WHY WE’RE FRAIL: An Alternative Explanation to Sin and Other Words

In Its Place.

We need reasons why things happen. If we don't, we feel like that event or

moment has no value or purpose. If someone close to us dies in a car

accident, we think we need to blame someone to justify our pain; we want a

reason why we have to grieve. If our six-year old son wins an award at school,

we want to know why. We want to know why, so that we can celebrate. Our

experience of life seems to be a series of explanations, and if there are

periods where we have no explanation, the tendency is to forget that moment

or to find creative means with which to explain it away. We're not really good

with mystery. We say we are, but we want to know how mystery works and

how we get it to work for us.

Mystery can be painful. Not knowing why your husband died on the operating

table could ruin you for life. Or why a tornado chose your house and not the

one next door, or why war parades itself across our television screens. The

act of knowing leaves us helpless, confused and weak. Well, that's what we're

taught to believe. When we begin to look inward at our frailty we began to ask

the question 'Why?' And not simply, 'Why me?' but 'Why did this happen?

Where did this come from?' And then comes the 'Why me?' You see this

process in the person of Job, a popular character in an ancient story in the

Jewish Tanakh and Christian scriptures.

Job and the Question Why

Job essentially loses everything he could - his house, cattle, health, marriage,

children and respect from his friends. And he begins to ask 'Why' which then

leads to 'Why me?' Why? Seems to always lead to the Why me? Then

according to the author of the story, the divine responds to Job's inquiries by

pointing to creation and the origin of that creation. Now, if you just read this

story without a background in Christianity, or if you've been inundated with

Christian theology all of your life, you might assume Job is being reprimanded

by God. What we don't get is the tone in God's questioning or the Hebrew

language that is used. When the divine responds to the question of a

depressed Job, God begins asking 'Where were you when I?' Most would

read that as a frustrated retort to Job’s line of questioning. Yet, when re-
rendered from the Hebrew it would sound more like this 'I was there when...'

The first rendering seems almost accusatory while the second one seems

laced with drips of compassion. The author was trying to make sense of why

humanity is frail and couldn't come up with a viable answer. (Note: To some

historians, Job is the oldest book in the Tanakh.) So, to better understand

their frail condition, they had to give it a name and an origin. The Hebrews

were storytellers; the story was always saying something more than what

seemed obvious. This is where the traditional and popularized version of the

story of the 'Garden of Eden' comes into creation. It was created to explain

the origins of pain, ageing and why we are so frail.

Different Views on Adam and Eve

Some historians have found similar writings that are directly linked to the

inspiration of the Adam and Eve account, which dates back almost 22

centuries before the manuscripts of the The Garden Account were found on

the Mesopotamian Cylinder Seals (“The cylinder seals were used from the 3rd

millennium BC in Mesopotamia for authenticating the cuneiform documents -

tablets and bullae, that is lumps of clay that sealed doors or closures of

objects). These seals usually represent an endorsement of the officer in

charge of the operation in question (initialling a tablet as witness, sealing the

closure of the door of a storeroom, affixing one's seal to a clay vase as a sign

of ownership, etc.)”.1 So the origin of the story of Adam and Eve was hidden

on someone’s personal seal and found its way onto sacred pages, and now

has found a home in theological understandings of the divine. This would be

like taking a child’s homework assignment (one with a name on the paper, the

‘stamp’) and burying it for someone centuries later to find. Then the
1 http://sistinechapel.va/3_EN/pages/x-Schede/MEZs/MEZs_Sala08_02_032.html
archaeologists who find it claim it to be some sort of holy work2. (This isn’t to

minimize the sacred history within which the narrative of Adam and Eve is a

part, but to shed light on some of the argumentative presuppositions within

contemporary modern Christianity and to offer an alternative explanation.)

There are several interpretations of the story of those who lived in the Garden.

Let me share what I have found in my own personal studies. Adam is

pluralized in Hebrew, so that ‘man’ really signifies the word for ‘men’, or

properly stated, mankind. In this ancient story, we have the assumption that

all of mankind once closely walked with the divine and communed with God.

Some ancient Hebrew scholars surmise that the snake was the ancient

Palestinian symbolism for the brain or the seat of thoughts or maybe even the

act of thinking. And so the story becomes about a people who were learning

to think, or depended upon their own experiences to lead them, rather than

that of the Divine experience. And so, in this instance, sin becomes a

metaphor for self-reliance and has nothing to do with eating fruit. The fruit is

simply a metaphor.

Another interpretation is that the story itself is metaphor for something bigger,

and each prop or character in the story represents something else. Take, for

example, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which tends to be a big

player in the story when it’s referenced in religious discussions. Yet, some

Jewish historians, along with mythologists, think it could be a metaphor for a

library. In fact, the word for the phrase in Hebrew is ‘Etz Hadaath3’, which

when dissected, isn’t knowledge that is separated into good or evil, it is an

explanation of all knowledge. So here we have a story where knowledge is

2 Personally, I do believe God is even in the scribblings of six-year old boy

3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_and_evil
accessible, but unattainable. Knowledge is right before their eyes, yet out of

their grasp. In this rendering then, there is a separation between knowledge

that is learned (from a book) and knowledge that is gained (from life

experience). But the assumption is that knowledge is still attainable.

Freud posited that the Garden experience was more about maturity and

learning, and that all decisions have a direct cause and effect clause invisibly

attached. And so, what we have is a story of two teenagers4 who are learning

what it looks like to make beneficial decisions, even ones that might hurt. And

the fruit is the metaphor for the process of making and learning self-sacrificing

decisions. Freud goes on to say: “The process of maturation occurring in the

incidents around the tree describes, in an abstract way, the splitting of the

human consciousness into the limited context of conscious thought and the

underlying all-aware unconscious.”

There are some within the New Age movement who would say that the story

is about enlightenment, but about also an introduction into dualistic thinking5.

And so the story about the Fall of Man becomes about how we lost the

awareness that we were always connected with the divine. And so then, in

that instance, sin becomes about accepting dualism as reality and about how

we are somehow permanently disconnected from God. But, what if that wasn’t

even what the stories were about?

Christian Theology

4 there is no direct reference to this in the scriptures, but merely an assumption because the age of
adulthood in Jewish life was what we now would call the teenage years.
5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism
 All of the above are good explanations of what might have happened,

but, at best, are complete summarisations of metaphorical6 events that may or

may not have actually happened. A large majority of those influenced by

Christianity tend to accept the story as a story of sin defined as something

destructive and pervasive that flows through the veins of all of humanity - an

inescapable death. Somehow we have transformed a beautiful story of myth

into an explanation of why we are frail. And yet, most of the previous

explanations shared here assume a sort of learning process going on rather

than a cancer coursing through the history of humanity. The Eastern and

Western view of the story seem at odds with one another. The authors of the

story seem okay with it being a metaphor for something bigger, something

more inviting rather than repelling. Most Western theologians see it as a story

where hope goes out the window and we helplessly chase after it. The

Eastern view makes it about transformation. The Western view focuses on the

details so much that it takes the depth and power out of the narrative and

turns us into victims of our own inescapable folly. So, where do we go from

here?

I think Christians may have to accept that sin isn’t the reason why we’re frail.

That frailty isn’t even an enemy. That frailty is simply on the journey with us.

To teach us, hold us, cry with us. And to transform us into whom we are

meant to be. This last point is so important to understand because the word

sin isn’t epidemic. The Hebrew word for sin is chait7 , which when modernized

speaks of someone ‘not making it to their destination’. But the word itself is
6 I use the word metaphorical here to include the small possibility of the literal story, but mostly I use
the word to include the larger contextual possibilities. I tend to use the word myth in this work as
Joseph Campbell does to mean ‘a larger story’. The story is too layered to simply accept one
interpretation as the right one.
7 http://www.aish.com/jl/j/48964596.html
directly talking about personal potential. And so sin isn’t what’s wrong with us,

sin is the process whereby we learn to live out who we are meant to be. It is

about how we can grow rather then how we are impeded. It’s about who we

are becoming rather than who we once were.

This is an invitation to those who would unintentionally seek to aggressively

cheapen our experience of life and the divine within it; maybe we can agree

that we might have got it wrong. And that we might have got it wrong for

thousands of years. And that’s okay, because life is about maturing and

moving on and learning to make self-sacrificing decisions. Maybe the best

one we can make now is to let go of what we have been taught to hold onto

so tightly. That maybe we need a clean cut divorce from some of our

theological standpoints. Maybe we need something new - a death and

resurrection. Because, honestly the word sin in its orthodox context just isn’t

working anymore and isn’t helpful at all.

Who We Are Becoming

As you have seen here, sin is about who we are becoming. So maybe we

need a new word. Maybe something like our ‘unrealized potential’ or

‘energetic momentum’ or even ‘embryonic future’ might be a better offering in

light of these new discoveries.

And this would seem to offer hope to those we reach out to. To those we

might call friend. Even to ourselves in time of need. And this also re-invites

everyone to see that life is full of potential. That even in the midst of our frailty,
we can still chase after who we are meant to be. That we can dance dances,

drink drinks, live life, love scandalously. This is what it means to live out of our

potential.