A New Kind of Christianity - Brian McLaren [27]
Scenes 6 and following. These patterns repeat themselves as Noah’s family leaves the ark. Noah drives drunk and creates another crash in which his sons are injured. God remains faithful. Then Noah’s descendants decide to build a massive tower—using the newest brick-and-mortar technology—evocative of the next step in our ironic ascent from hunter-gatherers to nomadic herders to settled farmers to city dwellers to empire builders. And there’s another crash, as their empire rises in prideful confidence and then collapses in misunderstanding and conflict, its various tribes divided through different languages. And again, God remains faithful.
Finally, after eleven chapters, this repeated pattern of human stupidity and divine fidelity opens into something new: God calls Abraham and Sarah and imbues them with a new identity as the father and mother of a nation who will be blessed in order to bring blessing to all nations. It is absolutely essential to notice what God is doing: not damning and rejecting all nations and exempting one from damnation, not hating all nations and loving one, not privileging one superior nation to conquer and rule all others, but blessing all nations through one, choosing one to bring benefit to all. This is not the Greco-Roman story!
Genesis ends with the story of Abraham’s great-grandson Joseph, and Joseph’s life plays out this calling of Abraham. Joseph’s brothers show that they—like Adam and Eve, Cain, the city dwellers before the flood, and the builders of Babel—have developed a taste for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.12 Like Cain before them, they want to kill their brother Joseph, but end up selling him into slavery instead. In spite of their evil intent, and in spite of a host of other characters who similarly betray and fail Joseph, God proves faithful. God eventually blesses Joseph with a position of power in Egypt, where Joseph ultimately becomes a blessing first to the Egyptians and then to the very brothers who had betrayed him, forgoing revenge and saving their lives.13
God is faithful to Joseph, and through Joseph God is gracious to Egypt, and through Joseph God is even gracious to Joseph’s wicked, Cain-like brothers. Joseph is blessed not to the exclusion of anyone, but for the blessing of everyone. Blessing triumphs. Goodness triumphs. God triumphs. And in the end, God provides something better than the “knowledge of good and evil” offered by the serpent: just as God had brought light from darkness and order from chaos and life from barrenness, God now creates a good outcome from the evil intentions of Joseph’s brothers. Through Joseph’s willingness to forgive and forgo revenge, God creatively overcomes evil with good.14
If Genesis sets the stage for the biblical narrative, this much is unmistakably clear: God’s unfolding drama is not a narrative shaped by the six lines in the Greco-Roman scheme of perfection, fall, condemnation, salvation, and heavenly perfection or eternal perdition. It has a different story line entirely. It’s a story about the downside of “progress”—a story of human foolishness and God’s faithfulness, the human turn toward rebellion and God’s turn toward reconciliation, the human intention toward evil and God’s intention to overcome evil with good. It begins with God creating a good world, continues with human beings creating evil, and concludes with God creating good outcomes that overcome human evil. We might say it is the story of goodness being created and recreated: God creates a good world, which humans damage and savage, but though humans have evil intent, God still creates good, and God’s good prevails. Good has the first word, and good has the last.
Not only does the shape of this Genesis narrative have little to nothing in common with the six-line Greco-Roman narrative; the character named God in this story