We tell our children over and over to be nice to the other children on the playground. We teach them not to hurt others. We teach them to express their frustration in constructive ways, but never to take it out on another in anger. And the stakes are high, right? If they don’t follow these teachings, they might become the bully. Why do we hold our children to a higher standard than God?
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.
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.
Obviously no one would admit to God being a misogynist but would rather hold on to interpretations of the Bible that devalue women. In this creation myth, there are plenty of interpretations that can lead us to think that God is a misogynist.