It's kind of sad knowing this is the last Michael Crichton book I'll read, because Crichton died in 2008 and this is the second of two books to be released posthumously. This actually is one of his better books, probably because it follows the Jurassic Park formula of opening up a just-credible enough world that has so much going on that it's as much about the exploration as it is about the fights and thrills. There's the wonder of the new world along with the typical techno-driven plot. In this book, the world is the micro scale, what things would look like if you were shrunk to half an inch tall and out in the wild.
I found some of the stock Crichton characters -- especially the annoying academic that he doesn't agree with -- to be especially poorly written. Maybe he writes them badly so you like them even less? But there's some surprises to the usual formula that I liked, although they may have been added by Richard Preston when he completed the novel.
This has all the usual strengths and weaknesses of the typical Crichton novel, and the strength of its premise puts it high on the list, probably of the top 5 Crichton novels of all time. There's one BIG problem with the underlying scientific premise that he never explains (and is particularly annoying to a biochemist), even though a character actually articulates it, so I had hope that it would be revealed at the end, but it's not, and I think ... it's better if you know that going in. Or you can wait for the inevitable movie.
Rest in peace, Michael, and thanks for all the books I read in high school that probably influenced me to become a scientist more than I know.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Kitsch and Anti-Kitsch
This article is an excellent, dense, but clear piece of writing. Highly recommended.
Just one quote: "... we have to ask why there is no kitsch in the Christian Scriptures. It is not that the texts are shy of emotion: to the contrary. But throughout there is an insistence on seeing reality, seeing it steadily and seeing it whole. Kitsch ducks this insistence."
Just one quote: "... we have to ask why there is no kitsch in the Christian Scriptures. It is not that the texts are shy of emotion: to the contrary. But throughout there is an insistence on seeing reality, seeing it steadily and seeing it whole. Kitsch ducks this insistence."
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Book Review: Holidays in Heck
P.J. O'Rourke isn't quite as funny as he used to be, but he's writing about his family (considering he spent his 50's rearing three new kids), and I find that funnier than I used to, so it comes out to be an equilibrium. Also, he's writing about politics less, which is probably a bonus. He's usually got a point but it's not always the point he thinks it is. Regardless, I enjoy his writing and his perspective. The two best essays are probably the one about taking his family to Hong Kong and the one about his diagnosis of having a malignant hemmorhoid, which he acknowledges may be the best cancer for a humorist to have. The essays about his travels in China are pretty good too, but nothing too memorable. Mildly recommended.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Responding to Barfield, Introduction: Words and Rainbows
(I'm going to take a step back and give an introduction to Barfield's thought as I see it. I should have taken the hint because he starts each of his classic books with these examples, and takes a bit of time to develop them till he takes off. I'm struggling with the attempt to accurately represent his thought and argument here, so I figure I'll try with this as an intro. I'll go back to part 3 of this series after this.)
There are two things you need to think about with every sentence as you read something by Owen Barfield: words and rainbows.
Words are where he starts. Poetic Diction (reviewed here) was his first book and was basically an expansion of his Honors Project, and this was about what it sounds like: the words chosen for poetry. But because Barfield believes that all words contain something of the history of their original creation in them, talking about words is talking about history, so that talking about where they came from is talking about where they are going. So on the one hand, it's just words, but on the other hand, everything is about words. This resonates with what we know about us being built from words of DNA, and our ability to look into the DNA to discern the history of the DNA words. Exciting stuff for a scientist.
Barfield observed that we originally had fewer words with broader meanings that would overlap and poetically reverbate. But as time passes, lives are lived and knowledge is increased, the meaning of the words becomes more specific, "fossilized" or "calcified", and the multiple meanings are lost while more specific "scientific" meanings are gained. Not that there's anything wrong with that! The way forward according to Barfield is not to limit our vocabularies and somehow forget the specific meanings, but rather to put our words back together in new and poetic ways. This may sound like sitting around writing poems, but it isn't. Verlyn Flieger makes a strong case in Splintered Light (reviewed here) that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote Middle Earth (starting from words/languages not geography, and including various prominent songs and poems in it!) as his way of putting fragmented things back together, just like his friend Barfield suggested. It is possible that one reason people have found Middle Earth so inspiring is because Tolkien meticulously and creatively captured Barfield's ideas in a story, possibly the only way it can be fully captured.
The other thing you need to constantly keep in mind is rainbows. Barfield's other "great" book, Saving the Appearances (review here) starts with the sentence "Look at a rainbow." and then asks, "Is it really there?"
The rainbow does not exist except as a combination of light, rain, and the observer. It moves with the observer, but it's not a hallucination, it is a true observation of the outside world. You really see it -- it is really there. (Interestingly enough, a recent Scientific American article talked about the rainbow halos seen around shadows, called "glories", and these too are tied to the observer. There was no question in that article of whether the "glory" is really there.)
Barfield's key move is to say that if a friend there with you also sees the rainbow, you talk about it as a real thing: "Hey, look at that rainbow!". It is really there as a "collective representation" that you both see and process in your minds and talk about with your words. Then he extends this to look at a tree nearby. This, too, he notes, is a collective representation. We can understand that from previous experiments that the tree is made of cells and the cells have photosynthetic pigments in the leaves and that can explain all sorts of things about the tree, why it changes color in the fall, etc. But fundamentally, what we're talking about when we talk about the particles that make up the tree is a model or hypothesis of the things we can't see, collective representations on top of collective representations.
When I type "rainbow" or "tree" on my computer, and when you read those words, we can be pretty sure we're talking about the same thing and are using the same "collective representation" for it, and likewise for the scientific models of atoms and photosynthesis that work very well to describe the tree or why the rainbow only shows up when the sun is behind you. They are true and consistent collective representations, invoked by the words.
Barfield's basic point is that the observer is part of the whole scheme for the rainbow and for the tree. And his apparent conflict with science comes in when science tries to remove the observer from the picture and Barfield says "you can't do that!". You are part of the system, whether you're observing a rainbow or a tree, and whether you're observing it at the macro- or micro-scopic level. You're making observations, putting them together, and talking about them with words, or "collective representations" as he likes to call them because he wants to group thoughts and words together.
(Students of 20th-century physics may realize that the involvement of the observer with the experiment is actually one of the fundamental conclusions of 20th-century physics! Barfield's ideas actually cohere well with some physics experiments.)
So as I write about Barfield, remember the words, and remember the rainbow. These are all human observations described with human words.
Now we may be ready to start part 1.
There are two things you need to think about with every sentence as you read something by Owen Barfield: words and rainbows.
Words are where he starts. Poetic Diction (reviewed here) was his first book and was basically an expansion of his Honors Project, and this was about what it sounds like: the words chosen for poetry. But because Barfield believes that all words contain something of the history of their original creation in them, talking about words is talking about history, so that talking about where they came from is talking about where they are going. So on the one hand, it's just words, but on the other hand, everything is about words. This resonates with what we know about us being built from words of DNA, and our ability to look into the DNA to discern the history of the DNA words. Exciting stuff for a scientist.
Barfield observed that we originally had fewer words with broader meanings that would overlap and poetically reverbate. But as time passes, lives are lived and knowledge is increased, the meaning of the words becomes more specific, "fossilized" or "calcified", and the multiple meanings are lost while more specific "scientific" meanings are gained. Not that there's anything wrong with that! The way forward according to Barfield is not to limit our vocabularies and somehow forget the specific meanings, but rather to put our words back together in new and poetic ways. This may sound like sitting around writing poems, but it isn't. Verlyn Flieger makes a strong case in Splintered Light (reviewed here) that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote Middle Earth (starting from words/languages not geography, and including various prominent songs and poems in it!) as his way of putting fragmented things back together, just like his friend Barfield suggested. It is possible that one reason people have found Middle Earth so inspiring is because Tolkien meticulously and creatively captured Barfield's ideas in a story, possibly the only way it can be fully captured.
The other thing you need to constantly keep in mind is rainbows. Barfield's other "great" book, Saving the Appearances (review here) starts with the sentence "Look at a rainbow." and then asks, "Is it really there?"
The rainbow does not exist except as a combination of light, rain, and the observer. It moves with the observer, but it's not a hallucination, it is a true observation of the outside world. You really see it -- it is really there. (Interestingly enough, a recent Scientific American article talked about the rainbow halos seen around shadows, called "glories", and these too are tied to the observer. There was no question in that article of whether the "glory" is really there.)
Barfield's key move is to say that if a friend there with you also sees the rainbow, you talk about it as a real thing: "Hey, look at that rainbow!". It is really there as a "collective representation" that you both see and process in your minds and talk about with your words. Then he extends this to look at a tree nearby. This, too, he notes, is a collective representation. We can understand that from previous experiments that the tree is made of cells and the cells have photosynthetic pigments in the leaves and that can explain all sorts of things about the tree, why it changes color in the fall, etc. But fundamentally, what we're talking about when we talk about the particles that make up the tree is a model or hypothesis of the things we can't see, collective representations on top of collective representations.
When I type "rainbow" or "tree" on my computer, and when you read those words, we can be pretty sure we're talking about the same thing and are using the same "collective representation" for it, and likewise for the scientific models of atoms and photosynthesis that work very well to describe the tree or why the rainbow only shows up when the sun is behind you. They are true and consistent collective representations, invoked by the words.
Barfield's basic point is that the observer is part of the whole scheme for the rainbow and for the tree. And his apparent conflict with science comes in when science tries to remove the observer from the picture and Barfield says "you can't do that!". You are part of the system, whether you're observing a rainbow or a tree, and whether you're observing it at the macro- or micro-scopic level. You're making observations, putting them together, and talking about them with words, or "collective representations" as he likes to call them because he wants to group thoughts and words together.
(Students of 20th-century physics may realize that the involvement of the observer with the experiment is actually one of the fundamental conclusions of 20th-century physics! Barfield's ideas actually cohere well with some physics experiments.)
So as I write about Barfield, remember the words, and remember the rainbow. These are all human observations described with human words.
Now we may be ready to start part 1.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Book Review: Civilization by Niall Ferguson
This book is a history of civilization, and the first book by Ferguson I've read. I thought Ferguson's economic focus and anecdotal arguments worked rather well in the early parts of the book, but when he got to the latter half of the 20th century it seems the wheels started to come off. Intriguing arguments: that the Chinese have imported a work ethic and savings mentality along with Christianity (especially interesting coming from an atheist, albeit right-wing, author). I-don't-buy-it: that clothes shaped the consumer society, I think causes and effects are being totally mangled there. Wait-and-see: that the US will be in decline precisely because China is becoming more Western (nothing about India?!). At the end of the day, a short book in popular style can't help but be incomplete, and Ferguson is so intent on making iconoclastic arguments that it ends up reading like Malcolm Gladwell-lite applied to history. The problem of cherry-picking is pervasive. But like Ferguson says about climate change, he'll have to let the qualified people argue about it. I'll let the historians argue about the overall arguments, but at least this provided some interesting anecdotes and new angles about empire and economics. So if I don't buy Krugman that debt is no problem, but if I also don't buy Ferguson that it's totally out of control yet, then who do I buy??
Sunday, February 5, 2012
A Weird Time
(I really do have a continuation of the Barfield sequence of posts half-written, but once again a Sunday of education led to some thoughts about time and science and faith ... )
Scripture has a strange sense of time. For example, there's the way the author of Hebrews takes a Psalm referring to the Exodus and says, "This is talking to you, today." But it goes beyond that. Skeptics take a dim view of the way John's gospel appears to place the crucifixion on a different night than the others (probably so, but slightly debatable in my opinion), and of how Matthew's King Herod and Luke's Census couldn't overlap. (Nevermind the unanimity of the four on the essential points, but that's another post for another day.) And the "simple explanation" of 6 24-hour days of creation runs aground very quickly on the mountains of evidence supplied by biology, chemistry, and physics.
We play with time as a church. The way we keep repeating Christmas and Easter, bringing the birth and death of Christ into the rhythm of the seasons, re-enacting the past in the present with pagaents and parades. The very day of Easter skips about in time so that a musician's family always has to check the calendar to see when the spring "crunch time" will be this year. Not to mention the time-spanning remembrance built into the Eucharist, looking back to that upper room and forward to the New Jerusalem.
Many theological puzzles are really questions about time. Your sins are washed away, or is it they have been washed away, but why is there still such struggle in so many places? Theodicy is not really a question of why not but why not yet? Why do we not yet see all things subjected to him? What has happened already, what is happening now, and what will happen later? When is it time to quote 1 Corinthians 15 (looking forward to the future putting-right of the resurrection) and when to quote 2 Corinthians 4 instead (always bearing about his death that his life may be made manifest ... bringing the past into the present)?
All of these indicate an unconscionable mixing of time in Scripture and the church. It seems that trying to straighten out exactly when Galatians was written relative to Acts can be maddeningly elusive if you insist on being 100% sure. Time is weird in the Bible.
But we never see how science takes just as weird a view of time. If I'm to be a scientist, I'm to control time, to run the experiment so many times I know the future from a large enough sample size of the past. I count on my experiment to be clean and elegant enough that I can do it over and over again and it won't wear out or bend or change. These assumptions predicate that I can step through time when I really am trapped in its flow, and only in limited cases can I pretend to lift myself out of it for a moment. And even then, that phrase, "for a moment," belies that time still goes on.
If you try to run a controlled experiment with who you're going to marry ... well, you're going to end up like Newt Gingrich. That's not good, folks. Us normal folks can't do that, and it doesn't seem to improve things. For the biggest decisions, science can inform but it must take a back seat to the fact that my life is unique and so is every moment of every decision I make.
Science works better the simpler (and therefore the more repeatable) the system -- until you simplify so far you run into the Uncertainty Principle and the entanglement of time and space in a single coordinate system. When the speed of light and time-space come into conflict, it is time-space that bends and gives way!
We cannot escape the weirdness of time any more than we can escape the weirdness of our own souls and viewpoints embedded inside and itself entangled with these mortal frames.
What gives me hope is that Christianity, with its timeless God living from 4BC to 30AD, is as strange as time itself, even with the same flavor of strangeness and beauty as creation.
I don't expect this to convince anyone, but I know it sustains me. The incarnate, eternal, uncontrollable God reflected 66 ways in the books of the Bible is weird -- the right kind of weird. If that's not a hymn, then maybe it should be.
Scripture has a strange sense of time. For example, there's the way the author of Hebrews takes a Psalm referring to the Exodus and says, "This is talking to you, today." But it goes beyond that. Skeptics take a dim view of the way John's gospel appears to place the crucifixion on a different night than the others (probably so, but slightly debatable in my opinion), and of how Matthew's King Herod and Luke's Census couldn't overlap. (Nevermind the unanimity of the four on the essential points, but that's another post for another day.) And the "simple explanation" of 6 24-hour days of creation runs aground very quickly on the mountains of evidence supplied by biology, chemistry, and physics.
We play with time as a church. The way we keep repeating Christmas and Easter, bringing the birth and death of Christ into the rhythm of the seasons, re-enacting the past in the present with pagaents and parades. The very day of Easter skips about in time so that a musician's family always has to check the calendar to see when the spring "crunch time" will be this year. Not to mention the time-spanning remembrance built into the Eucharist, looking back to that upper room and forward to the New Jerusalem.
Many theological puzzles are really questions about time. Your sins are washed away, or is it they have been washed away, but why is there still such struggle in so many places? Theodicy is not really a question of why not but why not yet? Why do we not yet see all things subjected to him? What has happened already, what is happening now, and what will happen later? When is it time to quote 1 Corinthians 15 (looking forward to the future putting-right of the resurrection) and when to quote 2 Corinthians 4 instead (always bearing about his death that his life may be made manifest ... bringing the past into the present)?
All of these indicate an unconscionable mixing of time in Scripture and the church. It seems that trying to straighten out exactly when Galatians was written relative to Acts can be maddeningly elusive if you insist on being 100% sure. Time is weird in the Bible.
But we never see how science takes just as weird a view of time. If I'm to be a scientist, I'm to control time, to run the experiment so many times I know the future from a large enough sample size of the past. I count on my experiment to be clean and elegant enough that I can do it over and over again and it won't wear out or bend or change. These assumptions predicate that I can step through time when I really am trapped in its flow, and only in limited cases can I pretend to lift myself out of it for a moment. And even then, that phrase, "for a moment," belies that time still goes on.
If you try to run a controlled experiment with who you're going to marry ... well, you're going to end up like Newt Gingrich. That's not good, folks. Us normal folks can't do that, and it doesn't seem to improve things. For the biggest decisions, science can inform but it must take a back seat to the fact that my life is unique and so is every moment of every decision I make.
Science works better the simpler (and therefore the more repeatable) the system -- until you simplify so far you run into the Uncertainty Principle and the entanglement of time and space in a single coordinate system. When the speed of light and time-space come into conflict, it is time-space that bends and gives way!
We cannot escape the weirdness of time any more than we can escape the weirdness of our own souls and viewpoints embedded inside and itself entangled with these mortal frames.
What gives me hope is that Christianity, with its timeless God living from 4BC to 30AD, is as strange as time itself, even with the same flavor of strangeness and beauty as creation.
I don't expect this to convince anyone, but I know it sustains me. The incarnate, eternal, uncontrollable God reflected 66 ways in the books of the Bible is weird -- the right kind of weird. If that's not a hymn, then maybe it should be.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
It Is All Happening Now
Today's Sabbath observation is of some interesting similarities between the gospel narratives of the Temptation of Jesus, 1 Corinthians 10, and Hebrews 3-4. All refer back to the story of Israel wandering in the wilderness and all are about temptation and time.
First off, all make the point (explicit in the epistles, implicit in the gospels because of the setting in the wilderness) that the story of Israel is repeating itself. What happened to them was for us, Paul writes (1 Cor. 10:6), because their story is our story and their YHWH is our God. Countless sermons have been built on this assertion. But realize what an amazing assertion it is: that this story about the deliverance of a bunch of slaves in the desert over 3000 years ago is still relevant. That's because God is universal and God is the same, and our problem is the same. It's like the past is happening again.
The author of Hebrews makes this explicit in a slightly different way, by emphasizing the entrance to the promised land as the "rest" provided by God. This rest is also the rest that God entered into on the seventh day of creation (4:4) and it's the same rest referred to both by David in Psalm 95 and by Moses when looking toward the promised land. The author's point is that this is ALL the same thing, even though the Scripture references are scattered across thousands of years (and even the writing of that observation is now back two thousand years!). This rest is the salvation offered by Jesus, the gift putting things right, the rightness and peace of "shalom." Temptation attracts us away from this rest. Temptation is anti-peace, anti-wholeness, frenetic and frantic. Sound familiar?
The author of the Hebrews emphasizes that for each of these events -- the 7th day of creation, the words of David, and the wilderness wandering of Israel -- the real choice and real crux of action is Today. Again and again the author repeats the old Psalm, "Today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts" and "So I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest." The author (of Hebrews and of Psalm 95) says that "Today" is today. All these times are happening for you, for your choice and your direction and your repentance. In this sense, it is all happening now. Look at the present tense in 4:1: "A promise being left us of entering into his rest."*
This is personally convicting. When I look at myself, I don't see the rest I want to see. So many "todays" I have not entered in. I haven't been particularly peaceful lately, although with four small children I hope there's a bit more contingency grace for that. That serenity is not a cliche, it's a goal that Christ can bring me into, it's a land waiting to be entered, with patience. And the temptation is there, just as it was for those wandering in the desert, to turn another way, to another source for energy and life, whether by hoarding manna or begging for quail.
Adam and Eve faced that temptation and turned elsewhere, going so far as to hide from their maker (and their maker played along with the charade they set up that they could hide!). Jesus faced the same temptation, three times explicitly, and stronger than they ever did.
This is where a Christ-centered interpretation of Scripture becomes crystal clear, because what was the nature/event of the Fall? (David Bazan wrote a whole album about this with Curse Your Branches, though I don't agree with his conclusions!*) Was the moment of the Fall definitely the eating of a fruit, teeth ripping into a sugary something-or-other, was that the primary disobedience? If that's the case, why didn't Jesus go to a garden and refuse to eat the fruit? If the historical details of Genesis are of primary importance, then there's a sense that Jesus never fully reversed the fall.
But what if the Fall was something different, this inevitable, selfish turning away that now must be turned away/repented from? If the Fall was reaching out to eat what you shouldn't, then it was reversed by the refusal to turn stones into bread. If the Fall was displaying an unholy reliance in God to catch you when you were doing something wrong (to stop you from eating the fruit), then it was reversed by refusing to jump from the pinnacle of the Temple. And, most generally perhaps, if the Fall was worship of the power of self and bowing down before the wrong thing, a reflection of the self in the skin of the fruit, then it was reversed by refusing to bend a knee on the top of the world before the father of lies. Each of these is greater than refusing to eat a fruit, and yet each of these IS a refusal to eat the fruit. Each of these was reversed and resisted, and each of these is still a temptation, even years after that temple pinnacle itself was razed.
If we believe Jesus actually, truly reversed the Fall with his life, culminating in his resurrected and ascended body, then we have to believe that Easter happened 2000 years ago, not necessarily that a piece of fruit entered one guy's mouth twice that long ago (or more).
It is more important to understand that a historical Jesus fixed the world than that a historical Adam broke it. And it is most important to understand that today, right now, he is here holding out his rest for us to enter. May we actually take him up on it, one of these todays.
* Not sure if this present tense is there in the Greek, but it's there in the King James translation I'm using right now, so "today" that's a present tense verb, which I think is cool!
** Curse Your Branches is a great album for exposing the insufficiency of the Sunday School treatment of the Fall but of course it stops way too soon. The day is yet young ...
First off, all make the point (explicit in the epistles, implicit in the gospels because of the setting in the wilderness) that the story of Israel is repeating itself. What happened to them was for us, Paul writes (1 Cor. 10:6), because their story is our story and their YHWH is our God. Countless sermons have been built on this assertion. But realize what an amazing assertion it is: that this story about the deliverance of a bunch of slaves in the desert over 3000 years ago is still relevant. That's because God is universal and God is the same, and our problem is the same. It's like the past is happening again.
The author of Hebrews makes this explicit in a slightly different way, by emphasizing the entrance to the promised land as the "rest" provided by God. This rest is also the rest that God entered into on the seventh day of creation (4:4) and it's the same rest referred to both by David in Psalm 95 and by Moses when looking toward the promised land. The author's point is that this is ALL the same thing, even though the Scripture references are scattered across thousands of years (and even the writing of that observation is now back two thousand years!). This rest is the salvation offered by Jesus, the gift putting things right, the rightness and peace of "shalom." Temptation attracts us away from this rest. Temptation is anti-peace, anti-wholeness, frenetic and frantic. Sound familiar?
The author of the Hebrews emphasizes that for each of these events -- the 7th day of creation, the words of David, and the wilderness wandering of Israel -- the real choice and real crux of action is Today. Again and again the author repeats the old Psalm, "Today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts" and "So I sware in my wrath, They shall not enter into my rest." The author (of Hebrews and of Psalm 95) says that "Today" is today. All these times are happening for you, for your choice and your direction and your repentance. In this sense, it is all happening now. Look at the present tense in 4:1: "A promise being left us of entering into his rest."*
This is personally convicting. When I look at myself, I don't see the rest I want to see. So many "todays" I have not entered in. I haven't been particularly peaceful lately, although with four small children I hope there's a bit more contingency grace for that. That serenity is not a cliche, it's a goal that Christ can bring me into, it's a land waiting to be entered, with patience. And the temptation is there, just as it was for those wandering in the desert, to turn another way, to another source for energy and life, whether by hoarding manna or begging for quail.
Adam and Eve faced that temptation and turned elsewhere, going so far as to hide from their maker (and their maker played along with the charade they set up that they could hide!). Jesus faced the same temptation, three times explicitly, and stronger than they ever did.
This is where a Christ-centered interpretation of Scripture becomes crystal clear, because what was the nature/event of the Fall? (David Bazan wrote a whole album about this with Curse Your Branches, though I don't agree with his conclusions!*) Was the moment of the Fall definitely the eating of a fruit, teeth ripping into a sugary something-or-other, was that the primary disobedience? If that's the case, why didn't Jesus go to a garden and refuse to eat the fruit? If the historical details of Genesis are of primary importance, then there's a sense that Jesus never fully reversed the fall.
But what if the Fall was something different, this inevitable, selfish turning away that now must be turned away/repented from? If the Fall was reaching out to eat what you shouldn't, then it was reversed by the refusal to turn stones into bread. If the Fall was displaying an unholy reliance in God to catch you when you were doing something wrong (to stop you from eating the fruit), then it was reversed by refusing to jump from the pinnacle of the Temple. And, most generally perhaps, if the Fall was worship of the power of self and bowing down before the wrong thing, a reflection of the self in the skin of the fruit, then it was reversed by refusing to bend a knee on the top of the world before the father of lies. Each of these is greater than refusing to eat a fruit, and yet each of these IS a refusal to eat the fruit. Each of these was reversed and resisted, and each of these is still a temptation, even years after that temple pinnacle itself was razed.
If we believe Jesus actually, truly reversed the Fall with his life, culminating in his resurrected and ascended body, then we have to believe that Easter happened 2000 years ago, not necessarily that a piece of fruit entered one guy's mouth twice that long ago (or more).
It is more important to understand that a historical Jesus fixed the world than that a historical Adam broke it. And it is most important to understand that today, right now, he is here holding out his rest for us to enter. May we actually take him up on it, one of these todays.
* Not sure if this present tense is there in the Greek, but it's there in the King James translation I'm using right now, so "today" that's a present tense verb, which I think is cool!
** Curse Your Branches is a great album for exposing the insufficiency of the Sunday School treatment of the Fall but of course it stops way too soon. The day is yet young ...
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