According to the Anglican Church of Canada:
The first crisis of human stewardship came with our first ancestors’ decision to test the sovereignty of God by consuming the only fruit in the garden reserved exclusively to the Creator. Rejecting stewardship and embracing the illusory promise of sovereign possession of the garden, they initiate a continuing pattern of exploitation, entitlement, violence and destruction that plagues human participation in the life of the earth. There is only one essential stewardship question: Will we make use of resources entrusted to us to serve God’s mission, or for purposes that we ourselves devise or that are thrust upon us by an economy that depends absolutely on growing consumption to sustain it?
The ACoC must be really desperate for money if it has resorted to a more literal interpretation of Adam and the apple than the most fervent fundamentalist.
The usual interpretation of the unhappy events in the Garden of Eden is that Adam rebelled against God by disobeying the one thing God asked him not to do: eat the apple from the tree of life. Adam ate because he wanted to become like God and when he did, sin entered the universe, polluting it and us until the end of time.
Not so for the Anglican Church of Canada: for them it’s all about the apple. It’s God’s apple, you see – he really likes apples – and we pinched it from him: thus began the evil of capitalism.
All this reminds me of what my dog must be thinking when he licks yellow snow and I pull him away: “master wants to lick it himself”.
