Читать книгу Blessing the Curse? - Ksenija Magda - Страница 7

In the Bible, the problem of Genesis 3 is often described as “the curse.” The uncomfortable (and unpopular) message is that we are evil, sinful, and, as the Apostle Paul says, “dead,” like living corpses (Rom 5:12; 7:5; 7:14–25). As “dead” to God, we continue to bring death rather than life into the world. Nobody wants to hear the notion that we are intrinsically bad. Contemporaries who are shaped by an individualistic worldview are particularly upset by the notion of sin, because they see themselves as good people.

Thus there have been long discussions throughout Christian history about complete or partial defilement by sin in the Christian church. These discussions have been documented back to the fifth century, when Augustine won a debate with Pelagius through his claim of total human corruption.^[1] As good as people sometimes appear, the true motivation of their hearts is often concealed – sometimes even to themselves. Depending on the circumstances, even the best people become corrupt by opportunity. The driving force behind Augustine’s reasoning derived from his philosophical explanation of Adam’s sin as “original sin” in Romans 5.^[2] Since then, Christianity has blamed the state of intrinsic corruptness on Adam through the doctrine of original sin. Had Adam not sinned, the doors to evil and death would have stayed closed. Humans would still live the blissful lives of innocents in paradise. Yet such thinking is a shortcut, for people in any time will inevitably do what people do best – blame others. For this thinking suggests that the unfortunate affair of sin is that it isn’t really anyone’s fault; if anything, God should be blamed. What is sin after all?

This oversimplifies a long philosophical discussion, but in our time, the concept of original sin is not self-evident. The book of Romans communicates a concept that can be more easily understood than “sin” by disclosing Paul’s preoccupation with the death that sin brings. Paul’s driving mission is to reveal how Jesus cures the problem of the death caused by sin. He points out that “death” reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose “sinning was not like the transgression of Adam” (Rom 5:14). Theoretically, like our contemporaries, Paul can envision people who did not sin like Adam, although they are already all condemned (Rom 3:9). But even if there were some sinless people, they would not be spared, for those who live without God will still suffer the deadly consequences of other people’s sins in this world. If we read Romans less doctrinally and more literally, we see that Paul’s problem is with the death sin brings to everyone and everything – not just the sinner! Sin sets up structures and networks that catch and harm innocents. Sin does not ask whether or not people deserve it, or whether there is a law against killing. Sin likes to kill.

Often and easily, evangelicals who believe in sola gratia still explain sin as “bad acts” for which a grumpy white-bearded God punishes people on the spot. The definition of sin as acts of misbehaviour is entrenched in our heads even after five centuries of reformation and the thought, “I am not a sinner because I sin, but I sin, because I am a sinner.”^[3] Yet the problem is far bigger than a person’s sporadic malfunction. The problem is a systemic defect, which needs a systemic answer.

It has been shown recently that Paul does not argue from Adam to Christ – that Adam’s sin was so great that only Christ could overcome it – but the other way around: because the Son of God had to descend from heaven, die, and rise again in order to deal with human sin, we can now understand the extent of Adam’s one-time transgression. Once introduced, sin produces a state and structure of decay, which brings death to the world one sinful deed at a time. Sin permeates all areas of life and impregnates it with seeds of death. Under its domain, people remain entrapped in sinful structures. On our own, we remain blind to these sinful structures. We realize that death is the result of sin when it hits us personally. Yet when tragedy hits others, we tend to see death as the natural course of things, a normal part of life.

And some object, “Surely we cannot all be that bad.” But let us look at Genesis 1–3 with a different set of eyes and try to keep our defences down so that we can immerse ourselves in what the Bible has to say about the depth and extent of sin. This is a first step, Paul would argue, to dealing with the problem. Without God’s law (the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible), we would die unconscious deaths, for God’s law gives us a feeling for what sin is and shows us its dreadful and hopeless depths. Only after we have seen and understood our own inadequacy to deal with it can we accept and appreciate God’s solution.

The story from Genesis 3 is known in most parts of the world. People learn it early in life. It is important to dwell on what God tells Adam and Eve on the day they decided to eat from the one and only forbidden tree in Paradise. As in any story, motives are more important than the deed itself, and the Bible is clear that turning away from God is the underlying sin. Adam and Eve turned away from God to become as gods and to know good and evil. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Gen 2:9) was called that for a reason. We are not told if Adam and Eve knew this name. If they did, we can call them childishly naïve (as some commentators interpret the story) for eating from it. But we do know that God told them that they would die if they disobeyed God and ate from it.

In the story, it is important to note that the readers are painfully aware that there is nothing “good” to be acquired from this fruit as the snake makes its way to tempt Eve. The readers have already read the opening chapters of Genesis, where it has been hammered into their minds that everything that God made up to that point was “very good” (1:31). What else could be experienced by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil but evil and, as God puts it, death?

Yet the first humans were unaware that they were living a perfect dream under God’s complete provision. When temptation hit, it hit hard. They wanted to have everything. They wanted to be like God. They were already walking in God’s presence every day. We may find all sorts of reasons that wanting to be like God was a legitimate wish for Adam and Eve. Yet when humans want to be like God, they are acting upon a death wish. The phrase, “You will surely die,” is not a threat so much as a statement of a fact. If you are a creation, which is a vital presupposition of the biblical story, then the decision to detach yourself from the Creator means you stop being. A created being who is made “in God’s likeness” is not God. Humans are not fit to be the Almighty, all-sustaining, eternal Being, who, as Jürgen Moltmann put it, is great enough to make space in himself for the other, possibly even a hostile other.^[4]

After the disobedience, the emancipated and detached creation does not really feel divine at all, but rather exposed and threatened by the death that is approaching from everywhere. The detached creation feels it must take things into its own hands to protect itself and fight for itself against everything and everybody, especially God. Thus the detached creation learns to feel fear, jealousy, and contempt for others, especially those who threaten its existence, and so it conceals itself, becomes defensive, and acts out against its enemies. The creation is left to protect its own life, but it is unsure about how to do this in light of all its limitations and its lack of the life elixir. It feels it can never gather enough to provide for the skinny years it anticipates in its dark hours of isolation.

Wanting to be God has many other implications as well. First, everyone fights for their own territories in whatever ways they can. The inner motivation is to make it for ourselves. The hierarchies we so often identify as divine are actually a temporary status quo that support our instinctual self-preservation. We agree to give a hierarchical precedence to someone we cannot beat ourselves – just yet. No wonder hierarchies form early on in life – and are established everywhere!

Because we only accept hierarchies when it is obvious that it would be counterproductive to fight opponents, we are always waiting for a new opportunity to regroup and attack. Thus systems establish myriad mechanisms to keep people in place so that they will believe they cannot change the order of things. Those who are at the top of the hierarchy want the status quo to hold on for as long as possible, and yet those at the top also tend to ignore the temporality of hierarchies. They feel they’ve finally made it to the God position, where they can make all the rules and own the mechanisms of change, thereby enforcing eternal obedience. But the history of hierarchies tells a different story: every single one falls because of the unquenchable human urge to get to the top, to be God. When Nicolae Ceaușescu, the dictator of Romania, died in front of a firing squad on Christmas Day of 1989, the world was amazed. Friends who had visited us at the end of November that year to smuggle a contingent of illegal Bibles into Romania had commented, “His power is as firm as ever!” And yet, not even a month later, Ceaușescu was no more.

Hierarchies are so basic to our experience of life that most people believe there is no way to live outside them. However, recent research in the business world has found that hierarchies are truly inefficient. For various intricate reasons, most organizations that rely on hierarchical structures lag behind because they tend to inhibit human potential. Though they may speak of progress, hierarchies only support the interests and needs of whoever is at the top rather than those of the business.

More often than not, the Christian church is smitten by hierarchies, which makes delusions about being God particularly interesting. Church hierarchies are often more important than God, the Bible, faith, or justice. Any challenge to those at the top of a church hierarchy will immediately reveal how minimally God is actually in the system. Even at the lower end of a local church hierarchy, church members will walk on eggshells to avoid waking up the human god who is in charge. Many human gods in such churches – and one finds them in all denominations – go so far as to micromanage the lives of their followers and to set up structures to enforce this power. They believe – and have taught others to believe – that they alone have the divine right to intervene, forbid, or allow any action, including whom church members will see or greet, whom they will avoid, or whom they will marry!

Hierarchies are so prevalent in the church and society that it may be difficult to find any alternatives. Undoubtedly, hierarchies seem to be an inevitable expression of our life on earth. Moreover, many Christians will say that the Bible affirms, if not orders, hierarchies. In several places, the Bible mentions a house code, which depends on a hierarchical structure and forces women to obey their husbands, children to obey parents, and slaves to obey masters. In 1 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul argues from the creation order for a hierarchical family system. This system was maintained and affirmed by church writers even before the Cappadocian Fathers (c. 330–395), who described women as ontologically inferior to men and therefore unfit to rule over them.^[5]

Thus it is generally believed that hierarchies reflect the nature of things. Much of our hierarchical church order and other related concepts derive from the patristic church. These theologians from the first five centuries are valued primarily because of their proximity to the New Testament writers, a line of reasoning that always puzzled me, since reading the Church Fathers and reading the writers of the New Testament is such a different experience. Can we really claim that our contemporary theology should in some way be proximate to the Reformation theology of the sixteenth century? Rather, the experience of reading early church materials should teach us that proximity can get lost – and probably in less than a century. The church itself did not feel the historical proximity that we ascribe to these writings, for it only allowed those writings that (among other things) had a proven connection to the apostles in the first century into the Canon of Scripture.

In addition, we must ask whether the hierarchies in the Bible actually reflect the complete picture that the Bible paints about the will of God for creation. For instance, shouldn’t the way Jesus treated women and turned hierarchies upside down have a more serious theological emphasis, since Jesus is our main authority? Yet his teaching gets lost in the theologies (and hierarchies) of the later church. And shouldn’t we consider the theological framework that Jesus employed when he approached the hierarchy-obsessed Sons of Thunder in Mark 10, telling them that hierarchies are an expression of the rulers in the world, but it should not be so “among you” (v. 43)?

I have come to believe that Jesus challenged and reversed hierarchies because he wanted to redefine the world from the perspective of a new creation rather than the curse. While the creation is obstructed by the structures of sin, and hierarchies are the dominant experience of the world and the ambitious disciples, Jesus says, “this is not how it should be among you” (Mark 10:42–43). Hierarchies insist that someone needs to be in charge, and someone has to have the last word, and someone generally needs to rule over others with force. Yet such hierarchical structures do not reflect God’s intent or will for the creation, nor any ethical approach to life.

For example, when God first created the world, what was “good” was for people to “care” for the world, which was “very good” (Gen 1:31; 2:15). They were not created to lord over it. Moreover, the equal status of the man and the woman was also “good” (2:18). She was from the man’s side (as some rabbis tended to teach – Gen Rab 17.2), which meant she was a helper who was equal to him, not a slave to obey him (2:20 comp. Yeb 63a). While Jesus affirms hierarchies as the prevalent structures of the world, he specifically claims that they do not reflect the true nature of the kingdom of God. For in the kingdom of God, greatness is expressed by serving others and washing their feet, regardless of their gender or social status (see Mark 10:44–45; John 13:12–16).

So as Christians, how did we come to establish hierarchies and mandate them to people we claim to love, just so we could reach the top and rule over them? Why is having power over others so appealing in the church?

Returning to the Genesis narrative, I think the answer lies in the structures of sin and the primary human sin of wanting to be God. For once people emancipate themselves from God, hierarchies give them a sense of structure in a world that they have made God-less, which is a dead and disintegrating world. To understand the outcome of this God-less agenda, we will need to read Genesis 3 from a new perspective – not as God’s order and punishment, but as a statement about how the now God-less will constellate themselves.

It is as if God is saying, “Now, because you have disobeyed, this is what your life will look like. The women and her offspring will be constantly challenged by the snake, but will crush its head eventually – luckily! (This is a promise and a way out.) The man will try to rule over the creation, but the creation will grow increasingly unresponsive to his authority and will neither bring forth what he wants nor how much he wants. Additionally, the woman will try to build a relationship with her husband, but the man’s focus and urge to rule over everything and everybody (including her) will make their bonding an impossible agenda. His rule and her lack of relationship with him will bring her constant, great pain. After all, she is the one who will bring new life into the world, only so that it may be destroyed by pain and agony.”