When a few years ago I set out to read some of the great writers of the American West, I started with Wallace Stegner. It turned out to be a good choice. The first Stegner I read, Angle of Repose (1971), was a revelation. In the book, 1972 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Stegner adopts a novelistic strategy he uses to advantage in many of his novels: he tells two stories at once. One, the story of the narrator, is set in Stegner’s own time; the other, the story told by the narrator, is a story of the past that echoes still in the present. With this technique Stegner brings the present into conversation with the past. 

Lately, I have been reading what is perhaps the oddest of Stegner’s books, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954), a biography of John Wesley Powell and a history of the opening of the Colorado River basin to exploration and development. Stegner says at the beginning of the book that he is not interested in Powell as a personality, although Powell’s personality comes amply through, but what Powell did: his career as explorer, scientist, writer, and manager of efforts by the federal government to map the West. With all his skill as a novelist, Stegner immerses us in the perils and triumphs of Powell’s pioneering journey down the Colorado through uncharted waters. But he also, from the perspective of the 1950s, looks at what Powell and other explorers accomplished. And didn’t accomplish—more on that later.

One of the singular virtues of Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is that it gives Stegner opportunity to reflect at length on the way the plateau country of the West required its early explorers to change the way they saw things. At first, they not only failed to understand the landscape; they didn’t entirely see it. Their eyes needed retraining to see not only the beauties and wonders of this desert landscape, so different from the landscape from which they came in the East and Midwest, but to see what was going on in that landscape—the processes that formed these mighty rivers and deep canyons. 

One particular paradigm shift came when Powell began to understand that in the formation of the landscape of the Southwest, it’s often the mountains and not the rivers that are in geological time the more recent. Stegner observes:

[Powell] had to conclude that these rivers [the Yampa, the Green, and the Escalante] . . . were older than the mountains. . .. Out of that simple observation arose a whole complex of ideas: that mountains were relatively ephemeral earth features, that nature abhorred an elevation almost as fiercely as it was said to abhor a vacuum, and persistently cut it down and carried it away; that in this case at least, and probably in most, earth movements were slow, not catastrophic as . . . some . . . geologists [then] held. (128)

From these observations and others Powell shaped a new science of physiography—the study of how the landscape has come to take the shape it has.

To see the world new is the goal of science. Powell perhaps more than many of his contemporaries had the capacity to see what had long been missed, to see, in Stegner’s example, that in some cases rivers were older than mountains. It was not the rivers cutting down that created canyons but mountains rising up. Call it the rivers and mountains principle: sometimes things are just the opposite of what we have long thought.

Powell’s observations about the landscape of the Colorado basin were only a small part of a 19th century revolution in how the story of the earth and its inhabitants would be told from then on. It wasn’t just rivers and mountains; it was the idea that the earth—no, not just the earth but the universe—is in process, always changing. Mountains come and go and will perhaps come again. Rivers run their courses, sometimes cutting the same path for millennia and sometimes changing and shifting into new paths. The earth is forever being shaped and formed; it’s always in process. There is no earth paradigm. No way that earth was once and should be still.

And this is true not only of earth but of earth’s inhabitants, including us. Charles Darwin and others in this same 19th century time began to describe the processes that brought about life on earth and the development of life into new shapes and forms, from molecules to bacteria to plants and animals and us. Again, these processes are not done. The forest we walk through today is not the same forest as the forest that the first humans walked through. Nor are the humans who walk the forest today the same creatures as were those first humans. In evolutionary terms, there is no single human paradigm. No way that humans once were and should still be.

Perhaps now you see where this is going. It’s rivers and mountains all over again, only this time what needs to be seen in a new way is the direction of human history. For generations people have told the human story as a story of devolution, a running down. Human history began, so goes this version of the story, with humans as paradigm: a woman and a man who for a brief moment were exactly what humans ought to be. But then these two ancestors of the human race disobeyed, fell, and since then humans have not measured up to the paradigm.

This is still the story that is still told in many theology classes, even in seminaries. It is still the story that is assumed on Sunday morning. But something has happened to this story. It may be the story we tell in church, but it’s no longer the story that we tell from Monday through Saturday. It’s not the story we tell in our science labs. It’s not the story we tell in our educational institutions. It’s no longer the official story even in popular culture. When the Smithsonian, to use an example, tells the story of the human race, the story it tells is not the Eden story but the story of evolutionary and cultural change (Smithsonian).

Perhaps we could live with these two stories, one for Sunday and the other for our workdays, but these two tellings of the story of the earth and human life on earth have quite different consequences. They lead in different directions. Take two of these consequences for how we tell the story. The two are interrelated. The one has to do with aspiration: to what should humans aspire? The other has to do with human evil: what has gone wrong?

I’ll have to be brief here, briefer than I would like to be. Take the question of aspiration: to what should humans aspire? If you tell the story the way it often has been told as a story of humans who were originally “good,” without flaw, then the goal of human life is to get back to the garden or, at least, as close to the garden as we can get given what has happened in human culture. Our imagined picture of life in the garden becomes the paradigm for life today. So, to take one example, when the CRC human sexuality study committee wanted to define human sexuality the way it ought to be, they went immediately to Eden, to the man and the woman in the garden, and they declared that this and this only is how it ought to be. Humans were in their view created for heterosexual monogamy. Any departure from that paradigm is, they allege, a departure from what humans were created to be. 

But if we tell not the Sunday story but the Monday through Saturday story as it’s told in our culture, then we have quite a different picture of human development. Human life didn’t begin with a paradigmatic pair but developments from an ancestor we share with chimpanzees and bonobos. (Bonobos, interestingly enough, sometimes engage in homosexuality.) In the course of that development, we—humans—notably developed the capacity to think and plan and dream in new ways, ways that opened up not only immediate experience but the future. We woke up, we might say, to a sort of divine knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil, possibility and peril. Aspiration in this telling of the story is not a matter of going back but a matter of going forward, a matter of grasping what the future has for us. God in this telling does not so much push the human race into existence as summon it into full human life.

I’ll leave this difference of aspiration in that quite unsatisfying place to move to a second, related consequence for how one tells the story. And with this consequence, we will briefly circle back to the story Wallace Stegner tells in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. The consequence is one’s view of human evil.

In the older telling of the story, evil is the consequence of a single disobedient act in Eden. In ways that have never been quite clear to me, that act not only dooms the human race to multiplying evil consequences but the earth itself. Humans now lack the capacity for good. Evil proliferates and will do so until it goes smash in the end.

This view has the consequence of seeing evil mostly in terms of personal disobedience. “Sin” is the preferred word here, where sin is taken as disobedience to God’s law. One can see how this view of evil tends toward a view of human life that focuses on personal right and wrong, whether one is a good or bad person. Most of us grew up with this way of thinking.

But this view of evil fails to take account of most of what has gone seriously wrong in human history. Allow me a single example for what could be amplified at great length: global warming. Global warming is a present and powerful threat to human life as we know it. And not just human life, but much of life on the planet. But global warming cannot be addressed in terms of individual actions. 

Like most of you, I try to act responsibly in how I live. I drive a hybrid car. I recycle. I have solar panels on my roof. But my actions have only the smallest consequences for climate change. I still live in the rich American culture, and I benefit from all the advantages of overconsumption. The problem is larger and deeper and more lethal than my individual choices can address. Evil in this sense is not so much personal as systemic.

It’s this larger sense of evil as something that we don’t so much choose as stumble into that the traditional telling of the Eden story has a hard time accounting for. The other way of telling the story—what I have called the Monday through Saturday story—has more promise in this regard. The story told by human evolution is that we have developed powers—magic powers, as it were—that are far too powerful for us. We stumble ahead without knowing what the consequences will be until it’s late, very late, perhaps too late. At first we see only the promise of the next new shiny thing, as we did with the automobile; only later do we see the peril of what we have created.

Again, I’ll leave it there, with much more to be said. We have one more question to face before bringing this to a conclusion. The question is about the story that grounds the story we tell in church on Sunday, the Eden story in Genesis 2-3 (don’t forget chapter 4). We often frame the issue in terms of the Bible and science: doesn’t the Bible demand that we tell the story in the way we have always told it: a story of the fall of the human race, a story quite at odds with the way science tells the story?

My straightforward answer to that last question is no. The story the Bible tells in Genesis 2-3 is not the story we have been telling in churches. At least, not in any simple sense. The story that the Bible tells in Genesis is much more like the story that science tells. It’s a story that has been borrowed from Mesopotamian antiquity, a story about what it means to be human. To be human, the story tells us, is to choose knowledge—the knowledge of good and evil—even when that knowledge is something we cannot entirely control. 

Which brings us back to Wallace Stegner and the “opening of the West,” as he puts it. In his book, Stegner spends a good deal of time talking about how the early explorers had to learn to see the West. The colors and shapes of the landscape were so different from those with which they had grown up that initially they failed to see it for what it was. Powell and others helped the country to see the West as it is, not as they thought it should be. And Stegner, in his turn, helps us to see Powell and his contemporaries for what they were and what they contributed to our understanding of the West. But, reading this early Stegner today, what one notices is not just what Stegner himself sees but what he too often misses. What he misses is a sufficient appreciation for what has been lost, for what was being lost even as Powell and his explorers made their perilous way down the Colorado River. As they plunged headlong into the ravine of the Grand Canyon, they (and Stegner with them) failed to see native cultures about to be displaced, plants and animal species that would not survive, rivers that would be dammed, a landscape that would be forever changed by its encounter with European culture. We are the perpetual bull rummaging around among the fragile china of the world we have inherited. We have the power but not the wisdom for the power we possess.

So why do we continue on Sundays in our churches to reflect on the Eden story as it has been long been interpreted and not on the story we know to be true, the story that science tells and that the Eden story, read properly, reflects on in its own singular fashion? Why do we consider sin in terms of personal disobedience but not sin and evil in terms of the massive overreach of the human race? Why do we aspire to go back to a mythical past rather than embrace the future that faces us and summons us? Why do favor a creation-order reading of Genesis rather than an eschatological reading of that important material? 

Perhaps it’s rivers and mountains. We thought so long that the mountains were original and the rivers late that we failed to see, as John Wesley Powell did, that one cannot explain the landscape in that way. Sometimes it’s the mountains that are ephemeral and the rivers that are ancient. Sometimes one has to see things differently to see them at all. We have so long read Genesis as if it’s an enemy of modern science that we can longer read it at all. We no longer see the text for what is. What we see instead is what we think the text should say.

If only we were to begin to think again theologically, to consider anew what we are seeing, we would find the Bible and science both illuminating for life in our own time. In doing so, in seeing the peril and promise of human life differently, we will not lose our faith. The gospel will not be lost. But we will see what lies all around us in ways that we had not seen it before. And seeing is the beginning of wisdom.

Clay