A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [24]
For starters, this very good world has a beginning, which suggests a change from before the beginning. And this beginning is not complete: it unfolds in stages, with the first stage being a formless, uninhabited expanse. Into this expanse, light shines and sun and moon take shape. Seas are created and divided from land. Gradually, plant life emerges, then animal life, then human life. And none of it is perfect in the Greco-Roman sense.3 Instead, all of it is good and wonderful, constantly evolving into something even better and more wonderful.4
If it were perfect—in the Greco-Roman sense—the earth would have come into being fully populated, fully “developed.”5 But this creation has plenty of room for reproduction and development. A perfect world would have come into being complete with names, but each creature remains nameless until Adam names it. All that we call human culture also waits to be created in this good world—music, science, art, architecture, agriculture, engineering, even theology. These things will be created not by God, but by humans, who, as image-bearers of the Creator, are themselves creative.6
Although this evolving creation-in-process would be appalling to Theos, it is delightful to Elohim, because Elohim, unlike Theos, loves stories and seems to have little taste for states. And Elohim’s story is not a “safe” predictable story, but rather a story with unpredictability and danger written into its first chapters. There, even chaos, barrenness, and darkness have a place, first in the tohu bohu (“formless void”) of Genesis 1:2, then in the limited but real presence of the seas, and finally in the tempting presence of a tree of knowledge of good and evil, the tree itself being part of the goodness of the primal garden.
We have been so thoroughly trained—can I say brainwashed?—to read Genesis through Greco-Roman bifocals, and as a result Theos is so deeply embedded and enthroned in our minds, that it is agonizingly difficult for us to recapture the wild, dynamic, story-unleashing goodness of Elohim, a goodness that differs so starkly, so radically, from the domesticated, static, controlled perfection of Theos. The difference multiplies as we come to the passage traditionally defined as “the Fall.”
It is patently obvious to me that these stories aren’t intended to be taken literally, although it didn’t used to be so obvious, and I know it won’t be so now for some of my readers. It is also powerfully clear to me that these nonliteral stories are still to be taken seriously and mined for their rich meaning, because they distill time-tested, multilayered wisdom—through deep mythic language—about how our world came to be what it has become. They’re intended, as all sacred creation narratives are, to situate and orient us in a story, so we will know how to live. But again, that story does not happen at the bottom of our six-line diagram. It is not a tragic story of a fall from Platonic perfection, because the biblical story does not unfold in Theos’s world at all. Instead, we must remember again, it is the story of Elohim in Elohim’s world.7
In this world, there is not one isolated moment of ontological shift from state to story: it’s all story from beginning to end, and likely before and after as well.8 God doesn’t respond to a loss of perfect status with a furious promise of eternal condemnation, damnation, and destruction. God doesn’t pronounce the perfect state ruined and the planet destined for geocide. The experiment is not a failure. All of these conventional conclusions flow from the Greco-Roman assumptions and biases with which the story has been read and taught for centuries. Take away those Theosological assumptions, and the story unfolds very differently.
Elohim’s story, it seems to me, unfolds as a kind