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“The scale of theological thinking, in both space and time, still remains domesticated and anthropocentric. When theologians speak of the “world”, they usually do not mean the universe but our local planet. When they talk of history, it is mostly the few thousand years of human cultural development that they have in mind. When they talk of the future, it seems to stretch only a few centuries onward. This means that some questions referring to cosmic beginnings and endings require further discussion.
Concern with beginnings scarcely needs to focus yet again on the tired issue of big bang cosmology. Popular science writers, who like to garnish their wares with references to God, still seem to find it difficult to grasp that the doctrine of creation is concerned with why the world exists, and continues to exist, rather than how it all began. Yet the rest of us know that theology is concerned with these ontological questions and that it gains little from science’s fascinating, but largely theologically irrelevant, talk of temporal origins. Much more important is that event which surely the most significant in cosmic history to date–the dawn of consciousness. From the theological point of view this raises the acute question of how we are to understand the Christian doctrine of the Fall.
In sense of contemporary experience it seems to straightforward. One recalls Reinhold Niebuhr’s remark that original sin is the only empirically verifiable Christian doctrine! You only have to look around–or within–to see the slantedness of human nature, which frustrates human hopes and perverts human desires. Yet we can no more believe that this is the entail of a single disastrous ancestral act than we can believe that there was neither death nor thistles in the world before our forebears took that fateful step. It has long been understood that the powerful tale of Genesis 3 is to be understood mythically rather than literally. In part it portrays life as we now experience it, but that recognition does not remove the question of how these things came to be in God’s supposedly good creation.
Clearly consciousness is possessed by some of the higher animals but it seems likely that the further power of self-consciousness, with its concomitant ability to form expectations and plans for the future, only dawned with the evolution of hominid lines leading eventually to Homo sapiens. As that self-awareness developed, I suppose that a corresponding spiritual awareness of the presence of God also became apart of the experience of these living beings. One can conceive of a struggle in the hominid psyche between the pole of the divine, resolved by a turning from God and a concentration on the creature as all-sufficient, a succumbing to the temptation whispered in Eve’s ear by the serpent in that powerful ancient story, to assert human autonomy over creaturely dependence, to believe “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5). In Luther’s phrase, humanity became incurvatus in se. At what stage in hominid development, an over what period of time, this inversion upon the self took place, I do not know. That it has taken place seems confirmed by the contemporary human condition. It is in these terms that one can try to construct a contemporary doctrine of the Fall.
There was death in the world long before there were our human precursors. After all, it was the extermination of the dinosaurs that gave us mammals our evolutionary chance. But the Fall, as I have described it, turned death into mortality. Self-consciousness made us aware of our transience–we could foresee our deaths–and alienation from the God who is the eternal ground of hope, turned that recognition into sadness and bitterness. In a similar way, the problems of living, symbolized by thorns and thistles, became causes of frustration and the expense of spirit” (Belief in God in an Age of Science 87-89)
I think John Polkinghorne, a respected and well known Theoretical Physicist, trained under the amazing Paul Dirac (pretty much the founder of contempoary physics) has come to an Eastern understanding of the cosmos and the Fall. Science and Theology find their greatest comonality in Eastern cosmology and soteriology.
In Eastern Orthodoxy the Garden and the Fall is not some “perfect” place where Adam and Eve were fully realized in their perfection, and that we “fell” from this status and now we are forever damned by the transmission of “Original Sin” by our progenitors. This is a Western Idea of the Fall. In the light of physics, the universe seems to have an inclination towards openness and creaturely self-making, and this seems to square much better with Eastern cosmology than with the West.
As Vladimir Lossky states in “Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church” we see in “the initial state of the created cosmos an unstable perfection in which the fullness of union is not yet achieved and in which created beings still have to grown in love in order to accomplish the thought-will of God” (97). And these thought-wills “determine the different modes that creatures participate in the creative energies” (95).
So, instead of the myth in Genesis being understood as something that once was, it was something that could have been. Rather than being partners with God, partaking in His nature, growing in perfection, we instead chose ourselves to be self-sufficient. Christ restored that broken bond out of love, not as a satisfaction of God’s wrath. He “became human so that humans may become divine” as St Athanasius said.
In Eastern thought the universe is more dynamic and relational in character, not the static universe of Augustine. As creatures revealed to be created in the Image and Likeness of God, we have the supreme role in the cosmic drama as microcosm and mediator bringing together the physical and spiritual universe, in which we truly become “gods” as God himself became man, that the material world becomes full of God’s divine Energies through our responsibility as “cosmic priests”. This is most clearly seen in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.
The bread and wine are symbols of the true reality. God is there! Christ is on the altar, ready for our consumption. We all partake of the One Body becoming one with God and with each other. The Eucharist cannot occur with out the presence of a community. It is done “for the life of the world” as the Liturgy says, not merely for the clergy or the Christian community. It is in Communion, this Eschatological moment that not only recalls the past but done in antcipation of the final moment when all is in God and God is in all. God fully infuses himself in us during communion, when we are among our brothers and sisters in Christ. As my friend Jeremy has stated on his blog: “The condemned temporal, the dust, has been graced with its original purpose, that of restored relation, if all of life is found, again, as being in relation to God (as reclaimed by the incarnate Christ, ontologically/essentially) then life may be received as grace, as sacrament, and Christ may be known as the substance of sustenance for humanity.”
Until that final eschatological moment (billions of years in the future) when the Universe either ends in a Big Crunch of drifts slowly aprart, when God will resurrect this creation, and imbue it with his Energies as Christ was illumined on Mount Tabor, we see a glimpse of it in the Eucharist. Indeed, as Pope Bendict has said “Every Eucharist is a Parousia!”
