Whaley Bridge Parish
Feb 20th 2022
Genesis 3
Here’s a bible. It’s a wonderful book. It’s a life-giving book. God speaks to us through its pages.
People often struggle with the Bible and so today and so today I want to talk a bit about the Bible and how we make sense of it, and let God speak to us through it. And I am going to take as my example the story of Adam and Eve which we heard today. This comes from the very first book of Bible which is called Genesis. When we read the Bible we obviously want to make sense of it, and understand the implications for our lives. This act of “making sense of what we read” is called interpretation.
I want to suggest that when Christian thinkers have wanted to make sense of the story of Adam and Eve, they have often done so in unhelpful ways, that don’t take us close to God in Christ, but actually take us further away.
Let me explain what I mean. Steve and I love the island of Hoy in the Orkney islands. Hoy is a wild, empty island, with just one village down in the south. Cycling across a tract of empty moorland one day we found a grave. We read that it was the grave of a young woman from the village who, a couple of centuries ago, became pregnant by a sailor. She was so shamed and reviled by her community that she took her own life. She was buried then many miles away from the village as a further sign of her utter exclusion from her family, her community and the church.
For, yes, this Scottish island this was a devoutly Christian community.
This sad story raises a question for me. The question is this. Given that Jesus came to announce the Good News of forgiveness, healing and salvation, how can it be that a Christian Church should twist this into a religion of condemnation, cruelty and exclusion? How on earth did that happen? What Bible were they reading?
Well, we can’t know for sure. But the fact is that from the Middle Ages onwards, the church had a lot to say about human sinfulness and particularly about the sinfulness of women. Based on the thinking of Augustine, this teaching, or doctrine became very influential. And it took as its basis the story of Adam and Eve and a very particular interpretation – a way of making sense of this story.
So let me tell you a bit about Augustine, and his interpretation of this story.
When Augustine was around 1500 years ago - it was believed that Genesis was like a history textbook that was giving a literal account of events in history. At that time, nothing was known about human evolution, so it was assumed Adam and Eve were literally the first human beings, and the great- great -great grandparents of everyone. So, for Augustine, this story was particularly important.
Augustine was a brilliant man, and he was troubled by a big question: if God is a good God, how can we explain the existence of evil on the world? (It’s an important question, and people are still asking it.)
Now if Augustine were around today, I think he would start with the person of Jesus Christ to begin figuring this out. That’s what modern Christian thinkers do. But he didn’t. Augustine started – and finished really – with the story of Adam and Eve. He put this story front and centre of the Christian thinking about sin and evil. That was quite a controversial thing to do. The Old Testament makes no further reference to the story, and Jesus, who quoted the Hebrew Scriptures very frequently never made reference to it in the context of sinfulness – he makes one passing reference in the context of teaching about marriage. Be that as it may, Augustine used this story and this story alone to explain the existence of sin and evil.
Augustine’s logic was that if God’s creation is good – as it is – then all that is bad in the world must be the fault of human beings. Augustine’s theory said the world had been perfect, and then following Eve’s decision to eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge, everything went wrong, and evil and suffering entered into creation. This became known as the Fall of humanity.
Augustine then went further. He believed this original sin of Eve was passed down the generations through sexual reproduction. Human sinfulness was essentially a sexually transmitted disease.
This teaching led to a very gloomy view of human nature, and a particularly negative view of women. Because Eve’s temptation of Adam was believed to result in a catastrophe – the existence of sin and evil - Eve became a kind of symbol for women’s sexuality which was seen as dangerous and deviant. For many years of Christian history women who transgressed were treated with harshness. I think back to the young woman on Hoy all those year ago, shamed and driven out of her community even in death.
In our Living and Love and Faith Course we have been thinking about how society’s attitudes to sexuality have changed across the year – and that there are both positives and negatives in that. Most of us agreed that we are glad that sexuality does not carry the baggage of fear and shame in a way it used to do.
I believe that Augustine’s interpretation of the Garden of Eden story, and the teaching he based on it have cast a long shadow. But it’s interesting to know that the Doctrine of the Fall and of Original Sin has never been part of church teaching – not in the Church of England anyway. It’s not referred to in the creed, and there is no requirement to believe these things to be a faithful Christian.
Yet the issue that Augustine wrestled with – our human nature and the brokenness we carry within us – remains very real. Sin is the bible’s word for it, and we don’t have to look far to see evidence of it. Becoming a Christian starts from recognising our own inner brokenness, and the brokenness in the wider world whose systems we are inextricably tied up in. It is that humble self-awareness that is the starting point at which we begin to dimply recognise our own need for God.
The songwriter Leonard Cohen writes:
There is a crack in everything
That is how the light gets in.
Sin is the word the Bible has for this crack in everything, and it is recognising that we live within this crack, and the crack lives within us, that enables the light that is Jesus Christ to get in, letting his grace and love redeem and transform us and our world.
The Garden of Eden story is one story that illuminates the crack of sinfulness, but the Bible has many others. For me the most powerful image of sinfulness in the Old Testament is the story of the exile.
This was a time when Israel had failed to live as God was calling them to do, and they were invaded and taken off to exile in Babylon, where they felt cut off from God and unable to worship. It was hard to hold onto their sense of identity. We often describe sin as separation from God, and exile was literally that for Israel.
When we feel cut off from our deepest self and other people, when God seems remote, exile seems to me a good description of it. The pandemic has been like that for many people.
And God in his grace led his people back out of exile. Exile was not an end point, but a stage on a longer journey.
So back to the Garden of Eden, Eve and the apple. How will we make sense of this story?
Let me come back to Saint Augustine. He had something tremendously helpful to say about how we make sense of the Bible.
“Whoever, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbour, does not yet understand them as he ought.”
I think that is a great touchstone for making sense of the Bible. The heart of the Christian faith is God’s grace, mercy and forgiveness to us in Christ. Whenever we read the Bible, we need to keep one eye on that.
Task for this week. Take away the Genesis story and read it through, as if for the first time. Forget anything you were told that it meant before. Let it surprise you. Enjoy it. Read it in the light of God’s grace and forgiving love. I wonder what it will say to you?