You've made alot of excellent points that I would tend to agree with, but
there are a couple of comments that I would to make.
"I have recently been wading my way through Augustine's 5 books that deal
with Genesis and have found it both heavy going and enlightening."
Something that many people are not aware of is that Augustine also believed
in what could be called the "two document" hypothesis. This says that God
created two books: the Bible and nature. Each has its own set of
revelations and its own specific message, and while they can at times
compliment one another they were not necessarily meant to be different
versions of the same theme. My view of this hypothesis is that the Bible
reveals the spiritual nature of man's relationship with God, whereas nature
reveals the physical nature of man's relationship to God. This view in turn
compliments my belief -- as revealed in Genesis 2:7 -- that man is a
physical being with an immortal spirit, a belief also shared by CS Lewis.
What I also find interesting about Augustine is that he believed, whenever
the two documents conflicted, we should believe the book of nature over the
book of the Word, a view shared by many of the early church fathers, later
theologians and pre-Darwin Christian scientists like Galileo and Boyle.
"The human heart is desperately wicked (and therefore in need of salvation)
whether we believe that the heart refers to a particular organ in the body
or to the central being of a person."
It's interesting that you should bring this point up. That interpretation
of the events described in Genesis 3 was actually a minority opinion among
the early church fathers. As explained by Elaine Pagels in her book _Adam,
Eve, and the Serpent_, for the first four centuries there were various
interpretations as to what the "Fall" meant, but the overwhelming vast
majority of them assumed that man was being punished for his misuse of the
freedom of will that God had given him when He created Adam and Eve. Some
saw this as moral freedom, and hence moral responsibility to choose right
from wrong. Others saw it as (for lack of a better word) political will, in
the sense that God expected man to govern himself. To quote from her book
(pg.. xxv): "From these explorations I came to see that for nearly the
first
four hundred years of our era, Christians regarded _freedom_ as the primary
message of Genesis 1-3--freedom in its many forms, including free will,
freedom from demonic powers, freedom from social and sexual obligations,
freedom from tyrannical government and from fate; and self-mastery as the
source of such freedom." Thus the "Fall" occurred because Adam couldn't
master his own passions and desires, and started doing his own thing instead
of following God. (In essence, then, the "Curse" was simply the natural
consequences of Adam's choice.) These same Christians saw Christ's purpose
in His life, death and resurrection as providing man with the spiritual
power to develop self-mastery and thus live as the free creatures of will
that God made us to be.
As she continues, however, "[w]ith Augustine...this message changed." He
saw the "Fall" as a record, not of Adam simply following his own desires
instead of the desires of God, but as outright rebellion against God, and
the "Curse" as a record, not just of the punishment for our misuse of moral
freedom, but of our loss of that freedom as we became enslaved to sin
forever. Augustine came to believe that since death and sexual desire were
punishments for our rebellion, death and sexuality were not meant to be part
of man's natural state. As Pagels describes it, "Adam's sin not only caused
our mortality but cost us our moral freedom, irreversibly corrupted our
experience of sexuality (which Augustine tended to identify with original
sin), and made us incapable of genuine political freedom. Furthermore,
Augustine read back into Paul's letters his own teaching of the moral
impotence of the human will, along with his sexualized interpretation of
sin."
If this all sounds vaguely familiar, you are not mistaken. These beliefs
serve as the basis for the doctrine of original sin as we understand it
today. Yet even in his own time Augustine's view were a minority opinion,
opposed by bishops who did not believe that death or sexuality were
unnatural. Julian of Eclanum even called Augustine's views Manichaean
heresy. Unfortunately for Julian and the others, the Christianized Roman
state like Augustine's ideas, because it legitimized their imperial rule and
even their use of brutal force as needed to keep the masses in line. For
his part, Augustine believed only a strong central government could keep
sinful man in line, so he supported the imperial state. In return for
that, the Romans gave Augustine the power he needed to declare people like
Julian heretics. The result was that his preposterous and antinatural views
became official church doctrine, and remains so to this day.
"The Biblical world view is expressed in the language of the Biblical world
picture, but stands as a radical challenge to the world views of the
Canaanites, Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Greeks, and Romans of the ancient
world."
That may not be entirely true. Granted the Bible as a whole argues that man
is special, in fact central to creation, but if you look at Genesis 1-3, not
in comparison with the rest of the Bible, but as a stand-alone document, and
not in a way that tries to relate it to later events in the Bible, but in a
straight-forward manner as an independent text, you could get a rather
different meaning. For example, Genesis 2:15 has God commanding man to work
and keep the Garden. Many have interpreted this verse as implying that man
was meant to be God's partner in creation. However, the Hebrew words that
are translated as "work" and "keep" suggest something very different. The
Hebrew word for "keep" actually mean guard and protect, whereas the Hebrew
word for "work" is associated with bondage and slavery. In fact,
alternative versions of this word mean "bondservant". As such, the meaning
of the verse become very negative, with God ordering man to work the Garden
like a beast of burden and to guard it (from what?) at all times. This
revelation also changes the meaning of "helpmate" as applied to Eve. She
probably would have been expected to share in some of the toil, but mostly
she was to "distract" Adam from the toil of his labors, and to make babies
to increase the work force.
Now I do not endorse this interpretation as a modern one, but it does
suggest that the earliest version of this story is more in keeping with
Canaanite, Egyptian and Mesopotamian myths in which man is created to serve
the Gods as beast of burden, the one difference being that Adam and Eve
managed to find a way to rebel against this servitude, forcing God to deal
with them on more equal terms.
Kevin L. O'Brien