Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from Creation and Fall

Just read Bonhoeffer's Creation and Fall and I gotta say the man did an incredible job with the text of Genesis 1-3 (and also first verse of 4). It reads poetically and with a literary prowess unrivaled by much of anything that I have read. Bonhoeffer will get criticism because of his higher critical tendencies, but find me someone who in dealing with the actual text does a better job.

This excerpt I give to you is from his final chapter, about page and a half, when after having gone through Genesis 1-3 he sets up the next movement of the biblical narrative, and its Christological implications. He starts off by wrapping everything together under the theme of humans becoming "like God" getting what they wished for in falling for that very temptation by the serpent. And yet not fully understanding the consequences and heavy implications that come with being "like God." We are now our own creators, we live off of our own resources. In our delusion we grasp at the tree of life more and more because it was banished from us, but we cannot eat of its fruit because it is out of our reach. The only thing we can really grasp in our obsession to live is death. So humanity marches on and Cain is born. And we know the story that Cain strangles life out of his own brother. Bonhoeffer writes that Adam, the one who is preserved for death and consumed with thirst for life, begets Cain, the murderer (Bonhoeffer, 145).

All of this to set up for a breathtaking finale in which Bonhoeffer writes,

The end of Cain's history, and so the end of all history, is Christ on the cross, the murdered Son of God. That is the last desperate assault on the gate of paradise. And under the whirling sword, under the cross, the human race dies. But Christ lives. The trunk of the cross becomes the wood of life, and now in the midst of the world, on the accursed ground itself, life is raised up anew. In the center of the world, from the wood of the cross, the fountain of life springs up. All who thirst for life are called to drink from this water, and whoever has eaten from the wood of this life shall never again hunger and thirst. What a strange paradise is this hill of Golgotha, this cross, this blood, this broken body. What a strange tree of life, this trunk on which the very God had to suffer and die. Yet it is the very kingdom of life and of the resurrection, which by grace God grants us again. It is the gate of the imperishable hope now opened, the gate of waiting and of patience. The tree of life, the cross of Christ, the center of God's world that is fallen but upheld and preserved – that is what the end of the story about paradise is for us (Bonhoeffer, 145-6).

Like I said...breathtaking!