East of Eden: Understanding the Creation Story

The biblical creation story — Adam, Eve, the garden, the serpent, the tree, the fall — contains the seeds of many of life’s greatest mysteries.

Why are we here? How did we come to be? What is our relationship to the force that created us? What is our relationship to the environment and to the other creatures on Earth? Does man exercise free will? Why is life full of suffering? Where is the line between right and wrong, guilt and innocence, damnation and salvation? For Jews and Christians, these questions (and more) are first posed in that short, simple story.

In this story, we find God creating man and woman and giving them dominion over all living creatures, Adam (the first man) giving names to those creatures, God forbidding them to eat from the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” Eve (the first woman) being teased and tempted by a serpent, Eve eating of the fruit of the Tree, sharing the fruit with Adam, Adam and Eve realizing their nakedness and being exiled from the garden paradise known as Eden. The story has long been used to justify man’s separateness or falling away from God.

This violation of God’s command has come to be known as “original sin.” But, the idea of “original sin” isn’t mentioned anywhere in The Bible. In fact, the word “sin” isn’t mentioned until the fourth chapter of Genesis.

According to Thomas Matus, it was St. Augustine of Hippo that in the 3rd century “conceived of original sin as original guilt, transmitted at conception to each human individual. Hence, all of humanity is a massa damnata, an accursed mass, redeemed by Christ but still subject to sin.”*

Original sin is not a theme found anywhere in the origins of Christianity. It was invented by the church (as early as the 2nd century) as a mechanism toward salvation through Christ — or more specifically, through the church.

Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox famously called for the eradication of “original sin” in his pioneering work, Original Blessing (1983). This book represented his effort to “deconstruct and reconstruct our inherited religious tradition of the West: to deconstruct the woefully anthropocentric and pessimistic Fall/Redemption religion that begins with ‘original sin’ and to reconstruct religion with the more ancient and empowering tradition of creation spirituality that begins with ‘original goodness.’”

Modern contemplative, Brother David Steindl-Rast explains it this way: “When an educated person in the West asks me, ‘What is original sin?’ I answer that it is the Christian term for the universal phenomenon the Buddhists call dukkha. The original meaning of that term refers to a wheel that grinds on its axle: Something is out of order.”

Even the word “sin” in the West has commonly meant “evil” or “wickedness” (again, Augustine), but the translation of the original words in Hebrew (hata) and Greek (hamartia) find their origins in archery and actually mean something closer to “missing the mark.”

So, if the creation story doesn’t instruct us (or give us a concrete lesson) in “original sin,” what does it tell us?

In his new book, Unbelievable: Why Neither Ancient Creeds Nor the Reformation Can Produce a Living Faith Today, Bishop John Shelby Spong takes a discerning look at twelve aspects (or theses) of the Christian faith. One of these is the concept of “original sin” and the story of the Garden of Eden found in Genesis 2-3.

Spong reads the story of the fall through the lens of reason to sometimes comical effect.

The scene where Adam is wearing his newly crafted “fig leaf apron” — playing the first-ever game of “hide and seek” while cowering in the bushes from an omniscient God — is particularly ridiculous.

God metes out punishment to these conspiring parties as a parent would discipline his children.

Man’s punishment for his transgression is a destiny of “painful toil” and working on the earth, a lifetime of “thorns and thistles” in order that he may eat the “food and plants from the field.”

Woman’s punishment is to endure “painful labor” during childbirth.

The serpent’s punishment is to crawl on its belly and “eat dust” all the days of its life.

Spong paints this scene with all the projection, scapegoating and finger-pointing of a family dinner gone awry. He skewers and deconstructs the elements of this tale until there’s hardly anything left worth examining or redeeming.

And, this is one of the criticisms of Spong’s recent book. That it’s not “prescriptive.”

If we’re not to read this myth literally — this story that contains the seeds of so many unanswered and contested questions — then how are we to read it?

In The Power of Myth (1991), Joseph Campbell writes that these stories (creation tales and other tales from folklore) are “clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.”

Here are some of the many lenses through which we might read the biblical creation story:

Mythologically

What meaning can be found in the characters and their journey out of the garden? Does their nakedness come from a sense of shame or a feeling of other-ness? Does the garden represent the sacred time before creation or the border between sacred time and world time — the cycle of birth and death?

Campbell once spoke of an Indonesian legend of a tribe that danced around a fire. All was paradise until one of the dancers was trampled and died. He was buried and from where he was buried, a plant grew. The tribe then had to split their time between dancing and farming, thus moving from sacred time into the cycle of time, birth and death.

Cosmologically

What are the origins of man and our world? Is the moment when God breathes life and light into the world (Genesis 1) what we now know as the Big Bang? Does the creation of man represent his appearance (or evolution) on Earth? Does his exit from the garden paradise (Genesis 2) represent the moment that humanity became self-conscious (homo sapiens)?

Gnostically

What is the secret wisdom (fruit) that is hidden (hanging) in plain sight? What is the knowledge of good and evil, and why would the serpent encourage Eve to choose this fruit rather than that of eternal life? Who is this angel (the first, we are to presume) with the flaming sword that guards the eastern gate of Eden? Is the flaming (illuminated) sword a symbol for the understanding (illumination) that we seek beyond the garden wall?

Sexually

Is it a coincidence that the snake — a phallic creature who sheds its skin and is a long-held symbol of mystery and rebirth — is the one that tempts and confronts Eve about partaking in the fruit of the tree? Is it a coincidence, then, that her punishment has to do with birth itself and foreshadows her own fruitfulness?

Ecologically

If Eden is the garden and man the gardener, then what is our role in caring for the planet? What does it mean to have dominion over all living creatures? Where is the cycle of reaping and harvesting to be found in the 21st century? What is our relationship (degree of freedom and responsibility) to creation?

Joni Mitchell said, “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Is this drive to return necessary because we have placed ourselves above nature?

Archetypally

Who is the Adam in us — the sometimes naive and altruistic hard worker? Who is the Eve — the curious and bold explorer of her own backyard? Who is the serpent — the sly trickster shouting “YOLO!” and encouraging his friends to taste the forbidden fruit? Who is God — the equalizing and balancing force who is forced to referee the game?

Shamanically

What is the animal medicine found in the snake’s advice to Eve? What role do the trees play in this garden cosmology? Can they be likened to the World Tree in shamanic/indigenous traditions (the Axis Mundi or “Immovable Spot”)? In punishing the serpent, what animal medicine might Grandfather/Creator be denying man?

These are but a few of the various ways we may read and re-read the creation stories found in The Bible. And, as an integralist, I encourage you to generously apply all of these lenses to the reading.

Now, I ask you: How else might you (and your family) read this scripture? What meaning might we have to unpack 2,000 years later from these mere 2,000 words found in Genesis 1-3?

How is our future understanding of our origin story different from the story we’ve been telling each other for centuries? And, is it a story that we can find ourselves (and each other) inside of?

~ Joran Slane Oppelt

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* Belonging to the Universe, Fritjof Capra and David Steindl-Rast with Thomas Matus (HarperCollins, 1991)
** Photos by R. Crumb