Divine Plagiarism

You know, without Darcy and Lizzie’s embrace in the final scene of Pride and Prejudice, the rest of the story isn’t worth a hill of beans. The whole thing is, after all, a love story; the entire storyline exists solely to bring the two of them together in to that embrace. Until you understand that, all the literary analysis in the world won’t make sense out of Miss Austin’s book. To us, a love story is a two-hour escape from the day to day drudgery that theoretically eventually sums into the great events of history. I think we may have things backwards.

For all the consternation that the free will vs. predestination debate has caused, I find it fascinating that the Apostle Paul hardly discusses the controversy at all. Far from avoiding the topic, Paul unflinchingly and unashamedly uses words interchangeably that seem to support one side or the other, neither side, or both sides equally. Given the exquisite detail that the Apostle applies to other issues of dispute, Christ’s divinity, the role of circumcision and such, I find it extraordinary that he would introduce such a controversial topic without so much as an explanation. Perhaps we forget that Paul was not a twenty-first century American, steeped in two millennia of the rigid Greek teleological view of history (even the term ‘twenty-first-century’ reveals our hand.) Perhaps time has a different flavor to a Jew living in the time of the Herods. Perhaps through the Eastern eyes of the Apostle, there never was any contradiction to start with.

Sociologists use the terms monochronic and polychronic to describe how different cultures deal with time. Monochronic cultures are the most familiar to those of us in the West: the metronome of the wristwatch propels us from one event to the next. Cause links to effect, in turn becoming a cause itself, linking back in a long, linear chain to the very beginning of the world. Polychronic cultures, on the other hand, see time in a much more fluid manner. Any Westerner who has spent time in the Middle East knows (and has most likely become frustrated by) the phrase Insh’Allah. God willing, I’ll get the airplane fixed today. Or tomorrow. Or the next day. If it doesn’t happen today, it’s not because of some unbreakable chain of causality. It’s because God didn’t will it. Besides, you can’t let the day-to-day nonsense of work get in the way of important things like building relationships (an argument that has some merit.) To the Westerner, relationships are a means to achieve results, a way to get things done. To the Easterner, relationships are an end in and of themselves, and results they achieve are simply positive by-products. With the exception of Luke and Acts, the Bible was written by Easterners.

Remember the two trees of the Garden. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Forbidden Fruit. The funny thing is that the phrase ‘forbidden fruit’ isn’t even from Genesis. It’s from the Mosaic law. You are supposed to leave a tree alone for the first three years, and when it begins to bear fruit on the fourth year, you are to let the fruit fall to the ground. The law commands you to forgo this fruit as an act of humility and submission to God (which incidentally fits in quite well with God’s laws of horticulture.) In the fifth year and every year afterwards, you are free to eat the tree’s fruit. Of course, we never made it to the fifth year in the Garden.

Both of our comfortable Greek theories trip over the roots of the tree. Predestination almost makes God complicit in the fall. Put up the tree, knowing what we’re going to do, and you may as well have done it yourself. A man cannot put booze in front of an alcoholic and then plead innocence for the ensuing drunken rampage. Surely, God can do whatever He wants, but a simple appeal to authority here and you run the risk of defending an Islamic conception of the divine. The God of the Bible is faithful to Himself and to His covenants; there is no evil in Him. Evil must then be a result of an abuse of something beautiful that He made and meant for good. The tree’s purpose cannot have been the fall, yet we brought about the fall through the tree. If hard predestination applies in the garden, then God made a tree intended for its own abuse. But this is a contradiction in terms: a Creator cannot create something intended for its own abuse, as abuse is using something outside of the intentions of its creator.

Hard free will, on the other hand, almost makes God into a tempter. Love cannot be compelled, therefore there must be an option not to love someone. So the tree gives us that option… it stands in the center of the garden with its enticing fruit as the perennial ’road not traveled.’ But there is something disquieting about the whole thing: I don’t know any husband who puts a picture of a competing suitor on the bathroom mirror as a test of his wife’s fidelity. Free will is built into the wedding vows themselves; the couple’s love for each other needs no additional temptation in order to be true. The capacity for abuse need not be engineered into free will, but the possibility of abuse is simply a consequence of the power God gave us by creating us in His image. Boeing is not complicit in the September 11th attacks, even though it was their aircraft which were hijacked from their intended purpose. An airliner harnesses tremendous kinetic energy in order to move people to and fro. That same energy, twisted and applied to a much darker purpose, created the death and destruction that we knew all too well. Boeing did not need to build a red-guarded ‘suicide attack’ button into their aircraft in order to move people home for Christmas; the potential for abuse was implicit in the design by virtue of the power harnessed by the aircraft. I wonder if the same was not true for that tree.

You do not explain to your three year old the intricacies of AC power and voltage. You simply tell him not to put the knife in the electrical outlet. Yet, when your child is older, you will likely introduce him to the uses of electricity, plugs and outlets. We were simply told not to eat from the tree. God is not obliged to explain to us the entirety of His design, nor does He require our concurrence in order to execute His plan. So like Job, He doesn’t have to tell us why. But He does choose to bless us. I believe that His desire with the tree was to bless us at a time of His choosing. Instead, we hijacked His blessing and turned it into a curse. We abandoned our trust in His goodness, and infected the fruit with the venom of that choice. Eating the fruit was fatal, but the fruit‘s poison was our own. God made the tree. We poisoned the tree. We ate the fruit. We died.

The fall was about our failure to trust that God had our best interests in mind, in our choice to make our own way in the world and not in some piece of fruit. This is a story of relationships, and the narrative exists only as an expression of those relationships. You don’t need a tree to demonstrate fidelity. Simply by having a relationship with God, we had the capacity for free will. We walked with Him in the garden. We could have broken his heart there, even without a tree. After all, the Enemy thought of sin all on his own. But the tree is where it happened, no doubt, and in this we are twice the traitor. If the tree was the next step in a scripted tragedy, then we are merely actors playing a role. If the tree was the perennial arboreal tempted, then we simply gave in to the tree’s wiles. But we took a tree He intended as a blessing, a tree He was looking forward to blessing us with when the time was right, and not only destroyed it, but turned it to a means of destroying ourselves. We murdered two things God loved that day, the tree and ourselves, using the very implements of God‘s intended love. No longer the tragic hero, no longer the weak-willed fool, the twice-traitor creature man turns on his Creator and Lover. And the story writes itself to fit his betrayal. This is how history begins: a Lover betrayed by His beloved.

Tragically, the pattern seems to repeat itself. In the Hebrew symphony of polychronic time that is the Old Testament the same melody plays out time and again. God chooses a people, and they fall away. He rescues them from their oppressors, and they turn their back on Him. The Great and Ancient Lover, whose beloved chooses time and again to become a whore. You can hear it in His voice, His anger and His pain as He talks to His friend Moses atop Mount Sinai. The people He chose, He loved and He saved are reveling in their idolatry at the base of the mountain as He looks on with tears and rage. We take Plato and Aristotle up Sinai with us (Moses did not.) To the predestination reading, this is simply one more object lesson in God’s faithfulness. But the thick air of Sinai is not some clinical academic classroom, and God hardly sounds like a teacher here. God sounds as if He is in earnest when He threatens to destroy His people and start again with Moses. To the free will reading, God knows how Moses will respond, so He presents Moses with a teachable moment. But this is no fable of Aesop, and God does not present Moses with the moral of the story when he passes of the test. God speaks as a lover who has been betrayed, who in spite of the pain of a broken heart desires His beloved. Moses reminds Him of His promises and His love, and God relents. So despite the comforting Thomian axiom that ‘prayer changes me, it doesn’t change God,’ I can’t find anything of the sort in the text. God doesn’t ever change His nature, but it certainly looks like Moses changed His mind. I can’t say I understand it. More precisely, I can’t say I understand it with my head. But to my heart, it makes all the sense in the world. And God made my heart as well as my head. Pascal tells us that the heart has reasons the head knows not of. Those reasons of the heart can lead us to Him as surely as any reasons of the head.

History is God’s love story with humanity. Jesus Christ is the Lover. The narrative is nothing more than the outpouring of our relationship with Him. He is the center, the rock in the center of the stream. The water moves around Him, and He is unmoved. To our finite, linear minds, history is a snapshot of the stream and all things are fixed. But the river flows, and we choose whether we will let Him break us or whether we will be broken upon Him. There is no room for freedom within the foreknowledge of a finite mind, but infinite mind of Christ holds every possibility in the universe inside His omniscience.

It is too simplistic to say Plan A vs. redeemed Plan B. Still, human history seems to consist entirely of God redeeming foolish human choices. We were walking with God in the Garden. Which person of the Trinity is most relevant to man? I believe that when the Bible says that we were walking with God, that we were actually walked with Him the same way that we walked with Him on the shores of Galilee and the same way we will walk with Him on the streets of the New Jerusalem. Jesus doesn’t need the fall and the cross to be Jesus. We chose the fall. He made it beautiful. God set out a plan for His Chosen People. Seeking a messiah on their own terms, they rejected Him. Yet, they would have seen those terms met had they trusted Him… even the Maccabees could not have hoped for the victory over Rome that the catacomb Church enjoyed quite unintentionally. He prepares beautiful stories for us, yet we choose to go our own way, and somehow He makes even those ways beautiful.

None of this is to in any way diminish God’s omnipotence, foreknowledge, or prescience. God is never taken by surprise by anything that we could do. Yet we are still capable of breaking His heart. Like so many other mysteries, this seeming contradiction is swallowed up by the vastness of His infinite nature. God is like a husband who continues to prepare a home for the wife that has left Him, knowing that she will continue to break His heart, but hoping nonetheless.

Perhaps this is the last mystery, and the crux of the matter. God hopes despite knowing all things. So uncertainty is not a prerequisite for hope. Likewise, faith is not predicated on doubt. So why must love be predicated on the potential for sin? With all the free will I can muster, I desire to enjoy Him in the midst of a perfected creation finally free of every vestige of sin. In the new Garden in the New Jerusalem, I believe we will eat from all the trees God has made in His good time. My love for Him never hung upon a tree. But He hung upon a tree out of love for me. This is history… how it plays out is nowhere near as important as where it leads.