A Soliloquy Of A God Intoxicated Geek

It’s been sometime since I talked about that with anybody; and never before with someone who listens. A couple of days later, bored to death as a result of a curfew in Egypt, I stumbled upon some notes I kept during a full backup of all my gadgets. This is not what I would normally post on a blog given the religious and philosophical nature of the subject matter, but I wanted to formulate it in a readable format. A good friend of mine once told me that stating facts out loud – even if you know them by heart – will always lead you to new horizons. Augustine of Hippo wrote his soliloquies way before he wrote his confessions. Who knows, maybe this is the first step along the road to a more comprehensive inner dialectic. This is an attempt to formulate – to the best of my communications capacity – a simple personal understanding of salvation by a God believing, science fascinated geek tormented by the problem of evil in a post modern world. For me this will always be a work in progress given the absurdity of my mind.

I find myself biased towards a more naturalistic Hegelian framework on the fall and original sin as expressed in “Master–slave dialectic”, I find it consistent with both the mythical creation stories in the bible and the available scientific evidence (on a personal level, I have no problem reconciling both). I believe that in reality the moment of the fall (original sin) is the point at which the first human (Adam) developed self consciousness, at that point he developed the sense of separation from nature, realized his own mortality, he yearned to see beyond his life and in a sense became like God (he knew good an evil as stated in Genesis 3:22). He made a one direction move from consciousness to self consciousness. Thus the original sin was a dilemma caused by developing the capacity to sin rather than a single act of transgression, and that’s why a salvation act was needed rather than a single act of forgiveness on God’s side.

The trauma of such realization caused two things:

• First: Alienation from nature, nature is now an enemy he has to out wrestle in order to survive. (To the best of my imagination, this is represented in Genesis 3:23-24 by the exit from Eden after knowing the good and evil with a cherubim guarding the gate)
• Second: Alienation from self, the rebellion against God and the search for a meaning thus starting his existential struggle, this led to the development of all forces of evil within humans

The gap between consciousness and self consciousness was destined to be breached one way or another by that creature as a part of his natural evolution. But the initial self conscious act of rebellion committed by the first human that caused humanity to fall for the forces of evil could only be undone by another human self conscious act of rebellion against those exact same forces of evil, thus returning humanity to its initial state of peace while maintaining the newly acquired self conscious component. A rebellion that lead to his death by a world order of empire and corrupt religious order (these are the same forces that tested Jesus before, Mystery, Miracle and Authority as Dostoevsky puts it).

Before the fall “Adam” came to life when God breathed life into him (Genesis 2:7) thus making the un-fallen Adam God like, I would even go to the extent to assert that full humanity and divinity were the same!

Now the act of salvation through the incarnation (given its mystic nature), crucifixion and resurrection is a transformation act enabling humans to reach their true godhead potential in this life before the other (regardless of the heaven/hell framework). As Irenaeus puts it "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.”

To summarize, for me it was an act by a fully human God incarnate (and being fully human is pivotal in the process) to transform man to his pre-fall nature and reconcile him to a creation waiting to be liberated in the process (Romans 8:19). We are all called to do the same by revolting against the evil of the world, that’s why the act of salvation had to be done by the fully human Jesus, who in his full humanity is divine.

On the contrary, a high Christology approach to salvation with a judicial scene in mind undermines the role of Jesus as a human proxy (as a first century Jewish peasant living under the Roman Empire with a corrupted Jewish religious sect and through him God is visible) which is a role I am deeply attached to and can relate to rather than metaphysical postulations about God’s plan derived by church fathers based on platonic philosophical templates and can never be fully comprehended since the subject matter is extremely mystical. I believe it is based on the idea of a fully transcendent deity entering into our world for a brief period of time where he performs a specific deed and escapes it again after the task is done when in reality he has been here all along and we just didn’t know him (John 1:10)

Moreover, even if this action is enough to cleanse the sins, I don’t see how the cross (based on that approach) can provide a solution to the problem of evil where it is supposed to provide a solution to both the trespasser and the victim, the slavery in Egypt and the Babylonian exile, to both Hitler and a child he burned in the holocaust.

Finally, a high Christology approach doesn't provide a solid understanding of the problem of suffering and the meaning of life. The proposed solution was that the purpose (or meaning) of life was to be reconciled with God in a coming life after the physical death as a “reward” (don’t know if I’m using the correct word here) for a sanctified life before death. This actually postpones the question rather than answers it, living a better life afterwards doesn't address the question of why we live this one. It’s a mere trial at escaping the absurdity of a current situation by looking forward to a better one, but without actually answering why we exist in this one to start with.