part of preparing for the last post on Buddhism and original sin I re-read some material on original sin, particularly this and this. I was surprised to find that many people in the Judeo-Christian tradition have and still do deny the existence of original sin. I'm especially surprised by Wikipedia's claim that original sin is not part of Jewish doctrine, since it appears to me to be nothing more than a commentary on Genesis 3, which is certainly part of Judaism.

I guess I'm as surprised to find that there are people in our tradition who deny original sin as I was to find that Buddhism embraces it, because if we disagree on such a fundamental aspect of our natures how can we agree on anything? And if we and Buddhists do agree at this level, then we must agree on many other things as well, because a lot must follow from the way we view ourselves.

But it's clear especially from this that the 670 or so words of Genesis 3 have spawned a lot of additional explanation, and I suspect that when people of the Judeo-Christian tradition reject the doctrine of original sin they are really rejecting one aspect or another of that explanation, and not the central ideas themselves.

So what are the central ideas of original sin? I'm sure I'm not qualified to begin to describe them. But I can describe what the central ideas are to me. To me, original sin is an attempt to explain the mystery of the predicament in which we find ourselves. Again, Paul says it best in Romans 7:15ff:

I do not understand my own behavior; I do not act as I mean to, but I do the things that I hate.
....
so it is not myself acting, but the sin which lives in me.
And really, I know of nothing good living in me -- in my natural self, that is -- for though the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not: the good thing I want to do, I never do; the evil thing which I do not want -- that is what I do.

There is something not quite right about us. We know the kind of people we should be, but we are incapable of being that person. We do evil even though we know it does us harm. Somewhere along the way something went terribly wrong; we have been broken. How did this come about?

The term "original sin" comes from the act that led to this condition, but if we move on to that we've already skipped past the fundamental point. Because what original sin really refers to is this mysterious state of "brokenness" that we recognize in ourselves. I think I'm not alone in this assessment. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes original sin this way (CCC 417):

Adam and Eve transmitted to their descendants human nature wounded by their own first sin and hence deprived of original holiness and justice; this deprivation is called "original sin."

(emphasis mine). It's the state of deprivation, the brokenness itself, that original sin primarily refers to, and not the act that led to it. How could any Christian reject this basic diagnosis of the human condition? After all, what need is there for a savior if we're not in a state of needing to be saved? Again, I suspect the beef is with some particular of the doctrine, and not with this basic idea.

Incidentally, an alternative view is presented by the old Harrison Ford movie, The Mosquito Coast. The protagonist in the movie, Allie Fox, believes that evil is learned, and that if you could just roll back the clock far enough and start society over you could create a perfect society without sin. So he leads his family on a series of expeditions, each one traveling deeper into the jungles of Central America in search of ever more primitive societies on which to build his perfect community, and each time finding that sin is already present there. He ends by saying he wishes he could evolve backward into animal form, because only there will a truly pure spirit be found.

One could imagine the question being empirically resolved. If sin is learned then one of the so-called "wolf children" who are lost in the woods as infants and raised by wolves, if there really are such things, would be free of it. You could imagine a psychologist examining such a child to resolve the issue once and for all.

Original sin and Buddhism

What I know about Buddhism would fit on the back of an envelope, with room to spare. I've heard that it is a religion oriented entirely around the elimination of suffering. No doubt I picked this up from long ago reading C.S. Lewis' The Problem of Pain. The Buddha was a rich man who lived a pampered life, and when he finally encountered disease, poverty and death, he was shocked and disillusioned into spending the rest of his life in pursuit of techniques for training the mind and body in ways that would eliminate pain, by detaching oneself from this world that is the cause of pain. It sounds like a religion of escapism, but it's exactly the kind of religion I'd expect people to come up with "on their own," without the benefit of revelation. We either fear the unseen gods, and as pagans do attempt to placate them with elaborate rituals of sacrifice, or (better) we focus on what we see, that this is a world of pain, and we do our best to escape it.

These are the dots I connected in my mind, based on the few bits of information I had. But our understanding of others is always both clear, and incorrect, in inverse proportion to the amount of information that we base it on. So I expected to be found wrong when I picked up Huston Smith's The World's Religions, a nice little book that gives a 100,000 foot view of the world's major religions. Even so, what I found threw me for a loop:

The First Noble Truth [of Buddhism] is that life is dukkha, usually translated 'suffering'....Dukkha, then, names the pain that to some degree colors all finite existence. The word's constructive implications come to light when we discover that it was used in Pali to refer to wheels whose axes were off-center, or bones that had slipped from their sockets...The exact meaning of the First Noble Truth is this: Life (in the condition it has got itself into) is dislocated. Something has gone wrong. It is out of joint. As its pivot is not true, friction (interpersonal conflict) is excessive, movement (creativity) is blocked, and it hurts.

This assessment of affairs is what Christians call "original sin!" It's not just that we're living in a cruel world in which terrible things are constantly happening to us, we're living in a world in which something has gone fundamentally wrong with us. We're not fulfilling our true nature, and it hurts. Paul says it best in Romans 7:15ff:

I do not understand my own behavior; I do not act as I mean to, but I do the things that I hate.
....
so it is not myself acting, but the sin which lives in me.
And really, I know of nothing good living in me -- in my natural self, that is -- for though the will to do what is good is in me, the power to do it is not: the good thing I want to do, I never do; the evil thing which I do not want -- that is what I do.

Every Christian has felt the pain of the situation that Paul so eloquently describes. We know that we can be so much more than we are. We desire with our entire being to do good, and yet we don't. We know that we were destined to be better than we are, and that by doing evil we are constantly acting against our own true nature, but we can't help ourselves.

This worldview doesn't produce an escapist religion, but an aspirational one. Because if there's something about us that's not quite right, if something has gone wrong and it's preventing us from living up to our true potential, then the obvious question is, "How do we fix it?" If I was surprised to find that Buddhism and Christianity agree on the diagnosis, I was even more surprised to find that they offer similar cures:

For the rift to be healed we need to know its cause, and the Second Noble Truth identifies it. The cause of life's dislocation is tanha....Tanha is a specific kind of desire, the desire for private fulfilment. When we are selfless we are free, but that is precisely the difficulty--to maintain that state. Tanha is the force that ruptures it, pulling us back from the freedom of the all to seek fulfilment in our egos, which ooze like secret sores. Tanha consists of all 'those inclinations which tend to continue or increase separateness, the separate existence of the subject of desire; in fact, all forms of selfishness, the essence of which is desire for self at the expense, if necessary, of all other forms of life. Life being one, all that tends to separate one aspect from another must cause suffering to the unit which even unconsciously works against the Law. Our duties to our fellows is to understand them as extensions, other aspects, of ourselves--fellow facets of the same Reality.'

Smith's quote is from Humphreys, Buddhism, p91. Obviously this quote touches on areas where Buddhism is very different than Christianity. I know of nothing in Christianity that parallels Buddhism's idea of "Life being one." Paul's doctrine of the unity of the Church as the Body of Christ may come closest, but that still seems very different. But analyzing differences in religions is much more difficult than finding similarities, especially where Buddhism is involved, which is a religion that tries very hard to avoid dogmas that could be used for comparison, so I won't attempt it.

What does strike me though is that Buddhism posits self-centeredness as the most basic flaw in human nature, as does Christianity, and I imagine, Judaism, and denial of self as the cure. In Luke 9:23ff Jesus says:

'If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me.
Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake, will save it.
What benefit is it to anyone to win the whole world and forfeit or lose his very self?

We see this also in the parable of the pearl of great price, in which the merchant sells all that he has to acquire the kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 13). And in the story of the rich man who asked Jesus what he must do to have eternal life, and is told by Jesus, 'If you wish to be perfect, go and sell your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me' (Matthew 19).

An obvious difference jumps out: the Christian's self-denial is an act of turning toward God, and in particular Jesus Christ, while the Buddhist's self-denial appears to be more of a turning toward his or her fellow creature. The Buddhist appears to have the "You must love your neighbor as yourself" half of the Jewish Law, but not "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind" (Matthew 22:37ff), much less Jesus' "new commandment" to "Love one another as I have loved you" (John 13:34). This says it well:

Christian enlightenment, based on the gospel, remains irreducibly different from Zen or any other form of Buddhism.

[William Johnston, S.J.,] underscores the radical transcendence of God for Christians, including Christian mystics who use the language of nonduality. The climax of the Christian mystical journey is identifying with the Son and being filled with the Spirit and crying out: "Abba, Father!" At least on the level of expression and religious self-understanding, this is very different from Buddhist perspectives on nonduality, which do not address a transcendent in personal terms.

But again, analyzing differences in religions in difficult, and I know that many Christians have wondered if the Buddhist's nirvana isn't a vision of God of sorts, perhaps as clear a vision as the human mind can perceive without the aid of revelation. For me it's a great surprise, and a great comfort, to know that the Christian and the Buddhist have come to similar conclusions about the state of humanity, and spend the greatest part of their time responding to it in a similar manner: in the attempt to annihilate the self.