19 February 2024
An adjunct to the Radix Fidem community Bible lesson this week discussed how Ephesians 1:3-14 views the work of God on three levels. How do we know Christ? Because the Holy Spirit lives in our hearts and glorifies Him as our Lord. How do we know the Father? Because Christ is His Son and our Lord. Thus, the Holy Spirit operates within us on the individual scale. Christ died for us and opened a covenant for the whole human race. And the Father operates on a cosmic level in Eternity. Three different scales of understanding: personal, the whole world, and all of Creation.
It's probably the best way to view the meaning of the what people call the Trinity. It's the same Person, but how we as humans encounter Him varies with the level of context. This is a Hebrew way of seeing things. Instead of trying to nail down a firm verbal Christology, all we really need to worry about is how we experience the Lord, and how we can talk about Him to others.
Pageau echoes this in pointing out that the Garden of Eden represents a microcosm of the wider Creation. It's the part of the eternal cosmos that was designed for us. If you learn to see things on multiple levels, then on one level you could say we are still in the Garden. The natural world didn't fall; it hasn't changed since Adam was introduced to it. Rather, we are fallen because we are vulnerable to temptation. The same Garden without our eternal form is a harsh and difficult world that we don't even properly understand, much less can we control it the way an unfallen Adam did. Thus, the Garden isn't so much as a place as a symbol, a manifestation of something that defies words.
Sometimes the symbols change with the level of consideration. On the cosmic level is the universe; on the human level is the Garden, the part of Creation we can experience. They both symbolize the terrain inside our souls. In cosmic symbolism, there is Heaven (above); on the human level, there is the masculine identity. On a cosmic level, we have the earth (not merely the planet Earth, but the cosmic prototype), while on the human level it manifests as the female figure (below). In broad cosmic terms, we talk about space; in the Garden it was the image of a tree. The cosmic imagery of time was manifested in part by the Serpent in the Garden.
So, mountain and tree are symbols of space, while ocean waves and serpents are symbols of time. In some ancient art, it was the snake eating its own tail, an enhanced image of negation and renewal in one. On the one hand, we have the Four Rivers of Eden, telling us something about space opened up, dividing the waters and forming a square (typically seen as the four cardinal compass directions). But these are waters, so we have in the Garden a balance between time and space. Thus, the Garden itself is portrayed as a place where things are in harmony, proceeding according to God's divine purpose.
Adam's mission was to maintain this delicate balance, to keep the primal forces of the creation in symbiosis on this earth. Translated to our human scale, it's keeping a balance between the natural world and the artificial buildings of civilization.
Notice how civilization is not so much a good thing in itself as an inevitable yearning of human nature. It's what fallen humans do, and it can easily get out of whack against recognizing that the natural world should be treated as a person, too. What Adam had was a proper balance already established when God put him in the Garden. All he had to do was keep it.
Adam was able to do this because of his instinctive knowledge of God and His ways prior to the Fall. By working appropriately on his level, Adam knew the Word of God on a human level, and thus knew the Creator on a cosmic scale.
Comments
Jay DiNitto
This is fascinating, because it puts a lot of the symbolism into practical methodologies/strategy in how the ancient Hebrew would look at the world. I expect a criticism of exposing the AH worldview like this involves equating it with esoteric/pagan worldviews, as though the AH worldview wasn't birthed out of the pagan ANE background to begin with. That feels like one fact fundamentalists and evies would bristle at.
CatRez
In my attempts to the raise the issue with them, the response was as hostile as you describe.
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