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Tower and Town, September 2014

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Rocking The Boat

When Peter stepped out of the boat to walk to Jesus on the water, we can be certain that he rocked that boat.

Preface

How should Christians respond to newspaper headlines quoting a former Archbishop of Canterbury's fears that Christianity will be extinct in this country within one more generation? What is it about the Church and Christianity that leaves major percentages of our population completely cold? What follows here is offered in the hope that it might inspire vigorous discussion. It comprises the first third of a bigger article, with footnotes, that can be found at www.rockingtheboat.co.uk. The other two thirds are planned for subsequent editions.

In The Beginning

In the beginning, we read, God created heaven and earth, and shortly thereafter, man and woman. However, what is presented as an idyllic start is short-lived: Adam and Eve are rapidly shown the red card after an infringement against which God had specifically warned them. Their punishment, we are told, has consequences not just for themselves but for all succeeding generations of mankind.

In Rudyard Kipling's memorable book The Just So Stories, we read beguiling tales of how the leopard got his spots, how the rhinoceros got his skin, The Elephant Child, Just So Storiesand about the elephant child whose short, boot-like nose was stretched to the proportions we know so well today by an encounter with a crocodile on the banks of the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River, all set about with fever trees. While each of these stories contains a particular truth – the elephants that we see around us today do indeed have long noses, the leopards are wonderfully spotted, the rhinoceroses curiously armour-plated in their great folds of skin – none of these stories is presented as history. What Kipling has done is to take processes that did occur but only over thousands, perhaps millions of years, and compress them into charming stories lasting no more than a few days – one lifetime at most – in order to make the particular truths mentioned above vivid, memorable and delightful.

The Greeks did the same thing on subjects such as the variation of the seasons (the story of Demeter and Persephone) and many more. Here again, deep truths are captured in vivid, compelling stories but without any question of their being thought of as history.

The Garden of Eden story in the Bible is exactly such a story. Its literary form is almost exactly that of a Just So story. Most importantly, it compresses into a brief timespan a process that in reality must have taken thousands of years, namely, the emergence of moral sensibility as ape evolved into homo sapiens. What we see is mankind making a moral choice – cast symbolically as eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil (a tree that does not actually exist as an arboreal reality). The key thing is that it encapsulates a singular truth, namely, that mankind is a moral being and that we're really good at making bad choices.

There is a further aspect to this story that is worth commenting on. Reading the Biblical account of Adam and Eve's transgression in the Garden of Eden rather gives the impression that the whole debacle took God by surprise; that it was an unexpected failure in the Creation that He had only just finished and found to be “very good”. In the next section I'd like to think about that.

Before The Beginning

We know about – or at least we have stories about – the beginning, but what about before the beginning? Before God pressed the Go button on the Creation machine, did He spend some time thinking the whole project through? Or did He just wake up one day and act on an un-thought-out whim? I accept that this is ridiculously anthropomorphic language applied to something that is outside time and space, but the Bible itself is no less anthropomorphic.

I think we have to hope and assume that He thought it all through in minute detail before actually putting the project into operation. If He didn't then we might be tempted to agree with the musings of Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-76) that “This world, for aught [we] know ... was only the first rude essay of some infant deity” (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, part V). We would have to ask ourselves whether we as a species constitute a sort of Frankenstein monster, a creation run out of control, doing things never thought of by its creator.

So was the Primal Sin described in the Garden of Eden story a surprise to God or not?

I think not. If God is anything like His Biblical representation, then He must surely have been smart enough to know that the humans He himself had specifically designed and created would undoubtedly sin. He would have known with absolute certainty that if He gave us a degree of free will, many people would exploit that freedom to the utmost limits, both good and bad. He would have known that, sooner or later, figures with the propensities of people such as Hitler, Pol Pot and others would emerge from society, just as He would have known that Mandela-like figures, Mother Theresa-like figures would also emerge. I say -like, because I don't think there's anything deterministic about this. I am not trying to say that the specific person Adolph Hitler was pre-ordained to appear in history at his appointed time. I am trying to say that, given that He had designed us in the first place, God must have reckoned that, on a statistical basis, sooner or later some such personality would more than likely emerge somewhere or other.

If, then, we can agree that God thought His whole Creation project through before He actually embarked upon it, we also have to agree that He could at any stage have decided that what He was about to let loose was too risky and have abandoned the whole project. In short, He was under no compulsion to create, and He knew exactly what to expect once the project was in train.

The Expulsion from EdenThis has major implications for how we look at the Garden of Eden story. We could perhaps decide that, far from being the great disaster that it is traditionally presented as, the development described in the Garden of Eden was in fact an absolutely major step forward. Mankind developing a moral awareness, learning to make moral choices, was something that we might surmise God had been longing for and looking forward to throughout those long millenia of evolution. As a colleague put it, we can almost hear Him shouting “Hurrah! At last!” Instinctive animal behaviour is at last being overlaid by the ability to think in morally analytical terms, bringing us that much closer to God in His long-conceived plan to raise us to be His sons and daughters.

I think there is a further implication in espousing this way of thinking. It seems to me to mean that we can never be sure that we have sucked the final truth out of the Biblical text; we have to keep going back to it, re-examining it in the light of the new perceptions that come to us as generation succeeds generation. For example, there is no doubt at all that the ideas of Darwin impose a completely different set of proportions on our view of history compared with those accepted by the Church up until his time, and thus on how we understand the Bible. This and many other developments force us to re-appraise over and over again interpretations that have in many cases been taken for granted for nigh on two thousand years. The question of the authority of the Bible, therefore, emerges as one of immediate interest for a subsequent article.

Hugh de Saram

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