A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [21]
Coming back to our narrative diagram, I believe the Christian religion in the West, as it habitually read the Bible backwards through the lenses of later Christians, largely lost track of the frontward story line of Adam, Abraham, Moses, and so on, within which Jesus had emerged. It unwittingly traded its true heritage through Jesus from Judaism for an alien heritage drawn from Greek philosophy and Roman politics.13 Through this profound and unconscious syncretism (or mixing of sources), biblical data was reframed by the Greco-Roman narrative, which could be rendered like this:
In this way, the Greco-Roman mind transforms the Garden of Eden from its original earthy stuff into a transcendent Platonic ideal. It is no longer a good Jewish garden; it is a perfect Platonic, Greco-Roman garden. In this perfect Platonic garden, nothing ever changes, because in perfection change can only be for the worse. This changelessness means that the Platonic Eden is a state, not a story—a state of perfect innocence. Framed this way, the Fall into sin, it turns out, isn’t simply a move from innocence to experience or even obedience to disobedience. As Adam and Eve disobey the “don’t eat fruit from that tree” rule that maintains them in their state of innocent perfection, they plunge from state to story, from being into becoming, from Plato’s world into Aristotle’s world, and from the absolute light of day into the relative darkness of a cave, to conjure Plato’s most famous parable.14
So what Western theologians call “the Fall” (capitalized to show its transcendent importance) isn’t simply a matter of human beings becoming less innocent or obedient, because becoming is the one thing that can’t happen in a Platonic world. The Fall utterly transforms all of creation from something at perfect Platonic stasis and rest to something in Aristotelian change and motion, from something changeless to something changeable, from something perfect, static, and pristine to something imperfect, dynamic, and decaying. The Fall, conceived in this way, is an utterly radical change in being.
The new condition is no longer an ideal state in the Platonic sense. It is, rather, a deplorable shift in status. A philosopher might say it is an ontological fall, which is to say that the universe has failed to maintain perfection. It has dropped out of its pristine Platonic state. It has hurled itself down, down, down into the cave, into the dark, damp, changeable, shifty, nonabsolute story of Aristotelian becoming.
Now the god of this Greco-Roman version of the biblical story bears a strange similarity in many ways to Zeus (Jupiter for the Romans), but we will name him Theos. The Greco-Roman god Theos, I suggest, is a far different deity from the Jewish Elohim of Genesis 1, or LORD (referring to the unspeakable name of the Creator) of Genesis 2 and 12, not to mention the Abba to whom Jesus prayed. As a good—no, make that perfect—Platonic god, Theos loves spirit, state, and being and hates matter, story, and becoming, since, once again, the latter involve change, and the only way to change or move from perfection is downward into decay. In fact, as soon as something drops out of the state of perfection, Theos is possessed by a pure and irresistible urge to destroy it (or make it suffer).
So, having created a perfect world, now Theos is perfectly furious because it has been spoiled and is now decaying. It has fallen from its high table of perfection and is shattered on the floor. It has dropped out of its alma mater, Ideal State High School, and is hanging out smoking cigarettes on the street corner with Aristotle and his gang of tattooed thugs and crooks telling and participating in (swallow hard here) stories, unpredictable stories, unscripted stories, unsanitized stories, in which things happen, which is something