Biblical Critical Theory: The Enlightenment Tempts Us to Eat from The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

by John Ellis

“Therefore, no doubt, the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge.” Francis Bacon[1]

The masterful book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by anthropologist David Graeber and comparative archaeologist David Wengrow challenges the prevailing Western story about human progress. The first chapter, “Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood,” wonders, “why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly.”[2] It’s a similar pursuit to the one Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno undertook in the early 1940s while developing critical theory. Reeling from the horrors of the 20^th century, the two scholars in exile asked why the Enlightenment program failed to deliver on its utopian promise. For their part, Graeber and Wengrow, acknowledging that the pursuit is ultimately one of theology, write, “Essentially the question is: are humans innately good or innately evil?”[3]

Graeber and Wengrow begin their exploration of that question within the framework of two competing origin stories: a Rousseauian Garden of Eden story versus a Hobbesian State of Nature rooted in conflict. The two scholars draw a direct line between the Christian Creation Story in Genesis and the Rousseauian Garden of Eden. Humanity was born into a state of goodness. Conflict didn’t initially exist, and nature gave up her bounty in the service of human flourishing. In contrast, Hobbes taught that humanity was born selfish and prone to conflict. Ergo, humanity needs an absolute monarch to keep our otherwise inevitable penchant for conflict in check.

Tracing a path through advances made in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and, of course, history as related to so-called prehistory and ancient civilizations,[4] Graeber and Wengrow challenge the validity of both stories. They also helpfully undermine the shared “big story of history” idea common to both stories, arguing that history is far less linear and progressive than we’re led to believe in the West. If the arc of history appears linear and bent towards progress and justice, that’s because the “winners” in the West have shaped it to appear so.

While I diverge at important points from their argument, I do believe they provide a needed and cogent challenge to the Western worldview that centers power/control – a worldview of imperialism. I also believe that their “new history of humanity” has significant parallels with the Bible’s actual Genesis story and not the popular “Rousseauian” version they rightly reject (and the version most white evangelicals embrace).

The stories of Rousseau and Hobbes are both enemies and twins. Enemies because Rousseau’s story begins in a utopian innocence and Hobbes sees violent conflict at the genesis of humanity. Twins because they end in the same place: the need for civil authority to corral conflict and protect humanity from itself. Granted, they differed on what the best civil authority looks like as well as the evolution of conflict. As stated, Hobbes believed conflict to be at the core of human experience. For Rousseau, the development of conflict was connected to the rise of agriculture. In both genesis myths, inequality was inevitable. The Dawn of Everything subverts both by highlighting ancient cultures and city-states that fall outside the received Western wisdom of history’s trajectory and in which inequality was mostly absent and conflict rare. For Graeber and Wengrow, neither conflict nor the subsequent inequality was inevitable. While I agree with their critique of the Western worldview, I part ways with them on their rejection of the inevitability of conflict and inequality. I do believe, however, that the West willfully steers into the Curse – demonstrating some of the farthest reaches of the Curse – and, hence, the West creates more conflict and inequality than necessary. My caveat aside, Graeber and Wengrow’s argument stands in direct contradiction to Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, the authors explain, “Left us a story about the origins of social inequality that continues to be told and retold, in endless variations, to this day. It is the story of humanity’s original innocence, and unwitting departure from a state of pristine simplicity on a voyage of technological discovery that would ultimately guarantee both our ‘complexity’ and our enslavement.”[5]

For the two scholars, the Bible’s Garden of Eden narrative is a synonym for Rousseau’s state of innocent nature. They consider both a myth, pointing to archeology and history as evidence undermining them. Weaving various strands of human technological progress into their new story of history, Graeber and Wengrow point out that an innocent state of nature couldn’t have existed because nature and humanity were never completely in sync. They also argue that there’s never been a moment in history when, “everyone shared the same idyllic form of social organization.”[6]

At this point, Christians are tempted to respond reactively. If we must choose between the Bible’s story or history/science, our allegiance is clear. If history/science doesn’t submit to what the Bible says, history/science is in rebellion. Except, especially in this case, it’s usually not that simple.[7] I’m not saying I agree with everything Graeber and Wengrow assert, nor do I support all their conclusions. My argument at this point is that Christians in the West don’t understand the Garden of Eden story because they view it through the epistemological lens of modernism/Western worldview. In Western Christianity, we’re taught a Hegelian (and Rousseauian) understanding of Genesis 1-3 that centers the historical dialectic of imperialism while reading objectivist materialist questions into the text that Moses wouldn’t understand, much less intended to be answered by the text. As Horkheimer and Adorno scoff at this worldview, “The world became chaos and synthesis salvation.”[8]

“End of history” talk – the “synthesis” – ,which is common in the West, generally includes a healthy dose of utopian optimism. After the Soviet Union collapsed, it wasn’t uncommon to hear classical liberals – conservatives – breathlessly declaring that the end of history had arrived, and that Pax Americana would be ushered in. Classical liberalism had prevailed, it was believed, and the Enlightenment’s promised utopia complete with a Hegelian Geist would finally be realized.[9] A return to Eden.

The Garden of Eden: humanity’s true yet mythical birthplace. Eden was our birthplace in more ways than one. The first birth is fairly straightforward no matter the “how’s” – the material conditions – surrounding it. It’s that second birth, humanity’s birth into death, that I want to touch on because I believe it is wildly misunderstood even in white evangelicalism. What’s also wildly misunderstood is what took place – was supposed to take place – between the first and second birth. To be clear, and this is important, I’m using the birth metaphor because humanity was intended to be one thing but then became a different thing (and also because Jesus employed it). The answer to the question of whether we are innately good or evil is that we were made to be good but are now not-good. Rousseau chose good. Hobbes chose evil. Both were right and both were wrong, and both serve as a caution against hubris. For example, if it’s not treated carefully and with epistemic humility, my answer can flatten out the definition of good in ways that obscure the paradoxical nature of Adam and Eve’s God given tasks in the Garden. And that raises an important question: what does good mean?

In Genesis 1:28, we learn, “God blessed [Adam and Eve] and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Adding some more clarity, 2:14 says, “The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and care for it.”

One of the errors Graeber and Wengrow make is accepting the assumption that the Garden of Eden myth[10] requires the original occupants to possess agricultural knowledge on par with the great Bronze Age civilizations. Explaining that the couple would’ve passed off that basic knowledge to their descendants, they then argue that the historical record belies that having happened.

A mistake that many Christians unwittingly make, even if they articulate otherwise, and a mistake that unbelievers like Graeber and Wengrow make is failing to understand how fully finite Adam and Eve were. They were also tasked with working and caring for the Garden. Those two things being true, there’s no biblical reason to reject the received anthropological and archaeological wisdom that recognizes that humanity made advances in agriculture knowledge. The “pristine innocence” of the Garden of Eden is more complex and interesting than we realize. From our post-Fall/Curse, 21^st century perch, it’s also paradoxical because we view knowledge as power.

Being finite meant that Adam and Eve had to learn; they were created with the ability to know everything they needed to obey God’s commands. But they had to learn how to care for the plants and animals in ways that reflected the nature of their Creator. How to sow and reap. How to cultivate. How to build civilization. How to foster relationships throughout the entire program, but always in ways that reflected the character of God.

During his Incarnation, Jesus had to learn, too. He had to learn how to talk. How to walk. How to help Joseph in his work as a carpenter. Unlike Adam and Eve, Jesus learned and grew in an environment weighed down by the effects of the Curse. I would argue that the notion of a “pristine simplicity,” to use Graeber and Wengrow’s explanation of Rosseau, in the Garden of Eden speaks to the epistemological conditions in which Adam and Eve’s cognition developed, among other aspects of their growth. Their learning wasn’t one of control, wasn’t one of mastery. It was an epistemology of right relationships.[11] It wasn’t until after the Fall and the Curse that relational hierarchies and self-serving power dynamics were introduced and the battle for control began. After the Fall and the subsequent Curse, epistemologies changed.

I’m not capable of covering the entire scope of the evolution of the various epistemologies that have shaped societies throughout all of history. I am going to hone in on the dominant epistemology of the West. And that epistemology can be summed up with Bacon’s well-known dictum that knowledge is power. Horkheimer and Adorno made an astute observation about that dictum when they sneered, “On their way toward modern science human beings have discarded meaning.”[12] But I’m going to back up in history a bit before I explain their quote.

In 1784, the Berlin Monthly published Immanuel Kant’s essay “What Is Enlightenment.” Getting down to business with his very first sentence, Kant claimed, “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed non-age.” With his second sentence, he explains, “Non-age is the inability to use one’s own understanding without direction from another.”[13]

Kant’s thesis hearkens back to the Francis Bacon quote I included at the very top of this article: “Therefore, no doubt, the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge.”[14] Both Bacon and Kant believed that freedom, that Enlightenment, was found in epistemological autonomy. Please let that sink in.

The Enlightenment program is one of eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Horkheimer and Adorno believed that “Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world.”[15] I think we’re saying the same thing. If knowledge is power, as Bacon taught, then knowledge recognizes no master and has a focus of wrenching submission out of its subjects. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is the disenchantment of the world. It’s the belief that I am God, that I possess the power of control.

Buying (and selling) the lie that we too can be like God, Francis Bacon believed, and wrote in “In Praise of Knowledge,” that epistemological nominalism was immune to corruption. If we, as humans, discover knowledge via our own senses and/or reason, he argued, then the allure of wealth and position would hold no temptation. Furthermore, he taught that sovereign man’s knowledge would make him the master of nature. We can create paradise because we’ll be in control. This is the utopian promise of the Enlightenment: we get to construct paradise in our image.

Except that mastery via epistemological nominalism creates a divide between the subject and the object. Division is the enemy of our humanity. It’s the enemy of the Imago Dei. Setting up hierarchies of subject and object renders us largely incapable of relationships as we devolve into solipsism. Control – imperialism – doesn’t just dominate, it subsumes and erases, leaving only the master. A central component of the Curse was the division of relationships: between God and humanity, humanity and humanity, and humanity and nature. The Enlightenment’s nominalism further divides the subject from the object. Steering into the Curse, all relationships are further broken. This is one of the ironies of cultural apologists who are, essentially, apologists for Western culture. They are catechizing people into further nominalist divisions because they fail to deconstruct themselves from the Western epistemological program of imperialism.

Look, contra Graeber and Wengrow, two scholars I have the utmost respect and appreciation for, conflict is inevitable. Karl Marx realized this. Another irony is how white evangelicals unthinkingly castigate Marx (sometimes rightfully so, to be clear) even at those points where his critique of the Western worldview reflects the Bible’s story and shines a light of truth onto error. It’s beyond bizarre that white evangelicals recoil at Marx’s conflict theory and denounce it as unbiblical. Does Marx present full orbed biblical anthropologies and epistemologies? No, of course not. But his understanding of conflict contains important truth.  

Marx understood that humans are not adapted to nature. To put it in biblical terms, the Curse severed the relationship between humanity and nature. Marx explained that animals can survive nature, but humans have to manipulate and dominate nature in order to survive. The creation mandate meets the Fall and the Fall’s Curse. What’s more, in the attempt to free ourselves from natural constraints, we further entangle ourselves in social constraints – the Curse severs the relationship between humans. Our efforts to build civilization, especially Western efforts, deepen that severance.

This is what Horkheimer and Adorno meant when they wrote that “human beings have discarded meaning.” Now, obviously, they weren’t appealing to a better understanding of how an aspect of the Curse is that of relational severance. But they understood that since the time of the Greeks, Western culture, as it’s developed, has plunged us into a solipsism that shears the world, including us, of meaning. Cultural apologists love to (incorrectly) point out that Christianity opened up the possibility of science.[16] The correct reworking of that is that the unholy syncretism of Christianity with Western culture – imperialism – caused a severely compromised Church to join forces with the Enlightenment’s autonomous epistemology that divides the subject from the object.

God created us for relationship. Our meaning is found in relationships: first in our relationship with our Creator and secondly in our relationship with others – with “objects.” Think of the first and greatest commandment and the second that’s like it: Love God and love your neighbor.

Sin alters relationships in ways that divide. The autonomous epistemology of the Enlightenment is born out of the sinful desire to be like God. It’s in the very words of the revered Francis Bacon that, “the sovereignty of man lieth hid in knowledge.”

Christians in the West need to recognize that imperialism is at the center of our culture’s epistemology. That epistemological imperialism (and actual imperialism) runs pell-mell in the opposite direction from our Christ’s Kingdom. It’s rebellion against our Creator. It dominates and destroys as it builds Babylon. And it’s an epistemological imperialism that sits at the center of our worldview unless we’re willing to prayerfully do the hard work of deconstruction.

Until we do the hard work of deconstruction, we will continue to read the Enlightenment’s program of epistemological solipsism into the Bible while believing that classical liberalism is leading us to some type of a Hegelian end of history. This deceit hides behind the gilded trappings of the West’s Babylon. By our actions, if not by our words, we drag what belongs in the not yet into the already because we idolatrously believe that the Babylon in which we live is Jerusalem. John Bunyan’s allegory paints the picture vividly in the chapter about Vanity Fair.

The horrors of our age are not accidental to the Enlightenment program. The unholy syncretism of the Church and the Western worldview makes us complicit in those horrors. The through-line-of-action of progress that we’ve attached ourselves to works at odds with our call to make disciples of King Jesus.[17]

White evangelicals love to claim that we have a biblical worldview. But until we refuse the Enlightenment’s temptation to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, our worldview will never be biblical. We will continue to read imperialism back into Adam and Eve’s pre-Fall epistemology in ways that allow us to draw lines of progress that justify our society’s excesses and oppression. We will also fail to adequately come to terms with how fundamentally the Curse affects us. Instead of looking to the Second Adam as our model of sacrificial selflessness that eschews rights, we will continue to embrace a nominalism that divides the subject and the object and that terminates in solipsism. Our kingdom will continue to be of this world.

Soli Deo Gloria

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[1] Francis Bacon, “In Praise of Knowledge” Francis Bacon ed. Arthur Johnston (New York: Schocken Books, 1965), 15.

[2] David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 1.

[3] Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 1.

[4] This includes Mesoamerica cultures and North American cultures pre-1492.

[5] Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 27.

[6] Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 8.

[7] This is why deconstruction is needed in Western Christianity. Many white evangelicals unthinkingly reject anything that challenges their worldview. But truth is truth, and when something, let’s say CRT, exposes the sins and errors in our worldview, we should be thankful instead of the normal reactive response of angry defensiveness.

[8] Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1987), 3.

[9] 9/11 ripped their self-imposed and self-serving blinders off.

[10] Just because I use the word “myth” doesn’t mean I don’t believe it to be true.

[11] I encourage you to read Esther Lightcap Meek to get a better understanding of this epistemology.

[12] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 3.

[13] You can read the essay and check to see if I cited Kant correctly by clicking here. I don’t remember how to correctly cite online sources. I ain’t getting graded for this.

[14] Bacon, “In Praise of Knowledge,” 15.

[15] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1.

[16] There have been many cultures throughout history that were running ahead of the “Christian” Europeans in scientific advancements – like way ahead.

[17] This is demonstrated in our seemingly never-ending search for the right words – for the best, contextualized way to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. Instead of simply introducing them to Jesus, an epistemology of relationship, we strive to colonize their minds. We treat them as objects to be mastered. Apologetics is among the worst offenders of this.