Back of the Envelope

Jonah Goldberg has an interesting story about the "Jesus fish":

During a 1991 visit to Istanbul, a buddy and I found ourselves in a small restaurant, drinking, dancing, and singing with a bunch of middle-class Turkish businessmen, mostly shop owners. It was a hilariously joyful evening, even though they spoke little English and we spoke considerably less Turkish.

At the end of the night, after imbibing unquantifiable quantities of raki, an ouzo-like Turkish liqueur, one of the men gave me a worn-out business card. On the back, he’d scribbled an image. It was little more than a curlicue, but he seemed intent on showing it to me (and nobody else). It was, I realized, a Jesus fish.

It was an eye-opening moment for me, though obviously trivial compared with the experiences of others. Here in this cosmopolitan and self-styled European city, this fellow felt the need to surreptitiously clue me in that he was a Christian just like me (or so he thought).

Traditionally, the fish pictogram conjures the miracle of the loaves and fishes as well as the Greek word IXΘΥΣ, which means fish and also is an acronym for “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior.” Christians persecuted by the Romans used to draw the Jesus fish in the dirt as a way to tip off fellow Christians that they weren’t alone.

In America, these fish appear mostly on cars. Recently, however, it seems Jesus fish have become outnumbered by Darwin fish. No doubt you’ve seen these, too. The fish is “updated” with little feet on the bottom, and “IXΘΥΣ” or “Jesus” is replaced with either “Darwin” or “Evolve.”

It's been a long time since I've really thought about the Darwin fish. At first, I found it offensive. A deliberate mockery of what, to my mind, was the purest symbol of my faith. Unlike the cross, which is often used as a piece of art with no real meaning, no one wears an ichthus unless they mean it. They know that it was a symbol of Christianity when being a Christian was dangerous. And, from Jonah's story, it's still used that way in places where it's dangerous today. So no one mocks that symbol in ignorance of what it means.

It's hard to maintain outrage for a long length of time, however, and after a while I phased it out. I even used it in advertising for a discussion on evolution hosted by MIT's Christian groups. Still, it is the sort of insult that polite people are offended by. As Jonah is:

I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there’s the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers.

The hypocrisy is even more glaring. Darwin fish are often stuck next to bumper stickers promoting tolerance or admonishing that “hate is not a family value.” But the whole point of the Darwin fish is intolerance; similar mockery of a cherished symbol would rightly be condemned as bigoted if aimed at blacks or women or, yes, Muslims.

Civilized debate would be greatly encouraged if people were more polite to one another.

I've mentioned this idea before, but I'd like to expand on it a bit. So let's start with the story from Genesis 3 (NIV translation):

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ ”

“You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all the livestock
and all the wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.

And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”

To the woman he said,

“I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”

To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”

Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.

The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

There are a number of ways of looking at this story, and I'm not talking about whether the story is literal or figurative. What is the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Why was this knowledge forbidden to mankind? I had one mythology teacher who believed that the whole thing was an immortality story, quite common in ancient mythologies, where the gods jealousy guard their immortality from humans who always want to live forever. After all, Adam and Eve were cast from the garden in order to prevent them from eating from the other tree, the Tree of Life. Of course, this interpretation tends to overlook the fact that the two were free to eat of the Tree of Life before they partook of the Tree of Knowledge.

Many heretical philosophers view God as the antagonist of this story. To them, knowledge is the ultimate good, and innocence is a vice, not a virtue. They see God as trying to keep mankind ignorant and compliant. They read that last line, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever" as proof that God was trying to horde his knowledge so he could subjugate mankind, and believe that the wisdom gained by eating the fruit is worth it, no matter what the price, or the arbitrary punishment of a vain and greedy God.

There is a strain of Christian thought which runs along similar, but less cynical, lines. They see the coming of Christ as the greatest good possible, and the redeemed man in Revelations as superior, or at least wiser, than the innocent man in Genesis. Because it is the Fall that led to these things, they see the Fall as a good thing, and that ultimately we are better off for it having happened. Some of them even believe that the Fall was meant to happen. After all, how could the Lamb of God have been slain before the beginning of the world (Rev 13:8) if redemption, and thus the Fall, were not already in the works. And if God wanted us to Fall, who's to say we had much choice in the matter? Maybe I'm not the one, but I'll say it anyway: I reject this belief for the very simple reason that it portrays God as a capricious deity who made us Fall and then punished us for it. It's probably true that I don't understand God as well as I think I do, but I do think I'm staying truer to a straightforward reading of the text than those who imagine a divine conspiracy to undo us and then remake us.

What are we to make of this story then? What's so wrong about the knowledge of good and evil? God has it, why shouldn't we? Why is immortality okay for us as long as we're ignorant (i.e., not like God)? And who's the us of "one of us" anyway? (There are a variety of interpretations for that one line, some which see God as being sarcastic--as man by no stretch of the imagination became like God, despite the serpent's promise, I can see that--and others that take it more literally.) I will, for the moment, put that aside and reflect on the Tree itself. What was the purprose of the Tree? Why give man the opportunity to fail like that? Was it simply a test? And what knowledge of good and evil did we gain from eating the tree? Shame is the only thing mentioned. Did Adam and Eve lack a conscience before? Did our innate sense of right and wrong only come from the tree?

Here's where I'll start speculating, and to begin, I'll concede that the Christians who believe that redeemed man is wiser than innocent man have a point. We have gained something through the Fall that we've endured. I hold to the belief that while Adam and Eve were perfect, they were immature. They were intelligent, but not yet very wise. The serpent offered them a shortcut: eat the forbidden fruit, and you'll become like God. Notice that becoming like God wasn't a matter of power and immortality (to some extent, they already had that), but of knowledge. The wisdom which they knew they lacked. The fruit of the tree didn't necessarily have any supernatural properties. Merely by eating of it, they broke God's commandments, bringing sin and death into the world. They gained a firsthand knowledge of evil by partaking of it, and in this intimate knowledge of evil, fully understood the difference between it and the good they had forsaken. But, I maintain, there is another way to know evil. God, after all, knows good and evil, and it has not come from doing evil. Jesus knew good and evil, and not in the way the rest of humanity knew it. He knew it by facing it, resisting it, and overcoming it. If the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was a test, then failure was not the only option. There was also the possibility of success, and that would have meant understanding evil in the same way Jesus did, by opposing it. The Tree, then, would have taught mankind what they needed to learn, and they would have gained the knowledge that they needed to mature, without the catastrophe of the Fall, and the suffering it brought.

That, I believe, was the purpose of the Tree, not as a test, but as a lesson. Failure made the lesson a much harsher one, but even so, we are learning. And ultimately, that failure itself is redeemed.