I found the following excerpt from an article,
Bearing our Scorn: Jesus and the Way of Trinitarian Love by
Baxter Kruger
About page 6, you will find this part:
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Adam’s Fall
Looking back in the light of the trinitarian dream for real relationship with humanity, and in the light of Jesus’ suffering our rejection, we can see something of the way of the trinitarian love in the aftermath of Adam’s fall.
The Lord’s response to Adam’s fall is as remarkable as it is beautiful. There is no pretending that nothing disastrous has happened, no looking the other way as if Adam’s infidelity was a mere glitch in an otherwise properly functioning relationship. As Athanasius said, “the thing that was happening was in truth both monstrous and unfitting.”36 The Lord saw the disaster for what it was, but “what then was God, being Good, to do?”37 Pretend all is well? Lash out in anger? He chose to accept the fall, without approving of it, and to accept Adam as a fallen creature. There is no denial or looking the other way on God’s part. There is no divine indifference or neutrality as if the Lord could care less what happens in his creation. And there is no divine outburst of retaliatory anger. There is certainly judgment, judgment which discerns that a great wrong has happened, and judgment that insists on putting things right, on establishing peace and order and concord in the relationship. For the eternal purpose of our adoption stands.
So as an act of sheer grace, as an act of keen awareness of Adam’s fear and of
identification with him in his pain, and as an act of determination to meet and relate to him in his fallen state, the Lord accepted Adam in his shame and related to him as he was. He clothed him.38 Such an act was not about God or a divine need to be appeased.
This was an act of love, of acceptance and real relationship, flowing out of his determination to bring the purpose of adoption to fruition.
It was the great Anselm who said to his interlocutor Boso, “You have not yet
considered the exceeding gravity of sin.” 39 For Anselm, the problem of sin lay in the fact that it was committed against the great King, the eternal God Himself, and therefore even
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35 For more on the eternal purpose of the Triune God, see C. Baxter Kruger, God is For Us (Jackson
and Adelaide: Perichoresis Press, 1995 and Carlisle: Paternoster Publishing, 1997) pp. 1ff, and Jesus and
the Undoing of Adam, pp. 15ff.
36 Athanasius, On the Incarnation, §6.
37 On the Incarnation, §6.
38 Genesis 3:21.
39 Anselm, Cur Deus Homo (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1909), XX1.
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the smallest sin necessarily carried the weight of an eternal offense.40 But in the Garden of Eden it is difficult to find such an offended God, or to see sin being weighed over against God’s eternal worth. We see the Lord, who, by our way of thinking, should have been highly offended, and who could have easily and with every right cursed Adam and destroyed him utterly—but he didn’t. We see the Lord putting aside all his rights to abstract justice and punishment, and we see him more concerned about his lost and terrified creature than he is about his honor.
There are no dazzling lights, no hosts of angels, no triumphal entry of a King
demanding proper recompense or vengeance for Adam’s offense. The Lord came in the cool of the of the day for fellowship with his beloved creature. He finds his friend hiding, ashamed and terrified. He recognizes what has happened, and without flinching moves toward Adam in tenderness and accommodating love.
The dastardly confusion so obvious in our rejection of the Father’s Son incarnate is apparent in Eden as well. The problem of the fall, of sin, is not simply that there has been disobedience to a divine command. The problem is that Adam is now so lost in the cosmos of his own mind that he is utterly incapable of relationship with the Lord.
Trapped in the tragic nightmare of own his self-referential confusion, he has become “the judge,” and in his judgment, he believes that the Lord is the enemy to be feared and avoided. He is, therefore, ashamed of himself and terrified of God. He hides.
The hiding of Adam—from the presence of the concerned and caring Lord—tells us
that the fall, at the very least, is about a terrible twisting of human perception, about an alien, ungodly confusion which so warped Adam’s fundamental way of thinking that he hid from the greatest friend in the universe.
The most penetrating commentary on the disaster of Adam’s fall are the words of Jesus, “no one knows the Father, except the Son.”41 Jesus does not say that we are doing well but need some fresh insights about his Father, or that our basic vision gets good marks but needs to be tweaked. He says no one knows the Father. What statement could be more solemn? Here is the ‘exceeding gravity of sin.’ No one, not the Jews, not the Romans, not the Greeks, no one knows the Father. “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” as the apostle Paul contended.42 For Jesus, the problem of human blindness is absolute. For all are so caught in the toils of Adam’s confusion that there is not one who knows the Father, not one who sees him as he is, not one who is even close—except the Son.
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43 “I have come as light into the world, that everyone who
believes in Me may not remain in darkness.”44
40 Ibid., XI, XX, XXIII.
41 Matthew 11:27.
42 Romans 3:23.
43 Note Jesus’ or John’s comment: “What He has seen and heard, of that He bears witness, and no man
receives His witness” (John 3:32).
44 John 12:46.
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A confused mind sees only through its own confusion.45 We cannot push the weeds of our fallen minds to the side and know the Father’s heart. A vast delusion now casts its alienating shadow upon the Lord’s love for us. With Adam so confused, adoption now seems the dream of a fool, for the rug of any possible divine-human fellowship has been jerked out from under our feet. We are so trapped in our alien vision that we will not and indeed cannot let go of the way we see things, and therefore can do nothing other than impose our confusion upon the Father’s face, creating a god in the image of our
brokenness.46 Jesus is dead serious, no one knows the Father.
Reconciliation is not about changing God, as if somehow our failure altered the Father’s heart or his eternal dreams for us. Reconciliation is about how the love of the Father, Son and Spirit finds a way to do the impossible—reach us in our terrible confusion. The problem for God is not, ‘How can I declare righteous those who are not righteous,’ but ‘How can I restore to communion with me those so utterly lost in their own fallen minds that they hate me and run for cover from my sight?’
How do you relate to one who does not want to relate to you? How do you get inside of blindness? How do you reach one whose projecting shame so disfigures your own face that he disowns your love and hides in fear at your sight? In our pain we, like Adam, have condemned ourselves, created a god in the image of our shame, and hand-crafted a religion to go with it, all of which we project onto the Father and defend with a vengeance.
The issue of reconciliation is not about satisfying legal justice; it is about how God gets through our darkness and makes Himself knowable to us. Revelation seems the obvious answer, but is it? What good is revelation, even inerrant divine transcripts, when our minds are so twisted that we could only misread them? How could authentic communication be possible at all when our fallen imaginations paint the Lord’s heart by the numbers of our own guilt?
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Please check it out.
Boyd
"Live Nude and Prosper" Allen
"May the Lord protect our nudity from the sight of those who will not benefit, and may he allow us to be seen by those who will."
