A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [26]
Each step of socioeconomic and technological ascent thus makes possible new depths of moral evil and social injustice. (The story can yield insights for an individual reading as well as a social reading, with the garden of childhood giving way to the gains and losses of adolescence, adulthood, and old age.)
Scene 3. As the story continues east of Eden, the ex-hunter-gatherers have two boys, the younger (more “primitive”?) Abel, a nomadic herder, and the older (more “advanced”?) Cain, a settled farmer. If the first crash episode tells us about the losses associated with ascent to an agricultural life, this episode tells us of the struggle between two forms of life outside the garden. We have moved from garden to field, a landscape tilled and planted by Cain. Abel’s simpler life, it seems, is more acceptable to God, perhaps because nomadic life is not as morally compromised as settled farm life, with its fenced-in privately owned lands, accumulation of possessions, violent seizure and defense, and related moral entanglements. So Cain’s face grows dark in anger. What does God do to avert yet more evil in the world? This time, God doesn’t threaten Cain with immediate capital punishment as was done with Cain’s parents; this time God sternly warns Cain that sin is crouching at the door and Cain must master his angry impulses.
Scene 4. And what does Cain do? Just as his parents violated God’s command, Cain ignores God’s counsel, gives way to seething anger, and invites Abel into the field. The tilled landscape now becomes a crime scene. The very land that Cain has tilled now cries out with Abel’s blood. What does God do in response? Again, God doesn’t kill Cain, nor does God condemn him to eternal conscious torment in hell, nor does God tell him to do penance. Instead, God ejects Cain from his farm, just as Cain’s parents had been ejected from their garden. Cain will have to be a restless wanderer—perhaps regressing to the state of a nomadic herder like Abel or perhaps to the state of a hunter-gatherer as his parents originally were.
Cain sees this as a cruel and unusual consequence: “My punishment is greater than I can bear,” he says (4:13). Landless and wandering, Cain fears he will be vulnerable to murder, just as his brother, Abel, had been. So what does God do? Just as God mercifully provided the disobedient and ashamed Adam and Eve with clothing to cover their nakedness, God protects Cain from being murdered by other landholders on whose property he might trespass. Now representing humanity doubly expelled from the garden and the farm, the murderer Cain builds a city (4:17). The ascent ironically continues in the aftermath of the second crash.
Scene 5. Humanity, now distanced from both garden and farm, congregates in cities. Cities multiply and the habitual inclinations of the human mind and heart deteriorate all the more, becoming “only evil continually” (6:5). On the mean streets of human cities, human lives have collided in another moral crash. So God looks at what urbanized humanity has become—“corrupt…and filled with violence”—and God’s heart is “grieved” (6:11, 6). God regrets the whole project and decides to wipe out everything.11 But then God notices Noah. The pattern we have seen repeats itself again here: God refuses to let evil go unchallenged (Adam and Eve will die on the day they disobey, Cain will be a restless wanderer, God will destroy everything), but then God acts with surprising mercy (God lets the first couple live, God protects Cain from being treated as he treated his brother, God protects Noah and company).
What happens after Noah’s long cruise? God seems to recommence creation afresh, repeating the “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” command as at the original creation. And God “repents” of destroying the earth (as he had done with Adam and Eve in refraining to inflict the promised