This then is salvation: to marvel at the beauty of created things and to marvel at the beauty of their Creator.
—Meister Eckhart
G. K. Chesterton once wrote that certain “new theologians dispute original sin, which is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.”1 All you have to do, he argued, is open your eyes to see that original sin is self-evident and validated by all of human history. When St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo from 396 to 430, solidified the notion that we sin because we are born to sin, that we are the children of sin, that sin is in our DNA, passed down to us from the disobedience of Adam and Eve, he created the first major premise of orthodox Christianity.
Although the concept was not original to Augustine, it was his enormous influence on early Christian theology that gave us the fully developed notion that we are “fallen” by birth, trapped by the sin of our first parents, and can only be “saved” from that sin by Jesus. There is no doctrine of original sin in Judaism, and none in the biblical story of creation, except as the myth of Adam and Eve is “literalized.”2 In effect, the church has created the ultimate spiritual franchise, a kind of salvation monopoly. We are pronounced bad by birth and given only one possible cure by the same entity that provided the diagnosis!
Because of the doctrine of original sin, countless Christians have long considered sin to be a condition, not a choice. We are not sinners because we sin; rather, we sin because we are sinners. Sin is in the human gene pool like any other physical trait we inherit; nothing else can explain how a perfect God could have created such an imperfect species.
Although it is obvious that human beings sin and seem to do so pathologically, it is one thing to say we sin because we can’t help ourselves. It is entirely another to say that our sins are the result of the choices we make—separated from God, from each other, and from creation itself. What’s more, if we are born “infected” with sin, then sin is really an STD, a sexually transmitted disease. Augustine called it “concupiscence”—when people had sex and conceived a child, they brought home more than just a bundle of joy. They brought home a bundle of sin, hardwired to rebel, a baby bearing the seeds of guilt and shame.
More than any other Christian theologian, Augustine wrenched body and soul apart as a result of his own struggles with the flesh, laid bare in the world’s first autobiography, The Confessions. An absent father, a hovering mother who begged him to convert, and his own hedonistic lifestyle drove Augustine to see human sexuality as the battleground for the soul. For nine years Augustine had belonged to a sect called the Manicheans, which preached dualism, asceticism, and determinism and believed that life was a pitched battle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. They also believed that evil existed independently of a good God, who was powerless to stop it.
Augustine converted to Christianity at midlife, famously after hearing a child singing “Tolle, lege” (“Take it up and read”) in his Milan garden, after which his Bible fell open to Romans 13:14—Paul’s warning to “make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” Augustine believed that this was the sign he had been looking for, and Western theology would be changed forever.
Although Augustine left the Manichean sect, it would seem that Manichaeism never completely left Augustine. In his thinking, the sins of the flesh became the principal arena of the battle between darkness and light. Evil was considered an autonomous force stronger than God, which manifested itself most fully in an all-consuming sexual dualism. It was this fear and loathing about human sexuality and the idea of the body as betrayer of the soul that led the church to label sex as a necessary evil, a regrettable and dangerous obligation strictly for the purposes of procreation. Eros could not produce joy, intimacy, and spiritual union, not even in marriage—just sinful children.
It meant that the tiniest babies were tiny sinners, and if they died before they could be “saved” through baptism, then they went to a place called “limbo”—created by the Catholic Church to “spare” the smallest of heathens from burning in hell, while not allowing them to taste paradise either. The same fate reputedly befell all those babies who had the misfortune to be born before Jesus came. No word yet on how this spared grieving mothers.
When limbo was abolished by papal decree in 1992, the obvious question became a standard joke among my Catholic friends: Where did all the babies in limbo go? Perhaps a better question to ask is this: When are we going to graduate from the Middle Ages? The answer: when we reject once and for all the disastrous doctrine of original sin and replace it with the idea of original blessing.3 The former is about shame, helplessness, and entrapment. The latter is about joy, connection to creation, and personal responsibility.
IMAGO DEI, NOT EXEMPLARY SIN
It seems ironic that the church urges people to study the Bible critically and view the scriptures as normative for faith and life, while at the same time requiring them to believe nonbiblical or postbiblical concepts like original sin, the Trinity, and the blood atonement as gospel. No one can blame Augustine for wondering how a perfect God could have created such an imperfect world, but the very same dilemma confronted the very first author of the Bible, the Yahwist (or J) source, in the ninth century BCE. The answer he came up with, however, was very different. The biblical answer is found in an apologetic mythology. It says that creation is good, but that when given a choice, humans will often make the wrong one, especially if they have been told exactly what not to do.
In the poetry of Genesis, two different creation stories followed by the account of the first sin and its punishment are examples of inspired metaphor and pure etiology. Although “etiology” is normally a medical term dealing with the search for the causes of disease, in biblical studies it refers to the process of explaining the current human situation by creating a story and placing it into the divine drama retroactively. The Hebrew poet must have looked around at the world, as we all do, and wondered what could possibly explain the selfish and rebellious behavior of the human species. How could Yahweh be responsible for this deeply flawed creature who sins compulsively and destructively? If God is perfect, then what can explain the deeply imperfect state of God’s creation?
At least three possible answers come to mind. (1) There is no God, and so human beings are simply what they are, animal in nature and wired to survive. (2) God is imperfect or limited, and human beings reflect that imperfection as the defective product of a defective Creator. And (3) God is perfect and created a perfect world, but human beings rebelled, turned their backs on God, and introduced the world to sin, guilt, and shame. Once we occupied a garden of bliss, unaware of our nakedness, but now we have been expelled from paradise and must live forever “East of Eden.”
The Hebrew poet chose the last option by creating the myth of the first humans and the first sin. In an oral culture, such stories functioned to establish identity and provide a narrative to explain how we turned out this way. God could remain perfect while the imperfection of creation is given a human cause. Life in the present tense has been explained by divine action and human rebellion in the past tense. The story also provides answers to some of the oldest and most perennial of human questions.
For example, if we are born innocent, then why do we “fall” from that innocence by telling our first lie or being drawn into the commission of the very sins we have been warned not to commit? Why are we ashamed of our own bodies and our sexual urges? Why do we tend to blame others for our mistakes, as Adam blamed Eve, who blamed the serpent?
The story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden is a metaphor for the fundamental separation of human beings from God, and when God’s sentence is handed down—that women shall give birth in pain and men shall work by the sweat of their brow and then die—it serves etiologically to explain why both realities are with us still. After all, what sort of God would design a world in which childbirth was agonizingly painful, even deadly? Or sentence men to toil in barren soil, choking on the dust to survive until the day they died?
The Genesis answer: not the God we worship. Yahweh created paradise, and human beings created sin. God provided everything we need, but we incessantly wanted more, including the power to be as God and to worship ourselves. God gave us companionship and the abundance of the natural order, but we chose to lust after what is unattainable and thus destroy the shameless bliss that came before we knew we were naked.
As a myth, the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the garden is profound. As a myth, it is not history, and yet it is “true”—contrary to the continued insistence that a myth is a lie. As the renowned mythology professor Joseph Campbell taught us, a myth is about a truth so large, so important and mysterious that it cannot be contained by mere facts. Myths do not just explain the meaning of life but help us to understand the experience of being alive. We are creatures who need symbols and stories to represent the stages of life. Across cultures and traditions, the myths we make are remarkably similar. They involve the hero’s journey, temptation, testing, transformation, and return. Myths are frequently built around initiation ceremonies that move us from childhood to adult responsibilities. As such, the myth of Adam and Even and their expulsion from the garden is an initiation story on a grand scale.
A myth, Campbell says, “is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation.”4 The details of the myth are not meant to be taken literally. When they are, not only is the power of myth and metaphor weakened; bad theology can be the result.
Augustine knew this when he wrote about his struggle to interpret some Old Testament stories metaphorically, saying, “When I understood literally, I was slain spiritually.”5 Yet this rule apparently did not apply to the story of the Fall, proving that even bishops can practice selective literalism. Ironically, what never happened became the basis for the formulation of a doctrine about what always happens. Working from the consequences of fictional events involving fictional people, Augustine confused symbolic truth with historical truth to justify etiology as history and mythology as dogma.
To claim, as Augustine did, that we are permanently infected by Adam’s sin and that this condition is incurable, save by profession of faith in the atoning sacrifice of the new Adam, Jesus Christ, is to declare that creation is inescapably bad, but selectively redeemable. Yet the biblical account of creation says something entirely different—that we are made in the image and likeness of God, expressed by the beautiful Latin phrase imago Dei. It says that we are born inescapably good, as part of a good creation, and yet we lose our way by making bad choices. We do so not because we are carriers of sin, but because we are deluded by ego, trapped by fear, and paralyzed by insecurity. We may make mistakes, but we are not a mistake. This truth lies slumbering within us, as Socrates understood, and must be mined by a teacher, not cancelled or covered over by a savior.
Although it was once widely believed that sin was passed down from generation to generation like red hair or left-handedness, new understanding of both human development and genetics has rendered this idea unbelievable to most people. Thus, the idea that people should be punished for a “crime” they did not commit is unethical and unacceptable.
A literal reading of the myth of Adam and Eve also makes it possible to pin the blame mostly on Eve and has thus helped to create centuries of bias against women. A popular bumper sticker reads simply, “EVE WAS FRAMED.” But this is, once again, an example of the danger of reading the Bible literally. In the church, too many clergy have failed to teach their congregations what they have been taught. What, then, is the purpose of their seminary education? If they assume that people can’t deal with concepts like sacred myth and etiology, then they deprive their flocks of the richness and wisdom of biblical stories that could ignite the imagination and open the eyes of the heart. To teach that the Bible is inerrant and infallible would appear to represent the most exalted relationship of the reader to the text, but it defies the nature of scripture itself. What is meant to convey reverence and spark a conversation with God becomes a spiritual straitjacket.
In the case of Adam and Eve, the deeper truth is that it never happened, but it is always happening. It never was, but still is. It is both primitive and postmodern. The Bible is a Metaphor made up of metaphors, and the point is not to organize a search party to find a garden that never existed or Noah’s ark on a mountain in Turkey, so that we can “prove” that the Bible is true. Our calling is to graduate from a definition of truth that is too narrow and embrace the reading of scripture as sacred, normative poetry—not ancient journalism or objective history. This does not mean we stop “believing” the Bible. In this case, just think how timeless is the message of an archetypal woman duping a clueless, archetypal man and then passing the buck down to a talking snake!
The truth is, we all grow up and get kicked out of the garden, because we are all tempted by the very fruit we are warned not to eat. We are seldom satisfied with the life we have, always looking for a better garden than the one we live in. But treating the details of such a myth as if they were history and then expanding them into doctrines that seal the separation of humankind from both Creator and creation alike is the true definition of sin. Pronouncing the whole of humanity to be incurably sick and then claiming a monopoly on the cure limits the power of God, makes excuses for the inexcusable, and invites absolute power to corrupt absolutely.
The doctrine of original sin gives the church a permanent clientele in a salvation enterprise with no competition. You are born a hopeless sinner and sentenced to eternal damnation unless you “purchase” the only “product” that can save you. But there are no other choices. Recall the lines from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in which an Eskimo asks a priest, “If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” The priest responds, “No, not if you did not know.” To which the Eskimo replies, “Then why did you tell me?”
THE DEADLY LEGACY OF DUALITY
If we can read the Bible as sacred myth, poetry, and pseudo-history, we can move beyond the questions that still preoccupy much of the church, shaped by a Western, rationalist perspective that came with the Enlightenment. What is true is not reducible to “what really happened” any more than “what really happened” is an adequate representation of the truth. Even so, we humans crave fixed, absolute categories, especially when it comes to religion. We are not just featherless bipeds. We are binary thinkers with on-off switches in the brain.
Dualism is deadly, however—whether in biblical studies, human relationships, or foreign policy. The tendency of human beings to see life as a simple choice between opposing and irreconcilable states is, at best, falsely comforting. At worst, it is apocalyptic. Perhaps we like things to be simple because real life is not. It is difficult, confusing, even terrifying. Although we speak of death as the great enemy, it may be despair that haunts us even more—the idea that life itself means nothing. Macbeth put it memorably: “[Life] is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”6
This much we know. The more frightened we are, the less secure we feel. The more anxious we are about the world and our place in it, the more we seek simple answers to complex questions. Whether it is about sin and salvation, human sexuality, or the cosmic battle of good versus evil being waged for our souls, we are addicted to the easy answer. Ambiguity is frightening, and “situation ethics” (as if there is any other kind) smacks of moral relativism. It is no wonder that in times of fear, we follow leaders who talk tough and appeal to nostalgia. When thinking, deciding, and doing become too painful, we surrender our lives to authority figures who have all the answers.
For the same reason, we want the Bible to give us simple answers, not richly textured metaphors, songs, poetry, prayers, dreams, and maddening parables—but marching orders. We turn biblical symbols into theological propositions and dazzling metaphors into dreary ecclesiastical mechanisms. Biblical wisdom is replaced by doctrinal armor. Hearts “strangely warmed” become bony fingers writing new commandments. Bethlehem is now ablaze with floodlights, and the garden of Gethsemane is a tourist trap. Or, as Kierkegaard put it, “Something true when whispered may become false when shouted.”
We want our government to keep us safe by any means, because no matter how advanced we think we are, we are still profoundly ethnocentric, expecting others to become more like us to prove that they have made “progress.” The term “axis of evil” (and its unstated corollary, “axis of good”) is such a rich example of our addiction to dualism as to raise suspicion that a sophist made it up, instead of just a presidential speechwriter. Here is dualism immortalized in the State of the Union speech as a prelude to war. It reminds us that the way we use language is a moral issue, and life is linguistically constituted. “Be careful how you describe the world,” said one physicist. “It is that way.”7
Just as we want a blue pill to make us thin and a red one to make us happy, we want church doctrine to clear up the Mystery, not deepen it. We want the process of enlightenment to be translated into “strategies for success,” because faith as a transaction is simple, while faith as transformation is both complicated and costly. We want to fortify the self, not shatter the illusions by which it lives. We want to put on the “whole armor of God” and do battle with the infidels, not stretch ourselves out across the pain of the world as if nailed to a cross.
In trying to explain this swirling chaos that is life, the church has unwittingly participated in creating what might be called, for lack of a better term, “terminal false dichotomies” or “radical either/or-ness.” Whether it is the battle for the Bible (Do you believe it or not?), the existence of evil (Do you believe in Satan or not?), or the reason we sin (Do you believe in original sin or not?), it’s all or nothing. One is lost or found. One is fallen or saved. One must “turn or burn.”
The appeal of such simple choices is enormous, but so are its consequences. We are absolved from doing serious Bible study, which is hard work; absolved from considering that the enemy may be more like us than different from us; and absolved from caring for the earth itself and all living things because we have falsely interpreted the word “subdue” in our creation myth to mean us (humans) against them (the forces of nature). Our planetary house is now groaning from abuse, and this is a rallying cry that could unite the whole church across all its divisions. As theologian Matthew Fox put it prophetically thirty years ago, Mother Earth is dying.8
“Are you with us or with the terrorists?” This question divides the world like a machete dropped on a watermelon. Original sin cuts the same way. It tells us that we are both helpless when it comes to our condition and undeserving when it comes to our cure. Life is a battle to win or lose, not a journey toward wisdom. Original sin says that each of us is really born in the enemy camp, and the battle for our souls began with our first breath. We cannot help what we are, but to be “saved” from this inherited doom will require someone else’s sacrifice. Thus every human is in a state of total spiritual dependence. We are lost at birth, with only one hope of being found, so “salvation” becomes a closed system, a cosmic bargain initiated to save the helpless from being hopeless.
The language of the church reinforces guilt and shame by reminding us constantly that we are sinners. A common Protestant confession is
We poor sinners confess unto thee, that we are by nature sinful and unclean, and that we have sinned against thee by thought, word, and deed. Therefore we flee for refuge to thine infinite mercy, seeking and imploring thy grace, for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Although we know that confession is good for the soul and that pretending we do not sin is a form of delusion, the making of inherited sin into a self-loathing form of theological entrapment is one of the saddest legacies of the church. It has turned Christianity into a series of propositions that substitute for the life of faith and turned worshipers into those who “recite and receive.” Take a look at much of the church today, and you will come to a sad but inevitable conclusion. Faith for millions really is about believing stuff in order to get stuff.
Many Catholics must still make a confession first in order to receive the Eucharist. What is biblical about this? For the rest of us, sin is offered as the reason for the incarnation. Because we are born in sin, Jesus had to be born as God in the flesh and sent to die, according to the plan and purpose of that same God, in order that our sins might be forgiven. We continue to sing about, pray about, and confess to believing in having been “washed in the blood of the Lamb,” even though the assumed premise of the blood atonement is something most people no longer believe—at least outside of the church. Why, then, do we pretend to believe it when we are sitting in a pew?
The closed loop of original sin and exclusive salvation through Jesus (born bad/only way out) is a deadly false dichotomy. It suggests that sin is not just pervasive but inevitable, and that salvation is not a rebirth but a rescue. What we cannot save ourselves from, the church will save us from, and all we have to do is confess to believing in a set of postbiblical propositions that were not finalized until the early Middle Ages. Offering the only hope for the hopeless certainly solidified the power of the church, but it defies a much older tradition of creation spirituality. That tradition is older than the Hebrew poets who wrote the biblical accounts of creation and the wisdom literature of Proverbs and the Prophets, older than patriarchs and other “royal persons,” older than the ministry of Jesus with its focus on compassion or Paul’s talk of a “new creation” and the cosmic Christ motifs of Colossians, Ephesians, Galatians, and Philippians.
Salvation meant originally not that we are saved from, but that we are saved to. Having “the same mind in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 2:5) is a new way of being in the world that recognizes our kinship to Jesus as our teacher, not our indebtedness to him as a savior. The English word for “salvation” comes from the root word “salve,” which is a healing ointment. Salvation originally meant to be healed of what was wounding us. In the New Testament, salvation is about transformation in this life, not a change of destination in the next.
It is one thing to say that creation is flawed, but quite another to say that we are a mutant strain, a defective product, a bad seed. In so doing the church has sanctified helplessness, made all humanity victims, and built an inherited lack of responsibility into every waking moment. “The devil made me do it” is part of the vernacular of original sin. So are songs about wretchedness, loathsomeness, and humans as lowly worms. So are prayers urging that a deeply disappointed Father God “take pity” on and “show mercy” toward children who are a chronic disappointment. What else can we be? We were born to disappoint!
The pervasiveness of sin should not be confused with the inevitability of sin. The answer to the age-old question of whether people can change is yes, they can—but not because they confess to believing in theological propositions. Rather, change occurs when people are born again to their own goodness. It may take a convulsive event, since suffering often brings with it a redemptive clarity, but the verdict of all the saints and mystics is clear: we are not rotten to the core but made in the image of God.
Whenever someone says that real change is impossible, the late George Wallace comes to mind. Former governor of Alabama and once the embodiment of resistance to the civil rights movement, he espoused a holy trinity full of hate: “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He ran for president in 1972 and won nearly ten million votes in a campaign in which he vilified blacks, students, and people who called for an end to the war in Vietnam. That campaign ended in a parking lot when Arthur Bremer tried to assassinate him. The bullets paralyzed him from the waist down, and he spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair.
He also realized that he had been wrong about race all along and returned to public life as an integrationist. Earlier he had literally tried to block the schoolhouse door; he turned state troopers with dogs, whips, and tear gas loose on peaceful black demonstrators in a scene that shocked the nation and helped galvanize passage of the Voting Rights Act. But in his later days, he locked arms with the same human beings he had once vilified and learned to sing “We Shall Overcome.”
In the end, it is a very strange business indeed, this born-bad-but-saved-by-Jesus treadmill. We are said to be without a choice with regard to our condition, but free to choose our only means to salvation. This choice is not a choice to be good (which we obviously cannot be if we were born “bad”), but a choice to believe something about Jesus that renders us, not changed, but forgiven. After professing to believe this, we go on choosing to sin, of course, but are now absolved by the choice we have made! If this sounds like a convoluted version of free will, just remember that this comes courtesy of the same institution that only recently apologized to Galileo for being right about the solar system and still practices exorcism.
Original sin is a theology of entrapment, not liberation; it is a “recent” theological exception, not the rule; it is an interruption, a detour, an artificial formula, not the timeless flow of creation spirituality that preceded it and will succeed it. Long before the church created a sickness for which it alone had the cure, mystics, poets, and wise ones all agreed on this: we are not apart from nature, and nature is not our enemy. We are part of an insurgency of life whose arc is long and whose future is mysterious. We did not drop from the sky to do battle with our fallen nature; rather, we have crawled up out of the sea to work the garden, to protect our young, and to contemplate the gifts and obligations of higher consciousness. What does it mean to be human, to ask questions, to solve problems, to make art, and ultimately to discover the most sublime gift of all—love?
ON BEING WORTHY, NOT WORTHLESS
A preacher tells the story of a certain student, in middle school, in what used to be called “homeroom.” It was the first day of class—a tender, frightening moment when adolescents sit in awkward proximity to other adolescents and wonder why they can’t think of a single thing to say that doesn’t sound stupid.
Class begins with the reading of the roll, a seminal moment when individual identities are established by a godlike voice that speaks them into existence. Out of the teacher’s mouth comes the sacrament of sound, joining names and faces for better or for worse. All a good teacher has to do when she reads an unusual name is say, “I like that.” All she has to do, if the student is plain or shy, is to see something beautiful and name it.
This particular teacher, however, knew her subject, but little else. When she arrived at the name of one particular student and called it out, the young woman responded, “Here!” The teacher stopped, peered over her glasses, and said to the young woman, “Is so-and-so your father?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And is so-and-so your uncle?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, I sure hope you’re not like them.”
You see, the father and his brother had been arrested recently on drug charges, and both were now serving time in prison. The class fell silent. The girl said nothing. And for some reason, for some inexplicable reason, no one called the police to have the teacher arrested. They should have, for if this is not child abuse, then what is? “Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never hurt you.” That’s cute, but there’s one small problem. It’s not true.
Over a lifetime of ministry, I have come to believe one thing without reservation: most of the dysfunctional things we do are compensatory. Whether we realize it or not, we are always trying to prove something to someone. As a child we try to please our parents (some adult children never outgrow this). In our intimate relationships we try to prove that we are worthy of being loved by a partner, so at first, instead of being authentic, we try to appear irresistible. Because the act cannot be sustained, eventually we appear to be fraudulent.
At work we struggle to please the boss, to be singled out as the employee of the month, or to be voted the man or woman most likely to succeed. In other words, our worthiness is dependent on what others think of us, and we depend on external recognition to measure internal value. If we are never certain of our own inherent goodness, then we will never be satisfied with the verdict rendered by others, no matter how frequent or exalted. Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a book once entitled How Good Do We Have to Be? The answer seems to be: we are never good enough.
In a capitalist society, where money measures the value of almost everything, no one ever thinks that enough is enough. In a society that elevates competition to the level of a sacred spectacle, we are always being reminded that we fall short of someone else’s prowess and expertise. In a celebrity culture, most of us are peons. In an entertainment culture, most of us are spectators. In a consumer culture, we are all just “three easy payments” away from rock-hard abs, easy salad preparation, or a lucrative career in real estate.
Meanwhile, we wake up feeling unworthy; we go to bed feeling unworthy; and on Sunday morning, if we go to church, the preacher will render a similar judgment! So will the liturgy, the prayers, and many of the hymns. When we start from the doctrine of original sin, “one is old before coming into the world,” as Matthew Fox put it. The late psychologist Eric Fromm once wrote, “Those whose hope is weak settle for comfort or for violence.”
Imagine what might happen to the church in our time if we took seriously the praise of the Psalmist, who locates us, even in our brokenness, “just a little lower than the angels” (8:5), or the words of the Ephesians letter that we are “God’s masterpiece” (2:10, NLT). What shape would ministry take if we “accepted the fact that we are accepted,” to quote philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich? What if we truly believed that we had nothing, ultimately, to prove to anyone? What if faith could become again what it once was, a radical trust in God and the essential goodness of creation? Would this not be the ultimate form of liberation? Isn’t the end of all striving the true definition of freedom?
Since the word “religion” itself (from the Latin religare) means to “bind us back” to our source, the first question we must ask is not about our destination but about our origin. Where did we come from? Why is there anything? Does creation have intentionality, or is it a grand but fantastic accident? Why is there matter, and does it matter? Or, as Albert Einstein put it, is the universe a friendly place or not?
These are more than just basic philosophical questions. They force us back to a mysticism largely lost in the Western world. Since the Enlightenment, we have gotten very good at explaining things, even as Newton’s clockwork universe is being challenged by chaos theory and quantum mechanics. Yet we seem reluctant to move beyond cause-and-effect models to embrace reverence. We weigh and measure; we observe and analyze; we collect data and hypothesize. Now if we could only remember how to be astonished.
When Apollo astronauts snapped the most important photograph ever taken, on December 24, 1968, of the earth rising over the moon, the modern environmental movement was born. But it was more than just a photograph. It was also a call to a new cosmology. No wonder it inspired the poet Archibald MacLeish to write these words: “To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”9
Rabbi Abraham Heschel calls it “radical amazement,”10 and Matthew Fox calls it “deep ecumenism flowing from a morality of reverence for all creation.”11 But whatever you call it, creation-centered spirituality represents a return to our religious roots without the sacrifice of either the intellect or the legitimate place of reason and science in the modern world. We need this move now, more than ever before, because time is running out—for the earth and for the church. Fox says, “The universe itself, blessed and graced, is the proper starting point for spirituality. Original blessing is prior to any sin, original or less than original.”12
The endless arguments over evolution versus creationism are a symptom of this sickness. Evolution attempts to tell us how, but not why or wherefore. Science makes no presumptions with regard to theology, and theology should make none with regard to science. The two should be partners in pushing back the frontiers of an enchanted universe. Believing in evolution and believing in God are not mutually exclusive, but neither is it intellectually honest to pretend that a literal interpretation of Genesis should be passed off as science. To do so mocks both science and the poetic power of Genesis.
It is often assumed that faith and science are enemies, but they are not. The enemy of both is fundamentalism, which is driven by two forces: fear of women and the need to feel chosen. In both cases, men fear most not being chosen—either by women or by God. Nature is seen not as a parent, but as an adversary. To be victorious over nature or over a woman, men become warriors, and the outcome is a zero-sum game. Either we win, or nature destroys us. Either the woman chooses us, or she becomes the property of another warrior.
In the church, the language of war persists in the language of salvation, and ours is an ecclesiology of conflict. We are at war with our sinful nature, at war with the enemies of God, at war with the principalities and powers that seduce us with delusions of grandeur. Someone wins only if someone else loses. Someone is right only if someone else is wrong. Someone is saved only if someone else is lost.
Ours is a theology of entitlement, not communion. Ours is a culture of irresponsibility, not responsibility. Ours is a strategy for victory, not a journey toward wisdom. If we continue to believe that we did not come up out of the earth, but were dropped from the sky, then Jesus will continue to be understood likewise as an invader—a harpoon shot from God’s bow to reel in the perishing. He will be not a teacher but an elevator operator. He will bring us not wisdom but self-aggrandizement. He will not give us an assignment but deliver a certificate.
Faith as a corrective, as a means of slaying the insatiable appetite of the self, has become a form of neutral energy in our time. Whatever it is we are up to, we simply add Jesus to our tank, like STP, to get wherever we are going faster and with fewer knocks. But no one seems willing to ask: Where are we going? Our presses turn out countless books with the word “soul” in the title, but as integral theorist Ken Wilber puts it, what this really means is the “ego in drag.” What we are doing in the name of “spirituality” or “care of the soul,” he writes, “means nothing more than focusing intensely on your ardently separate self … just as ‘Heart’ has come to mean any sincere sentiment of the self-contraction.”13
Christianity is now so fundamentally associated with the formula of fall and redemption, so focused on beliefs about Jesus instead of invitations to follow Jesus, that a new Reformation is needed. It will deal not with matters of doctrine and church order but with a recovery of the concept of transformation through the imitative wisdom of discipleship. It will reject once and for all the illusion that knowledge alone is redemptive and seek to restore the ancient truth that creation is blessed, not fallen. Augustine said, “The soul makes war with the body,” but Meister Eckhart said, “The soul loves the body.”
When Martin Luther sparked the original Protestant Reformation by nailing to the door of the Wittenberg church in 1517 a list of ninety-five grievances he wished to debate, he questioned not the premodern cosmology in which the church was born but the inconsistencies and corruption of the institution. The new Reformation will be about the very life and death of Christianity itself. We must first recover the original message and then be willing to interpret it for a new age. It will be a return to faith as praxis, grounded in trust, not intellectual assent, grounded in doctrine. Christianity was once, and must be again, about following Jesus, not about worshiping Christ.