Image and Likeness of God: Adam and Eve...again

“But Adam and Eve is not just about the Universal Call to Holiness and the necessity of relationship with God needed in order to learn how to Love and how to be Loved. Adam and Eve is really about you and me”, I tell my students, “and what prevents us from knowing how to Truly Love and to be Beloved.” The fourth thing we talk about is what causes a break in the relationship with God. Original Sin is a tricky topic to teach. This is where my students forget what I taught them five minutes before about not reading Scripture like an historical document. One student will rightly note that it seems unfair that all of us suffer from separation from God because these two people did this one bad thing so long ago. I re-teach the class. “I still think it is unfair that we have to suffer from Original Sin because of Adam and Eve.” I put my head in my hands and chuckle. Ironically, the inability to let go of reading Scripture literally is related to Original Sin. This is how I teach this: Adam and Eve are offered a material method for becoming like God. The serpent tells them that all they have to “do” is eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and they will have the same knowledge that God has. They are attempting to “know” like God knows, and maybe that suggests the sin of eating from the tree is rooted in a natural desire to be like God, but the method they choose to be like God is purely material in origin, and, as it is material, it cannot achieve transcendent. Simply put, Original Sin is putting material Truth before Transcendent truth; it is the tendency to put human will before the Will of God. Original Sin, essentially, is related to the idea that we do not need a relationship with God in order to know what it means to Love and to be Loved. All we need is our own ability. “But I still think it is unjust that we are separated from God because of what two people did a long time ago!” I die a little bit inside: “Don’t you get it? We are Adam and Eve, and every time we sin we put our will before the Will of God! We are Adam and Eve every time we say we do not need a relationship with God in order to know how to Love and to be Loved! We are Adam and Eve every time we create our own morality or our Truth. The story of Adam and Eve is True, but not in the way you want it to be True. You want it to be True in a material, historical sense so you can “understand” the facts and find some legal loophole. That is very clever, but Adam and Eve is not about being clever…it is a story about being humble before God; it is a story about acquiescing so we can experience what it means to Love and to be Loved in a way that the human intellect cannot comprehend!” Blank stare. “Thank you for helping me to explain this to the rest of the class!”

(Cooling off after a long walk/run)