I Started a Fight (con't.)
Friday, April 3, 2009 at 1:17PM
rebecca in real life, theology

Episode 3: Things Get Twisted

(You may want to read Episode 1 and Episode 2 first.)

Yes, I know. Cliffhangers aren’t fun, but they are good for us. Waiting produce endurance, and endurance produces character. Buck up, dear reader; this is good for the constitution.

Now where were we? Ah yes. I was sitting in a Bible study and had just responded to the question, “Why would God have put the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden?” I replied, if you remember, that God planned from the beginning for humankind to fall, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was put in place as one of the means of the fall.

There was gasping, I think, and the teacher responded to me. His words, I remember perfectly. “That,” he said, “is twisted theology.”

(If you are reading with a feed reader, now’s when you click through to read the rest.)

Perhaps I should have shut up at that point, but I plowed on. “Christ was ordained to be the Redeemer before the foundation of the world,” I responded. “Doesn’t that mean that God planned for humankind to sin?”

The response from the teacher was that perhaps Christ was ordained to the role of redeemer as plan B in case human beings sinned. Almost immediately, he backed away from the term “plan B” but didn’t explain how, in his scheme of things, the whole plan of redemption isn’t a contingency plan.

This is where I shut up. It wasn’t my place to hijack things, was it?

The teacher went on to give his answer to the problem of that forbidden tree. The tree was put in the garden, he thought, because God wanted human beings to have free will, and without a command to break, there would be no free will. That means, I guess, that God’s ultimate goal in placing the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden was human freedom.

That was the end of things, or so I thought. Until the next morning when my sister got the phone call.

Come back on Monday to read the rest more of my story.

Update: Story continues here.

Article originally appeared on Rebecca Writes (http://rebecca-writes.com/).
See website for complete article licensing information.