|
Genesis, Jesus, and the New Story
Roots and Wings
The Human Journey From a Speck of Stardust
to a Spark of God
by Margaret Silf
Eerdmans, 2006. 162 pages.
Reviewed by John Kotre
It’s been called the New Story, the Universe Story, the Great Story, the Big Story, and (by me) the Story of Everything. It’s the tale of evolution and emergence that’s coming out of sciences from biology to cosmology. What is our place in that grand narrative? The place of Jesus of Nazareth?
In Roots and Wings Margaret Silf brings a spirit of exploration and wonder to these questions. Silf is a popular British writer who was trained in Ignatian spirituality and has written several books on the subject. She leads retreats and writes regularly for the Jesuit weekly America. Her present book takes the form of many of her previous ones—short reflections, suggested prayers and exercises. In this case one leads to the other and you find yourself on a journey.
Be not afraid, Silf tells those who are devoted to Jesus. Neither of science, nor of empirical evidence, nor of hard questions, nor of your own imagination. “Do you think creation has ‘peaked’ in homo sapiens, or are we going farther?” Before addressing questions like that, Silf says, Take a deep breath, stay calm, go only as far as you’d like.
And so she sets out, linking the New Story to images in the early chapters of Genesis. When the serpent tempts, Silf is reminded of our lower “reptilian” brain, which also tempts “when we live in fear.” When Adam and Eve discover their nakedness, her mind leaps to the moment when our forebears first stood upright, exposing their tender undercarriage to possible attack. When Eve is cursed with pain in childbirth, Silf thinks again of those forebears, whose birth canal gradually narrowed to accommodate their bipedalism. Then comes a major reinterpretation: expulsion from the Garden was not punishment but progress. Now homo sapiens had to toil and sweat . . . to further its own evolution.
This reinterpretation necessitates another. Who was Jesus, the “new Adam”? “This may be as far as the book will go for you,” Silf warns. Jesus wrote nothing, left behind neither a philosophy nor a theology, established no form of government. Some would argue he established no church, founded no new religion. What he did leave behind was a spirit. “He entrusted the ongoing evolution of the human family to a few men and women who had understood who he was.”
In Silf’s understanding, Jesus came up from the earth, not down from the heavens, and he did so just at the moment when homo sapiens was becoming spiritually aware. Jesus used the “lever” of love to shift the course of human evolution. Silf cannot accept the idea that he died to atone for sin. The God of compassion she encounters in prayer could not have demanded a blood sacrifice—the ultimate “death penalty”—to pay the price for some fall from grace 100,000 years before. Jesus was killed, rather, because he evoked the “shadow” side of a human nature incompletely evolved.
Did he rise from the dead? Acknowledging the mystery behind it all, Silf imagines Jesus becoming a “wave of pure energy” that many call the Holy Spirit. As the Christ, he is a transcendent presence, the perfect model of where evolution is heading, or at least has the chance to head: a stage in which humanity fully reflects the divine life. Silf doesn’t believe this, she knows it, from personal experience, from “heart-knowledge.”
I am quite sympathetic to these interpretations, but I wonder how Silf makes them so easily. When reading Genesis, she says she hears “other echoes” that the Genesis writers “had a hunch about” and perhaps articulated “unconsciously.” She seems to believe—or hope—that parts of the New Story are actually “in” Genesis, or at least foreseen by it. But let’s be clear: the echoes Silf hears are from the 21st century. The new cosmology isn’t in the Book of Genesis, nor is it prophesied there.
Nor is the Jesus of the New Story “in” the New Testament. Silf’s interpretation is not the one taught by the early followers of Jesus, nor is it what most Christians today hold sacred. The letters of Paul and others speak over and over of Christ’s atonement. Paul adds, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain” (1 Cor 15:17).
Perhaps Silf’s is the only way you can cross the ocean to the New Story. You simply do not look back until you have gotten to the other side and settled down there. And this Silf does, reflection by reflection, letting details of the Story seep into everyday life. Feel the cotton in your sheets, she counsels, and realize that every fiber remembers the universal story. Look at the wood in your furniture. It goes back to a single cell that emerged some 370 million years ago. Stand in a shopping center and recall that all the bustle there comes out of millions of years of evolution and that it’s heading toward a new kind of transcendence.
I highly recommend taking this trip with Margaret Silf, and I recommend the spirit in which she makes it. There’s a cost, however: for Christians to adopt the New Story, they have to take Jesus out of the categories of first century Jewish thought and bring him to the “gentiles” in a way Paul never imagined. They have to leave some scriptures behind, even core tenets of Christianity. They have in fact to see the Bible in a whole new way, reconsidering what it is and how it came to be and how it should be read. I’m afraid there’s a whole other passage involved in that. Maybe you become less of a “Christian” and more of a “follower of Jesus.” That seems to be what Silf is doing. Be not afraid.
John Kotre is the author of several books, the most recent being The Story of Everything: A Parable of Creation and Evolution. He was also the creator of the award-winning public television and radio series The Seasons of Life. A former Jesuit seminarian, Kotre received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Chicago and spent thirty-five years as a professor and project director at the Dearborn and Ann Arbor campuses of the University of Michigan. He and his wife Kathy have a blended family of five adult children and six grandchildren. They live in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
|
