Edgework

16. We Must Reject the Greco-Roman Six-line Narrative of the Bible: It goes without saying that we all read the Bible through a grid of pre-understanding which colors the way we see its unfolding story. For most of Christian History in the West we have read the Bible through the grid of Greco-Roman philosophy. In other words, instead of reading the Bible in a forward way that culminates in the Jesus event, we have read it backwards all the while assigning Greek philosophical concepts to the story. In brief, the story line goes as follows: Eden (a perfect place), the Fall (original sin), Condemnation (our hopeless dilemma), Salvation for a few (through faith in Christ), Heaven (a perfect, eternal place for these few), and Hell (a place of conscious, eternal torment for the many). When told in this way it becomes clear that Greek philosophy has persuaded us to accept an unnatural dualism which assumes that God loves spirit, state and being and hates matter, story and becoming.

Another way to tell this story is as follows: God (Theos) is furious that his perfect world is spoiled and so intends to destroy everything. The only hope for human salvation is for his wrath to be placated. This happens by God torturing his Son in our place. All who believe this can, after death, enter eternal bliss in heaven. For all who don’t believe this God’s wrath remains. Unable to destroy their immortal souls, he casts them into hell to torture them for all eternity.

This is the storyline that traumatized me throughout much of my youth. At the time, I could not conceive of a better narrative. That was the only one being told. Although I felt intuitively that there was something wrong with it, there was nothing I could do about it. But I wondered how it could be that at the end of the God story there would be more evil and suffering than at the beginning. Would it not have been better, I thought, if the story had never begun in the first place. It has taken me most of my life time to discover a more positive biblical narrative that saves God from a Greco-Roman overlay, as well as humankind from a very dismal prospect for the future.

It is important to understand what the Greco-Roman narrative has done to the biblical story because it is within this storyline that most of the dialogue about atonement throughout Christian history in the West has taken place. If, in fact, we reject that narrative in favor of a better one, it will naturally bring an important critique to atonement theories that have been developed.

Although I have written more extensively elsewhere about most of the six lines of this gospel narrative, I will summarize briefly here the reasons why we must reject each of them.

16a. Eden/Perfection: Looking back at the story of the Garden of Eden through the Greco-Roman lens we are tempted to see a “state” of absolute perfection presided over by a perfect God. By the time of Augustine in the 4th century A.D., Christian theologians had basically borrowed concepts from philosophical thinkers to describe this perfect God: self-sufficient, impassible (beyond understanding), immutable (unchanging), omniscient (all-knowing), omnipotent (all-powerful), timeless, ineffable (indescribable) and simple. Open nearly any textbook on systematic theology today, and these philosophical categories are still enumerated as qualities that best describe God. That means that we are asked to think of God and his garden as a perfect state where nothing changes, because any change from perfection would always be for the worse.

However, the biblical narrative paints a different picture. Creation didn’t emerge as a complete whole; there was a process of becoming so that there where various stages of incompleteness along the way. Even living creatures had to wait to be named by Adam, who was himself part of the creation. And God showed up to pronounce his creation good, even very good (not perfect) and gave Adam and Eve a free will to follow his instructions or not. God even called upon them to participate in populating the earth which obviously would involve a process.

At first it might seem innocent enough to think of God in philosophical categories. And, truth be told, it helped Christianity gain a foothold in the Greco-Roman world. But it will gradually become evident that by doing so we were forced to ignore the biblical narrative at critical points. And eventually that led us to think about the concept of atonement in philosophical categories as well. I will be arguing that atonement is best understood when we understand God as revealed in the biblical narrative instead through philosophical categories.

16b. The Fall/Original Sin: The second line in the Greco-Roman narrative goes straight down. Adam and Eve’s disobedience resulted in a fallen nature for them and all their progeny. But Genesis 3 does not speak of a “fall” in the sense of an ontological change in Adam and Eve which caused God to turn his back on them.

As a matter of fact, after their disobedience, God comes looking for Adam and Eve. He makes garments of skin to cover their shame and then accompanies them out of the Garden – helping them begin populating the earth and even putting a mark on Cain who had killed his brother so no one could harm him. The notion that the changed nature of Adam was now passed on to all humans through his semen was not articulated until nearly four centuries after the Jesus event and grew out of philosophical reflection, not biblical study.

Atonement, then, does not involve a process of changing human nature so God can once again look upon people with favor but does involve God’s activity to draw people back into a relationship which has been broken. Atonement is about an invitation for people to choose to turn toward the God who has never turned his back on them.