PARADISE LOST
Eve and Adam succumbed to the temptation and opted out of the game they had been
playing with God. They declared themselves autonomous, independent of His rules for them.
They broke the covenant established at their creation. They sinned and died. They did not
obtain the fullness of death at that moment, but they made the down payment. They signed
the contract with death.
What is sin? What does it mean to die? Schmemann puts it in this way: they ate from the
one tree that God had not blessed and given to them as a means of communion with Him. To
eat from this tree was not to eat with God but to have communion with death. "The
fruit of that one tree . . . was not offered as a gift to man . . . it was food whose
eating was condemned to be communion with itself alone, and not with God. It is the image
of the world loved for itself, and eating it is the image of life understood as an end
itself" ("For the Life of the World p. 15). He continues: "Things treated
merely as things in themselves destroy themselves because only in God have they any life.
The world of nature, cut off from the source of life, is a dying world. For one who thinks
food in itself is the source of life, eating is communion with death. Food itself is dead,
it is life that has died and it must be kept in refrigerators like a corpse" (p. 17).
So they had sinned and the image was lost, though not in the sense of their obligation to
be like God. Nothing can destroy that. It was lost in the sense of their freedom to
fulfill their calling to bear the image. Mark Fakkema, an early 20th century
Christian educator, had a helpful way of explaining this. He said that all of creation
reveals or reflects God, who is the creator, the great Original. But, within creation,
only humans reveal God in the special way of having His image or likeness imprinted on
them. So humans can be called original - IMAGES of God. They are not only involuntary
reflections of God as all creation is. They have the special capacity to want to be what
God wants them to be. They could be likened to a receptacle filled with a receptive liquid
like quicksilver that can give back the image of a star or the sun shining above it. The
receptacle is set on a knife edge fulcrum. It balances there because of two forces, one at
each side. On the "IMAGE" side is the force of "ought to." On the
"original" side is that of "want to." A mirror ought to reflect
accurately the person who stands before it. God creates us with the capacity to want to be
what He made us for. When humans want to do what they ought to do, they show what God is
like. This is seen briefly in Adam and Eve before the fall; otherwise we see it only in
the life of Jesus Christ. He so wanted to do His Father’s will that he could say to
Philip, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." This is something of what
it means to bear God’s image.
When the first parents sinned, they changed. They no longer wanted to do what they ought
to do. The equalizing forces became unequal, and the mirror went off balance. The
reflective quality drained away, and their conception of themselves changed. They were no
longer "original-IMAGES" but imagined themselves to be "ULTIMATE
ORIGINALS." Thus the image was lost and they found themselves under the bondage of
sin and death. Each now became, for herself or himself, the center of al things. They
began the fruitless struggle to make all things serve them. Seeking to find in nature,
people, and themselves what can only be found in God, they fell ever more deeply under the
power of idols.
THE PERILS OF OBJECTIFICATION
Another way to put this is to say, with Martin Buber, that their relation to the
creation changed from and I-Thou relation to an I-It relation. This was true of the
creation itself. Adam and Eve lost the sense of being fellow creatures with all of the
things in the world. The animals turned from pets to enemies. The primal couple was driven
forth to dwell in a land of unyielding soil and of thorns and thistles.
But is it possible to have an I-Thou relation to things? Aren’t they just inanimate
"its," made to be raw materials for us to use as we will? If the entire cosmos
is held together instant by instant by the power of God’s Word (Col. 1:17; Heb. 1:3)
and if the creation is meant to be a means of God’s speaking to us (Romans 1:20;
Psalm 19; etc.), then we need to be very careful when we interpret the Bible’s words
about the trees clapping their hands as mere figurative speech (Isaiah 55:12). Scripture
is serious when it speaks of the morning stars singing together (Job 38:7) and of the
pastures and the valleys shouting for joy and also singing (Psalm 65:13). When Jesus was
awakened in the storm on the lake, he spoke to the wind and the waves and they obeyed!
There is a mysterious oneness about the entire web of creation. This is not New Age
thinking, for the New Age identifies God with the entirety of what exists. The Bible sees
God as transcendent in it, and that immanence of the living God we, in our modern
scientistic objectification of the creation, have lost.
Objectification went further. People became "things" to each other. The way was
opened for manipulation, brutal competition, domination, blame placing and deception
instead of loving and serving others. We have even reduced our "selves" to
things and we have supposed that we are not souls but merely streams of consciousness that
can be fulfilled by the accumulation of pleasures, possessions and power or prestige. The
final step has been to turn God into a thing to be denied, disregarded and, ultimately,
hated because He is bigger than we are. Tony Campolo has a powerful, and sometimes
brutally frank, tape on this whole topic. It is entitled "Rediscovering Our Humanity
in Jesus Christ," and is available from Youth Specialties, 1224 Greenfield Drive, El
Cajon, CA 92021. It is #14 from the 1983 National Youth Workers’ Convention.
The most somber significance of objectification begins to appear when we remember that
"objective facts" and "objective truth" are the very cornerstones of
Enlightenment thinking and of modern education. The scientific pursuit of information has
been, and continues to be a means of tremendous blessing form God, but when objectivity is
regarded as a good in itself it becomes a crushing idol. Tragically, as this process has
accelerated in recent centuries, the church has been silent, retreating into the
protection of the private sphere and leaving the public areas of research, education,
politics, economics, and communication to the domination of the great modern myth of
objectivity. Seldom in history have God’s professed people fail so flagrantly.
IDOLATRY AND ADDICTION
The breaking of the covenant left Adam and Eve and the race that flowed from them in a
miserably reduced condition. The imagined knowledge for which they reached had turned out
to be not only empty but also malignant. Disdaining to bear the image of God themselves,
they sought to find it in the creation over which they thought they were gaining
independent dominion. Since humans are incurably religious, this led directly to idolatry
and its crushing servitude. Idolatry remains one of the major problems of the twentieth
century church, though it is not widely recognized as such.
What Adam and Eve failed to recognize is that when the love we are meant to have for God,
a love which gives us true freedom, is replaced by a love for something created, the
created thing achieves over us a power which is humanly irresistible. This is what is
known today as addiction. It is seen in its most fearsome form in alcoholism and substance
abuse. Its five basic characteristics are tolerance, withdrawal symptoms, self-deception,
loss of will power, and distortion of attention. Tolerance means the need for more and
more of the addictive thing or behavior. Withdrawal symptoms are the distressing
experiences that occur when the supply of what we are addicted to is cut off.
Self-deception describes the mind tricks used to rationalize or deny addiction; the result
is that the addiction strengthens its hold. Loss of willpower depicts the condition of
being unable to do without the addiction, even while one insists that he or she can handle
it. Distortion of attention means that we are not free to love God because our attention
is captivated by our addiction. Gerald G. May, in his book Addiction and Grace
lists these qualities, and I am indebted to him for much of the material in this section.
It is easy to identify the characteristics of addiction in the alcoholic or the substance
abuser. May insists, however, that we are all addicted, even though our addictions do not
reveal themselves as flagrantly as they do in alcohol or drug dependency. The
characteristics are there, and they prevent us from loving God and our neighbor and thus
from fulfilling God’s will for us. They do this because they are a form of idolatry.
Something created has taken the place rightly reserved only for God (Romans 1:25), and the
consequence is that we are bound to the service of the idol we have chosen.
("Service" may be a more helpful way to identify modern idolatry than
"worship", cf. Joshua 24:14-15.) The possibilities for addictive attractions are
almost endless. May mentions, for example, three security addictions: "In our
culture, the three gods we trust for security are possessions, power and human
relationships. To a greater or lesser extent, all of us worship this false trinity"
(p. 32). The list goes on indefinitely. We can be addicted to work, to food, to sex, to
fantasies, to good housekeeping, even to our understanding of God. The Pharisees were
obviously addicted to theirs.
There is only one power in the world strong enough to break that of our addictions. We are
utterly helpless on our own to deal with them. The Apostle Paul describes this
helplessness graphically in Romans 7:18-25. The single power that can deal with addictions
is the grace of God. Yet God’s grace is something we cannot control, manage,
manipulate or hoard. If we try to stockpile it, it is like the manna in the wilderness
which, when kept overnight, bred worms and stank. We can only come in our helplessness to
receive it. And that is hard for us to do, but, in God’s great mercy, it is not
impossible. Our approach to God, as James Houston points out, must be from the point of
our weakness, not our strength.
THE SERIOUSNESS OF THE FALL
The breaking point of the covenant meant, as Walsh and Middleton point out in The
Transforming Vision, that humans now tried to find the image of God in the creation
instead of bearing it themselves. Whatever we are addicted to takes the place of God in
our lives, and so becomes the bearer of His image: This change is serious because it
poisons us in the entirety of our being. There is no aspect of our make up - mind, will,
emotion, heart, or whatever - that is not infected. This is really what the theological
doctrine of total depravity means. There is no solid ground of holiness within us to which
we can retreat in order to begin cleaning up the mess.
Furthermore, once we took the step, there was no way to undo it. Adam and Eve were like a
person walking along the top of a cliff. As long as the walker stays on top, all is well.
But once a single step is taken over the edge, there is no way to recall that step. The
fact that we who live in the twentieth century did not personally reach out to seize the
fruit in the Garden doesn’t really make any difference. We would have done no better
than Adam and Eve did had we been there. And we are now part of a covenant - breaking
race, tainted throughout our being and powerless to retrieve the original innocence.
It is not a pleasant picture. Whether we call it addiction, or idolatry, or sin, we are in
deep trouble. But the glorious good news is that God loves us in spite of our sin. His
grace is available, and it is possible for us to receive that grace even though doing so
may seem the greatest struggle we have ever been involved in. Subsequent articles will
detail the way in which God has made His grace available and the consequences of receiving
it. In the meanwhile there is a light at the end of the tunnel. The consequences of
covenant rejection are deep and powerful, but God’s grace is even more so.
Editor: Al Greene
Alta Vista College
Alta Vista
1719 NE 50th Street
Seattle, Washington 98105
Phone: (206) 524-2262
Fax: (206) 524-1837
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