Russell A. Cardwell Online

Surely I’m not the first person to notice this. The creation of Eve in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, differs from the brief account in Genesis 2. In fleshing out the story, Milton seems to have injected some irony.

The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
—Genesis 2:18

In Genesis, God simply made the observation that it would not be good to leave the man by himself, and promptly set about making a mate for him.

In Milton’s version, though (Book 8, starting at line 357), it is Adam who begs God to make a mate for him. God agrees, and creates Eve. After that, as we all know, things began to get complicated.

What Milton seems to imply is that the creation of Eve was not part of God’s original plan. Instead, it was Adam’s idea. The first man looked around at everything God had created for him, scratched his head, looked up, and said, “You know, God, this Paradise and stuff is really cool and all—(Great job, really. I love it! And no offense, if you know what I mean.)—but I have a suggestion on how you might improve it.” And God went along with it. In other words, immediately after God made him lord and possessor of “all the Earth . . . and all things that therein live,” Adam’s first act was to try to improve on God’s plan! (A trait which, unfortunately, we have all inherited.) And as he has done ever since, God’s response was, “If that’s what you really want. But don’t blame me—it’s your choice.”

So Milton seems to be saying that if Adam had left well enough alone, he wouldn’t have gotten into so much trouble.

Of course, I’m just speculating here. The real theologians can battle this one out. But maybe Milton was just fighting back, trying to give the man a fair break. After all, there’s another way to interpret Genesis 2:18: Some would argue that God realized it could be a bad idea to turn the man loose in Paradise unsupervised . . . .

I’m staying out of it.

• Jesus’ Friends
• Obedience and Favor
• Toothache and Nails
• Six Principles for Godly Choices
• Reading List 2007

Again referring to the introduction of Adventures in Missing the Point: How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel, (see this previous post) McLaren and Ocampo ask:

Are we creating a self-isolating, self-serving, self-perpetuating, self-centered subculture? . . . This book is our attempt . . . to get us thinking about the possibility of unintentional betrayal of the gospel by those entrusted with it.

This is exactly what the church needs to be doing on a routine basis: reaching into the culture to find out what questions the unchurched are asking and reassessing the adequacy of our theology to ensure that we can correlate our theological answers to the new questions the culture proposes.

Why is the church simply not working for so many people? Why do so many pass through untouched? Why do so many leave unfulfilled? Why, after years or a lifetime in the church, is there no discernable difference in the lives of so many active Christians?

I think it was G. K. Chesterton who said that “the best argument against Christianity is Christians themselves.” How can the church regain its integrity and its relevance?

• Winning Souls, not Beating Them
• Anselm or Finney?
• More Messy Meditation
• Reading List 2007

Howard W. Stone and James O. Duke, in How to Think Theologically, referring to Paul Tillich, state:

Tillich maintained that human life and culture raise questions of the ultimate meaning of human existence to which religions and their theologies propose answers and that the task of theological reflection is to correlate these existential questions with their theological answers.

In other words, society and culture pose questions that demand theological answers.

Every ten years or so, our culture raises a new set of questions that demand new theological answers from the church. This is part of the explanation of why church is not working for so many people.

In aging churches where a small group of people hold all the power, and have been controlling the church for decades, with little turnover, they become an subculture that gradually develops its own norms, values, and traditions, and its connection with the culture at large grows ever more tenuous. They do not revisit and recorrelate their theological answers and eventually the church and its practices become irrelevant to those seeking answers.

There are two reasons for this. First of all, any ingroup is going to be resistant to change. It takes them out of their comfort zone, and any tightly knit group of elderly people entrenched in power and set in their ways for decades is almost always an immovable object.

But even if they are the most altruistic leaders imaginable, there’s a second, and far more serious reason. Having spent so many years in their insular subculture, they have lost touch with the culture. Immersed in their own systems of thought, customs, traditions, and language, they no longer know what questions society poses. They have no idea what answers visitors are seeking. They have no motivation to provide new theological answers, because they don’t realize that there is a new set of questions. They are often upset with the new people who come and quickly go again. They can’t understand why this new generation of unchurched people won’t accept what they offer. They demand that visitors adapt themselves to fit the theological answers they have. The new people are invariably uncooperative, and look elsewhere, often giving up on church all together.

The theological answers they have no longer correlate with the questions seekers bring from the culture outside. Outsiders stepping into the church subculture may as well be from another planet.

• God in the Workplace?
• The Best Argument Against Christianity
• A Global Ministry
• Half Full or Half Empty?
• Fallout From Nuclear Families

A few words from Adventures in Missing the Point: How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel, by Brian D. McLaren and Tony Campolo, caught my attention.

The phrases “world-penetrating (like salt and light)” and “world-transforming (like yeast in bread)” jumped off the page.

That would preach!

Salt, light, yeast: that’s what we are to be. Penetrating, illuminating, transforming.

• Our lives, not our words
• A Joy Too Sweet for Words
• God Bless Everyone
• The Greatest of These
• Sound Bytes