The garden is a place of God’s abundant providence and blessing. Everything is gift and cause for wonder and celebration. Everything is permitted and a source of ongoing delight and pleasure. But there are always boundaries, and the garden is bounded by one prohibition. he story does not explain the prohibition for the prohibition in and of itself is unimportant. What is important is the authority of the one who speaks and the expectation of an absolute obedience that is born of trust. This is God’s world and we live in it on God’s terms.
The conversation that comes later between the woman and the serpent is fascinating. The prohibition is interrogated and challenged, and what is a given is reduced to an option. In the process, what was boundary becomes threat, promise is obscured, and what was trust becomes defiance.In his commentary on Genesis, Walter Brueggemann rather scathingly says, ‘Theological-ethical talk here is not to serve God, but to avoid the claims of God. ”¦ The serpent is the first in the Bible to seem knowing and critical about God and to practice theology in the place of obedience’.
I wonder how often we ‘practice theology in the place of obedience,’ how often we use it to avoid the claims of God on our life? In the garden when the prohibition is violated, the promises are perverted and vocation is undermined. The energy once spent in ’tilling and tending’ God’s creation is now focussed entirely on the self and its new-found freedom that is not freedom but bondage.
Vocation, promise, prohibition are three strands of human life lived in God’s world on God’s terms, interdependent facets of divine purpose. Prayerfully they must woven into a threefold cord that is not easily broken and that can sustain us in our ministry. All life is vocation.
May the three-fold chord of your life be renewed this Advent and Christmas
Read it all. (Hat tip jdk)
I have often said that the first 3 chapters of Genesis are the most important in Scripture. God creates a good world, we rebel and mess it up and we, and the whole world, suffer the consequences. The rest of the Bible is the story of how God acts to repair the damage that we caused, both to ourselves and all of creation.
The fundamentals of the Judeo-Christian worldview are set up here. And many of the discussion here are between those who hold to this worldview and those who do not.
Totally agree, Br Michael.
But I think this piece makes a false distinction between “theology” and “obedience”. The serpent wasn’t just using theology, he was using BAD theology. Adam and Eve did not counter with GOOD theology, which results in obedience, but fell for the lie.
It really drives me crazy when the implication is made that somehow “theology” is merely an esoteric, intellectual exercise, divorced from the everyday life of faith.That’s rubbish. We are all theologians. What we believe about God (our theology) shapes our attitudes and actions. TEC has been able to do what it has done partially because it has spun the line that doctrine – formalised theology – is unimportant compared to a whole raft of other stuff (unity, inclusivity, compassion etc etc etc). Having cheapened theology, it has been able to feed very very bad theology to its members and people can no longer tell the difference.
Creation from chaos by the laws of chance will not work here. It is a different world view which leads to different results. If there is no creator, even by evolution, there is no higher power, not standards by which we are to live and no hope. The is basic to the lure of the present age. Hurray for Hollywood and TEC.
Y’all probably wouldn’t care for this.