Understanding Genesis: Adam, Eve, and the Fall

if you say i'm going to begin my consideration of the spiritual life with original sin i would say no no we're off to a bad start you don't begin with original sin begin rather with this marvelous original permission welcome back to the word on fire show i'm brandon vaught the senior publishing director at word on fire did you know that eden was on a mountain or how should we understand the creation of adam and eve and what actually happened at the fall well those are the questions we're going to discuss here in this episode continuing our series on understanding genesis and we're going to be discussing them with bishop robert baron bishop aaron good to see you hey brandon how you doing i want to hear more about that cow you mentioned a couple weeks ago you got a cow now and you're we do terry we've got a holstein cow on our little homestead here she's only nine months uh we can't breed her and milk her until she's a couple years old but those who know cows she's a holstein breed which is apparently the biggest milk producer and the person who sold it to us said look you got to be ready because she's going to be producing 12 to 17 gallons of milk a day when she's milking so our kids are going to be gorging on milk i'm sure well and i suggest that you should make cheese and then they send that out across the country there we go cheese butter sure okay well let's uh transition to your life you recently got back from new orleans you were there attending and celebrating the red mass tell us what that was about yeah it was fun uh that's the second red mass i've preached at um red mass you know is a special mass usually in october for the um legal community so for lawyers and judges and politicians i did one a few years ago in honolulu which was a delight and this year in the wonderful city of new orleans and i was in the cathedral there the first time i'd visited the cathedral beautiful place and the governor of louisiana was there the chief justice of the supreme court i think most of the justices of the supreme court of louisiana were there all sorts of you know federal and local judges and lawyers and law students etc uh so we had a mass to ask god's intercession over their um or god's protection over their work then i gave a somewhat substantive uh homily more like a little lecture on um church state you know politics religion that sort of thing and i i invoked everybody from um the author of the letter to diagnitis from the second century from the same time as irenaeus by the way that letter goes back to the time of like marcus aurelius um i invoked aquinas on law and i invoked um the great alexis to tocqueville as he uh reflected on democracy in america so this did a somewhat higher level presentation on those on those issues there were a lot of articles covering your celebration of mass there and my favorite was at the end of one of those articles at the end it said the governor of louisiana was in attendance there and it said the governor asked bishop baron for a copy of his homily is that true yeah he sure did his name is john bel edwards and he's a democrat but he's pro-life uh democrat strongly pro-life so i thanked him for that uh that commitment and then he said to me well you know i'm i'm for the full range of of life issues of capital punishment and and euthanasia and i said yep that's that's the right attitude you know uh and then he asked me for a copy of the of the so i just gave him the physical copy that i had in the pulpit pretty cool all right well again today we're continuing our series titled understanding genesis we did an episode a few weeks back on the creation story today we're going to move through the adam eve and fall portions of genesis and then in future episodes we'll keep powering through the book so i want to start with eden eden itself you've noted before that there's an interesting feature in the description of the garden of eden which i don't think most people have reflected on namely that there's a river that flows out of eden and then divides into four branches including the tigris and the euphrates river but when you think about it topographically this must mean that eden was a bit of an elevated place if you have these four rivers flowing out of it presumably down from it so it's it's a kind of mountain what's the significance of this geographic fact that eden was an elevated place or a mountain yeah it's a great symbol isn't it throughout the bible so the mountain the elevated place where the creation as it were goes up and where god comes down where the two of them meet so it's always a privileged place of encounter which is why mount sinai is where the law is given it's why mount zion is where the temple is built it's why jesus gives the law on a mountain it's why the transfiguration took place on a mountain height it's why calvary even though it's a little tiny hill is something like a mountain the idea is it's the place of of connection and encounter that's why brandon you know in the bible uh as i've as i've suggested the place of the law the place of the temple the place of sacrifice the place of right preaching those are all mountain places it's where we encounter the lord so coming down from the mountain coming down to the plain would represent a sort of declension from this heightened spiritual experience so i would read it that way poetically as eden being on a mountain or even being a kind of mountain it means it's a it's a primal temple it's a place of right praise and we mentioned i think last time as the whole purpose of humanity is to lead creation in a chorus of right praise so think of the garden in its beauty and its fecundity as evocative of the temple the place where humanity is doing what it's supposed to do and from that rightly ordered humanity comes a rightly ordered world i think all of that is contained in that beautifully suggested symbol because it doesn't say by the way on the mountain of eden but the very fact is you say the rivers flow from it means it's a heightened place and again the rivers too life comes from the right praise of god which is why i'll go to the prophet ezekiel when he envisions the restored temple what's coming forth from its side but a great river which then uh brings life and and healing to the world same idea isn't it what flows forth from the side of christ on the mountain of calvary but blood and water from his side same thing from eden and the rivers to to the temple and the water coming forth to the side of christ it's the same image and what does jesus say in regard to the temple in jerusalem i'm going to tear down that place and in three days rebuild it referring to the temple of his body right carried all the way forward what happens at every mass but life comes forth from this place for the renewal of the world so that's why that little subtle hint of what eden is like is filled with enormous symbolic import we read in the second chapter of genesis how after god creates the heavens and the earth and the plants and the animals then we get this evocative description of god creating the first man and i want to read this line and then get your take on what's going on here what the author is trying to convey so genesis says god formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living being what are we to make of this line you know bran it wasn't what two weeks ago we talked about saint irenaeus and his battle against the gnostics and i suggested there that the the hybrid quality of the human being is key to a lot of our poetry and a lot of our drama and a lot of the the tension and beauty of being human that we're we're both physical and spiritual we're like animals and we're like angels the medieval saw the human being as a microcosm for that reason beautifully i think that we're we're very much of the earth right and and we're like other animals we can see go to the zoo and you'll see how much like other animals we we look and are with our evolutionary perspective that our bodies indeed emerged out of you know a much older uh biological history and so on well that's that's now coming from the dust of the earth as genesis puts it in not scientific language but poetic language but making much the same point that we do we're of the earth good and we should never forget that that was the trouble with the gnosticoi whom irenaeus was fighting that's trouble with all forms of gnosticism is it forgets that we come from the earth that we are embodied we're animals you know good we should celebrate that but at the same time we're more than animals think of our friend g.k chesterton here that still i mean marvelous everlasting man it's not as though you know our our distant ancestors were classicists and then a little further they were romantics and then they were impressionists and now we're post-impressionists no says chesterton between the animal world and our world there's a big black line there's a quantum leap there's a qualitative difference between even the highest of the animals who are simply of the earth and us who are of the earth but we also have and here's that lovely idea the ruach adonai the breath of the lord remember that hovered over the surface of the waters over the tohu wabohu there's the rock adonai is the breath of god well here breathing into us what what makes us distinctively human this is our mind and our wills and our freedom our properly spiritual capacity which is qualitatively different than anything that exists in the animal kingdom and i'm with chesterton anyone that really knows animals knows this more clearly they see it more clearly right there's a biblical anthropology that's really beautiful in its balance um the two ways that i mentioned a couple weeks ago the two ways to solve it i'm all spirit i'm all matter and both are deeply problematic no i come from the dust of the earth but i've got the ruach adonai in me i've got the spiritual power michelangelo of course expresses this in that you know epically gorgeous image of the hand of god here's this this body of adam which has come from the earth but in that sort of electric charge that passes from the finger of god to the finger of adam that's the communication of the spiritual dimension right that's freedom and that's will and that's and that's intellect um so genesis says it here in poetic language of god breathing into us and then we become we earthly animal things become a living being from there we read how adam surveys all of the animal kingdom and as you've just described looks at all of it and realizes there's a difference there i'm the only one who's like me you know john paul ii and theology the body describes it as the original solitude he he was just alone in his humanity but then god causes a deep sleep to fall upon adam i'm going to read a couple lines about what happens next god takes one of adam's ribs and closes up its place with flesh and the rib that the lord god takes from the man he makes into a woman and brings her to the man then the man says this at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh this one shall be called woman with a capital w for out of man with a capital m this one was taken this is such a profound description help us unpack this well simply that you're right he's adam's found a proper partner someone who shares his manner of being no animal and they're all noble and adam gives them names which is a lovely gesture of of the scientific and philosophical imagination that looks out at the world and it catalogs the world cuts a logon according to the logos adam notices the inherent intelligibility of all these things he names them accordingly beautiful but he's noticed what you just said no matter how much intelligibility and order and harmony and beauty i find in these animals they're not human they're not my partner they're not at my level of being and so i can't be friends you know airsoft said that you can really only be friends with an equal and so i i can't find a friend among these creatures and so only one who's bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh who's at the same level ontologically as i can function as my my partner so there's the we have a biblical anthropology but now kind of a biblical account of of marriage and of and of friendship and so on um so again beautifully suggested what chesterton saw the the qualitative difference between animals and human beings so god's created adam and eve he places them in this garden which as we described earlier kind of foreshadows a temple it's a place of right praise most people then jump to the prohibition god gives them which is don't eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but but you've said in the past that before we get there we should acknowledge the the rangy permission not prohibition but permission that he gives our first parents he says you may freely eat of every tree in the garden how should we read this what's its significance you know it's remember brandon that dialogue i had with alex o'connor some months ago and um you know the young atheist and he was urging you know that every discussion has got to begin with with the fact of suffering and and is at the very end of our dialogue we didn't have a chance to develop it but i said no no no you don't start with suffering you never start with the negative because the negative is a provazio it's a privation of what ought to be there being and positivity is always more ontologically basic than negativity that's the point so it applies here if you say i'm going to begin my consideration of the spiritual life with original sin i would say no no we're off to a bad start you don't begin with original sin begin rather with this marvelous original permission that god makes this garden what does he want for us irenaeus again his glory is that we be fully alive so how the church fathers read the the symbol of the garden with all of its richness and its its trees and its fruit that's all of human flourishing it's science and it's friendship and it's politics and it's cities and it's it's everything that makes human life rich go off you go that's what god wants for us he's not in the in the negation business or the denial business he wants us to be fully alive i've come that you might have life and have it to the full says jesus um so don't begin with the prohibition because then we'll get this image well god is a stern law giver and we tend to get everything wrong and so there's a stern law giver and we're no good and all right there's there's room for that there is room for talking about god as a stern law giver there's room for saying we tend to get everything wrong but don't start there begin with what god wanted and still wants for us and is desperately trying to to recover for us is fullness of life i think if someone came to one of my young kids and they said tell us about your dad and the first thing they say is he won't let me eat chocolate for breakfast right it's like reducing all of my paternal love down to that one minor prohibition look it's you see you parents it's the master image for god in the bible there's it's the master image his father is parent and so that's exactly right it's exactly i mean you'd be heartbroken if if augustine this is you're augustin not saint augustine if you're augustine or you're isaiah not isaiah the prophet but one of your kids were to say that yeah my dad well he said kind of stern task master and he he prohibits this this this and that you say well come on i'm i'm prohibiting those things because i love you and i want fullness of life for you you know uh so it's the same problem if we say what's god like oh well you know he's pretty difficult and pretty demanding and he doesn't like this this this and that i'm missing the point all right well let's move from that permission to the single prohibition again genesis says but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat for in the day that you eat of it you shall die now i know this is among the most studied passages in the whole literature of the world not just the bible it's given rise to a whole number of interpretations jewish christian even beyond how do you understand this prohibition i follow john paul ii here i think has got the richest take on it which is god wants us to eat of all the trees he wants us fully alive but what's the one thing we can't do we can't seize the prerogative of god to determine good and evil so it's not so much oh yeah i understand there's good and there's evil that's not the kind of knowledge we're talking about it's a kind of grasping at the divine prerogative to be the criterion of good and evil i decide i have the knowledge i know what's right and what's wrong when i make that move i've now reversed this process instead of losing myself in the beauty and harmony and truth and goodness of the world i've now turned my own ego into god and it becomes the criterion of good and evil when i make that move then the garden turns into a desert you see and it just does and we sinners know this that's why we recognize ourselves in the story so readily because the garden that god wants for us becomes a desert when i determine good and evil so that's the one thing i shouldn't do is seize that divine prerogative rather listen to god do what god wants because his glory is that i be fully alive notice please what the serpent places in their minds is the suggestion that god is a rival to them that's why i mentioned with irenaeus you know a few weeks ago that god doesn't need us it's so important he's not a rival to us his glory is not bought at the price of our suffering on the contrary right so notice please what the serpent does that's the problem and when we to this day say something like that that well god you know he resents us if if we achieve something it's like prometheus he's going to punish us forever he's not like prometheus thomas merton said that they thought the promethean problem in religion was maybe the dominant spiritual problem of our time that's what he meant this illusion that we're in that kind of relationship with god so that's how i'd read it brandon i'd say don't seize the prerogative of determining good and evil for yourself now mind you all of our listeners does that sound familiar at all come on it's coming out of almost every uh speaker every uh song every movie today i decide my ego my voice i'll tell you what's right wrong don't you lay guilt trips and value you know trips on me i determine that's the primordial problem as the book of genesis lays it out quite correctly well as we all know adam and eve do give in and they eat the forbidden fruit we call this original sin and it's part of the fall with a capital f the fall um what is this single decision set in motion what are the effects of the fall just what we've been saying so it turned symbolically now poetically it turns the garden into a desert because it it reverses the proper momentum the momentum is out of the self to the world like a seed breaking open and then letting its life out you know this is now the move inward it's the deification of the self rather than the losing of the self in the values of the world it's a deification which then leads to an ossification it leads to a desiccation of one's life and now all these are desert people that wrote these books so they knew about deserts and oases that's what we're talking about here is going from like a beautiful oasis into the desert that's what it feels like that's what happens when we make this move whenever i think of the fall and i know you've quoted this line before as well i think of the the chesterton line where he says that either original sin or the fall is is the one empirically provable christian doctrine because you just need to open up the newspaper every day so many people say oh these these old stories from genesis these are you know made up mythic fairy tales but he says no that we have proof of at least this doctrine don't we of course and and the point is brandon once you understand that we're not dealing here with you know pseudo scientific accounts and all that nonsense that we're dealing with this extremely rich and powerful uh theological and spiritual writing we should recognize ourselves in every move in the story it's not something from the weird you know misty mythical past these are stories about us there see adam i think you're adam and eve they're like primordial uh and their effects are everywhere where they're all their descendants that means spiritually we participate in these same dynamics which is why these stories continue to have such power because of course we see ourselves in them they're a distant mirror of all the dynamics that bedevil us to this day um so that's why these stories keep singing to us across the centuries well next time we'll continue our understanding genesis series by focusing on abraham the father of our faith well it's time now for a question from one of our listeners today we have one from paul in daytona beach down here in florida with me he's asking about the ending of saint mark's gospel here's his question hey bishop baron my name is paul and i'm from daytona beach and my question is why would mark originally end his gospel with the women not telling the apostles about the resurrection of jesus wouldn't that make the gospel and the church impossible thank you and god bless you and all your work yeah it's a good question and um you know read you read dozens of books on this hundreds of books probably on the ending of mark's gospel let me give you a couple insights one is that the ending of mark's gospel originally might have been lost i mean that literally and physically keep in mind these were written on scrolls right and then they were rolled up and a scroll if it's rolled up and unrolled and rolled up again and so on and passed around that the especially the end of the scroll might have gotten worn away or torn away somehow so that's one theory see one indication is the original mark and ending because what we have now there's one that was added on they're almost sure it's kind of tacked on a little bit later but the original ending ends in a very peculiar way i think it's with the greek word guard g-a-r which has it's like a connective it means like for or you know it's not the way you'd ever end a sentence that's the point and so people think well i know mark wrote in kind of a rough and ready greek but nevertheless he would have known you don't end a sentence with that word so are we literally missing something that's altogether possible as i say the other ending sort of uh was added later but the other thing is this um mark is a is a poet not a refined writer the way luke or john are refined writers but mark i mean he invented the gospel form and he was something of a literary genius i think i always find his original ending rather powerful and moving that what's the response to a theophany to a manifestation of god in the bible old testament and new it's fear of course because god has broken in god the creator of all things they've had a theophany of an unsurpassed power in seeing the empty tomb and hearing the word of resurrection and so of course they they go away afraid uh it's not it's not the fear you'd have it watching a scary movie it's the fear of the lord it's the fear in the presence of this transcendent uncontrollable reality i've actually preached on this on easter sunday when we have mark's account because you know cemeteries are very peaceful places i've said you go to a cemetery to muse and to meditate and pray and remember but who runs scared out of their wits from a cemetery well nobody does unless in that cemetery you had a theophany of extraordinary power and so their running away from the tomb in fear is not to be read emotionally as oh boy they just they collapsed i'd read it as they're ready to talk they're ready to proclaim what happened to them anyway there's some perspectives on on the ending of mark uh there's a there's ample literature if you go online you probably can find some of the technical studies of it but those are a couple of perspectives well thanks for the great question paul and if you have a question send it in to us at the website ask bishop baron.com also as we wind up here can i make another request that you please leave a review of the word on fire show it helps us out a lot takes you less than five seconds just go to whatever podcast service you're using to listen to this leave a quick review and that helps those services recommend our shows to more people so leave a request review for the word on fire show thanks so much for listening and we'll see you next time here on the word on fire show [Music] thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed this video i invite you to share it and to subscribe to 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Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

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Keywords: Word on Fire Show, adam and eve, garden of eden, bible, original sin, bishop barron, bishop barron podcast, adam and eve podcast, adam and eve bible story, genesis, genesis bible, original sin bible, fall of man, brandon vogt, eden, the fall, the fall of man, understanding genesis, understanding the bible, understand the book of genesis, preaching on genesis, homily on genesis, sermon on genesis, the word on fire show, bishop barron genesis

Id: rAGyNe9hytc

Length: 27min 50sec (1670 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021