What would it look like for people to actually start living as though their God could never dominate? What would it look like for people to start living as though their God’s power was in weakness? What if weakness is what it is all about? We would rid ourselves of a lot of hurt.
Thomas Merton was one of the most influential religious figures of his time and one who truly moved beyond a belief system. Not only was he an advocate of social justice and peace, but he was a pioneer for interfaith engagement and his writing continues to be relevant today. He’s also a public figure of whom the state of Kentucky can actually be proud…
Christianity has been presented as the final “item” that will fulfill humans in a more eternal, everlasting way. Yet, we are seeing the myth of fulfillment in the ways people are leaving churches in higher numbers than ever before. The story of God that a majority of Christians are telling is simply perpetuating the cycle of idolatry that Rollins describes in this book: recognition of lack, pursuit of fulfilling idol, momentary satisfaction, recognition of lack, etc, etc.
We hear preachers from more evangelical and conservative traditions talk a lot about Original Sin, essentially saying that there is nothing we can do about it, but we just inherited these fatal flaws. And without their solution to sin, we die in eternal conscious torment in hell and live unfulfilled lives. Does that really happen? Probably not. But their message has poisoned the water as we read these Genesis texts. So we need to reclaim them, as we have done this week.
Original sin is the idea that Adam and Eve’s act of defiance and disobedience is either literally or figuratively passed down through every generation as a type of curse that separates humanity from God. Remember, these stories were written while the Hebrew people were in exile. They’d endured some horrible treatment, so they were trying to make sense of why they inherited such problems. It may have been written with good intentions, but it’s been the interpreters that have messed things up for the rest of us, once again.