Genesis: Key to the Dogma

In the end, Adam and Eve are barred from the tree of life (Gen 3:24).

God will not let their sin, great as it was, tarnish His fatherhood. He will use their act of rebellion to display an even greater love for mankind in an incredible act of goodness. He will create a New Adam and a New Eve out of the "dust, of the earth" (Gen 2:7 and 3:19), that is, out of our wounded, sin-laden nature. Once again He will breathe upon them His Spirit (Gen 2:7). And this couple will complete the mission the first coupled spurned. They will be fruitful, fill the earth, and conquer it: "I will make you enemies of each other: you and the woman, your offspring and her offspring. It will crush your head and you will strike its heel" (Gen 3:15).

How was God offended by Adam's sin? In spurning the tree of life to eat from the forbidden tree, Adam, in effect, aligned himself with God's enemy, the Serpent, becoming the Serpent's "son," since he did what the Serpent wanted, and not what God wanted: "The devil is your father, and you prefer to do what your father wants" (Jn 8:44). Evil took root upon the earth, then, as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil found a human father who would spread death to all his children. It was a personal attack against God's goodness, truthfulness and fatherly love for mankind, an infinite offense which demanded reparation. It's no small thing to break a covenant of divine sonship with God, the Sabbath "rest" of Genesis 2:2-3. It is the most mortal of mortal sins.

Adam's sin also offended God in another way. Since he was the first man, he acted not only for himself, but in the name of all humanity. If Adam was now at enmity with God, then all his children were also at enmity with God. Our father made the choice to squander the inheritance the Heavenly Father had entrusted to him, and we were stuck with the consequences. Like it or not, we would be forced to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which Adam had become one with. His action, as it were, "rooted" us there, because Adam's nature was now without sanctifying grace. And it was wounded as well, in so much that the harmony between intellect, will and passions was now all askew. It was this fallen nature Adam would now pass on to all his descendants, not as a fault of their own, but as "original sin." All this offended God because it thwarted the very purpose for which He had created us: to be His adopted children and live with Him in love, through the sacred family bond of the covenant made with Adam. It was a grave injustice for Adam to deprive his children of grace, one which cried out to God to be avenged.

But it is not completely true that all of Adam's descendants would inherit original sin. There is one of Adam's "descendants" who was "not conceived in original sin." I'm not thinking here of Mary, but of Eve. She came forth from Adam, descended from him, but in a way totally different from the rest of us, through God's special act of creation. Since this was before Adam sinned, she came into the world sinless, in the state of original justice, immaculately pure.

Therefore, we cannot lump Eve into the pot, as it were, with the rest of us. She is in a uniquely different position, for she contracted the original sin through a personal moral fault, and not as something she innocently inherited. She could not blame everything she did on Adam, though he did fail her, or on the Serpent for that matter, though she tried to do the latter (Gen 3:13). Eve was a free agent with a graced human nature. She could merit, just like Adam could. And so she could be culpable if she did something wrong, just like Adam could. When she sinned by eating the fruit (if not sooner through pride) she, too, incurred a debt, one that her husband ultimately had to take responsibility for, as head of the two. But, still, it was her sin, something which helped wound human nature, her personal contribution to the original sin the rest of us all inherit. It was a secondary evil influence upon the human race, under and with her husband, but one most real.

Adam and Eve, remember, were "one flesh." This is before sin marred the word "flesh" to mean something at enmity with God. They were "one flesh" in a way pleasing to God. Through the original justice they both had perfect bodies, united by nature, and not yet by sexual intercourse. And they had perfect souls, in the sense of being created with a graced intelligence, so that on every level, the natural and supernatural, they were of one mind and heart, true spiritual friends to each other. We know this because after God creates Eve and presents her to Adam, Adam names her "woman" (Gen 2:23). As head of this growing "body," he recognizes their special relationship. Eve is silent at this point. She lets Adam name her, "know" her this way, thus accepting her subordinate role as his "helpmate" (Gen 2:20).¹ So there is a marital covenant between them, a covenant blessed by God and taken up into His covenant with

"man" as a male-female duality (Gen 1:27-28). Through two covenants, then, the natural marriage and the supernatural marriage, "man," the male-female, is consecrated to God as a His adoptive family. And so God rests on the seventh day, because His "work" is done (Gen 1:2). The question becomes, will "man," "Adam-Eve," ratify their covenant with God by doing what God commands? Will they eat from the tree of life and become fruitful, or will they spurn this tree and become instruments of death? God's work is done. But now Adam and Eve have to add their "work" in order to consummate the two "marriages."

As "one flesh," then, Adam and Eve probably committed their respective personal sin at the same time. For up to this point, they had never experienced lust, or even petty faults. They probably could not even conceive of acting apart from each other, of bickering and arguing over what to do. So when Adam is said to have sinned "first," it is in the sense of his primacy as origin. Though Scripture says death entered the world through one man, early on the Church Fathers recognized it also entered through a woman, as Lumen Gentium points out: "... still more often they say: 'death through Eve, life through Mary'" (#56).

As "one flesh," then, both Adam and Eve become "sons" of the Serpent. Both obey the Serpent and eat the forbidden fruit. Both break their covenant with God, Eve doing this with and under Adam, who as head represent them both before God. Their marital covenant, so strongly rooted in their very nature as "man" remains intact, yet takes a beating, as disorder, or lust, enters in to eat away at their mutual love and trust. Breaking their friendship with God imperils their friendship with each other, something they hadn't planned on. It was just going to be the two of them, with the whole paradise for themselves. Now the two are not so friendly anymore. They start hiding from each other behind "fig-leaves" (Gen 3:7), a pathetic sort of defense against the disorder which makes them feel so ashamed.

In a way, Adam's failure to do the manly thing and protect Eve was a more grievous fault in God's eyes than Adam's sin towards us. For unless God gave Adam infused knowledge of the future, Adam could not "know" us. He could not know how many billions of people would eventu­ally be born into the world. We were still a hypothetical question mark, but Eve was a present reality. She was right there in the garden with him as his most intimate friend, bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh, his "better half" as we put it today, while we were as yet unborn. She was there as something immaculate, and he let her become tarnished. She was there as something virginal, and he let her be seduced by the Serpent. She was there as the future mother of his children, and he blamed her for the Fall. As the first man, how he interacted with his wife would become the paradigm for human behavior that all future family life would inherit. As a teaching passed on from generation to generation, it would finally solidify into social structures of sin, of sinful ways of thinking and acting towards others, legitimized because "that's the way everyone does things". And this, too, offended God, who had planted the woman in the garden for a reason: to be man's helpmate, not only in the prac­tical matter of procreation, but in the spiritual dimension of parenthood as well, which means teaching any children conceived how to live a human life. Since all of us were "in" Adam at this point, she was intended as a helpmate for all of us, too.

What was the woman's mission? Why was she created? Saint Paul tells us, "woman is the reflection of man's glory" (1 Cor 11:7). What is man's glory? His adopted sonship through the covenant God makes with him. Just as Eve is like Adam, yet somehow different too, so Adam is like God, yet somehow different too. Just as Eve comes forth from Adam's "heart" as a surprise, a gift, so Adam comes forth from God's "heart", as a sur­prise from God's totally gratuitous gift-love. After all, God didn't "need" us, He "wanted" us. Just as Eve's body is designed to be fruitful through both receiving and giving love, so Adam's "body", himself as head and then all the human beings who will come forth from him, are designed to be fruitful through both receiving and giving divine love. In other words, the "woman" is intended by God to be a "great sign" of humanity's own status before God as "adoptive sons", a sign God expected Adam to ponder and cherish for what is was-a gift-and not as something to be thrown into the mud of sin.

In other words, it is no small responsibility to be the first parent, the head or father of God's family of adoptive sons. It called for holiness, an extraordinary holiness, so that, from this one source, holiness would flow out to all the members of this family somehow "mystically" present within him. And Adam ran away from this responsibility. He refused to be fruitful. He refused to sacrifice himself. He was like Jonah, who because he didn't like what God had to say, hired a boat and went off in the other direction. Or we might say, he was like a bridegroom who didn't show up for the wedding, because he went off drinking with his buddies instead. In this sense, he "broke" the covenant. It was all off. But not irreparably so. In God's eyes, Adam was still His adopted son, even though he had just disgraced himself and deserved to be punished for his sin.

Many times I have heard it said that "God didn't have to save us." This is true if we make a qualification: "If God had never made a covenant with us, He didn't have to save us." Once God swears a covenant oath, gives His Word to do something, He can never go back on that Word, because His Word is eternal, unchanging: "By my own self I swear it; what comes from my mouth is truth, a word irrevocable" (Is 45:23). God said, "Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of ourselves" (Gen 1:24). There is no potency in that Word (on God's side of things). It is a promise of our immortality, i.e., God is never going to "let go" of us, somehow change His mind and "uncreate us." As the psalmist says:

O where can I go from your spirit,
or where can I flee from your face?
If I climb the heavens, you are there.
If I lie in the grave, you are there.
If I take the wings of the dawn
and dwell at the sea's furthest end,
even there your hand would lead me,
your right hand would hold me fast (Ps 139).

Notice how God enters into a dialogue with the man and the woman after the Fall (Gen 3:9-19). Adam and Eve are still redeemable, there is hope for them. God treats them as wayward children, who must be taught what is right by being punished for their misdeed: "You didn't want to sacrifice yourself, Adam, well now everything you do will become a sacrifice. All your labors will be tiresome, irksome, full of sweat and toil, until you finally make the ultimate sacrifice of your earthly existence, life as you know it. You, too, Eve will suffer, but in a womanly way. Love will cost you. If it is not the pain of raising children, it will be the relationship with your husband causing you difficulties. Forgetting yourself to love others will not be easy." God intends this suffering as remedial, as a counter paradigm to the path they have chosen through their sin.

God doesn't question the Serpent, however. There is no dialogue, for the Serpent, by his own choice, is unredeemable. Nothing God could say to him will change his mind, so there is no point in trying to remedy his sin. Instead, God points out the futility of what the Serpent is trying to do, again to teach Adam and Eve. The Serpent will be crushed, defeated, because he is working at a hopeless cause, trying to be "like God," but without God: "They have abandoned me, the fountain of living water, only to dig cisterns for themselves, leaky cisterns, that hold no water" (Jer 2:13).

In other words, God unmasks the Serpent for what he is: something loathsome and irrational. He may have come disguised as an angel of light, but he really is a "serpent": someone doomed to spit out poison, yet, at the same time, forced to "eat dust," to die again and again through every vile act he commits. (For every act he commits is a mortal sin.)

There were no winners among the three players at the Fall. The Serpent is driven by envy: if he can't have grace, neither can the two humans, so he tries to seduce them. The man is driven by lust: he wants the fruit, so he allows the Serpent to talk. The woman is driven by vanity: she wants to appear just as wise and powerful as the other two, so she eats the fruit. All of them are slaves to sin, driven by an irrational force of one sort or the other. All of them have "fallen" from grace, likeness to God (the supernatural image), into mortal sin, unlikeness to God. The natural image is still there, yet warped. Freedom is compromised, and so is their very personhood.

What is freedom? According to the Catechism, "Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so perform deliberate actions on one's own responsibility" (#1731). Sin is an irrational act. Something goes wrong in the reasoning process, so that an apparent good is embraced as a true good. Sin, therefore, always hurts freedom, since it goes against what is reasonable. And it always diminishes the person, one's transcendence, because, by definition, a person is a rational hypostasis.

God possesses unlimited freedom. We say He is free to create anything He wants to create. What is more accurate to say is this: God is free to create anything He "knows" as created, i.e., He has the power to put into act what His intellect had decided is something He wants to create, because He sees that it is something good for Him to create. Such freedom, based on infinite wisdom and power, is beyond our comprehension, but one thing we can grasp is this: God never does anything irrational or unreasonable. If He did, He wouldn't really be free at all, nor could we know anything about Him or have any relationship with Him, because He would not be a Trinity of Persons but sheer, unknowable Power.

This point is important because it explains the fourth way in which God was offended by Adam's sin. Adam was trying to do the impossible: break the covenant, which amounted to trying to change his very nature, his very self. And so he was hurting himself in the process. He was missing out on the inheritance that could be his, depriving himself of the kingly, priestly and prophetic role that God, as a loving Father, wanted to give to him. What a glory God was offering to Adam, to be the very first saint of a host of saints! And Adam said, "Thanks, but no thanks." What ingratitude!

But to suggest that God never does anything irrational or unreasonable may go against the grain. Such a statement itself may seem "unreasonable" as the "old Adam" in us protests: "No! No! Freedom is about power, unlimited power. Freedom means doing anything I feel like doing, without anyone else telling me what to do." In other words, freedom is all about "feeling" free. It has nothing to with the law of right reason, which has been thrown out the window. (Which is not freedom but lawlessness.) Thinking this way, with the "old Adam" can obscure our understanding of Genesis. We can assume the forbidden fruit was really, in fact, a fruit, something good for Adam to eat, maybe a nice juicy apple, succulent and full of vitamins. And God, because He has unlimited "freedom," one day just arbitrarily says, "Don't eat from this tree." "Why not?" poor Adam asks. And God replies, "Because I say so." Blind obedience. No reason is given. There is none, except the sheer power to decide what is good and what is evil. "Today I want it to be good. Tomorrow I want it to be evil." It is as if God decides to tempt man by giving him an unreasonable command, just to assert His absolute Authority: "Step over this line, buddy, and it's all over. I'll zap you good ..." Without knowing it, we are reading the Fall through the lens of a master-slave relationship, where the master gets everything and the slave gets nothing. God is arbitrary. He can change His mind and declare that something He originally created as good is now evil. So He is not really trustworthy. He is not really good or loveable. He is just a master to be feared.

So then we can start to read the redemption through the same distorted lens. And it really doesn't make any sense. Adam eats an apple and its the end of the world. He broke a command! Terrible. But God, for some unfathomable reason (which just happens to be lucky for us), decides to save us undeserving wretches. He didn't "have" to, of course. He is absolutely free of any commitment to us. Then, it gets worse. Much worse. God, who has the power to save us any way He wants to-for example, He could have just muttered from heaven, "It's all right, my son, I forgive you," and we would be saved-arbitrarily demands blood. A human sacrifice, no less. Nothing else will slake His thirst to be avenged. Shades of Herodias comes to mind, "Give me the head of John the Baptist on a platter!" "Yes, give me an innocent victim on a cross! Oh, I'll forgive you, but its going to cost you plenty. I want blood. Lots of blood." As for the woman, Mary, she doesn't make any sense, either. She must be some kind of afterthought, because why would God, sheer power, need any help in redeeming us? As for what the redemption actually is-well, that's a mystery, too. Somehow we are "saved" from "slavery" to sin and death, and when we die, we all go to heaven. That's it!

But as Saint Paul tells us, "Christ, our passover, has been sacrificed; let us celebrate the feast, then, by getting rid of all the old yeast of evil and wickedness, having only the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth" (1 Cor 5:7-8). Let us read the Fall and the redemption through the lens of the covenant. Let us restore the law of right reason to God's freedom, which means the law of charity-love, gift-love, friendship-love, covenant-love. However you want to look at it: divine, and not a self-centered love.