Since my freshman year in college, when I read the book “The Human Phenomenon” by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who was a paleontologist and a French Jesuit priest, I understood something important about what we think about the structure of reality. It is not cyclic, it is actually a process, with cyclic rhythms and order, but unique as time unfolds. This has amazingly important implications. The most important to me today is that St. Augustine was wrong. There was never a “fall” from a perfect Garden of Eden. We are evolving, and we were never perfect. The capacity to nurture and love, and connect have grown from beings which at first had no language. The brain had a reptilian underpinning, which is 100,000 years old, and then a mammalian brain, which is about 50,000 years old, which also has evolved, and which gives us these nurturing and empathic abilities.
This means that there is no “original sin”. The creation, the universe, is an unfolding miracle of physical order and unity, in which coherence is given by the substances of time and space, mass and energy, and in which all the elements of the Periodic Table came from processes which devolved from the Big Bang, over 13.8 billion years. From the original moment, the stars formed, then the planets as the universe rapidly burst outward. Some stars are dead or dying, but they are a unique unfolding, not going back to the beginning of time. There are billions of galaxies. We do not know of life anywhere else yet, but it is possible that another planet somewhere in all these billions of galaxies is also unfolding the complex interactions which might lead first to chemicals which begin to come together, and then exist in circumstances which make possible the biosphere. Fr. Teilhard spoke of what he thought as the countervailing force, which balances against the Second law of thermodynamics, which supposes that by spending energy, things ultimately fall into entropy. His understanding of Einstein’s showing us that energy and mass are interchangeable at the speed of light, was that there is a law of Complexity-Consciousness, which is building the process of the unfolding development of the universe. He considered the energy to be Love. Love as he defines it is not romantic, it is about growth and connection and order, where the order subsumes what was previously the structural organization. For example, the time and place in Earth’s development when chemical molecules coalesced and “infolded” to become organic compounds set the stage for the further development of life.
For many people, this doesn’t really seem to touch them, but what it does in theology is show that there was never a fallen world, and that we have misunderstood what Jesus came to do. His life, death and resurrection mirror the way life, death and resurrection are happening in the universe all the time– it is the pattern. Nothing is lost; rather, it is built- in to what comes next. The Cosmic Christ is the pattern of this unfolding. Jesus was not “paying” for our sins, but he LOVED us, so that we could learn how to be human in the best way, as our connection to God within this reality of the process of Creation. We can feel and believe and THANK Him for this gift of the modeling of how to be more loving, more connected, more deeply compassionate; and to be enfolded in love with God and with the world around us. The scriptures constantly connect us with this loving Creator. This God is benevolent, and wants our growth, and wants to help us, actually IMPELS us, toward greater empathy, connection and unity. Teilhard called this the NOOSPHERE, which will be a way that humans become more connected, as we are so quickly doing through the use of communications and our inventions for sharing knowledge and problem-solving skills over the whole Earth. This is the understanding of St. Bonaventure, who with St. Aquinas, emphasized what is GOOD in creation, and that in the first chapter of Genesis, God saw it was “GOOD!” Instead of being full of fear, and hearkening back to a mythic time when everything was perfect, we need to have courage to move forward into the unknown, unfolding creation. We need to let go of the picture of a static universe, such as was the Ptolemaic system, before Galileo. We need to understand that Jesus was inviting women as well as men to a deeper relationship with the Divine Mystery. We need to get rid of the concept of “original sin”. We each have enough flaws and dents in our characters, and we hurt ourselves and each other, but the invitation is toward growth, healing, strength, and deeper loving union with the Divine who is calling us forth into a blooming future! There is no need to add a super-sin, which is our imperfect character, which needs to be forgiven. God made us and God is helping us grow. We are the universe expressing itself, lovingly. We can ask God for forgiveness for our behaviors, our sins; but the idea of an original sin which was committed by Adam, is not true, not the right way to see the story of Creation. This does not take away from our love of God, it makes us see that God is so much MORE loving, MORE creative, than we thought! Ilia Delio, a follower of Teilhard de Chardin, calls this God the “not-yet God”. The God of the future.
St. Thomas Aquinas thought that sin was “missing the mark”. As if a behavior was shooting an arrow and missing the bull’s eye– we overthink or overreact, or our own agenda or needs get in the way of a clear and good way to interact or solve a problem. We are called to deeper interactions, better human unity and relationships. The biggest sins we commit are failure to love. Love brings increased complexity but also keeps individual uniqueness. All of the ways the universe is made of relationships help us see that love and relationality are how God is bringing the universe along!
Whenever I see something about Original Sin now, it makes me angry. It is bad theology. It is not appropriate to what we know about the universe and the way creation has unfolded. It also makes God look like a mean and cruel deity, who would send his son to be killed. We have to get back to what is actually in the scriptures, that we are called into being out of God’s infinite creative love. That is the “good news” we need to share!
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