Thanks But No Thanks To The Garden Of Eden

From the perspective of moral decision-making, the Bible's single reference to a tree whose fruit contained the knowledge of good and evil seems to call for trusting and obeying rules unconditionally --- e.g., Curb your curiosity --- and never asking for the underlying ethical principles that would render the rules morally approvable in the first place --- e.g., Pushing the limits of our finite, human nature can be a good thing, but not defying those limits altogether. Passing up the fruit stands for sticking to the rules. Scarfing it down exhibits a defiant insistence upon principles.

Tradition has it that we are to follow the former course not because we see for ourselves that it is the better course to follow. We are to follow it because God told us to follow it. On our own, we cannot see what is better and worse, good or evil at all; only God can. All of this cries out for a second look.

It is true that only a mind like God's could contain all of what it would be good to know about good and evil themselves. For one thing, the good or the evil of any created thing (e.g., a beautiful sunset, or a tornado) is relative to how that thing does and does not fit into God's plan for the whole, and it is just this Whole that stretches finite understanding and imagination to the breaking point. Nevertheless, we still want to know anything and everything, from first principles down to last details, even when we discover that our thirst for knowledge may be forever beyond our capacity to quench.

Whatever is good or evil, then, about something cannot be such merely because God says that it is. Rather, when God says that something is good or evil, he does so because that thing really is one or the other, given the kind of world he has chosen to create and the plan by which he has chosen to govern it. Further, he says so on the basis of perceptions and judgments that are open to our understanding as well as to his.

The question of what God sees in something that makes him call that something good or evil, from viruses through civilizations all the way out to black holes and the Big Bang, is one of the biggest questions that we will ever ask about the created order. But it is a question that we ask because we cannot stop asking it. As is the question of whatever else God may know --- about himself, the created order, parallel universes, and perhaps even contemplated universes yet unactualized --- that we might have the capability of knowing, and in the knowing of which we might love him with our minds all the more completely.

Theologically speaking, then, we eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because it is in our very created nature and not, as tradition would have it, our fallen nature, to do so. It was truly a tragedy when mention of that tree was dropped without ceremony from the Old Testament altogether, not to appear in its pages again, except perhaps in the oblique hint of a later Preacher that the fruit of a tree like that could only be bitter. "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." (Ecclesiastes 1:18, KJV)

And so, I keep on asking the very same question that flummoxed Eve so very long ago: did she hear the Creator right about those two trees? And I keep on thinking that she didn't. To her credit, she did see through at least one attempt of the serpent to confuse her, recognizing immediately that God's prohibition did not apply to each and every tree in the garden, but only to one. But what if Eve then got confused about which tree it was that she and everybody else must approach with caution?

Think about it. In the light of almost everything else that the Bible says about God's glorious gift of minds with which to know and love him, it simply cannot have been the tree of knowledge that posed the problem in the Garden of Eden. It had to have been that other one. And even the fruit of the tree of life could not have been prohibited absolutely, for it is a measure of God's own life that makes us the living beings that we are. Just as it is a measure of God’s own wisdom that makes us hunger for as much as we can find out about his created order, whose immensity and beauty will both thrill and stagger us for however long our lives shall last.
　
　
　

The Tree Less Cherished

Here is a little story that I heard about for the first time in third grade Sunday School. It pretty much spoiled my whole day. Once upon a time, there was a garden planted by the Creator of the universe. There, human beings and every other creature of the fields and the air were meant to live happily, forever. Right in the middle of the garden were two glorious trees. One, called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, was immediately declared off limits. But a very deliberate Eve and a very distracted Adam ate from it anyway, and the world has been paying the price ever since.

I still think about this story a lot, especially during the Epiphany season, which celebrates among other things the manifestation of God’s light, life, and truth to all peoples.With respect to the latter in particular, I like to think of the coming of Jesus as bringing with it a new planting of the tree of knowledge, this time in the human heart. But the problem still remains of making credible the reasons the Old Testament story gave for God’s prohibiting access to a tree like this in the first place.

According to the first creation story in The Book of Genesis, what God had in mind for human beings was that they/we would tend the earth with him caringly and knowledgeably. But Eden's god --- the god of a second creation story --- is a very different kind of god, who had a very different kind of plan for a not nearly so admired human race. This god is a jealous, vindictive, self-serving, tribal kind of deity who hands out prohibitions and then tempts people into ignoring them. He seems constitutionally incapable of embracing the only creatures on earth capable of comprehending the wonders of creation, and seems not to care a whole lot for their habitat either, if the big flood later on was any indication.

What the story of the Garden of Eden finally comes down to is God’s expectation of unremitting obedience, and about the troubled life that befalls people who disobey him, in specific: having to work harder outside the garden than they would have had to work in it, having to bear children in pain, and having to die. (Genesis 3:16-19) My Sunday School teacher had an impressive way of boiling this down to third grade essentials. When you truly obey God, she told us, you trust that God knows best and you do what he tells you to do with no questions and no grumbles.

Sitting in church the hour after she laid this on us, I came to the conclusion that my own relationship with the god of the Garden was no better than Adam’s and Eve’s, and for much the same reason. I could not bring myself to believe that the supposedly perfect God we pray to is a God unwilling to give reasons for what he asks of us. Even my own very imperfect parents worked hard to be reasonable about what they asked of me, because they believed that it was the right thing for any parent to do. "Don't touch that tree," God said. Well, okay, but for whom, then, was it planted in the first place, and why?

The right attitude, this story encourages us to believe, is one of trusting and obeying: our parents, our teachers, our leaders, our church. It is one of bending to their will, conforming to their beliefs, and becoming as much like them as our immaturity and inferior wisdom will permit. The one question not to be asked about any of these conditions for living long and prospering is: why? Why should anyone be better off for doing so? Why should we trust these parents, these teachers, these leaders, this church?

What truly makes for the kind of partnership with God that human beings were created to enjoy in the first place --- at least as the Priestly writer of Genesis 1 envisioned it --- is not merely obedience, but also knowledge: knowing for oneself what is good and evil, knowing why each is what it is, and knowing that God is just as bound by the good and is just as obligated to resist evil as we are. Obedience to shared norms, based upon shared understanding, is what makes for co-creatorship, not a do-what-I-tell-you-or-else approach that prepares people neither to become mature on earth nor joyful in heaven.

There is a lot to be learned from the second creation story in Genesis. But not how to love God with all our minds. Or how to share in all of God’s truth, rather than in just the truth Who is Christ, without feeling fearful or guilty about it.