A Tale of Adam

In light of my last blog entry, I would like to introduce some thoughts based upon something I originally wrote down a couple years ago as a way to deal with something on my mind at the time. Back then, I titled that discussion “A Discourse on Creation Pistology”. Yeah, that was back when I was still trying to sound important and impress people. Now, I’ll just call it “A Tale of Adam”.

In this little discourse I talk about a “philosophy of God”—by that I mean what we think God is like, how and/or whether we can experience God, how we can know anything about God, etc. Academic theology would cover these ideas in the disciplines of theology and pistology; however, I think these separate constructions are faulty and would rather see them as parts of an overall approach to God, hence my term "philosophy".

So, without further ado...



I recently read Tales of Adam by Daniel Quinn. I thought it was an excellently crafted work that made the first family of the Judeo-Christian tradition seem quite well what they always were—human. After all, the term adam is simply the Hebrew word for “a man” or, by extension, “mankind”; it should never have been considered a proper name. This story of “Adam” is representative of the story of humanity.

Tales of Adam got me thinking about the Taoist attitude which has made its way into Christianity by which we lazily allow circumstances to shape us, accepting things in the name of being the will of God. This turned my mind to the problems this situation creates—namely, the manic/depressive episodes of thankfulness and anger/despair felt in response to accepting the circumstances of life as the will of an assumably benevolent God, and the general apathy that can result.

What should happen to this situation when we look past the belief that the world was ever an idyllic place? What happens when we trace concepts such as sin and salvation back beyond their ecclesiastical constructions? What happens when we deconstruct beliefs such as these in light of and in favor of a more ancient understanding?

We would deny some of the bases for Christian doctrine. But we would open up the possibility of experiencing an attainable and intimate faith.

A faith in which we and the world around us are not at odds, not at enmity with one another, not different creations, but one and the same. This would free us from the restraints of enmity with Creation (and our Creator in the bad times) and allow us to rest.

We have created God in our own image. We have allowed thinkers in dark rooms to express in finite human terms the infinite light of God. We have taken their ideas and have elevated them to the status of being an ‘ology’—a study of, a dependable discourse about. Some strains of Christianity have taken this further and have reified a particular view of theology into an ‘onomy’—a law—particularly medieval Roman Catholicism, Calvinism, and modern evangelical fundamentalism.

In these systems, the constructed “faith”—one’s perception of his own relationship with God—is the tread of a wheel, the beliefs and doctrines its spokes, and their commitment to a particular philosophy of God is the hub, without which the entire wheel falls apart and the believer is left broken and in peril. What all these systems have failed to recognize (or admit) is that the hub rides along on an axle of human thought, finite constructions, and various responses and revisions according to the circumstances of belief over time and space, and is cotterpinned to these deficiencies by a choice of commitment. Upon the collective “wheels” and “axles” of all believers of all time ride our ecclesiastical structures—our denominations and hierachies, our missions, our ministries, our programs.

But what if the believer should consider this axle to be faulty and untrustworthy? What if his wheel is damaged? Does he lose his constructed “faith”? Where is he left? He is either adrift, alone and lacking a dependable archeology of belief, or he takes the more determined human route in which we whip the amalgam of our ideals, our desires, and our guilt into action until it surges forward beastlike in its traces and pulls our ecclesiastical structure along on a path of its own devising regardless of the lack of integrity in our vehicle’s construction and regardless of our lack of confidence in its design.

But what should happen if we deny this hub of human-made law, allow our spokes to fall away, break the axles of our own faulty construction, release the beast of our ideals and desires and guilt from its burden, step out of our rickety ecclesiastical constructions and down into the path of creation, where we find both the laws and presence of the one in whom we live and move and have our being? What happens when we stop midstride on the march of the Christian soldier and sit down among the meek?

The entire world becomes open to us, and we to it. And I say this not in the Zen, Toaist, or Hindu sense, and certainly not in some mindless New Age Aquarian hallucination, but in the very real and true and indisputable admission that it is in the Creation that humanity finds its most evident, effable, consistent, everlasting, and transcendent revelation of God. When we see the world around us in such a way, we begin to look around us for the revelation of God and not for the manifestation of evil, we look for the good in our fellow humans rather than for their sins. Our constructed “faith” is replaced by deep experience, and we find rest for our weary souls in the stasis of eternity. Suddenly, accomplishment of the greatest commandments—to love our God and to love our neighbors as ourselves—is not so improbable. When we find ourselves in the limitless sea of the revelation of God around and in us, our relationship with God is no longer a contingency of belief, and therefore then finds substance of its own. It then rests and finds its identity not in choices, commitments, or practices but in the absence of these—faith, the evidence of things unseen—while the turbulence and insubstantiality of a contingency upon commitments and constructions drop away from us like a burden turned out of hand.