In the book “The God Who Weeps” Fiona and Terryl Givens wrote:
As William Blake said, as one of the greatest insights of the modern age, “without contraries, is no progression.” We are apparently made of the same stuff as Darwin’s honeybee. We need the continual friction of difficulty, opposition, and hardship, or we will suffer the same stasis as the bee.
In this context, one can understand why instead of deploring Eve’s and Adam’s transgression, one might find in it a cause for rejoicing. If we take seriously God’s words that the couple “has become like one of us,” then human history does indeed take a new direction here. In some incontrovertible sense this new direction is an ascent, and not a fall. Paradise is lost, but divinity appears on the distant horizon. In one version of the aftermath, Adam and Eve give momentous new meaning to the term, “Fortunate Fall”: “And in that day Adam blessed God, and was filled, and began to prophesy concerning all the families of the earth, saying: Blessed be the name of God, for because of my transgression my eyes are open, and in this life I shall have joy, and again in the flesh I shall see God. And Eve, his wife, heard all these things and was glad, saying: Were it not for our transgression we . . . never should have known good and evil.
In our birth is a choice and not a cosmic quirk, if life represents the opportunity for further progress from acquiring the virtue and holiness that characterize God, and if sin is the educative consequence of bad choices, then Fall and Damnation are not the best terms to describe the human predicament. And guilt, original or otherwise, is not the central human problem. Inadequacy, insufficiency, weakness, and spiritual immaturity, are more accurate descriptors of a soul in the early stage of heavenly development. Krister Sendahl, Lutheran Bishop of Stockholm and dean of the Harvard Divinity School, lamented the early historical turn that took Christianity in the direction of more negative characterizations and preoccupations. And he blames it on a misreading of Paul the Apostle:
. . . .The point where Paul’s experience intersects with his . . . understanding of the faith, furthermore, is not “sin” with its correlate “forgiveness.” It is rather when Paul speaks of his weakness that we feel his deeply personal pain. Once more we find something surprisingly different from the Christian language most of us take for granted: it seems that Paul never felt guilt in the face of his weakness—pain, yes, but not guilt. It is not in the drama of saving Paul the sinner, but it is in the drama of Paul’s coming to grips with what he calls his “weakness” that we find the most experiential level of Paul’s theology.
Christianity’s fixation on the “plagued conscience” is a development Stendhal traces to Augustine three centuries after Paul, and then to the Reformers over a thousand years later. Sinfulness and guilt assumed thereafter center stage in the Christian drama. For most of Christian history, all humans were considered to share in a guilt and a depravity traceable to our biblical parents. “In Adam’s fall, We sinned all,” as the New England primer taught generations of school children. Such guilt was said to attach to us from our birth, prior to and independently of individual choice. And at the same time the doctrine of Original Sin asserted a universal predisposition in human nature toward evil rather than good. ~Terryl and Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps (Ensign Peak, 2012), 62-63
