The other day on Facebook I saw a meme featuring an expositor preacher, on Mother’s Day, ignoring that it was Mother’s Day and proceeding to the next biblical passage on the docket. It was interesting because this past Sunday, by coincidence, I was asked to speak on a passage from Genesis at a church here in Houston, and it was Mother’s Day.

I started by mentioning Mother’s Day, told some stories about my own mother, pointed out that there are some passages, especially in Isaiah, that offer images of God as a mother and not just a father, and, after discussing the Genesis excerpt, ended by reading Billy Collins’ poem “The Lanyard.” It was easy to carve out a few minutes to honor mothers.

Anyway, the passage from Genesis was from chapter 2, verses 8-17. It begins with God planting a garden in Eden, where he put Adam. God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground, trees pleasing to the eye and good for food. And in the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Near the end of the passage we’re told that God charged Adam to work the garden and take care of it, and then told Adam that he was free to eat from any tree in the garden save for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

I spoke about three things: (1) the garden, (2) the work of tending the garden, and then (3) this tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In this post I’m going to talk about the garden, and in the next two posts I’ll talk about tending the garden and the tree of knowledge of good and evil, respectively. I do this without taking any position on the literalness of these chapters. Such questions are notoriously vexed when it comes to the early chapters of Genesis, but I take it that, however literally or figuratively we are to take some of these matters, the passages are rife with substantive theological insight.

The garden of Eden represents the world prior to the fall. It’s unspoiled, creation as it was intended to be. And we all know that Adam and Eve will soon disobey God, and the horrible fall will ensue. But sometimes Christians get accused, and properly so, of starting with the fall and paying short shrift to the preceding creation narrative. The flow of salvation history in the Bible goes like this: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation (or Restoration). Whereas Adam is responsible for our expulsion from the Garden, Jesus makes possible life once more at it was intended be.

We shouldn’t start with the fall. We should start with the creation narrative. God created this world, and he made us, and in fact made us in his image and after his likeness. That’s an even more central aspect of who we are than our fallenness. Our fallenness is a contingent feature that we have—like where we live. It can change; likewise, our sin problem can be fixed, and for those who follow Christ it has been fixed and it will be fixed. But our having been made in God’s image is an essential feature of ours—a feature that, if we were to lose it, would prevent us from being us. It’s not an accidental feature, but a necessary feature. It’s central to our identity. This is one among other aspects of this all-important creation narrative that predated the fall.

The creation narrative also reminds us that there really is a way the world ought to be, and the world as it currently is isn’t it. We as Christians have an account for why this world falls short of what it should be. When it comes to something like the problem of evil, therefore, its whole force comes from the sense that the world is somehow broken, not what it ought to be. And that’s true, and something that Christianity itself acknowledges and explains. In contrast, a wholly secular or naturalistic understanding of the world doesn’t leave much if any room for the world not matching up to a higher ideal. It is what it is; why expect anything different? It’s all an inevitable byproduct of the laws at work in the world and atoms in motion. Christians in strong contrast have a principled and grounded hope for the world’s redemption, the closing of the awful gap between is and ought. This is part of the good news of the gospel.

Another reminder the creation story offers us is the goodness with which God imbued the world. Think about the garden, filled with delightful fruit and stunning beauty. God wants us to enjoy life and the goodness of the world he created. He imposes some limits on our behavior, it’s true, but the freedoms far exceed the limitations. And what limitations he imposes are for our own good. He wants us to taste and see his goodness in a plethora or resplendent ways. There are so many wonderful things this world contains—meaningful work, rich friendships, faithful marriages, rearing children, beautiful art, transformative conversations, music and literature, food and sport, worship and love The world contains great goodness, enough to break our hearts with joy.

Yet still it isn’t what it was originally intended, and for some their lives are filled with sadness and pain. In fact, the world wasn’t perfect even in Eden, was it? Temptation comes to Adam and Eve—in the form of the serpent. If the world were perfect, that wouldn’t be the case. Plausibly this points to something like a fall before the fall. Tradition has it that Satan was an angel who fell. So the world, even in Adam’s time, was already in need of fixing, even prior to the fall.

There are thus at least two ways that the ultimate redemption of the world will make for a world even better than Eden: (1) Satan will eventually be utterly defeated and silenced. And (2) we won’t be vulnerable and susceptible to sin in our glorified state.

The latter point raise in the minds of some the issue of freedom. If we can’t fall in our beatified state, does that mean we lose our free will in heaven? I don’t think so. I think we’ll lose a vulnerability to sin that they had (and we still retain for now). In that sense our glorified state isn’t simply a return to Eden. It’s better. The picture is one of complete victory over sin—not just forgiveness for our sins, but the defeat of sin itself—understood in a broader way than just individual sins. Whatever is wrong with the world—and clearly the world isn’t the way it ought to be—will be wholly fixed.

Biblically speaking, the deepest sense of freedom is freedom from sin. Sin binds us, holds us in bondage. This is why those who think they’ve broken free from God’s constraints are often those most held in the grip of sin.

One more thing about the creation narrative for now—notice that the creation is described as good—and the notion there is interchangeable with the notion of beautiful. Christianity has always taught there’s a close connection between the good and the beautiful, so that makes sense. Kant thought of the beautiful as a symbol of morality, and of course the history of philosophy is replete with those who have thought of the transcendentals of the beautiful and goodness as flip sides of the same proverbial coin, in some ultimate sense ontologically inseparable, even if they remain conceptually distinct.

Hans Urs von Balthasar famously argued that Kant’s arrival at beauty only in his 3rd Critique (after truth in the 1st and goodness in the 2nd) represents the way philosophers tend to privilege truth and goodness over beauty. Balthasar actually argued that this is a mistake. He thought that beauty paves the way to thinking of goodness and finally of truth in the right sort of way, making beauty the appropriate place to begin. It can offer an enrapturing vision of how the world ought to be, something that includes our will within God’s animating providence. This is one reason among others why, though I’ve devoted most of my professional energies to work on the moral argument(s), I have a growing desire to extend my work to an aesthetic argument for God’s existence. If goodness and beauty are in fact inseparable, perhaps I’ve been doing so all along.