And God Said, "Where Are You?"

I recently attended a sermon in a conservative Christian church. The topic was how it was important for a believer to confess all personal secrets to God in order for prayers to be effective. This all sounded like a typical session in this church, where a member apparently is expected to spend the rest of his or her life deep in emotional anguish over every little dinky-ass thing he or she has ever done, is doing, ever will do, or even consider ever doing, and whether, if there is the remotest possibility of any impropriety going on (Christian translation: sin), this shouldn't be confessed, not just in quiet prayer to God but also to each other. Ho-hum, so what's new, anyway...

Well, here's what's new. During the message, the preacher made a reference to the Genesis story of Adam, Eve, and the Garden of Eden. It seems that humanity's first couple had been naughty and eaten the forbidden fruit of knowledge. Now they were hiding from God because... well, they were naughty and knew they were naked, to boot. The Lord happened to be walking in the Garden and called out to Adam, "Where are you?"

It was then that the preacher did something I have heard preachers do often over the years: he made presumptions about God that were not mentioned in the text. He said that, of course, God knew all along exactly what Adam and Eve had done and where they were hiding. And then he used this personal revision of the actual text to illustrate his argument for confession (which I don't quite get since God had already told Adam that eating the forbidden fruit would bring on a death sentence, so why confess and die).

The original writer of that section of text in Genesis in which God said "Where are you?", as well as the compiler of those ancient textual fragments into a cohesive narrative later known as the Book of Genesis, did not reveal God's motives behind his statement. And the statement, literally read, is self-explanatory: God is asking someone where he is. The preacher/interpreter, though, in order to ease any sense of awkwardness in this passage, which implied that God really wasn't all-knowing after all, inserted the "divine omniscience" doctrine into his interpretation during the sermon. As he performed this oratory legerdemain from the podium, I looked around at the faithful, uncritical congregation and saw person after person nodding and smugly smirking. Yeah, God knew all along where Adam and Eve were... but that's not what the text says!

Why am I belaboring this point? Because just a few passages before this in the same book of Genesis, the Biblical creation narrative is laid out. Those Christians claiming that evolution is false and that the origins of everything are literally explained in the first few verses of Genesis include the same preacher who, when it was convenient to HIM, added his own special enhanced interpretation to a nearby passage.

Hmmmph!