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Okay, gang, the object of this lesson is: "To help each class member understand that the Fall was a necessary part of Heavenly Father's plan for us." Maybe I'll get to that, maybe I won't - but you can just remember that that's what you're supposed to be learning. First off, let me introduce you to my favorite Old Testament commentator, a nice Jewish lady named Jeanne Steig. She happens to be the wife of cartoonist and author of children's books, William Steig, whose books you might have read to your children. (Amos and Boris and Yellow and Pink are my personal favorites, as well as CDB!) Anyway, Sister Steig wrote a book called The Old Testament Made Easy, with illustrations by her husband, from which I draw the first text for this morning: And God Said, "Let us Make Man" And begin it did. As I see it, the Garden of Eden is the first place where the mythos of the Latter-day Saints runs headlong up against the logos of scientific rationalism. There's no scientific way to examine pre-earth existence, one way or the other. When it comes to actual creation, Latter-day Saints can go along with the Darwinians and geologists (though few enough do, I suppose) accepting the idea that it took millions of years for the earth to get into its present condition. It even seems possible that God could have used a technique like natural selection to create the wide variety of plant and animal life that we find around us on the earth. Except when it comes to human beans. In order for the whole Fall-and-Atonement scenario to work, at least in the literalistic way that LDS talk about it, you have to have somebody Fall. There has been some talk about "pre-Adamites" (was that Tallmadge? or Roberts?) who were vaguely humanoid but were wiped out by the flood, thus accounting for human-like bones dating back some 10 million years. But I think most Latter-day Saints believe that Man was a special creation, not really related to all those mere animals. And most of them date the Fall, along with Bishop Ussher, at about six thousand years ago. So let's see what happened, back in the recent past. One of the statements from the lesson that caught my attention was this one: Satan comes to the Garden of Eden and seeks to deceive Eve. Y'know, I've always liked snakes, ever since I was introduced to them by my 5/6/7th grade teacher. And I've never liked the idea that I wasn't supposed to like them. But I think that Satan/serpent gets a bad rap here. When you look at what the words actually say, we're told that God originally said to Adam, "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." (I'm using the Genesis version for a reason that will come up later.) This really sounds like God is saying, "If you eat the fruit from that tree, you won't live past sunset." Right? Then the serpent comes along, and says, "Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." Was he deceiving anybody? Well, maybe in the sense that he seems to be telling her that she wouldn't die at all - which she would. But she wouldn't drop down dead as soon as she took a bite, which was what God made it sound like. And they would be like Gods, knowing good and evil. So I'd say that God and Satan seem to be about even at this point - neither of them being perfectly frank and forthright about what would happen as a result of eating the fruit. Still, I guess it can be argued that Satan was trying to get Eve to do something that he thought would be harmful to her and as William Blake wrote, "A truth that's told with bad intent/Beats all the lies you can invent." The reason I'm taking the passage from Genesis instead of Moses is this: Fundamentalist, Biblical literalist Christians, are always insisting that when it talks in Genesis about "days" it means precisely those 24-hour periods that it takes the earth to rotate on its axis. But God says, "in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die," and Adam lived for nearly a thousand years after he ate the silly apple (or apricot, or whatever it was.) If Genesis days are only 24 hours long, how come Adam lived so long? In an attempt to limit my commentary, I'll try to follow the main points of the lesson, as outlined in the teacher's manual. You'll notice that these headings are black and italicized. 1. The Fall of Adam and Eve and its effects on them and us There's a long list here: Physical death separation from God, ability to reproduce, necessity to work because the ground is cursed, and, rather intriguingly, "we can obtain eternal life." Could Adam and Eve not have obtained eternal life without first becoming mortal? Looking around on the web for stuff about felix culpa, the traditional Christian teaching of the "fortunate fall," the consensus seems to be that if mankind hadn't fallen, they would never have known the great love the Savior had for us, which was manifest in his saving us through his death and atonement. But is that really true? Is that really the only way God/Jesus could have demonstrated his great love for us, so that we would "get it"? I don't know. Do we have to fall so we can know how great it is to be rescued? It seems to me, though, that coming to earth from a pre-earth paradise where we were always in the presence of God is enough of a fall that we wouldn't need any more fall to become vulnerable to sin. I have a hard time imagining a world in which people, with nobody watching them all the time, would always be inclined to be honest and hardworking and altruistic. I actually kind of like the LDS idea that one main reason we're here is to learn how to do those things from the inside, not just because we've always been told to do them. But in learning such things on our own we're bound to make mistakes, and then maybe an atonement would still be necessary. Latter-day Saints tend to teach that the Fall of Man was a Good Thing, in keeping with God's Plan, but that it was good mainly because it caused people to be able to reproduce, which they hadn't been able to before. This teaching seems mostly unique to Mormonism, backed up by the Book of Mormon in 2 Nephi, chapter 2. This puts Eve in the very interesting position of sacrificing (deliberately, if you credit the temple version) her own privileged situation in Paradise, so that the rest of the human race could come into existence. Some other religious thinkers seem to think that if there had been no apple eaten, then all of us would have gotten to live forever in Paradise. [1] I've been reading some stuff lately about how hard it is to get people to sacrifice their own private advantage for the common good. Eve seems to have done this, at least in the LDS view, but although Mormons don't condemn her choice in the way traditional Christians have, somehow this has never translated into giving LDS women equal privileges in the church. 2. The Atonement of Jesus Christ saves us from physical and spiritual death. This is a significant part of the lesson as it appears in the lesson manual, which suggests that the three things necessary for human salvation are 1) a creation, 2) a fall, and 3) an atonement. I don't want to speak slightingly about this subject - it's one way humans have found of dealing with the idea that, even though a benevolent and wise God created this world, and the people in it aren't perfectly good, (some of them are downright rotten) it will all work out right in the end. All of us who have any sense of morality know that sometimes we fall short - far short - of the sort of behavior we would wish for ourselves. And we all know that we're going to die someday, and generally we don't like that idea one bit. I wonder how much more hopefully people are able to live, with the idea of Christ's gift to them, and how much this can make their lives better. 3. Adam and Eve begin life as mortals, bear children, teach them the gospel, and worship and obey God. I'm intrigued by this passage in Moses 5:10-11, which does not correspond to anything found in Genesis:
I've long seen the fall, metaphorically, as the time when humans decided to stop being animals and become humans. Knowing good from evil certainly seems to be one of the traits that divides humans from other animals and Eve, having experienced both, seems to prefer knowing. And in some ways, it seems that those of us who have "fallen" out of the church have similar feelings. I really don't like it when people talk about faithful Latter-day Saints as "sheep," but sometimes I do get impatient with those among them who live unexamined lives. I'll end up with another tidbit from Jeanne Steig, this one from another book, called Consider the Lemming: Man __________ |