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Charting the New Reformation
Part XIV – The Third Thesis: “Original Sin” Pre-Darwinian Mythology – Post Darwinian Nonsense (Continued)
It was Charles Darwin, who was the primary voice sounding the death knell on Atonement theology. Darwin’s work did not just attack the literal details of the Bible’s creation story. That was but his first perceived target. By the clever scheme of suggesting that each of the seven days in the creation story might well have been a billion years, much of Darwin’s original challenge was removed. Fundamentalists actually believed for a time that they had successfully fought off the Darwinian threat and had succeeded in harmonizing the literal Bible with science. It was, however, a shallow and short-lived peace. As the thought of Charles Darwin began to percolate throughout the educated world, a far deeper threat from Darwin began to be felt by believers. On these new levels no compromise was possible. Both Darwin and the primary way in which the Christian story was told could not be right; one or the other had to be wrong. The battle was on and the destruction of the primary Christian myth that involved a good creation, followed by a fall into sin, which then required the rescue operation, which God mounted in Jesus with its climax on the cross of Calvary, producing the pious claim that Jesus “died for my sins,” all came crashing down. What had been a pre-Darwinian myth became post-Darwinian nonsense. It would take a couple of hundred years for this challenge to the Christian faith to be completed. Today, we live in the aftermath of Darwin’s total victory.
The first challenge that traditional Christianity had to face was that there never was an original perfection from which we had actually fallen. Darwin confronted us with a creation that was both ongoing and incomplete. At this very moment galaxies are still being formed and various species of plant and animal life are being born and becoming extinct. At least at this moment, human life sits at the top of the food chain with no natural enemies. We are the current winners of the battle for survival, but uneasy should be the head that wears that crown.
Some 65,000,000 years ago the dinosaurs occupied the top rung in the world’s food chain. They too had no natural enemies. Those dinosaurs, like Homo sapiens today, had no reason to believe that their ascendancy would ever be challenged. That is, however, not the way that evolution works. In the ever-churning evolutionary process when one door is closed on one form of life, it appears to open to another form of life. In that ancient moment of dinosaur supremacy in the history of this planet something radical, unexpected and dramatic happened. Today’s major scientific conjecture is that there was a collision between the planet earth and a giant meteor, perhaps one as large as the planet Mars. This collision may have been so powerful that it knocked this earth out of its primary orbital path around the sun, changing the earth’s climate measurably for a significant period of time. Perhaps it raised a level of dust that would not settle for generations, scrambling all of the forms of life in a chaotic way. Whatever it was that happened, we know that the dinosaurs became extinct and with that extinction, the age of the dominant reptiles came to an end. The door was thus opened for the mammals to rise in ascendancy. Our first mammalian ancestor appears to have been a mouse-like creatures that inhabited the grasslands of East Africa. From that single ancestor, the mammals proliferated in a number of directions. There were many families of mammals and each species joined in the struggle for supremacy. Some like the mouse, beaver and opossum were rodents. The cat family included creatures as small as tiny kittens, as well as midsized wildcats and mountain lions, to larger panthers, tigers and lions, the latter of which was given the title “king of the jungle.” Then there was the mammoth family of mammals, which included the now extinct mammoth, the elephant, and possibly both the hippopotomusses and the great whales, which seem to be distantly related. There was also the primate family, which included small monkeys, larger orangutans, gorillas, the great apes and ultimately Homo sapiens. For millions of years, representatives from each of these mammalian subsets struggled among themselves and with each other for supremacy until finally the superior brain found in the primate line led to their domination of the animal world. That was as recent as 4-6 million years ago. Nothing, however, in this long evolutionary process pointed to an original perfection. No form of life is what it was originally, nor is it what it will always be. No part of life was born in a state of unchanging perfection, as the Bible suggests, and no form of life ever fell from perfection into what we came to call “sin.” Physical reality knows only an evolving world of trial and error. There was no original perfection; there was only an ever-changing evolutionary process. The theological ramifications from that insight alone are stunning for Christianity. If there was no “original perfection,” there could have been no fall from perfection into “original sin.” If there was no fall into sin, there was no need for a “savior” to rescue us. One cannot be rescued from a fall that never happened, nor can one ever be restored to a status that one has never possessed. The idea that Jesus on the cross paid the price of our fall in order to save us from sin, thus becomes an idea that no longer translates into a concept that makes any sense. This ancient form of telling the Christ story has thus collapsed before our eyes. Yet we continue to say the ancient words about Jesus: “O Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.” Is there any reason for us to continue to think that these non-sensical words will ever be able to translate themselves into meaningful worship for post-Darwinian Homo sapiens?
We human beings were not made in a special act of creation, nor were we created in the image of God. Like every other form of life, we have journeyed over billions of years from a single cell into our various levels of complexity, consciousness and self-consciousness. As recently as the 1960’s we learned of our DNA relatedness to all living things. We now know that not only do we share a 99.9% identical DNA with the great apes, but we also share a DNA connection with the clams, the cabbages and even the plankton of the sea. Life is all one evolving whole. There was no original perfection followed by a fall into “original sin.” There was only the slow and gradual unfolding of life in an evolutionary process. There were howls of protest in religious circles as these realities began to be processed and established as truth. Darwin became, and in conservative religious circles, remains the primary enemy and threat to traditional Christianity, but no credible challenges to Darwin’s explanation of our origins have yet been found. Darwin was correct. The primary way we told the Christ story was not!
So how do we today account for the reality of evil? Is it simply a part of life? Are we nothing more than the survivors of a tooth and claw struggle? If human beings are connected with every other life form, then how do we tell the story of Jesus? Is there anything from that story that we can maintain? While the theological forms of yesterday no longer hold rational water, must we give up the experience just because the human explanation of that experience has become bankrupt? Is the reality of “Transcendence,” “Otherness” and “God” dependent on the truth of ancient mythology? I do not think so, but I do know that our explanations today cannot begin where they began in our religious past.
Human beings share the gift of life with every living thing, both plant and animal. Is there something common to all forms of life? I think there is. Studies reveal that every living thing, including human beings, is survival-oriented. Illustrations that support this premise are not difficult to find. Survival drives the evolutionary process.
Mangrove trees, a fresh water plant, but now living in a tidal river in Northern Queensland in Australia, have developed, in the service of survival, an elaborate rootage system that filters out much of the salt before it can kill the tree. When excessive salt still threatened the life of the tree, a means was devised to guide the salt to particular leaves, which then turned orange and fell off the branches. These leaves came to be called “the sacrificial leaves of the mangrove trees.” They died that the tree might live. Parakeets, living in the Amazon jungle, receive life giving nutrients from the seeds of the fruits that grow in the jungle. The problem is that these seeds are toxic, so the food on which they survive will also kill them. These parakeets, however, have learned to go daily to certain places in the forest, called “clay-licks,” where the soil is filled with anti-toxins. Here they ingest the dirt, getting their fill of anti-toxins, which then enables them to eat their toxic food and still survive. There are no native mammals on the Galapagos Islands, but pirates who once used these islands as hideouts imported some goats so that they would have a fresh meat supply. Over time the stomachs and kidneys of these wild goats adapted to the briny water, the only water available in those islands, in order to survive.
Biology dictates that self-conscious human beings have installed survival as our highest value. That inevitably means that we are self-centered. We do not respond well to people who are different – those who look different, speak a different language or worship a different God- because we have judged them as a threat to our survival. So to be human is to be prejudiced, tribal and sectarian. Self-centeredness is rooted, not in our morality, as we once thought, but in our biology. It is a given, not a consequence! That is the universal human experience that our ancestors once called “original sin.” The experience was real, the interpretation was false. We are not “fallen sinners,” we are rather incomplete human beings. Atonement theology is dead. The door begins to open a new way to tell the old, old story.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.
Question & Answer
Krysztyna E. (last name withheld on purpose), via the Internet, writes:
Question:
I have only just found your work and in the last couple of months have read three of your books and there are two more on my shelf waiting for me. It is hard to express how grateful I am and how much it means. I had heard your name back in the early 90s when my world crashed down around my ears, but since my parents were fundamentalists, it wasn’t something I could pick up off the bookshelf. It is too late for me to find belief again, but even so the 30 years old pain that has directed so much of my life is finally finding some relief.
A short background: for the first 25 years of my life, my faith was the foundation of my entire being. It was only when I found myself running away from my husband, who was violent to my children, that I suddenly came crashing against something I had never had to look at before – that the church insisted that the reality was not what I could see in front of my face, but only what they could imagine was the “real’ existence in the heavenly realm.
So for the first time, I was brutally confronted with a division between God and truth. I had always thought they were the same thing. My God was truth so the church fell away from me (in fact I was asked not to come any more). My parents agreed with the church and sided with my husband. (My father even suggested that I should be exorcised). So I was 25, naïve with three children under five with no community, no family, trying to find air in the vacuum. I tried here and there to find a framework for my profound spirituality. Eventually I just wore out and literally drifted away, leaving everything behind me. I had nothing to give me reality. I lost my children because suicide attempts don’t look good in custody courts. They went back to live with their father with devastating consequences. Two of them now, as adults, never even speak to their father (or go anywhere near a church).
I am sure this is a horror story often repeated in the history of the church. For me, my entire journey is about losing truth. I know now that I will never recover from that loss. The God-shaped hole is ferocious in my case and I cannot fill it. Right now I cannot find anything to believe in at all. Not love, not hope, not relationships, not anything; perhaps respect, perhaps that is all. So now my task is to deal with the death of truth and to find a way to walk forward anyway.
So to read your work is almost, almost enough. To see that the truth I was fed was not even true on its own terms. To see that there are people who can find truth while looking at the damage of the church full in the face and naming the lies as such. To sense your great compassion for those who left or were left, even though it mattered more than anything. Somehow your work makes it ok. If I had had access to it 25-30 years ago, I would not be where I am now. I would probably be in exile as your term perfectly captures it. I would not have had to lose truth; but it’s ok anyway. It gives me some strength. A way to hold up my head, a way to stop crying to the long invisible people, who were so wrong about what truth was – to put that finally to rest. To know that it is not up to them. Somehow I still needed to know that it wasn’t true. That I was actually ok. I hope you have understood something of what I am trying to say.
Answer:
Dear Krysztyna,
Thank you for your letter. It was one of the hardest and most honest letters I have ever been asked to read. Religion can be and has been a cruel force in the lives of a number of people, but what your letter does is to put a face on it. I apologize to you for what well-meaning, but deeply uninformed people, have done to you in the name of the Christ I serve. I hope you can find a loving community in which to live, in which your wounds can be bound up and you can find yourself free to grow for which you obviously have great potential. In my experience the church that does that best both intentionally and actually is called Unity. I do not know where you live, but if there is a Unity Church near you, I invite you to try it for a period of time. More than any other denominational movement I know this church accepts people as they are and then loves them into being all that they can be. You have so much to offer that I would hate for you not to discover this and then not to give others a chance to receive your gifts in a community of worship.
I hope to hear from you again.
Live well!
John Shelby Spong
Announcements
Jesus: The Cold Case, the film is up on On Demand again for the duration of Easter!
Winner of the AFTA award for best documentary (in New Zealand) and Silver and Bronze medal winner at the New York Festivals Awards. Acclaimed film director and author Bryan Bruce takes on the ultimate cold case – Who killed Jesus and why? He visits the scenes of the crime, and talks with some of the world leading experts on the historical Jesus including Geza Vermes, Prof. John Dominic Crossan, Prof. Elaine Pagels, Dr. Helen Bond, Sir Lloyd Geering and Bishop John Shelby Spong.
Rent $3.99
24-hour streaming period
Watch on iOS, Apple TV, Roku, and Chromecast. Learn more.
