From Mud to Mystery - (Christ in You, The Hope of Glory) Part 1

 

In the last post I took us through a recent experience of walking with some Evangelical Fundamentalists and how that felt a bit swampy or Dead Sea-ish! While it was good to meet some lovely new people, the spirit, and intentions of the leadership, as well as the all-too-familiar destructive doctrines and dogmas being taught, meant I was glad to be allowed to end that experiment, through God’s grace and kindness.

It might be helpful for us, then, to look back to see where this has all come from, and then enjoy The Gospel of the revelation of the love of God and the glory that is Jesus Christ, and His resurrection power to save the world through reconciling us all to God.

In the beginning there was: light, land, water, air, plants, planets, stars, fish, birds, animals, cattle, insects, spiders, and snakes. And God declared it all “good”. Then came the Apotheosis: “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing (including snakes) that creeps on the earth.’ God created man in His [sic] own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them…and behold, it [creation] was very good.”

The second account of the origin of Adam (“man”) offers more detail: “Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living (soul).”

Let’s start, then, from the Original Blessing of Innocence, rather than the Augustinian error of “Original Sin.”

Aurelius Augustine (354 CE – 430) based his theory on Genesis, chapter 3. He would have done better if he had read properly, starting with the beginning two chapters, before drawing any conclusions. Text, without context, is always a pretext: in this case for erroneous conclusions that have deceived and deluded the Church - at least the Western Church - ever since.

Hans Küng explains: “Augustine was convinced that behind all the misery of the world lurks a great sin which is having an effect on all human beings. This, of course, was also the conviction of many pagans in late antiquity, but Augustine accentuates it through a theology of the first Fall, by historicizing, psychologizing and above all sexualizing this ‘primal event’.”

Misreading Paul’s line from Romans 5:12, “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men – because all sinned…”  Augustine concluded, Küng explains, “Not only a primal sin of Adam but an inherited sin, a sin which every human being has from birth, an original sin. For Augustine, this was the reason why every human being, even the tiny infant, is poisoned in body and soul. All would incur eternal death unless they were baptized.”

Which gets us into the Evangelical Fundamentalist swamp of erroneous doctrinal dogmatism I mentioned previously!

Key to this, as with so many of the misconceptions and downright lies we have been taught as foundational “truth”, is in the errors of translation and interpretation. As Küng goes on to explain why Augustine read “Original sin” into the text: “What Augustine found in the Latin Bible translation of his time was in quo, and he referred this ‘in him’ to Adam. But the original Greek text simply has eph’ho = ‘because’ (or ‘in that’) all sinned!” Augustine could not read Greek and so was dependent upon the only available Latin (mis-) translation. This is such a regular pattern of misinterpretation and misrepresentation of Scripture, and it haunts us to this day. So much for the “inerrancy” and “infallibility” of Scripture!

Writing about these questions in his first book, The Mystery In You, Logan Barone explains: “When we examine the story of mankind in Genesis, we see that from the start, he was created in the perfect image and likeness of God. God even calls man very good compared to the rest of creation He calls merely good. So, from the beginning, it is right to say that the nature of the human race was originally very good, or as I like to say, originally innocent…”

Sin, then, is not about God separating Themselves from us because we are, by nature, sin-full, but our “sin” is “to enter a delusion where we become unconscious of our union with God.” (Barone, Op Cit.) Because here’s the thing: The saving death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ was not some sort of Plan B. Rather, it was, as Paul makes clear, “God…in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself.” (2 Corinthians 5:19) It was man who “separated himself from God psychologically” by entering into the unconscious state of “sin”, as Barone sees it.

Dr C Baxter Kruger, in his book, Jesus and the Undoing of Adam, explains our glorious hope in the perfect plan of God from the beginning: “It was not the Fall of Adam, therefore, that set God’s agenda; it was the decision to share the great dance with us through Jesus. Adam’s plunge certainly threatened God’s dreams for us, but that threat had been anticipated and already strategically overcome in the predestination of the Incarnation.”

So, where the first Adam failed, a second Adam - Jesus – succeeds. Indeed, Paul writes to the church at Ephesus: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavens in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation [lit: Fall] of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love, He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will…” (Ephesians 1: 3-5.NASB)

Which brings us to the Mystery part! Next time, we will see how the revelation of Jesus as the Christ (Anointed One) of God exposed a profound mystery. Paul, again: “…that I might carry out the…word of God, that is, the mystery which has been hidden from the ages and generations, but has now been manifested to the saints, to whom God willed to make known what the riches of the glory of this mystery among the Gentiles is, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.” (Colossians 1:25b – 27 NASB)

And, as Richard Rohr points out: “Mystery isn’t something that you cannot understand—it is something that you can endlessly understand! There is no point at which you can say, ‘I’ve got it.’ Always and forever, mystery gets you!”  

 

* Hans Küng – Christianity – The Religious Situation of Our Time (SCM Press, 1994)

   Logan Barone – The Mystery In You (The Writers’ Society, 2023)

   Dr C Baxter Kruger - Jesus and the Undoing of Adam (Perichoresis Inc, 2007)

   See also: Matthew Fox – Original Blessing (Bear and Company 1996)

   Danielle Shroyer – Original Blessing (Fortress Press, 2016)