How Theology Reduces Us to Children

A couple of posts back (available here), I reflected on biblical views of evil—evil as the coming apart of things. I mentioned in that essay that the T of Tulip (total depravity) in Reformed theology has a way of letting us off the hook. We need not, in fact in terms of this theology, cannot, take full responsibility for our actions. After all, we are depraved, thoroughly, if not totally, and we live among a depraved people (to misquote Isaiah). By these lights, the world is a sad place but not our problem. We can only wait for the coming of the eschaton, for God to fix it. In the meantime, we do the best we can, so long as it doesn’t greatly inconvenience us. It’s the ethos of what I once called “pretty good Christians.” Me, first among them.

In thinking more about this, I’ve come to see that total depravity is part of a larger pattern in theology, a pattern that minimizes human responsibility, and that by doing so, it infantilizes the human race. We style ourselves God’s little children, up to no good perhaps, but children, nevertheless. We find this pattern of infantilization in conventional (especially evangelical) notions about grace, faith, the future of the earth, the Christian life, and more, but for the purposes of this essay, I’ll limit myself to just one example of theological infantilization, an example that includes both Eden and Christmas.

The infantilization of the human race can be said to begin with the biblical Eden story. Not the story itself but the way the story is read. In the reading we learned in Sunday School (and, for that matter, in seminary), Adam and Eve, the innocent and childlike first humans, are presented with a divine test of their obedience. The Lord God declares to them: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die” (Genesis 2:16-17; NRSVue).  What’s required in this reading of the story is obedience. Take, for example, Louis Berkhof in his Systematic Theology:

. . . the command given by God not to eat of the fruit of the tree simply served the purpose of testing the obedience of man. It was a test of pure obedience, since God did not in any way seek to justify or to explain the prohibition. Adam had to show his willingness to submit his will to the will of his God with implicit obedience. (Systematic Theology, Kindle Edition, p. 181)

“Pure obedience,” Berkhof calls it, by which he means blind obedience. Obedience with no reason given, which in the way of thinking implicit in Berkhof’s comment, ennobles it. Or would have, had Adam and Eve obeyed. The idea is: don’t ask questions. Just obey.

In this reading God comes off as an arbitrary parent, and the human couple, as children. The rule makes no practical sense. You want to ask the God of the story: if you don’t want them to eat of the tree, why put it in the center of the garden? And why are you surprised when they do eat of it? Like children everywhere, they are going to test the rule. And why the rule in the first place? To which, in this reading, God replies with the last resort of every parent: Because I said so. 

The arbitrariness of the command is important. It tends to reappear later when those who advocate for this reading of the story want to defend other, seemingly arbitrary, rules. Rules like the long-standing prohibition against women holding church office, for example. In the debates over women in office years ago, as I witnessed them, someone would inevitably ask: So, why? Why are women not permitted to preach and lead? Sometimes, a made-up reason would be given: because women are not suited for leadership. Such reasons themselves seem arbitrary. But more often the reply would be, “Because God said so.” End of argument. Pure obedience has its uses in defending the patriarchal order.

The idea that God’s will requires no explanation, no grounding in anything except it being God’s command, effectively infantilizes the relationship between God (or, rather, those who claim to represent God) and us. To take one more church example, in the debate over human sexuality as played out in the Christian Reformed Church, one might have expected the long study report submitted to the synod to have engaged the rich cultural conversation about consent: who can and who cannot give consent in sexual matters. There is broad agreement in the culture that the concept of consent is important, if complicated, and should be included in any serious discussion of sexual ethics. But the study report and the subsequent discussions in the synodical meetings almost entirely ignored the concept of consent. Why? Because in the view of the report writers and many synodical delegates, sexual ethics is not a matter of discussion, cultural or otherwise; it’s a matter of obedience. God—through the priestly writers of Leviticus and the Apostle Paul—has declared God’s implacable opposition to sexual relations between members of the same sex. Case closed. No explanation necessary. Pure obedience is all that is required. We are back in the garden with the Lord God saying, “Don’t eat of that tree.”

As I said, this stance effectively infantilizes the human race—the rest of us who would like to know why this rule and not another. We are told, don’t try to figure these things out. That’s not for you. For you, what’s required is obedience. The disdain for the culture that comes through these study reports and synodical proceedings has about it more than a whiff of infantilization. It says that the people discussing matters like consent and gender and marriage are not to be taken seriously. They—the report writers and current leaders of the denomination—are the adults in the room. They know what God wants.

But they don’t. Not really. Let’s go back to Eden, to the story. The story is not about Berkhof’s “pure obedience.” It’s much more interesting than that. The story is about what it means to be human—the peril and promise of human existence. (And about what it means to be divine, but that will have to wait another time.)

So who are we? As every good creation story knows, we humans are two things. We are dirt, and, as the story tells us and we know well, in the end it’s to the dirt that we return (Genesis 3:19). Like other animals we are time-bound, contingent, mortal: dirt. Earth is where we belong.

And yet we don’t, entirely. We don’t belong. The story captures a bit of this in the episode of the naming of the animals. Realizing that his newly formed humans need companionship, the Lord God creates animals. Like humans, they too are “living beings,” the Hebrew phrase that the King James translates “living soul” the first time it appears, in reference to humans, and “living creature” the second time, when it appears in reference to the animals. The KJV translation (intentionally) obscures the point: we and the animals are the same sort of thing, living beings. Sentient beings, perhaps. We share DNA. We share evolutionary features like eyes and ears and brains. We share lives together. Even so, the divine experiment doesn’t work out. Instead of living among the animals, as other animals do, the first human names them. Naming is something the other animals don’t do. To name something is to categorize it, frame it; it’s a gesture of control. It’s part of how we don’t belong. We are animals and we are not.

The Eden story comes at the question of what distinguishes us from the animals in terms of a choice: life or knowledge. Life must be taken in the terms of the story. It’s not that the first human couple are immortal, at least not initially. It’s that mortality has no meaning for them. Mortality has not entered their world, their consciousness. In this sense, they are like children. Or like animals. They don’t know good and evil. The Hebrew doesn’t have in mind by that phrase, not primarily, moral good and moral evil, but something closer to prosperity and calamity. They don’t know prosperity because they don’t know calamity. 

They live the only life they know until the snake slithers in. The snake, “the cleverest animal” of them all, according to Genesis 3:1, says to them (in the story, to Eve, with Adam in listening distance) that there’s more. Eat the fruit, and “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God [or the gods], knowing good and evil.” It’s this knowing, already hinted at in the naming of the animals, that characterizes human beings

And what is this knowing? To explore that question in any depth would take us too far afield, but on even the most cursory reading of the story, it seems to involve consciousness of ourselves as individuals, and with that consciousness, awareness of time, and with awareness of time, consciousness of our mortality. More than that, but it’s enough for now.

It’s this knowledge that Eve chooses—without perhaps fully understanding what she is choosing, but that’s just the way it would have happened in our evolutionary history, is it not? How did we become the sort of self-reflective, culture-forming animals that we are? How did we come to stand out in the world of nature? By in each case choosing that new kind of knowing. Faced with the choice of knowing or not knowing, everyone of us would choose knowing. In fact, faced with that choice as we grow up, we do choose as did Eve to step from innocence into knowing. We play out the Eden choice every day, and every one of us chooses the same way. We choose to know.

In this way in the story, the first human couple and we with them step into human life. We know no other way to be human. To live, even if forever, without knowing good and evil would be to step into some form of animal consciousness, to step out of time and into the boundless present. It would be to give up what we are as self-reflective, culture-forming creatures. None of us would wish to live with that. The other alternative, to have both knowledge and everlasting life would be to step into the divine world. But were our days not numbered, would we be the same? Would our lives mean the same thing? Isn’t to be bounded at the heart of being human?

It’s these sorts of questions that are at the center of the story. And these questions to which Christmas provides a surprising answer, as if Christmas were answering Eden. The snake offered Eve divinity: eat the fruit, and you will be like God [or the gods]. The dream of divinity has not died, post-Eden. The popular conception of heaven is the same dream: someday we will be immortal. One day we will escape time. But this is not the gospel answer to the Eden questions.

The gospel answer comes in the form of Christmas—incarnation. The answer to the Eden puzzle is not divinization, apotheosis, as the Gnostics thought. It’s not escaping the surly bonds of earth, as the popular sentiment has it. It’s the descent of God. This idea presents all sorts of intellectual challenges, as the early church knew, but as it’s worked out in the New Testament and later, it comes to this: that Christ presents us with a new, post-Eden, model for what it means to be human. 

The model is inherently relational. Jesus himself models, no, more than models this new humanity. He incarnates it, constitutes it. He faces, as it were, in two directions. Facing earth, he belongs fully to earth, to human life as we know it. We know him in this way as teacher and Lord. Facing heaven, he belongs fully to the divine world. We know him as Son of God, Word (logos), eternally begotten of the Father. In this way, he brings earth into relationship with divinity. We through Christ are brought into the divine life.

A favorite text of mine in this regard is John 14:23, where Jesus—the Jesus of John’s gospel—picks up a word used only once before in the gospel, the word monē in Greek, which means an “abiding place.” It comes the first time at the beginning of the chapter, when Jesus says that in his Father’s house are many abiding places, monai (John 14:2). But in verse 23, he reverses the image. Now it’s not God providing an abiding place for us, but we who provide an abiding place for God, both Father and Son.

If anyone loves me, they will keep my logos, and my father will love them and come to them, and we will make our abiding place with them. (My translation)

This verse needs more commentary than I can provide in this essay, but pause for a moment on the word I left untranslated, logos, usually translated “word.” The gospel of John has an elevated sense of the divine word, famously beginning the gospel with an echo of Genesis 1:1:

In the beginning was the word [logos],

and the word was at God’s side,

and the word was God.

This echoes as well Proverbs 8, where instead of the Greek logos, we have the Hebrew ḥokmâ. Ḥokmâ, like logos, is not just “word” but “order”—the way things hang together—in this case, an order waiting to be born, a way of being waiting for its time, and now dawning in the coming of Christ. In our verse, John 14:23, we are called to identify with this order, to become part of it, to step into it, as it were: “If you love me, you will keep my logos. . ..” 

In this way, Jesus brings us into divinity—into the trinitarian relationship of Father and Son—not by abandoning our humanity but by embracing it. This is the most important point of the Christmas message. Earth is not abandoned. Any gospel that abandons the earth and, with it, our humanity, is not the Christian gospel. God embraces humanity: us, flesh and blood, timebound, and mortal. Just as the divinity of Jesus does not in any way compromise his humanity, so our invitation into divinity does not leave behind our humanity. Key in this is resurrection. Once having stepped into this relationship, this participation in the divine life, God will not let us go, as he did not let Jesus go.

These are not new insights, lest you think I’m making it up as I go. We find these thoughts already in Irenaeus, the late 2^nd century bishop of Lyon. Irenaeus thought that humans needed growing up. In stepping into this new way of being in and through Christ, we step in the direction of maturity, becoming what we were created to be.

Which brings me back to where I began, to the theological infantilization of the human race. If, in the terms I’ve laid out above, we step into the divine life, we become with God participants in the creation of the new order, the new creation.

Imagine what this might mean. Instead of insisting that humans remain bound by a rigid order based in outdated assumptions and enforced by a theology that offers no better reason for that order than the idea that God long ago commanded it, we are invited to dream of a new order in which the earth and our fellow creatures and we ourselves can flourish together—a garden, as it were, east of Eden. 

But for that to happen, we must grow up, take responsibility, stop blaming Adam and Eve or the snake or someone else and take up our work together. Perhaps the original sin was not when Eve and Adam ate the fruit but when, asked by God what they had done, they began blaming each other. Theologies that let us off the hook are extensions of that sort of blaming. 

Jesus invites into something altogether more exciting and interesting. As another dreamer from long ago had it, “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared. . .” (1 Corinthians 2:9; paraphrasing Isaiah 64:4). 

Clay