There has been a fair amount of discussion lately in the Christian blogosphere of the story of Adam and Eve, discussing a.) whether it is scientifically viable to read the story literally, and b.) whether a literal reading is necessary to maintain orthodox Christian theology on the Fall of Man and Original Sin. (The most recent bout of blog posts seem to have been kicked off by this article by John Farrell in Forbes magazine; Mark Shea has a good response from the Catholic perspective.)

My sermon this past Sunday happened to be on that same story from a New Church perspective.  I ended up focusing more on the New Church teachings on the internal sense of the story of Adam and Eve, and less on the question of original sin – but the sermon does address the question of what the story is about if it is not a literal story: the way that sin could come into a world that God had created .  (For the basics of the New Church teaching on original sin, see True Christian Religion 520-524 – in short, we do not inherit guilt from Adam and Eve, but we inherit from our parents a tendency toward evil.)

THE FALL OF MAN

Texts for the sermon: Genesis 3:1-19; Revelation 20:1-3, 7-10; Arcana Coelestia 206

“And Jehovah God commanded the man, saying, ‘Of every tree of the garden eating thou may eat. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eat of it, dying thou shalt​ die.” (Genesis 2:16, 17)

We live in a fallen world.  When we look around at the violence and poverty, the cruelty that one person inflicts on another, we acknowledge this.  We live in a broken world.  And we are part of that broken world.  We see the same tendencies in ourselves that appal us in others – greed, selfishness, vengeance.  We know that our world is broken, and there are two questions that we ask: how can something God created be so full of pain and suffering?  And can the world be redeemed?

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