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By Root 1506 0

of compassionate coming-of-age story. Imagine that a father has a daughter whom he loves with all his heart. When she comes of age, Dad gives her a beautiful sports car. Dad tells her to drive safely and stay in her lane, but soon she crashes into a tree and totals her vehicle. Dad gives her a stern lecture, and a few months later replaces the sports car with a modest economy car, more of a starter car, you might say. Then she takes her new economy vehicle off-road and gets stuck in a muddy field. Dad pulls her out and requires her to take a drivers’ ed class before she can drive again. She finishes the class and then a few weeks later she speeds around a corner, recklessly loses control, and drives herself into a river, and the economy car is totaled. At this point, Dad decides she isn’t ready for a car and gives her a bicycle instead. Then she crashes her bike into a tower and breaks her arm. God again comes to the rescue and rushes her to the ER.9 In each case, what does the father do in response to his daughter’s foolishness? Disown her? Lock her in a dungeon? Condemn her to eternal conscious torment? Not even close!10

The protagonist of Genesis patiently bears with a rebellious and foolish humanity again and again. Consider how the Genesis story actually goes.

Scene 1. God tells Adam and Eve they are free (this is a primary condition of their existence, 2:16) with one exception. If they eat of one specific tree, on the day they eat, they will die. Notice, the text does not say they will be condemned to hell, be “spiritually separated from God,” be pronounced “fallen” or “condemned,” or be tainted with something called “original sin” that will be passed on to their children. There is only one consequence indicated by the text: they will die—not spiritually die, not relationally die, not ontologically die, but simply die. And not die eventually, but on the day they eat. (Few commentators seem to take this seemingly significant detail of the text into account.)

Scene 2. What do they do? They abuse their freedom and eat of the one forbidden tree. And what does God do, inflict immediate capital punishment on that very day as promised? No. God not only doesn’t kill them, but rather God makes clothes for them, mercifully shielding them from their shame at being naked in one another’s presence. God does let them suffer consequences for their behavior, but not lethal ones. God pushes them out of the nest, the garden in which they have lived. Now they must go from being hunter-gatherers in a beautiful garden to agriculturalists who must struggle with thorns and thistles to produce food by the sweat of their brow, entering into the harsh realities of marital and family struggle in a harsher world, out of the garden, east of Eden. Having tasted of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they will no longer have access to the tree of life, meaning they will someday return to the dust from which they were originally created.

That’s the first crash, and the biblical text never even hints that it entails an “ontological fall” from Platonic being and transcendent state down into Aristotelian becoming and debased story. Rather, it is the first stage of ascent as human beings progress from the life of hunter-gatherers to the life of agriculturalists and beyond. Their journey could be pictured like this:

But the ascent is ironic, because with each gain, humans also descend into loss. They descend (or fall—there’s nothing wrong with the word itself, just the unrecognized baggage that may come with it) from the primal innocence of being naked without shame in one another’s presence. They lose their fearlessness in relation to God. They cross a developmental threshold, leaving behind an original garden that can never be reentered. Their departure is truly ambivalent, because although it is the result of the disobedience of one command (don’t eat from the forbidden tree), it results in obedience to an earlier command that never could have been obeyed from within the garden (be fruitful, multiply, fill and subdue the earth). This