Twenty-first century progressive Christians often have a hard time with the story of Adam and Eve, as told in the third chapter of Genesis – traditionally called “the Fall”. 

I remember teaching a Sunday morning formation session on this passage at my last church. A faithful parishioner asked me with real anguish on her face, “How can we treat this story as important when it’s so misogynistic? The woman is blamed for everything, and then cursed!”

It’s true that the parts of the story that have been emphasized are Eve’s guilt and her curse. But the actual text is scrupulously fair. Adam blames Eve for his choice; Eve blames the snake. And God, unimpressed by this constant shifting of blame, curses both Adam and Eve.

I pointed this out to my parishioner, and then I asked a question: Are these curses a prescription – that is, do they represent what the writers of Genesis believe God wants? 

Because if so, then they are irredeemably patriarchal. God’s exact words are these: 

To the woman he said,
“I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing;
   in pain you shall bring forth children,
yet your desire shall be for your husband,
   and he shall rule over you.”
And to the man he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife,
   and have eaten of the tree
about which I commanded you,
   ‘You shall not eat of it’,
cursed is the ground because of you;
   in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
   and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
   you shall eat bread
until you return to the ground,
   for out of it you were taken;
you are dust,
   and to dust you shall return.” (Gen. 3:14-19)

If that is God’s desire for God’s creation – if God is gleefully pronouncing these curses on God’s cowering children and enjoying watching them writhe – then this is indeed not a God worth worshipping. 

But – I asked my parishioner – what if these words are not a prescription, but a diagnosis? What if the man’s hard agricultural labour and the woman’s pain in childbearing are simply things that the writers of Genesis observed in the world around them, and decided that these things were, in fact, not the way the world should be, and therefore sought an explanation in the origin myth  of their culture?

Given that the people who wrote down the story of the Fall were almost certainly high-status men (because nobody else in that time and place would have been literate), it is fairly astonishing that they saw their own privilege, and the labour and pain of lower-status men and of women, not as the divine order of things, but rather as the result of a cosmic rupture, a wrong that cried out for righting.

And what, precisely, is this wrong?  What is the “knowledge of good and evil” that was so dangerous that Adam and Eve had to be warned away from it on pain of death?

In J. Baird Callicott’s groundbreaking 1990 article, “Genesis and John Muir,” he argues that “the knowledge of good and evil means neither knowledge of sexual congress, certainly, nor the simple knowledge of the difference between right and wrong, but the power to judge, to decide, to determine what is right and what is wrong in relation to self.” (Italics Callicott’s.) And this knowledge is dangerous because “once aware of themselves they will inevitably treat themselves as an intrinsically valuable hub to which other creatures and the creation as a whole may be referred for appraisal.  Self-consciousness is a necessary condition for self-centeredness, self-interestedness.”

In other words, the Fall of Adam and Eve was the beginning of anthropocentrism, the fatal flaw in humanity that leads us to see ourselves (falsely) as separate from, and superior to, the rest of God’s creation, and thus enables us not only to damage and destroy that creation to the point that it threatens the existence of other species and ecosystems and even of the human race, but to continue doing so with full consciousness of these consequences!  For a progressive faith that reckons with the big issues of our time, this story could hardly be more relevant. The breaking of the apple’s stem in Eden was the first step on the road to the global climate crisis.

Callicott speculates that this story “seems openly to lament the neolithic revolution, the shift from foraging to agriculture that had befallen evolving Homo sapiens some seven millennia beforehand. … It regards an agricultural modus vivendi as a cursed way of life and marks the dawn of the Neolithic as the point of departure for an upwardly spiraling human population and a multitude of human evils. It accurately … suggests that Homo sapiens’s earliest ancestors dwelt in a tropical forest and fed on fruit.”

Intriguing potential support for this theory has been found at the architectural site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey, which features elaborate ritual structures (many of them fertility-themed and featuring snake carvings) created by a hunter-gathering culture which then appears to have either disappeared, or packed up and moved elsewhere. A New Yorker article on the site by Elif Batuman (2011), remarks, “The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, like the first fruits of cultivation, brought on an immediate, irrevocable curse. Man now had to work the earth, to eat of it all the days of his life. … God’s terrible words to Eve—‘I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; in pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you’—may refer to a decline in women’s health and status produced, in early agricultural societies, by the economic need to have children who would till and inherit the land. Women, having access to goat’s milk and cereal, may have weaned their children earlier, resulting in more frequent, more debilitating pregnancies. The institution of private property, meanwhile, made paternal certainty a vital concern, and monogamy, particularly for women, was strictly enforced.”

The Göbekli Tepe site has been proposed as evidence that the shift to centralization and hierarchy in human society actually caused, rather than resulted from, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, but the exact chronology is not really relevant; the important point is that the text of Genesis 3 accurately diagnoses a tectonic, traumatic shift in the very nature of human existence, and attributes the “cursed” results, not to the will of God, but to human stubbornness and error. (A seminary classmate of mine had a T-shirt which said, “God’s original plan was to hang out in a garden with some naked vegetarians.”)

So what do we do with this insight? Going back to Eden is impossible, and we must live with the knowledge (a word that now seems remarkably loaded in context) that not only our techno-commodified and industrialized lives of the last few centuries, but even our relatively “close to the land” agricultural lives of the last ten millennia or so, have put us on a collision course with ecological catastrophe. 

As Christians, we may deplore the actions of the first Adam, but we worship the second Adam. Christ, in the Incarnation, entered into the human experience in an essentially agricultural manner, growing up in a peasant village in Palestine and telling stories about wheat and figs, vines and sheep. This God compared himself to a grain of wheat that fell into the ground and died, and commanded his followers to remember and consume him in the form of bread and wine – the “staple food and festive drink” (Gordon Lathrop’s phrase) of his society.

Jesus was and is in the redemption business. If humanity is the problem, then Christ entered into, and redeemed, humanity. If agriculture is the problem, then our project, as a Church and as the human race, must be the redemption of agriculture: the conversion of a hardscrabble Neolithic project of extracting as much nutrition from the soil by any means necessary, to a Divine undertaking of stripping off our anthropocentric blinders, coming to see ourselves as part of nature, and using our intelligence and consciousness to renew rather than to destroy. (The Netflix documentary Kiss the Ground provides an inspiring look at how this is happening even now, though not in a religious context.)

God’s vision of the ultimate telos of Creation is not of a pristine wilderness, nor even a return to Eden, but of a city: a human-scale community in which architecture and agriculture intertwine, where a crystal-clear river flows through the streets, where the tree of life bears fruit in every month of the year and provides its leaves for the healing of the nations. This vision resembles nothing so much as a permaculture: the contemporary (yet age-old) eco-agricultural concept of a living landscape, deliberately cultivated so that human needs are in harmony with what the land offers, and the cultivators offer as much back to the soil as they receive.

For centuries, this image of the redeemed city has been, for the faithful, a glorious metaphor expressing our eternal hope. In the 21st century, if the Church and the human race are to survive, it must become a glorious reality representing our actual lives.

Let’s get to work.

J. Baird Callicott, “Genesis and John Muir,” in Covenant for a New Creation: Ethics, Religion and Public Policy, Maryknoll, 1991.

Elif Batuman, “The Sanctuary: the world’s oldest temple and the dawn of civilization,” New Yorker, December 19/26, 2011 (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/12/19/the-sanctuary)

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