Paradise in Crisis

Overview

The Bible is not a series of disconnected stories, each one with a little moral for how to live, but it’s actually primarily a single story about what went wrong with the human race and what will put it right.

Figuring out what went wrong with the human race is really important. In her 1925 diary, Beatrice Webb, one of the architects of the modern British welfare system, says there’s something wrong with us that leads to selfishness and violence, corruption in business and government, war and atrocities—and that it’s consistent across history. Science hasn’t dealt with it. Education hasn’t dealt with it. Social machinery hasn’t dealt with it. Who will explain it? Chapters 3 and 4 of Genesis do.

Let’s start with this very famous text, and let’s notice four features of the narrative: 1) the sneer, 2) the lie, 3) the tree, and 4) the call.