The following is an excerpt from Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity pg 14-15.
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As I explored Genesis 1, 2 and 3 over a period of three years a remarkable simplicity began to emerge. God creates a magical world of beauty and harmony. There is so little information – only a few simple, vital details. God establishes creation with an extraordinary sense of imagination, then embeds in the story this significant insight: over and over again God judges it as good. Then out of this same sense of imagination God shapes humanity and calls it very good. God’s judgment becomes the key. Everything is good. There is no exception. This is the God imagination, a way of seeing the world from God’s perspective.
Creation is a world of remarkable freedom. Humanity is given exceptional permission to “eat”, or partake, of everything. But in the midst of this creation is also a single tree. The tree is identified as the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Everything is permissible, with the exception of this one tree. This tree essentially asks one single question. Are we good or evil? Seeing this question opened the floodgates to everything. Through it, we come to see the root problem God was attempting to solve in the Garden.
The tree prompted a confrontation with the nature of truth and reality. Could humanity do something to change God’s perspective of what was true? Could humanity experience evil, even know evil – and thus become evil? Everything hinged on how we answered this one question, because the judgment of the self produced our understanding of reality.
Exploring Genesis happened to coincide with my own exploration into neuroscience, and how the brain operates and processes information. For the first time in history, scientists were beginning to understand how the brain constructs judgment and a sense of reality. Was it possible that the story would present a tale that was consistent with science?
As I examined the story, the answer was unequivocally yes. The entire scene of the crime rested on a single verse:
Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. (Gen 3:7)
In other words, the story was presenting a problem happening inside the brain. Adam and Eve were already naked, but for some reason their judgment of its meaning had changed. Naked was still true but no longer good. The evidence that followed revealed that their judgment of its value had changed. They had gotten the one question wrong.
Everything hinged on the word, “realized”, essentially a construction of a sense of reality. Realizing didn’t mean it had to be true. They just had to agree it was true. This false realization created a sense of disorientation with the self that was devastating. Their sense of reality was suddenly different than the God imagination. They had in essence constructed and agreed to a lie. Worse, neuroscience was now revealing that once a lie is embedded it creates a bias towards information that reinforces it.
To my amazement, Scripture was locating the problem in a much different place than the traditions. Was it possible this was the root problem in humanity? Was Genesis suggesting the origin of pain and suffering? Was it possible, as human beings created in the image of God, we could construct a sense of judgment about the self that was counter to what was true? The story strongly suggested it was. The problem was in essence an ontological shift within the self about the nature of the self.
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Discovering The God Imagination: Reconstructing A Whole New Christianity explores a profound possibility. What if we’ve misunderstood the Gospel? What if our historical approaches to Christianity have been distorted by the very same problem they are attempting to solve? Available today from CreateSpace and Amazon. Order from CreateSpace and use code 5GFARGT9 to receive a 15% discount.
