The Bible as Tree of Knowledge

The Bible as Tree of Knowledge January 12, 2017

Book treeIn a recent Facebook exchange, I formulated some points that seem to me to have a wider applicability, and so I am sharing them here, more or less in the same form as I first wrote them…

Your underlying aim is to escape from the uncertainty inherent in the human condition. Historical study, for instance, only offers probabilities at best. But you desire certainty, and so you pretend that the Bible is the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and don’t recognize that you are reenacting one of its famous stories as you bite into it, expecting it to make you wise as a god. And yet in the very process, your own human frailty and nakedness is exposed.

I figure things out in much the same way that you do, but without pretending that I have something that allows me to escape my human limitations and see from a “God’s eye perspective.” Because to claim that would be to reject one of the most central teachings of the Bible. The irony is that so many who desire a “core basis for truth” do so because they have missed or reject the Bible’s core truth: human beings are not gods.

Arrogance is a pitfall that humans of every stripe fall into, and so too is pretending that it is more associated with one’s opponents than one’s own position.


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