Danielle Shroyer > Quotes

“But we remember that God creates all the world good, which includes both the safe protection of the garden and the expansive complexity of the fertile land. Indeed, God fashions the man from the fertile land itself, and only afterward places him in the safe confines of the garden. After they eat the fruit, God sends the man and the woman back into the fertile land, to find their way and farm the soil, and, eventually, to discover God’s goodness even among the thistles and thorns.”
― Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place

“you may be surprised to learn the church flourished for four centuries without any concept of original sin at all.”
― Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place

“If we are looking for a biblical view of sin, the best place to start is in Genesis 4, not Genesis 3. Genesis 4:7 marks the first time the word “sin” is used in scripture.”
― Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place

“Jesus is Lord” is our most central confession. “I am born with a sin nature” is not.”
― Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place

“One of the biggest mistakes we make when reading scripture is that we come to the text demanding something of it. Don’t misunderstand me: scripture has so much to give us, more than we can imagine. But scripture cannot be anything other than what it is. I don’t believe the function of scripture is to make us feel better, or to give us an answer, or to tell us what to do. It can do these things, and very often does; but the function of scripture is revelation, certainly of God but also of what we may need to confront, realize, accept, or see differently. When we come to scripture, we do so knowing it will likely demand something of us. Scripture is a sacred book meant to provoke us in ways that will move us toward God.”
― Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place

“If we imagine creation to be something as simplistic as a utopian happy-go-lucky place where nothing ever will go wrong, we disparage the beauty and harmony illustrated in the Genesis stories. God’s goodness is not that shallow and neither is God’s creation. I wonder if there is not something immature about our desire for the garden to be perfect. Perfection is, in a sense, very naïve. It’s almost as naïve and problematic as believing that one action in Genesis 3 is supposed to upend God’s entire created order. These assumptions seem to reject the very sovereignty of God the book of Genesis is trying to show us. In contrast to the other Mesopotamian gods, the God of the Israelites is loving and good and intentional. All of creation finds its meaning within its relation to God.”
― Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place

“Consider the possibility that while Genesis 3 is a great text to spark questions, it isn’t trying to answer a good number of those questions. It is not trying to determine how sin entered the world, or where death came from, or why people sin. Genesis 3 is not a laboratory experiment where we get conclusive results about some shocking alteration to our human DNA. If we have sane and simple expectations for the story, we will be much more equipped to read what it says, rather than what we think it means.”
― Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place

“When we are in the trenches of pain, we cannot always say that God fixes it. But we can say God is with us.”
― Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place

“Jesus himself does not speak of his death this way. Jesus doesn’t say that God is angry, or that he is paying the price for our sin. When he predicts his death to his disciples, he tells them he must undergo suffering and be betrayed at the hands of humans. He doesn’t speak of the cross as something to be settled between him and God, but something to be endured between him and humanity. Jesus experiences God-forsakenness not because of God but for us, so that no part of our human experience, even the most death-determined parts, would remain untouched by his resurrected life. Jesus entered into our suffering and death not to pay a price but to make a way. And that way leads us to whole, redeemed, abundant life.”
― Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place

“It’s worth noting, because the text just said the reason there was not yet a garden was because there was no rain and no farmer. But God does not make the human plant the garden. God benevolently begins the work, and places the human in the garden to maintain it.”
― Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place

“But God will walk among us not in the confines of the garden, but in the great expanse of the city. Even God doesn’t stay in Eden forever.”
― Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place

“I would also encourage you to see the text literarily. (Did your brain fill in a different word you were expecting?!) By literarily, I mean that you accept the text as what it is, which is a piece of literature. It is holy, inspired literature, but it is literature nonetheless. Genesis 3 is not journalistic live reporting. It is a story passed down through storytelling from one generation to the next, until at last we had the means of writing the story down to preserve for future generations. It has an audience, and a narrator, and primary characters. Because it’s good literature, it has a crisis, and a climax, and a resolution, too. Rather than asking the text to be the first, sole, or primary spiritual, philosophical, psychological, and sociological statement about humanity, we could choose instead to accept it as what it is: a story from scripture, meant to provoke us in ways that will move us toward God. It can far and away exceed that particular expectation.”
― Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place

“Hebrew, there’s a little play on words between the human (“adam”) and the earth (“adamah”). Thanks to God’s breath of life, the human of dust becomes a living being, literally an earthling.”
― Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place

“God is decidedly not a helicopter parent. God places the tree and the snake in the garden because they are necessary. If we are to live into the image of God, we cannot remain infants, or children, or even teenagers. We must become disciples, who fashion our lives of faith by making choices, day after day after day.”
― Danielle Shroyer, Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place