Paradise has no History
History does not exist in a paradisical world where time has no meaning. Without birth, death, and all the violence in-between, there is nothing to record for the bliss of every moment is continual, without disturbance. Life in paradise is peaceful, joyful, without need or desire.
Without sin, sex, shame, violence and death a paradisical existence has no way to measure time or need to record any event. Paradise can be interrupted only by a prohibition. Desire is birthed into the reality of paradise once a prohibition is in place.
James 1
14 But one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it; 15 then, when desire has conceived, it engenders sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death.
Desire is a sense of lack of self in relation to another. In the mythical garden of paradise Eve senses, a lack of self in relation to God; this is so also for Adam.
In scripture history begins with an act of existential violence when the first man and woman were given a prohibition that birthed desire. The desire is birthed by choice (there were two trees in the middle of the garden the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil). One tree is prohibited the other is a mystery to the first two people. This is so because they are alive and like very young children, death is incomprehensible.
Their paradisical world has been disturbed by choice. It is the tree of prohibition that gains the woman’s interest. The man is her silent but complicit partner in their refusal to obey the one whose voice blew like a breeze through his garden. Death is inconceivable but the desire to be like God, like the one who rules their Edenic home, is ignited like an unquenchable flame that sets fire to humanity for the rest of history. We live with the flame of desire and plagued by choice at every breath.
12 Blessed is anyone who endures temptation. Such a one has stood the test and will receive the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him. 13 No one, when tempted, should say, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one. 14 But one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it; 15 then, when desire has conceived, it engenders sin, and sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death.
There is no choice, no birthing of desire without the tree calling Eve to gain knowledge and be like God. Yet, in the story it is God who put the tree in the garden and informed the first couple of the prohibition. Yet, the story is about us (humanity) it is not about God. It is instructive on an immediate level that human beings will challenge the giver of life with the desire to be more than creatures. God’s voice is not enough to halt humanity from the pursuit of knowledge and self-governing. God’s voice is rejected, yet in our moral conscience God still speaks.
One might ask, but what of the serpent? In the ancient near eastern world serpents were a symbol of wisdom. In the mythic story the serpent provided an image to reflect the voice of Eve’s inner thoughts. The first woman, Eve, whose name is like God’s (havah) ) demonstrates her humanity as she reasons ethically, she cannot grasp why God would hold her back from the pursuit of knowledge (nor can she grasp the concept of evil). She demonstrates her aesthetic soul for the fruit is pleasant to behold. Finally, the pursuit of wisdom is the pursuit of all religious instruction.
The instruction of the story is more important than a mere historical record, it is a reality of necessity for God desires to be known, to be loved, to be in relationship with the creature who bears in their soul, or consciousness, the image of God. This being said, the image of God calls us to be aesthetic, ethical, religious creatures who learn to hear and obey the voice within, a voice breathed into us from the living God.
This birthing of the creature (humanity) in the creation narrative is incomplete, the movement from an existentially unsustainable paradise to fulfilling the desire of God for a family who can enjoy the glorious creation with God is going to require some history. The fulfilling of God’s desire is for us to hear the voice of God and follow God in a spiritual relationship of love, in a paradise where wholeness is found in the joyous uniqueness of each one of us and our God.
We are born into the world in need of a second birth, for we are inheritors of a beginning that of necessity, left us like God but not yet able to live in relation to God fulfilling all God’s longing and desire. God’s desire is not like ours. God’s desire births self-giving love for the human beings who bear God’s image.
We think of birth as a completed work and do not acknowledge the ongoing development of ourselves as a continuation with a completion of our self in God. If you will, our first birth released us into a world where death reigns as an inevitable end. Beyond history, where history ends, we are enraptured in the Spirit of God. We need a second birth, one that can begin now in the present. It requires that we develop ears to hear the voice of God that speaks in our moral conscience and longs to walk with us in the evening breeze (healthy shame is revealing of our innate moral conscience).
It is significant that the scripture begins with a mythic paradise for the myth speaks of a reality yet to be born; a reality that requires the presence of humanity. The myth tells us the story of loss in order to leave us with an understanding of ourselves and invite us to search for God; for God reveals God’s self to be a relational, redeeming, creator who keeps promises sealed in the guarantee of life.
The invitation to enter the garden in Spirit is still present, yet we are halted by the flaming sword of fire and steel (the weapons of war) and by a tendency to separate ourselves from God through mythic creatures (cherubim). We replace the voice of God walking with us with intermediaries as though God is untouchable by our humanness. God removed any element of an inability to know what it is like to be human in Jesus’s incarnation, life and death. Let me clarify further, the experiential reality of being human did not belong to God until in Jesus God entered the world from Mary’s womb and lived a very human life.
A New World Calling
There is within each of us another world calling, it is the voice of God, it is a world free of death and violence, void of sex, sin, and shame, where history is fulfilled in the story of God.
We need a new birth, a spiritual birth, where our imagination, our words, our vision, are used to move us into the reign (Kingdom) of God. In John’s gospel the reign of God is synonymous with the phrase eternal life.
The literary design of John 3:1-15 is in part to introduce a synonymous yet nuanced term for the Kingdom of God. At the conclusion of verse 15 the phrase eternal life is used for the first time in John’s gospel. It is notable that the phrase Kingdom of God is not used again in the gospel of John.[i] Verse 15’s use of eternal life marks the end of the pericope. Verse 16-21 serve as a theological sermon expanding upon understanding the meaning of the life of Jesus.
Our need for a ‘new birth’ is connected to the subject of God being King. Throughout the scripture the concept of a king who reigns with sovereign power over people is a power that belongs only to God. For this reason, the rejection of God in 1st Samuel is when Israel seeks a king.
Our birth from above enables us to see the Kingdom of God in the present through the power of the Spirit helping us to align our thoughts for how we are to live as human beings with God’s thoughts. The birth from above allows us to relate to our first birth metaphorically so that we might better understand the teaching of Jesus. Although birth is confined to a momentous event, a beginning, it is not a leap to maturity. This being said, I will use the event of birth to reflect our ongoing spiritual development as the children of God. I will relate the trauma of natural birth to the process of spiritual formation that the new birth event brings into our life in our ongoing journey. I suggest that we should not limit the new birth event to a moment when it is in fact a journey, a process for receiving salvation and being reconciled to God.
The spiritual life is always traumatic, it is like birth when we leave our womb of comfort, disrupted by contracting muscles, the water breaks free to leave us feeling the collapsed amniotic sac surrounding us, only the cord of life through which we breathe and are nourished holds us in this moment.
Then, as we are pushed into the light, our skull gives to the pressure and we enter the world to see for the first time, and the terror of breathing takes hold of us as our lifeline is cut and we can never return to where we began.
Water and blood mark our beginning, spirit and life, wrapped in a little bit of skin, the image of God enters the world.
Our birthing by the Spirit so that we might see and enter the Kingdom of God is revisited each moment we learn to better align our thoughts and actions with the reign of God. Curiously, Jesus expected Nicodemus to already know that a birth from above was essential for seeing and entering the Kingdom of God. Granted Jesus’ interpretation of scripture was often original and shocking. For example, when Jesus affirms the resurrection by adamantly rejecting the idea that God ruled over the dead.
Luke 20: 37,38
37 And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. 38 Now he is God not of the dead but of the living, for to him all of them are alive.”
Yet, Nicodemus fails to grasp the concept of spiritual life as beginning with a moment like birth where our eyes are opened to the world in such a way that prior to this moment we were blind. To be born of the Spirit is to be free as the wind, unbound by the powers of the world. I think Jesus’ subtly suggests that Nicodemus is bound by his religious institutional loyalties and limits and has missed God. Nicodemus is not free like the wind, the trauma of being free requires an ear to hear and the birthing touch of the Spirit to see and enter the reign of God.
This spiritual reality communicated by the new birth metaphor has always been present for those souls seeking God.[ii] However, it is the revelation of God in Jesus Christ being released into the world that has opened this reality in a clear manner for all of humanity through the teaching of the good news. Likewise, the reading of scripture requires the revelation of Jesus as the lens for interpreting all of scripture from Genesis to Revelation.[iii]
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[i] In John 18:36 Jesus’ speech explains to Pilate his Kingdom is not of this world. He does not use the phrase Kingdom of God.
[ii] 26 From one ancestor he made all peoples to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27 so that they would search for God and perhaps fumble about for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28 For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,
‘For we, too, are his offspring.’
[iii] Learning to find God in reading the OT has been for me a joyous effort in discovery. God is not violent. I demonstrate this fact with careful reading of OT texts in my books, particularly in Theological Adventures. Truly, God has always been like Jesus, but the violence of humanity has obscured the vision of God and limited reading OT stories to ready acceptance of violence. If you want to find God in scripture look for mercy (learn Hebrew, study hermeneutics, literary design, Hebrew poetry, A.N.E. texts etc.).
