"The Fall" (Genesis 3)

This story is so renowned that I do not need to go into details. The man and woman - Eve is not named yet - live in peace and serenity at one with God in the Garden of Eden. They are naked before God and feel no shame about it. God has given one command – not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, we might call it the Good and Evil Known Tree. The Tree of Life – the Life Tree – on the other hand, is free for their taking. A serpent enters the Garden of Eden. He talks to the woman. The man is with her and clearly hears what’s happening.  The serpent tempts them to ignore God and eat fruit from the Good and Evil Known Tree. She eats that bitter fruit first, then hands it to Adam who eats it as well. Upon eating that fruit, their eyes are opened and they immediately realize they are naked and immediately feel ashamed. God curses them man and woman with labor, with pain, with division in relationships, etc. God also curses the ground, making it hard to farm. The last and most significant of consequence is death. The man and woman, and the whole human lineage, no longer have unmediated access to the Life tree. They will live now only to eventually die later. They must live east of Eden where physical death is an inescapable reality for all.

The first thing I’d like to say is this: the Adam and Eve story is, in literary terms alone, a masterpiece of ancient literature. It’s rich with imagery, structure, metaphor, and plot twists. Outside the theological importance of the story, we ought to appreciate its gifts as great literature.

That said, it is a theological story, one of the earliest. And so we need to look at the theology expressed by the text. That’s just what I’ll be doing.

I’d like to approach the story by separating things into two categories. The first category I will call Life. The other category I will call Knowledge of Good and Evil.

In the Life category, we have one God, Elohim, who is a unity of a plurality of - according to Christians - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We also have one couple, a united relationship of the man and woman. They live in union in one, harmonious garden, Eden. We have life and life alone. Everything in the Life category is marked by connectedness and harmony. There is no shame, only contentedness.

Everything is marked by chaos and discord in the Knowledge of Good and Evil category. There is shame as opposed to contentedness. There is death as opposed to life. There is division as opposed to union. There is disharmony as opposed to harmony. There is distance instead of relationship.

The serpent presents the man and woman with the option of choosing another path. Before the serpent and the choice, they were otherwise content. Their world was perfect. They perfectly partook of Life. Given the option of giving up contentedness for something “more,” something different, something other than the way they’ve been taking, they chose another way.

That the other path is marked by partaking of the knowledge of Good and Evil tells us something profound. Let’s meditate a bit on that forbidden tree.

We should note that it is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. There’s something not advisable about this kind of knowledge. 

Well, we know the eventual consequences of partaking of this tree.  Partaking of the knowledge of good and evil tree leads to death.

What about such knowledge leads to death?

We can assume that what makes the fruit from this tree a bad choice is the “and evil” part of it, not the good part of it. If it was only knowledge of the good, the consequences wouldn’t be so dire. Add "and evil" to the good, and things get dire. Deadly, even.

The knowledge of evil leads to choosing it as opposed to the good.

Here’s something else to consider. Good is presumed in the Tree of Life. When it comes to creation, life is the ultimate good. If we choose the way of life and partake of the tree of life alone, we cannot help but live the good life.

Evil and death go together. Choosing something other than life, the ultimate good, means choosing death and by extension evil.

It is no wonder that the Adam and Eve fall story is followed almost directly by the Cain and Abel story where the ultimate – and first – sin of killing life enters the world.

But why is God so leery of the man and woman coming to know about good and evil, especially evil?

What follows the knowledge of good and evil is the ability to play one against the other. "Good and evil" quickly becomes good versus evil. 

Add a versus into things and you soon have winners and losers. And sometimes, many times, in fact, evil wins.

This power of evil to win and good to lose, this is a power humans aren’t built for. For humans, created by God as the ultimate good, but less than the ultimate good, evil is a possibility in the human use of power. Put evil in the hands of power and we have a recipe for disaster, possibly on a global scale. Hence, God wanted to keep humans from walking that path to its sordid end.

 

One last thing that cannot be ignored when talking about this story. What is it a Fall? Does the story give credence to the Christian notion of The Fall? How about Original Sin?

I won’t say a lot about this. I will say that Judaism, the faith that first internalized this narrative, doesn’t see any kind of universal fall or change in the essence of humanity. They see the narrative as a morality tale that points to the unforeseen consequences of disobeying God. It is the Christian faith that gives a cosmic reading of the text.

Christianity, however, offers diverse readings of the story. Protestants and Western Catholics - Western Christianity - asserts that there was a cosmic fall and that human beings were most directly affected. Or should we say infected? 

The Western Christian idea is that Adam and Eve’s sin guilt is passed down from generation to generation, all the way down to each one of us. We are born as guilty as Adam and Eve were. And we face the same consequences for it. The wages of Adam and Eve’s sin – the original sin – was death for them and it is death for all of us.

Eastern Christianity splits the difference between Judaism and Western Christianity. It does see a cosmic fall in the Adam and Eve narrative. But the fall is not so drastic. The Eastern church does not assert the original sin idea. We don’t inherit a sinful nature and sin guilt from Adam and Eve’s sin. We inherit the predisposition to sin.  

I use the analogy of alcoholism versus cancer. The Western church sees Adam and Eve’s fall as leading to a genetic disease like a cancer that is passed down without fail to each of Adam and Eve’s children (all of us). The disease is deadly and needs the cure of Christ.

The Eastern church sees Adam and Eve’s fall as more like alcoholism. If my father and grandfathers were alcoholics, the propensity for me to become an alcoholic is strong. I have a genetic predisposition to become an alcoholic. So, I must be extra careful.

Now, we shouldn’t underestimate the genetic predisposition. Alcoholism can kill. Similarly, the predisposition to sin most certainly leads to sin, and the consequences are dire. The wages of sin is still death!

As mentioned, where both Eastern and Western Christianity agree is that something humungous shifted with Adam and Eve’s bad choice. I like to use the language of Star Wars. With Adam and Eve’s silly decision, the Force, for the first time, was pushed off balance. Before this, the Force was by nature balanced, directly linked to only to the Light. With Adam and Eve, that direct link was severed. And now, the Force is by nature easily disturbed, easily influenced by the dark side.

To create balance in the Force, Christ enters. Christ links us back to the Light so balance is restored. This restoration of balance happens on an individual and group basis now. But in the “end times,” that restoration of balance will happen on a cosmic level, reversing Adam and Eve’s cosmic disturbance for good. Eden will be restored and the Tree of Life will be the only one remaining.