Original SI{g}N

The story of the garden, with its climax in the "fall of man," is often read as a story of humanity's disobedience towards God perpetrated in the act of eating from the tree in the center of the garden. This understanding focuses on a conception of God as a law giver and man as a law-breaker. We are "fallen" because we could not and cannot keep God's law(s). Could it be that humanity's sin goes much deeper than this juvenile disobedience? This act of disobedience was based on a promise. A promise that we could know like God and therefore be a god. The deception of the serpent in the garden is the promise of knowledge, a knowledge of good and evil, of right from wrong; "when you eat of [the tree] your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil (Gen 3:5)." A knowledge that would release humans of their dependence on a relationship with God. The forbidden fruit quenches man will to know. It is the source of our endless systemization of morality. The delusion of the garden may have no greater advocate than the proto-Cartesian philosophizing of the west. Beginning with the thinking self we set out in our delusion, driven mad by the promise of knowledge, to establish 'clear and distinct' ideas about the world with which to return to the cabinet of the mind, storing them until such time as we are ready to construct our understanding of the world using the 'secure foundations' we had retrieved from reality. We are all fallen not because at sometime or another we stole something or told a lie but because we have all succumbed to the great illusion of the serpent: that we can be like God, creating a world out of nothing. We attempt to speak this world into being through language, a language of violence that obscures the other to clarify the self.

The Externality of Grace

“For there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a sacrifice of atonement by his blood, effective through faith. (Romans 3:22-25)”

Grace, so ingrained in our protestant understanding of Christianity, seems to have an obvious meaning: God in his ultimate love for his created order sent his son the carry the burden of all sin to the cross and present himself as a holy sacrifice on our behalf. Grace in this sense is always for me. It is God’s solution to the problem of sin. We have fallen from God’s grace and therefore must receive it as a gift from his son. Yet what do we do with this gift; wear it like a badge of honor that reinstates our specialness, our position in glory? Am I now a new being in Christ in opposition to a still fallen world? Grace is for me, for my understanding of self, how precious am I in the sight of the Lord. Yet is there an aspect of grace beyond our own wellbeing and eternal security? Grace is not just the starting point of the Christian life it is the Christian life.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away” And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new. (Revelation 21:1-5)”

Language constructs the world we live in so as to convert the other into the same. Meaning is a perpetual return to self in that meaning is constructed for the self. Our judgments of the world are judgments of the world the self constructs through language. Paul writes: “Therefore you have no excuses, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself (Romans 2:1).” This is the fallen world the world the mind constructs as a world of one apart from the reality of the Kingdom. To accept the internal gift of grace and nothing more is to live as an alien in a foreign land. A land given to us by the mind for the perpetuation of the fallen state of humanity: the illusion that the knowledge of God has been given to us through language, a deception as old as the serpent himself. Yet Christ makes all things new. And with grace we are promised the kingdom of God, which was inaugurated not in death but in life! In grace Christ is offering “eyes to see and ears to hear.” God dwells with us and through grace pierces the constructs of the same into the reality of the other, into the reality of the kingdom. No longer as I gaze upon world do I return to self but am transformed by the other, which is always a transcendence of the self. The externality of grace is kingdom vision: to see the other as a face and as such be filled with compassion and love. Jesus, as the first fruits of the kingdom, lived in radical relational to the other, perceiving that which was other than himself and therefore in relation to himself. Where the religious leaders looked and saw only the law, or the denial of the law, Christ saw the face of a person and was moved to compassion, to love. There is a new heaven and a new earth, one where God dwells among mortals, in the here and now and I pray that Christ may come and give us eyes to see and ears to hear.