An Anarchist's View of Original Sin: What Really Happened in the Garden of Eden

 

In classic Christian doctrine, human beings were originally set up with a pretty sweet gig. They were created in a state of perfection in God’s image and placed in a paradise. The rent for paradise was simply not to eat the fruit of a single tree. And of course, people being people, they found a way to screw it up for the rest of us.

 

Even non-Christian and non-religious people are familiar with this story. A snake sets up shop in the tree and convinces the woman that if she eats the proverbial forbidden fruit, she’ll be like God, which is really kind of stupid because the narrative seems to suggest that she was already like God. Then she gave it to the man and he ate the fruit. Suddenly God shows up and says, “Everybody out of the pool!” And viola, no more perfection and no more paradise.

 

As someone who is obsessed with words, and as someone who has spent a lot of my youth and approaching middle age studying and theorizing, I’ve learned something that most people never come close to knowing: facts and truth are not the same thing. Something can be true without being factual. If truths and facts were the same thing, we wouldn’t need lawyers and there wouldn’t be a need for courts. If facts were truths, then all one would have to do is present the facts and the truth would be known. But that’s not how courts work. There are two lawyers using the same set of facts to construct two different truths–one that results in the verdict of “guilty,” and one that results in the verdict of “not guilty.” So facts are not truths, but they are the building blocks upon which truths are constructed.

 

I said that last bit so I could say this. Some people read the Adam and Eve story, believing that they were factual, historical people. Others read the same story, believing it to be a parable describing the human condition. But regardless of whether one reads it as history or allegory, the story is crammed packed with truths.

 

For instance, there is a truth about human beings constantly wanting more than what they have, even when they have it pretty darn good. Come on! Adam and Eve are perfect in paradise. It’s not going to get any better than that. Yet, being people, they want more. And the truth that I have noticed so often in my own short life is that human beings, in their drive and desire to be more, often become less then what they were. Human beings, at their core, are like that guy who finally finds himself in a stable, healthy romantic relationship with a beautiful, intelligent woman who loves him for who he is, and suddenly finds himself trying to figure out how he can trade her in for a better model.

 

There is an untruth to the story, however, that is often presented as truth–the notion that it was the woman’s fault that both man and woman were kicked out of paradise. This unfortunately is the standard misogynistic, patriarchical tale passed down by a male dominated world. Men like to present the story as if Adam were off somewhere, working in the Garden and doing what he was supposed to be doing, while Eve was at the tree with the snake, screwing everything up. But in my Bible (actually all of my Bibles, which are a variety of English translations, not to mention Hebrew and Greek versions) the man is standing right there with the woman while she is being deceived. And he didn’t do a single thing to stop it.
 

 

“She took some of its fruit and ate it; and she also gave some to her husband, WHO WAS WITH HER, and he ate it” (Genesis 3:6).

 

The woman may have been tricked, but the man knew exactly what he was doing. So who was really at fault–the person who didn’t know what she was doing, or the person who did? And this, I think, expresses another truth: people will accept a world of s**t in the attempt to hold onto what they have. And then, of course, they’ll start blaming whatever or whomever they were afraid to lose for causing their present miseries.

 

But I didn’t start out to write any of that. What I wanted to say is this: this story of “the Fall” has been employed in Christian thought since the time of Augustine as a proof text for the Christian doctrine of original sin. Original sin simply means that human beings are faulty at birth. The extreme adherents to this doctrine believe that all human beings are born sinful and condemned by God, doomed to an eternity in hell unless they receive Christian baptism. This was the view of Augustine himself who established the doctrine. He developed the doctrine of original sin to explain why he believe unbaptized babies go to hell, even though they never had a chance to do anything wrong.

 

So for Christians (because even though Jews created and accept the story of Adam and Eve, they have no doctrine of original sin) original sin is biological. Every person is born with a genetic disease that results in eternal damnation unless one is cured through the medicine of baptism.

 

Sorry, I just don’t buy it. If human beings can come up with a system of justice that refuses to hold children accountable for the crimes of their fathers, certainly God, who is the standard of justice, could do a little better. Don’t get me wrong! I’m more than willing to accept concepts of sin, that people need to be freed from sin, and even the concept of original sin. But I believe that original sin is systemic, not genetic.

 

The “sinful” state that results from the Fall is that of hierarchy. The act of the original sin of Adam and Eve resulted in Eve becoming subordinate to Adam. Before the Fall there is no hint of subordination, no hint of inequality, no hint of hierarchy. But after the Fall there is a heirarchical order–man dominant, woman subordinate. Original sin is the presence of hierarchy that has always been present in every human society throughout human history. The hierarchical reality has made it impossible for people to live “sin free” lives. People are constantly pressured to do what they know to be wrong in order to satisfy their heirarchical superiors. Ask anyone who has worked for some corporation how often they’ve had to check their values in order to satisfy the demands of his boss. So where I would disagree with classic Christian doctrine is that Christians want to blame people for being bad before they’ve ever done anything bad, whereas I want to blame the system for being bad by demanding that good people do bad things in order to survive within that system.

 

Now, as a Christian who is also an anarchist. I want to say that Jesus Christ can free us from original sin. But by now, it should be clear that I don’t mean this in a classical, orthodox sense. What I mean is that Jesus Christ found a way to live outside the system and taught others to do so. If people spent more time paying attention to what Jesus said, rather than who Jesus may have been, then the world would be a much better place. Certainly it would be a lot more like the paradise that was lost, rather than the hell that it is.

 

The Sermon on the Mount and other teaching are radical lifestyle changes that demand living outside the demonic, hierarchical systems of the world. I’m not saying that Jesus was an anarchist, but I am saying that his teachings advocate anarchy in that they express a distrust and dislike for hierarchies. The only government Jesus advocates is God and God alone. But human beings, like Adam and Eve, feel naked within that arrangement and feel the need to clothe themselves with structures and systems that create barriers between God and humanity so that they won’t feel so damned exposed. But if we can’t stand naked and exposed before God, then we can never become the people we were created–the people we are capable of being.

 

Baptism doesn’t wash away a genetic or moral failing. To think that it does is kind of silly. Baptism expresses one’s desire to symbolically wash one's self clean from the systemic corruption of the world and commit oneself as Jesus’ disciple. To be a disciple is to learn and live the teachings of a master teacher. If a student of Jesus never takes the step of learning Jesus’ teachings and putting them into action, then baptism is merely one more bath among the thousands that one has already taken throughout life.

 

So as an anarchist, do I accept original sin? Yes, but it’s systemic, not personal. Do I accept the concept of sin? Yes, but a person is forced to commit “sins” because that person lives within a sinful system, not because a person is inherently bad or faulty. Do I believe that Jesus can free people from sin? Yes, but not necessarily because he was God and his blood blots out moral or genetic failings, but because he provided a clear set of instructions that forces people to live outside a corrupt system.

 

Call me naive, but I believe that if all people would just for one day obey the instruction to treat everyone else the way they want to be treated, then the kingdom of God would explode onto our planet and the need for laws and governments would disappear. But I have a long history of being wrong about stuff, so there’s a chance (a small chance, mind you) that I could be wrong about this as well.