Affirming Our Freedom in God

Genesis also includes the story of Abraham, the father of all three theistic faiths. Through Abraham, the revelation of the one transcendent God becoming intimate with the human community represents a giant step out of polytheism and idolatry. The truth about God as both sovereign and solicitous is celebrated in this Sacred Book.

Today, creationists and evolutionists fight about the meaning of origins in Genesis. They quarrel over the manner in which the cosmos was formed and how human beings entered space and time. Creationists often tend to be too narrowly focused. They may take, as absolutely literal, phrases that common sense qualifies. Evolutionists are inclined to dismiss as virtually meaningless the classic descriptions of creation in six days, and of the creation of man from the earth and woman from a rib. By overlooking the depth of the symbolism involved, both sides exhibit a tendency to squander the revelation.

Including both literal and symbolic meaning, the Sacred Scriptures reveal...from the Heart of God...superabundant truths. And their meaning addresses not only our conscious minds, but also the depths of our spiritual unconscious. We cannot exhaust the riches of the revelation. We can only hope to deepen and develop our understanding.

On its surface, of course, Genesis can raise more questions than it answers. Yet these inquiries help to unpack the density, unfold the richness, and explore the depths of Divine Revelation.

The following are some possible questions that can be asked with reverence and explored through faith and reason working together.

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If the world was created perfect by an infinitely Perfect Being, what is a tree of knowledge of good and evil doing in the middle of Paradise? And if Eden was perfect, what was a diabolical, slithering serpent doing there?

If Adam was perfect, why was he lonely, as Genesis says he was? If both Adam and Eve were perfect creatures of God, how could they submit to the serpent without raising a single question?

If Adam and Eve had never sinned, would any of their children have done so and passed on the sin to their own children? If so, how could both sinful and sinless descendants inhabit the same world through inter-marriage?

Was the sin of Adam and Eve inevitable? After all, Yahweh God told Adam, "The day you eat of it (the forbidden fruit) you shall surely die." Apparently God knew the result of the "test." Was the temptation real, or was its result a foregone conclusion?

If God eventually commanded Adam and Eve to increase and multiply and fill the earth, why were no children born in Eden? And then, once driven from the Garden, how could a single first family develop without incestuous relations?

If the Book of Genesis includes the story of creation, where is the creation of the angels? Is there an untold story here? If so, what are some of the implications?

Perhaps creation is basically person-to-person, and only secondarily cosmological. The basically personal (person-all) story might be left untold. This seems to be a very noticeable and intriguing possibility.

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According to the surface story of Genesis, Adam and Eve lived in a beautiful Garden called Eden. They seemed to be doing well until they were confronted by a serpent, a tempter who deceived them. They fell for the ploy about how they could "better" themselves, even so as to become rivals to God in knowledge and wisdom.

Apparently, Eden was not...even from the beginning...all sweetness and light. First of all, in the very middle of the Garden was something that combined good with evil. Adam and Eve had been warned to stay away.

But why was evil there at all? Why was there something so imperfect in a supposedly perfect place? Why was there any tree whose fruit could be harmful to the first man and woman? Why were they not ecstatically happy and fulfilled by their existence such that they would not give a talking reptile the time of day? If they were really committed lovers of God, could they even be tempted, let alone succumb?

Though they were created sinless and perfect, the first man and woman, as portrayed in Eden, were too vulnerable to be perfect. They were in the presence of too much evil (including especially the tree and the serpent) to be in a perfect place. Is this a contradiction? No. It is a paradox that could lead us into another dimension of the truth, if we would follow its lead.

From the beginning, the six days of creation are permeated by the Spirit of God saying of various creatures, "Let them be." This command is done fully in the context of a process of things coming to be, but it might also suggest that the ultimate origin of these creatures...in a different dimension of being...is an immediate act of creation.

Also, in the depth of the revelation, we sense that Adam and Eve were created perfect. Yet, they appear to be literally in the presence of evil and vulnerable to it. At least two levels of meaning, enmeshed in each other, are calling for distinction and clarification.

Quite obviously, an important part of the creation story is missing. Below the surface we might begin to surmise the part of the story where human persons were created perfect in an interpersonal world: where God simply created persons, without any presence of evil, and the cosmic world of good and evil did not exist.

The present physical world of space and time, though very good, is structurally imperfect. Stars explode, black holes swallow the debris, meteorites pound the planets, animals stalk, prowl, pounce, and devour each other. How could a man and woman cause all of this imperfection by eating fruit from a tree? Something else happened to cause this good, but fallen, material universe even to exist. Something unfortunate transpired in the non-cosmic world, the world of persons only.

On the face of Genesis, human life began in a good, yet defective, universe. But according to the deeper implication of Genesis we fell from a perfectly interpersonal world into an imperfect one where good and evil combine, where animals eat each other, where tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes are natural, and where temptation threatens. Even now, we are not ultimately destined for this imperfect world, the cosmos. We are moving out of here toward the interpersonal world where we inherently belong, and where we belonged from the beginning of beginnings.