“At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Adam and Eve put themselves in the place of God by asserting that they do not participate in God’s moral knowledge, but are instead the source of that knowledge.

The man and woman in the Garden of Eden represent us. Indeed, they are us. They are proxies for the whole of humanity, illustrating not just a particular moment in a particular narrative but the entirety of human existence. The dialogue between the serpent and Eve is the paradigm of the universal occurrence of our own inner conversations when we ar

This communicative aspect of the image of God is reflected by the community of humans in the Garden of Eden. Prior to the fall, the man and woman exist in harmonious union with one another, and ordered toward God as both their origin and end. They come from God and are ordered toward God, and thus necessarily properly ordered toward one another in

it. Rather, we know it because it is true. And it is true only because it is part of the very intelligence that is the mind of God. We might assert that we are the sources of mathematical truth, and we hereby declare that twice two equals five. But, of course, every time we take two marbles and add them to two other marbles, we will have four marbl

To put it simply, we are not the sources of intelligence, knowledge, meaning, and truth. To the extent we “possess” any of these faculties, it is only by our sharing in the mind of God. For example, we “possess” the knowledge that twice two equals four. But “twice two equals four” is not true because we “know” it, or because we have simply decreed

This poetic ordering tells us that we are not reading a scientific account of creation. Our author is not interested in telling us how or when the universe came into being. Rather, both by the literary form and the orderly content of the prose-poem, the author is making the claim that the universe is orderly. Some things are ordered toward and by o

If we Christians were to live our civic lives as though politics mattered less, we might find that — well, politics matters less. And we would thus be more likely to resist the siren call of the kind of partisan zealotry that defeats civic friendship.

This is especially important when we consider partisan identity. It is a mistake to justify one’s partisan identification by theological argument, but we go even further when we attempt partisan justification of our theological commitments. This collapses the latter into the former and verges (at best) on idolatry. For example, when “conservative”