Читать книгу Blessing the Curse? - Ksenija Magda - Страница 8

For the time being, we will skip God’s curse for the snake (Gen 3:14–15) and resume this discussion near the end of this book as we examine the future of our world from the perspective of Romans 8. We will also look at Adam’s curse (vv. 17–19) before we turn to Eve’s (v. 16).

After dealing with the roots of evil and the first perpetrator (vv. 1–10), the story in Genesis 3 continues with God’s word to the male (v. 11). From the storyline, God first addresses Adam, and so then he blames Eve for what happened (v. 12). While Adam turns on Eve, she accuses the snake (v. 13). The first curse begins where this last accusation finishes (v. 14). In some ways, God’s word to Adam is the peak of the curse (v. 17), and so that culmination needs to be our starting point in order to understand the outcomes of sin for all. Men somehow set the tone for what becomes a downward spiral of the human experience of death after sin.

In traditional environments that enforce hierarchies, some maintain that the fall happened because Adam failed to enforce his hierarchical position over Eve. In other words, he was a wimp. Had he shown Eve her place, what a difference this could have made! Instead, he let the subordinate take charge, which is not a good idea in any hierarchy. So the story of the man’s sin is interpreted as if the evil begins when hierarchies are disregarded. Yet there is a problem with this reading, because Genesis 1 and 2 do not reflect hierarchies and, most interestingly, God places the curse against Eve (v. 16) in between the curse against the snake (vv. 14–15) and Adam (vv. 17–19).

This myth that locates the core of evil in Adam’s disregard for hierarchies is a strong rope in the net of our human experience of deadly structures. We see it in basic male-female relationships, marriages and families, and businesses and societies in general. Some may argue that in more recent history, we have idealized the diminishment of social stratification and promoted mobility between the hierarchical strata – but this is changing. Globally, there has been a steady return to stable hierarchies with immovable structures and strong, tyrannical leaders, Big Brothers who will watch us and keep us “safe.” We are even giving up our personal freedom to such autocrats because we are afraid of terrorist threats and dissolving families.

Some claim that liberalism brought us here, creating an unstable global society with a postmodern view of individualistic approaches to life and too much emphasis on freedom. The solution being offered is that we need to return to traditional hierarchical structures. Someone has to take charge. Someone has to rule and keep us safe to preserve our freedom. And so the world is scrambling to restructure its hierarchies and elect strong leaders to head them. When we feel weak, we tend to put all our hope in those who seem strong and wealthy enough to solve our problems. Yet these people became strong by ruling over us, and they did not become rich by caring for others. When we hand our freedom over to these leaders on a silver platter, they become even more powerful. They are not using their strength in order to nurture us, but to conquer even more powerful hierarchical positions for themselves in an ongoing competition for the exclusive god position in the world. The best we can hope for is to be given concessions that will benefit us. But the purpose of these concessions is to keep us quiet under their feet while they establish their higher positions.

Thus the god-wars are on, and they have been raging forever – though sometimes they change outward appearance and become more sophisticated technologically. Darwin noticed this in the biological world and called it “survival of the fittest,” but in human societies, it is the survival of the most ruthless – those who accumulate power and manipulate people and then rationalize any concerns of conscience.

So far, I have focused on those who are at the top of these hierarchies, and some may think that only the men at the top are to blame. There are certainly plenty of incorrigible men up there, initiating this sort of evil, taking away freedom and resources from others in order to secure their own positions. It is common rhetoric in shops and cafes, on street corners, and at family reunions to blame the men on top. We want to believe that things would be better if only we had better politicians. From a feminist perspective, we might think that everything would change if only we got rid of the patriarchy. But we have already established that sin is at the core of each human heart – not just the male heart.

Moreover, hierarchies do not exist without the vast number of victimized people’s submission. For becoming a god in the world requires power, people, and means, and gods cannot be expected to care for their children, vassals, servants, and slaves, for they need to fight other contenders for the god-position in the hierarchy arena – and if possible, they do it via proxy. To give just one example, how often do the warlords die in a war? Thus those who reach the top of hierarchies could never be there if they had not been helped by grassroots supporters and champions, who either live in the illusion that they will profit from hierarchies, or else the delusion that one day they will be on the top!

For instance, most people think hierarchies bring order to a society. The argument is that some measure of peace is better than chaos – and in a God-less society, this has some truth to it. Humanism, for example, is a God-less system in which the human is the highest good and the measure of all things. This sounds like exceptional altruism and even lines up with some traditional Christian doctrines, such as the sanctity of human life.^[6] However, the main question behind such a system may not be neglected: exactly which human is the measure of all things? This question reveals humanism as egotism in a more sophisticated disguise. Even humanism that places the other before the self feeds into the Übermensch ideology (the concept of, “Oh, he serves me, so I must be God”). From early on, we are fed these traditions and myths so that we are ready to offer our freedom and potential to such human gods. Nationalism is one myth that easily convinces people to give up everything and stop thinking altogether, but there are numerous others. Myths can be driven by basic human needs for food, shelter, and medicine, but also by the desire for extended luxuries, such as travel and the privileges of an easy life.

As much as we may want to believe that these gods are keeping us safe, our language (that marvellous vehicle of social experience) betrays our ordeal, for in a hierarchical system, creation and people become commodities (“Every man has his price”), and commodities are there to be sold (“He would sell his [grand]mother for this”), and commodities are often “sacrificed” for some greater good (“It is better for one man to die for the nation”). Of course, the god at the top of the hierarchy determines what this “greater good” should be and then seeks to indoctrinate and manipulate the people below.

Thus from top to bottom, hierarchies are the pragmatic result of negotiations between those who are contending for the god position, each serving its own little interests. During a war-free period, the status quo accumulates new resources and envisions new strategies to launch a new attack and attempt a new hierarchical structure.

In the Balkans, for example, there is a war approximately every fifty years. The real surprise is that whatever “peace” is negotiated holds for fifty years! But it takes time to build a new generation of indoctrinated innocents who will act upon the myths of the holy sacrifices that were made in the past to preserve their happy youth.

An old woman who used to live with us after the Croatian war told us stories about her life between the two World Wars amidst a family of nineteen children in what was then First Yugoslavia. She started working as a servant in a well-off family when she was ten, as did her other siblings. When one of the kids became sick (and some did in fact die at a young age), her father would just say, “Oh wouldn’t I be so lucky . . .,” meaning, if the kid dies, he could get drunk for free! Some human gods do not have high standards for satisfaction and are happy with a small entourage and resources to support their own little pleasures – such as alcoholism. In those times, having children meant having more work power to manage more land and get more crops. To work more land meant to have more influence, or in the case above, to be able to get drunk when one of those children died.

In our own day, there has been a shift away from big families. In the new circumstances of today’s life, people are expensive, both in families and in industry. In former times, you needed thousands and thousands of people to run a production line, but today, at least in the Western world, workers have become expensive, and robots can easily and more economically take their place. Human power is still appreciated in the Majority World, where children are still employed – as Ben Skinner found out when he was only four and began producing silica sand for practically no pay.^[7] In some places, humans are still very cheap to buy.

In the Bible, God’s plan for humans to “care for creation” became a command to “lord over” creation within the hierarchical structures of sin. Those at the top of this structure continue to exploit the earth as long as it is profitable, without giving any thought to the consequences. The gods at the top need to accumulate stuff to prove their position, and so they seek to lord over as many resources as possible and to keep as many people under their control, working for their purposes, as they possibly can.

It is easy to see how such structures have brought our generation into our current global sustainability crisis. The creation has been abused and torn apart by the gods of corporations, banks, and global enterprises with a complete disregard for sustainability. But one cannot think about sustainability while waging a war to secure the top position in the hierarchy. Thus creation has become a commodity to be bought and sold at will between the big players. Not even sophisticated negotiations, such as those set up by the UN through their research and advocacy, help the situation, since the negotiators and advocates have their own agendas and are vying for someone’s interest. The big players do not sign agreements about a more sustainable use of resources, because they would suffer big losses in their global hierarchical positions. A world run by the profit wars waging amongst hierarchical contenders will never be good news for creation – neither humans, nor nature, which has no direct way to fight back. As we are seeing, however, the creation is responding in the form of natural disasters.

The Bible predicted death for any God-less system that establishes hierarchical structures to be ruled by the gods on top. God did not ordain a curse over the world, but stated the facts: a God-less system cannot sustain a creation that finds its beginning and end in the Creator. Detached from God, the creation is on its way to ruin, a process that is accelerated by those who contend for the god-position and abuse the creation for their own gain. God gave the creation the freedom to detach itself from the life-giving sustenance of its Creator. By following that path, death has become imminent.

When the Bible speaks of sin, it is not only referring to human’s sinful deeds, but to the reality that all of creation has been turned over to the mechanisms of God-less world structures that sell everything for profit, including humans. These structures of sin cause the innocent to suffer alongside the perpetrators, leading the whole world towards a slow but certain death. Though this may sound pessimistic, the world is running towards its painful end simply because humans have sought to become gods in God’s stead.