In honor of this fact, I am reading Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Ethics. Although most of his arguments will not stand in class, I wanted to get his perspective on things. As an ethicist, I find him fascinating. He fiercely resisted the Nazi party and involvement in the church, and was even part of a plot to assassinate Hitler. Talk about an understanding of good/evil. If you have a chance to get rid of evil, but must break the law (murder, both illegal in the world and a sin) in order to do so, are you perpetuating the evil? Is bad ever good?
I am not very far yet, but it is reminding me of Rick Joyner's There Were Two Trees in the Garden, especially in describing shame and conscience, and what happened at the fall. I've been finding the fall more and more fascinating lately. I'd always understood that it was a separation of man from God, it began sin and death, it led to shame and man's hiding from God, but I'd never quite grasped what it meant to acquire the knowledge of good and evil. Don't we need to know evil to know good?
Maybe, but maybe not. If God told Adam and Eve that the one tree should be avoided, and all the rest were good, that should have been enough. God said, This here is good, this is not. They didn't need to know evil to continue to live. They didn't need to be able to make that distinction.
Another intriguing point pops in at Genesis 3:6
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.
Depending on the emphasis you put on the bolded person, you get different interpretations:
1) the tree was desired to make one wise. In this case, "one" serves as an impersonal pronoun referring to the partaker of the tree's fruit.
2) the tree was desired to make one wise. In this case, "one" is a quantitative adjective used to describe the number of people the tree would make wise. Could it be that the knowledge of good and evil was meant for just one? One - you know, perhaps God, who created the knowledge of good and evil?
Maybe the Hebrew text clears this all up, and I'm reading into things, but that second option is pretty crazy, right? It would make one (person) wise. This actually flows into patterns of iniquity from Isaiah 12:13-14 that I've written on before -
You said in your heart,
‘I will ascend to heaven;
above the stars of God
I will set my throne on high;
I will sit on the mount of assembly
in the far reaches of the north;
14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.’
The Most High was the one who had the knowledge - and in taking the fruit, Eve showed she also wanted it, she wanted to be like the Most High and know what He knew.
In any event, Bonhoeffer talks about man's relationship with God, his understanding with God, his understanding of self, his understanding and relationship with fellow man, and a hundred other things. I'm going to share some of my favorite bits so far. It is pretty thick, so it will take awhile to get through, but I recommend it. Highly.
"It is only in the unity of his knowledge of God that he knows of other men, of things, and of himself. He knows all things only in God, and God in all things. The knowledge of good and evil shows that he is no longer at one with this origin. In the knowledge of good and evil man does not undesrtand himself in the reality of the destiny appointed in his origin, but rahter in his own possibilities, his possibility of being good or evil"
"Originally man was made in the image of God, but now his likeness to God is a stolen one. As the image of God man draws his life entirely from his origin and has made himself his own creator and judge"
"[With the eating of the forbidden fruit], man now knows good and evil. This does not mean that he has acquired new knowledge in addition to what he knew before, but the knowledge of good and evil signifies the complete reveral of man's knowledge, which hitherto had been solely knowledge of od as his origin. In knowing good and evil he knows what nly the origin, God Himself, can know and ought to know. It is only with extreme reserve that even the Bible indicates to us that God is the One who knows of good and evil"
"Instead of knowing only the God who is good to him and instead of knowing all things in Him, he now knows himself as the origin of good and evi. Instead of accepting the choice and election of God, man himself desires to choose, to be the origin of the election"
"He has become like God, but against God. Herin lies the serpent's deceit. Man knows good and evil, but because he is not the origin, the good and evil that he knows are not the good and evil of God but good and evil against God. They are good and evil of man's own choosing, in opposition to the eternal election of God. In becoming like God man has become a god against God"
"Shame is man's ineffaceable recollection of his estrangement rom the oriin; it is grief for this estrangement, and the powerless longing to return to unity with the origin"
"Shame seeks a covering as a means of overcoming the disunion. But the covering implies the confirmation of the disunion that has occurred, and it cannot therefore make good the damage"
"Shame is overcome only in the shaming through the forgiveness of of sin, that is to say, through the restoration of fellowship with God and men...'Chris's blood and righteousness, that is my adornment and my fine raiment'"
"Conscience is farther from the origin than shame, it presupposes disunion with God and with man and makrs only the disunion with himself of the man wo is already disunited from the origin"
"...conscience is concerned not with man's relation to God and to other men but with man's relation to himself...a relation of man to himself, in detachment from his relation to God and to other men, can arise only through man's becoming like God in the disunion"
"Conscience pretends to be the voice of God and the standard for the relation to other man"
No comments:
Post a Comment