The Draft articulates a highly traditional Calvinist view of humanity summed up in a sentence in section III, "Essentials of the Reformed Tradition," in the chapter of essential tenets, which reads, "Since the fall our natural tendency is to abuse and exploit the creation, preferring evil to goodness." "The fall," of course, refers to one interpretation of the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis where God creates the world good but Adam and Eve decide to ignore God's commands, eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good & evil, and get themselves thrown out of the Garden of Eden. The Draft goes on to observe that, "Since the fall, our natural tendency is to engage in relationships of tyranny and injustice with one another, in which power is used not to protect and serve but to demean." And, finally, "Since the fall, our natural tendency is to hate God and our neighbor, to worship idols of our own devising rather than the one true God."
OK. One can hardly deny that humanity is seriously deficient in all of the ways described. We exploit and abuse the natural world. We often choose evil over good. We are tyrannical and habitually visit injustice on each other. We misuse power with sometimes tragic and catastrophic consequences. We also habitually worship the creations of our own minds, which we sometimes shape into physical idols and always express as ideologies and ideological theologies. Guilty as charged, beyond any question.
But, there are some other points to be made:
First, in his outstanding commentary on the Book of Genesis (John Knox Press, 1982), Walter Brueggemann contends that later interpretations of the Genesis stories misinterpret their original intent, which was not to describe a fundamental change in human nature from purely good as created to purely evil. In general, he argues the Old Testament does not take such a pessimistic view of humanity although some of the prophetic books do lean in that direction (pp. 41ff). The point is not that Brueggemann is necessarily correct on this point so much as that the Genesis stories can be read in other ways—and we should at least give consideration to the views of Brueggemann, arguably America's leading Old Testament scholar and a man deeply committed to the Christian faith.
Second, it is simply not true that humanity only behaves in the ways described above. Knowing full well my own frailties and failings, I know that I do not prefer evil to goodness. I get confused on things and sometimes have a dickens of a time figuring out what is best, but I do not prefer evil over goodness. Not one person in the community of faith it is my privilege to serve as teaching elder and pastor prefers evil to goodness. The same is true of every church that I have ever been associated with. For 11 years, I lived in a largely Buddhist rural community in Thailand, and there is no one in that community that I know of who prefers evil over goodness. This is not to deny for a minute that there are people who do prefer evil—although most of them probably don't think of the evil they prefer as evil. It is simply not true, however, that the human race collectively prefers evil. Bashar al-Assad apparently is a man who prefers evil and visits evil daily on the people of Syria. But the people of Syria don't prefer evil, indeed, many of them are taking serious personal risks for freedom and justice.
Yes, the human race is busted, broken, and ill-formed. But we do not collectively prefer evil. Actually, it makes more sense in the early 21st century to think in evolutionary terms. God, the author of the universe, as best as we can tell uses evolutionary processes to create. God thus has been creating the human race for tens of millions of years and our creation goes on today. The way God does this evidently is through a mixture of natural evolutionary processes shepherded by the underlying presence of God's Spirit prodding us forward to a destination we cannot yet see but might call the Kingdom of God. So, it's not so much that we are broken as that we are still only half-formed. But God is not done with us as God's incarnate presence in Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, indicates. There was never a fall in any objective sense, and Eden does not lie behind us in the past but out there ahead of us in the future.
Therefore, third, I would suggest one "minor" change in the wording of the Draft and that is to drop the world "natural" from the phrase, "since the fall, it is our
More to follow in the next posting.
