The first paragraph here is taken verbatim from the commentary on Gen 2:15-17. If you have come from there, you may wish to skip this paragraph, though re-reading it will refresh your memory of what has been said.
The nature of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil has remained an enigma for commentators, and no amount of explanation will take us anywhere near being certain about what it means. The tree is mentioned only here in the Bible, and the raw data given us is not much. One approach is to begin with its name, and notice that "good and evil" is a merism. It has been suggested that this refers to omniscience, "all-knowing." This clearly was not evident in Adam and Eve after they ate the fruit.11 We suggest that at least part of what it means to possess the knowledge of good and evil is moral understanding, the appreciation of the possibility of possibilities and, therefore, of autonomy, the option of choices. The First Couple discovered nakedness, shame and fear as categories of human existence they did not have before. The problem with managing choices perfectly is that it requires one also to be all-knowing since only such knowledge will enable one to know what the consequences are of deciding for the one or the other. But lacking the wisdom of omniscience all the First Couple could do was the totally inadequate resort to hiding. "Knowledge of good and evil," therefore, requires the corollary gift of omniscience to shoulder its heavy responsibility. It is an ability that belongs alone to God, and only He can handle its burden and demands. It is not something humans were made to handle. We discovered the option of plastic but lacking the wisdom of omniscience, see what we have done to our world!12 And how many of us can go through the ugliness of a betrayal by someone we trust deeply and come out still whole? How many of us can look at the mangled body and the brain splattered on the road of a bad accident victim without feeling nauseous afterwards? We cannot see many of these ugliness's without soon becoming traumatized or jaded, "inside-dead." Tragic stories have been told and retold, especially since the First World War, of how men would go off to war only to return so totally shocked by what they have experienced they could never be 'normal' again. We are just not meant, or made, for such things. God understood and warned the First Man about it.
But is there any way to understand what 'knowing good and evil' means more deeply. A line of thought proposed by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his post-humously published book, Ethics is promising. Let me see if I can provide an outline of it without distorting it too much.1
First of all, we note that Adam did not naturally possess 'the knowledge of good and evil.' He acquired it by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,' by an act of disobedience. As a representative of the human race, his act of disobedience—what we call in Christian jargon, the Fall—shaped the way humans choose.
In the knowledge of good and evil man does not understand himself in the reality of the destiny appointed in his origin, but rather in his own possibilities, his possibility of being good and evil. He knows himself now as something apart from God, outside God, and this means that he now knows only himself and no longer knows God at all; for he can know God only if he knows only God. The knowledge of good and evil is therefore separation from God. Only against God can man know good and evil.2
This knowledge of good and evil, however, is not the good and evil of God but "good and evil against God."(5) This knowledge of good and evil is, of course, a knowledge of disunion and disunity; of disunion with God, suspicion, distrust and conflict with others, and conflict and brokeness of being within. It is a knowledge that although knowing God, refuses to glorify Him or give thanks to Him, a thinking that is futile and foolish (Rom 1), i.e., the story of the human race as we now know it, despite his attempt to be good. This is illustrated in the example of the Pharisees in the New Testament:
The Pharisee is that extremely admirable man who subordinates his entire life to his knowledge of good and evil and is as severe a judge of himself as of his neighbour to the honour of God, whom he humbly thanks for this knowledge. For the Pharisee, every moment of life becomes a situation of conflict in which he has to choose between good and evil. For the sake of avoiding any lapse his entire thought is strenuously devoted night and day to the anticipation of the whole immense range of possible conflicts, to the reaching of a decision in these conflicts, and to the determination of his own choice.(12)
Jesus—the Second Adam—in sharp contrast to the Pharisees, seems totally unperturbed by this conflict. Bonhoeffer speaks of Jesus's stance as true freedom:
The freedom of Jesus is not the arbitrary choice of one amongst innumberable possibilities, it consists on the contrary precisely in the complete simplicity of His action, which is never confronted by a plurality of possibilities, conflicts or alternatives, but always only by one thing. This one thing Jesus calls the will of God. He says that to do this will is His meat. The will of God is His life. He lives and acts not by the knowledge of good and evil but by the will of God. There is only one will of God. In it the origin is recovered; in it there is established the freedom and the simplicity of all actions.(15)
But how then did Adam and Eve choose in the Garden of Eden? What guided them in their choices? Traditionally, systematic theologians would say that Adam had the law of God written on his heart. He knew by nature what was good and evil. But this is a reading into the text. Bonhoeffer points out that:
Man at his origin knows only one thing: God. It is only in the unity of his knowledge of God that he knows of other men, of things, and of himself. He knows all things only in God, and God in all things. The knowledge of good and evil [which he came to know as a result of his disobediences] shows that he is no longer at one with this origin. (3)
By nature, therefore, the basis on which Adam and Eve decided in the Garden was the knowledge of God and the will of God. "Consequently, the choice he made in relation to the forbidden fruit was not a choice between a good act and an evil act but the choice between obedience to the will of God and disobedience to that will. The root of the sin was a belief that human beings were capable of standing apart from God as autonomous beings able to decide what was good and what was evil.3
In that all human ethical system is founded on a knowledge and assessment of what is good and evil, right and wrong, Bonhoeffer goes on to say, if we can speak of Christian ethics at all, it will "be a critique of all ethics simply as ethics."(3).
This then seems to be the thrust of Scriptures towards good and evil: that it consists entirely in knowing God and His will. Jesus reprimanded Peter to "get behind me, . . . you do not have in mind the things of God but the things of men" (Matt 16:21; Mk 8:33). And to have in mind the things of men is to be equated with 'Satan.' Even to have in one's mind determined to be a slave to God's law—and what higher Pharisaic ideal is there?—was to be a slave to the law of sin (Rom 7:25). Everything that the book of Proverbs has to say about right and wrong, good and evil, hangs on the fundamental principle that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (1:7). Everything that the New Testament has to say about good and evil, right and wrong, is "in Christ." In Him alone do we rediscover the true compass of freedom in all of life's complexity.
Low Chai Hok
©Alberith, 2020