Magazine letter for July 2024
Considering the elections, and the choices on offer to us draws me, strangely, to the story of Adam and Eve.
The historically literal reading, or misreading, of this creation story has overwhelmed the subtleties of the original and its careful placing after the account of the first seven days. It is only within the context of God’s good creation of all things that this story of mankind’s place can be understood. It is indeed a story with a sad ending, but not a hopeless one, it still speaks of God’s care and love for man and woman.
The story is a triumph of Hebrew prose, carefully balanced and interconnected. There are, for example, 16 words used to describe the creation of man, and 16 for the creation of woman. Word-plays abound, man is ‘adam and the ground which formed him is ‘adamah, when he sees the woman he takes for himself a new name – ish and calls her ishshah – now he knows his identity, found in hers.
Such are the subtleties of the original – it is an amazing paradox that just as the words have been given the status of the words of God, their beauty and depth of meaning have been subverted and corrupted. What should we do with this ancient and beautiful story, from another age, another culture, another language? We now know so much about our created and evolved world, what mysteries are there left that might need such a story? What can it still say to us? It was intended to describe the human condition, but is it still true?
Well, do we recognise a world where there are choices, where there is danger as well as safety, good possibilities and bad outcomes? Do we recognise a world where there is vocation, freedom and prohibition? A vocation to tend and care for the garden – a vocation to work, to share in God’s creation, as independent, self-aware beings, given freedom, ‘you may eat from every tree in the garden’, elemental sustenance, there is freedom to harvest. But along with freedom was also given…. prohibition, our freedom has boundaries. The thirst for knowledge is inevitable, but handle it with care.
Such a world is recognisable to me. And, along with it the consequences of failure to follow the insights the story has to offer – the spoiling of vocation, the failure to fulfil the opportunities of freedom, and the disobedient crossing of the boundaries. Such a world is one where God may still be found walking in the garden in the cool of the evening, but it is also one where we continually hope to hide from him.
If such a world feels familiar we should accept the timeless truth of the noblest of stories…. that God is intimately concerned with our creation and our best happiness, that he expects us to honour our vocation, explore our freedom and respect the boundaries to it.
That is how things are for men and women, no less now in the age of genetic manipulation and global warming, artificial intelligence and weapons of mass destruction, than when Genesis was written, perhaps even more so – the stakes are even higher. If this garden becomes barred to us, let alone barren, where are we to go?
William