God and the Spectacle of Creation

Part 2 of the series Jesus and the Spectacle of Faith

This is the continuation of a series that began with Jesus and The Spectacle of Death and Resurrection.

Part 2: The Origin of the Tradition

In the very beginning of the Bible, in the early chapters of Genesis, we find two creation stories. One is a story where the world is created over the course of six days, with God resting on the seventh. The other story is about the creation of Adam and Eve, the first man and first woman. In the first of these stories, we read,

Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’
So God created humankind in his image,
   in the image of God he created them;
   male and female he created them.
God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

In the second story, we are told how Adam and Eve, who were born into the perfect world of the Garden of Eden, violated God’s instruction to not eat from The Tree of The Knowledge of Good and Evil. They are banished from the Garden with the sentence of toil in work and pain in childbearing.

Here we find the origin of forensic psychology as I described in Part One of this series.

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God say, “You shall not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.” ’ But the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.”

Ever since these stories were first told by the ancient Hebrews, there have been questions about why did God create a situation where Adam and Eve would fail. Why did God create a perfect world with a flaw that human choice could destroy it?

The psychopathology of this moment is the first great turning point in human history.

“Then the Lord God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever’ “

I have concluded that two human truths are presented in this account.

God created humanity with human agency

The first creation story says that God created a perfect world. Our modern utopian tendencies automatically think that this means a perfect world without variance or difference. We could call it the First Singularity. In effect, God was the first totalitarian, and the sin of Adam and Eve reveals that human free will is evil and must be restricted.

You can see how this particular of view of God principally turns God into a moral authoritarian dictator of divine judgment. The perfect world of the Garden of Eden, in effect, is a prison. From this perspective, a perfect world is an environment that is complete, unchanging, and without variety or creative difference. This view matches the notion of the utopian perfection that is common today. The contemporary transhumanist utopian perspective also believes that human agency is evil and should be restricted, or eliminated.

This perspective of the origin of humankind misunderstands the biblical story of creation. The Genesis account says that humankind was made in God’s image. The Spectacle of Creation is the spectacle of a dynamic God of three persons in relationship as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This perspective, known as The Trinity, is the traditional understanding of these creation texts. We can think of it as a perfect unity of three persons in relationship as one.

The meaning of this image of the Trinity in relation to humanity in the perfect world of the Garden is suggested in Guy Debord’s description of the phenomenon of the Spectacle.

The spectacle is not a collection of images,

but a social relation among people, mediated by images.

Think about the world that Adam and Eve lived in before their sin. They lived in a world fully present with The One God in Perfect Unity of Three Persons. Not only was this a dynamic world of variation and difference, but a world created for relationships.

The perception that some theologians have often presented about the distinction between that perfect world and our world is that they are impossible to compare. I don’t find that plausible. Instead, I think all aspects of that perfect world are present now. The difference is that our capacity to access that knowledge was severely inhibited by God’s punishment of Adam and Eve.

Of course, I am only speculating. I really don’t know, but logically speaking, it has always seemed to me that the difference between pre and post Adam and Eve’s sin, is the difference between the relationship between complete knowledge and uncertain knowledge. This diminishment of our capacity to know and understand the world is primarily relational. In other words, our understanding of God and the world has a deep level of inscrutability factored into it. It is far easier to see the particulars of the world than the comprehensive whole of it.

We have to grasp glimpses of this knowledge of the world as Iain McGilchrist describes in his book The Matter with Things. He writes in Chapter 20 about The Coincidence of Opposites. See McGilchrist’s presentation on this perspective in this Ralston College presentation.

He quotes physicist Niels Bohr,

“It is the hallmark of any deep truth that its negative is also a deep truth. … Bohr’s greatest insight into the deep nature of the universe was that contraria sunt complementa: contraries fulfill one another. “

Later in Chapter 28, The sense of the sacred, McGilchrist writes,

“For me, and for many philosophers historically, the deepest question in all philosophy - both the most important, and the hardest to answer - is why there should be something rather than nothing.

And close on its heels comes the question why that ‘something’ turns out to be complex and orderly, beautiful and creative, capable of life, feeling and consciousness, rather than merely chaotic, sterile, and dead. It is not a matter of opinion, but a fact if ever there was one, that, somehow or other, this ‘something’ has within it the capacity to give rise to Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion. Any attempt at understanding the cosmos needs to take that stark fact into account. There is a parallel between the false view that we are separate from and over against Nature (encapsulated in the disastrous idea of Nature as the ‘environment’) and the idea that we are separate from and over against the cosmos. This cannot be true, for the same reason in either case. We were born out of, and return to, the one and the other. It therefore makes no sense to set us up as proud, lonely, tragic figures, struggling against Nature, trying to subdue her, or struggling defiantly to bring love, goodness and beauty into a hostile cosmos. Any love, goodness and beauty we can bring come out of Nature and out of the cosmos in the first place: where else can they possibly come from?”

If this is a deep truth, it may well be a deep hint to the world that transcends the moment of Adam and Eve’s sin. It may be a remnant of a time of perfection that was not static but dynamic. That God would create a perfect world of opposites boggles the mind. The reductivist thinking of our scientific age has little tolerance for anything other than the particulars of scientific proof. But we do not live this way. We live embodied in the world that surrounds us. Just as Adam and Even lived embodied in a perfect and changing world that surrounded them.

If the recognition of the comprehensive whole of the world is possible, we can then see that humanity’s purpose is to function as God’s opposite, not his copy. With this line of thought, I see that the forensic psychology perspective touches only a particular part of human nature and our relationship to the divine.

If this perspective carries enough validity to continue this train of thought, then the implication is that our human agency is purposeful and filled with meaning. Our lives are discovered meaningful in the acts of agency that we make. This is why I came to see that “all leadership begins with personal initiative to create impact that makes a difference that matters.” I believe this is true whether you are a theist or an atheist. Observation points to the capacity of human beings to look beyond themselves to create ways to benefit people and the world.

What this explains is what happened through Adam and Eve’s act of rebellious human agency. It really doesn’t explain why they did it. Particularly, if this was a perfect world where they had everything that they needed.

Our agency as human beings is not simply that we can choose between different options, or that we can evaluate situations. It is that by our choosing, we learn about the world. I have no idea what learning was like in that perfect world, except that there was no independent awareness of good and evil. Maybe the perfection of human agency in the Garden of Eden was a growing, deepening appreciation or love for the world that God had created. I don’t know, but it seems logical that the whole break caused by Adam and Even is principally relational, and their act of rebellion was a means of replacing their love for the Creator and his creation, with a love for themselves as preeminent expression - image - of that creation. As a result, the social relations between God and humanity, once mediated by the Image of God found in the Trinitarian relationship was lost. This, therefore, means that we cannot live by the reality of God’s certain presence in a direct relationship, but rather by faith in believing that there is something rather than nothing to this world’s connect to the divine.

This world of God’s creation is a relational one

Our world is not principally governed by forensic psychology. Our modern rationalistic culture perceives society as a process of transactional exchange. Quid pro quo. Adam and Eve, in this respect, made a bad deal. They simply violated their social contract with God. This is how their story has been understood. It is how forensic psychology came to define what being a sinner means.

This forensic view of sin ends up missing the larger point of God’s purpose in creation and of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The biblical meaning of sin is to miss the mark. As an archer missing the target. What is that target? It is that of human purpose.

The penalty for Adam and Eve’s sin was separation, alienation, and isolation from the relationship that humanity had known with God before their act of rebellion. As a result, we find hardship, suffering, and insecurity in life.

When I first read Iain McGilchrist’s chapter on opposites, it reminded me of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible. From chapter 3.

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. I know that whatever God does endures for ever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by.”

The relational character of creation remains even after Adam and Eve’s sin. It reminds us of a larger, more comprehensive whole. These hints to a reality behind a screen are told all throughout the book of Ecclesiastes. He closes with this.

“Go, eat your bread with enjoyment, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God has long ago approved what you do. Let your garments always be white; do not let oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that are given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might; for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.

Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to the skilful; but time and chance happen to them all. …

The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded
   than the shouting of a ruler among fools.
Wisdom is better than weapons of war,
   but one bungler destroys much good.”

The Unifying Principle is Love

For a person who has been enveloped by the Christian religion his whole life, I am actually not a very religious person. The reason is that I see religion as a cultural institution intended to take historic and transcendent beliefs and accommodate them to the contemporary world. This is why conservative churches will have Fourth of July patriotic services to celebrate the Christian founding of the US and why liberal churches promote social justice as a revolutionary orientation to the Bible. Churches reflect the current narratives of society. We are no different from Adam and Eve.

In every situation, a transactional understanding of God and the human community dominates. Frankly, it is easier to see God as a judge than as a God of love. If God is love in an absolute sense, then he loves the very people that I hate. It is easier to draw lines and choose opponents. Then, we have to figure out how to transact an agreement with the judge through good deeds and pious participation in church and society. The result is that I remain not only immune from judgment but can hold an obligation for personal change at an arm’s distance. As Christian Smith described above, God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions. And may I add, I want to decide what good, nice, and fair mean.

We are no different than Adam and Eve. We are also no different from the men on the road to Emmaus, the women who first went to the empty tomb, and the disciples in hiding after the catastrophe of Jesus’ death. We are both seeking hope for our futures and are uncertain that any genuine hope exists. What, then, do we do when hope is lost, and cynicism or nihilism reigns supreme in the land?

The most difficult and revolutionary thing to do is love as if we are living before the time of Adam and Eve’s sin. Imagine a perfect world of opposites in relationship with one another, requiring us to see ourselves differently than we do now. We are neither the center nor the opposite other. We are persons with human agency seeking meaning and reconciliation. Ultimately, meaning finds its substance in love. Not the sweet love of a Hallmark card. But rather the hard love of sacrificing ourselves for what we seek to understand as the greater good.

When I use the terms “particular” and “a comprehensive whole,” I use them in the way that Michael Polanyi spoke about science. What is science except as a search for an understanding of what the world is? To approach this task as a journey of unfolding love for the comprehensive whole of the world takes us back to that moment when Adam and Even made the bad decision to cross the threshold of the knowledge of good and evil.

All our efforts to create a perfect world are illusory. Instead, we can do no other than to seek to create a world without God, and with ourselves at the center. In the end, what we believe in, or, who we trust in, becomes a life-defining choice.

In Part 3, I’ll look at how faith can be understood for us in our time.