Category Archives: Faith and Doubt

Saving Jesus (Episode 4): Render Unto Caesar

This week’s episode of the Saving Jesus DVD series at my church featured John Dominic Crossan describing Christianity’s countercultural challenge to the political theology of the Roman Empire. It was a real eye-opener for me and the other students to discover that the kingly titles given to Jesus in the creed and liturgy — God from God, Prince of Peace, Savior and Redeemer of the World — were originally applied to Caesar Augustus. Those titles may scare us now because they sound so hierarchical, but as the early Christians heard them, they were the ultimate rebuke to human tyranny and the propaganda that supports it. Because we don’t recognize the radical critique of human power contained in the words “the kingdom of God,” we’re always tempted to read this language as a divine rubber-stamp for our imperialist projects.

One of the class members, who’s widely read in church history, noted that the processions that open and close the worship service in liturgical churches (Catholic and Episcopal) are modeled on the Roman triumphal processions, but with the imperial values reversed. In the Roman scheme, a procession celebrating a military victory would have the emperor at the head, the captured slaves at the rear, and everyone else between them in descending order of importance. In a church procession, the cross is carried at the head, and the priest comes last, because he is the servant of all.  

Crossan concluded with the question: What would the world look like if we acted as if God were in charge, rather than the Roman Empire or its modern equivalent? The kingdom of God is not reserved for a future place and time. It’s a new perspective that’s available to us right now.

Or, as Anglican theologian N.T. Wright put it in his article “Paul’s Gospel and Caesar’s Empire”, St. Paul’s missionary work


must be conceived not simply in terms of a traveling evangelist offering people a new religious experience, but of an ambassador for a king-in-waiting, establishing cells of people loyal to this new king, and ordering their lives according to his story, his symbols, and his praxis, and their minds according to his truth. This could only be construed as deeply counter-imperial, as subversive to the whole edifice of the Roman Empire; and there is in fact plenty of evidence that Paul intended it to be so construed, and that when he ended up in prison as a result of his work he took it as a sign that he had been doing his job properly.
I’m going to give away how it ends, but you should still read the whole thing: 


If Paul’s answer to Caesar’s empire is the empire of Jesus, what does that say about this new empire, living under the rule of its new lord? It implies a high and strong ecclesiology, in which the scattered and often muddled cells of women, men and children loyal to Jesus as Lord form colonial outposts of the empire that is to be: subversive little groups when seen from Caesar’s point of view, but when seen Jewishly an advance foretaste of the time when the earth shall be filled with the glory of the God of Abraham and the nations will join Israel in singing God’s praises. From this point of view, therefore, this counter-empire can never be merely critical, never merely subversive. It claims to be the reality of which Caesar’s empire is the parody; it claims to be modelling the genuine humanness, not least the justice and peace, and the unity across traditional racial and cultural barriers, of which Caesar’s empire boasted. If this claim is not to collapse once more into dualism, into a rejection of every human aspiration and value, it will be apparent that there will be a large degree of overlap. “Shun what is evil; cling to what is good.” There will be affirmation as well as critique, collaboration as well as critique. To collaborate without compromise, to criticise without dualism—this is the delicate path that Jesus’ counter-empire had to learn to tread.
Wright’s analysis feels to me like more of a complete breakfast than the “Saving Jesus” perspective, which stops at the critique of state power without recognizing its tragic necessity. “Civilization has always been imperial,” Crossan asserted. But as one of the participants in our class asked, what’s the alternative? We don’t want chaos, either.

Although I don’t agree with his defense of the current war in Iraq, this article in First Things by Wilfred McClay, about the intellectual legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr, eloquently captures our Incarnational faith’s paradoxical relationship to the princes of this world:


In his youth, Niebuhr was a devotee of the Social Gospel, the movement within liberal Protestantism that located the gospel’s meaning in its promise as a blueprint for progressive social reform, rather than in its assertions about the nature of supernatural reality. Social Gospelers were modernists who had largely dismissed the authority of the Bible and the historical creeds. But they insisted that the heart of the Christian gospel could still be preserved by being “socialized,” i.e., translated into the language of scientific social reform. As Walter Rauschenbusch, perhaps the leading figure in the Social Gospel movement, once put it, “We have the possibility of so directing religious energy by scientific knowledge that a comprehensive and continuous reconstruction of social life in the name of God is within the bounds of human possibility.” The Kingdom of God was not reserved for the beyond, but could be created in the here and now by social scientists and ministers working hand in hand.

Niebuhr soon grew impatient with this kind of talk. He found the progressive optimism undergirding the Social Gospel to be utterly naive about the intractability of human nature, and therefore inadequate to the task of explaining the nature of power relations in the real world. Sin, he concluded, was not merely a byproduct of bad but correctible social institutions. It was something much deeper than that, something inherent in the human condition, something social institutions were powerless to reform. In what was perhaps his single most important book, Moral Man and Immoral Society, published in 1932 in the depths of the Depression, Niebuhr turned the Social Gospelers’ emphasis on its head, arguing that there was an inescapable disjuncture between the morality governing the lives of individuals and the morality of groups, and that the latter was generally inferior to the former. Individuals could transcend their self-interest only rarely, but groups of individuals, especially groups such as nation-states, never could. In short, groups generally made individuals morally worse, rather than better, for the work of collectives was inevitably governed by a brutal logic of self-interest.


Niebuhr dismissed as mere “sentimentality” the progressive hope that the wages of individual sin could be overcome through intelligent social reform, and that America could be transformed in time into a loving fellowship of like-minded comrades, holding hands around the national campfire. Instead, the pursuit of good ends in the arena of national and international politics had to take full and realistic account of the unloveliness of human nature, and the unlovely nature of power. Christians who claimed to want to do good in those arenas had to be willing to get their hands soiled, for existing social relations were held together by coercion, and only counter-coercion could change them. All else was pretense and pipedreams.


This sweeping rejection of the Social Gospel and reaffirmation of the doctrine of original sin did not, however, mean that Niebuhr gave up on the possibility of social reform. On the contrary. Christians were obliged to work actively for progressive social causes and for the realization of Christian social ideals of justice and righteousness. But in doing so they had to abandon their illusions, not least in the way they thought about themselves. The pursuit of social righteousness would, he believed, inexorably involve them in acts of sin and imperfection. Not because the end justifies the means, but because that was simply the way of the world. Even the most surgical action creates collateral damage. But the Christian faith just as inexorably called its adherents to a life of perfect righteousness, a calling that gives no ultimate moral quarter to dirty hands. The result would seem to be a stark contradiction, a call to do the impossible.


But Niebuhr insisted that the Christian life nevertheless requires us to embrace both parts of that formulation. Notwithstanding the more flattering preferences of liberal theologians, the doctrine of original sin was profoundly and essentially true, and its probative value was confirmed empirically every day. Man is a sinner in his deepest nature. But man was not merely a sinner, but also a splendidly endowed creature formed in God’s image, still capable of acts of wisdom, generosity, and truth, and still able to advance the cause of social improvement. All these assertions were true. All have an equivalent claim on the Christian mind and heart. In insisting upon such a complex formulation, Niebuhr was correcting the Social Gospel’s erroneous attempt to collapse or resolve the tension at the heart of the Christian vision of things.


Toward the end of our class, my minister — otherwise a complete devotee of the Social Gospel’s message of self-salvation — came out with something orthodox and profound. When we try to rely on ourselves alone, he said, we become insecure and violent, fighting to protect the territory on which our livelihood depends. What if, instead, we back away and trust God instead of whatever social system protects our property, and recognize that all the world’s riches belong to God? We have to depend on a different kind of strength — not ourselves or our empire, but God — so we can feel safe enough to go to the back of the line.

Jewish World Review: “Free Will and Its Deniers”

Jerusalem Post columnist Jonathan Rosenblum’s intriguing recent post at Jewish World Review revisits the age-old debate over free will versus determinism, and how it makes a difference to our understanding of morality. Among other good points, the article helped me reconcile the Old Testament’s emphasis on moral choices with other passages where God appears to predetermine the outcome by hardening people’s hearts to do evil:


In his Discourse on Free Will, Rabbi Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler describes how the area of free will differs for each and every person, based on education and other factors, and how it shifts constantly. It is only possible to speak of the exercise of free will, he writes, at that point where a person’s apprehension of the truth, i.e., what is right, is in perfect equipoise with a countervailing desire. Precisely at that point, nothing besides the person himself determines the outcome.

Rabbi Dessler employs the spatial metaphor of a battlefield to capture the process. The point at which the battle is joined is the point of free will. Behind the battle line is captured territory — the area where a person feels no temptation to do other than what he perceives as right. And behind the enemy lines are all those areas in which a person does not yet have the ability to choose.

The battlefront moves constantly. With every victory — every choice to do what is right — a person advances. And he retreats with every defeat. Pharaoh provides the paradigm of the latter. By repeatedly hardening his heart, he finally lost the capacity to exercise his free will.

In a contemporary context, Rabbi Dessler remarked that those who deny the possibility of free will do so because by failing to develop their own will power through the positive exercise of their free will they have lost their freedom.


G.K. Chesterton on Why Religious Ideas Matter

From the first chapter of Heretics:


Nothing more strangely indicates an enormous and silent evil of modern society than the extraordinary use which is made nowadays of the word “orthodox.” In former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was the kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who were heretics. He was orthodox. He had no pride in having rebelled against them; they had rebelled against him. The armies with their cruel security, the kings with their cold faces, the decorous processes of State, the reasonable processes of law–all these like sheep had gone astray. The man was proud of being orthodox, was proud of being right. If he stood alone in a howling wilderness he was more than a man; he was a church. He was the centre of the universe; it was round him that the stars swung. All the tortures torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical. But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He says, with a conscious laugh, “I suppose I am very heretical,” and looks round for applause. The word “heresy” not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word “orthodoxy” not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. The Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy. The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox.

It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. General theories are everywhere contemned; the doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint. We will have no generalizations….


This was certainly not the idea of those who introduced our freedom. When the old Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies, their idea was that religious and philosophical discoveries might thus be made. Their view was that cosmic truth was so important that every one ought to bear independent testimony. The modern idea is that cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot matter what any one says. The former freed inquiry as men loose a noble hound; the latter frees inquiry as men fling back into the sea a fish unfit for eating. Never has there been so little discussion about the nature of men as now, when, for the first time, any one can discuss it. The old restriction meant that only the orthodox were allowed to discuss religion. Modern liberty means that nobody is allowed to discuss it. Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions, has succeeded in silencing us where all the rest have failed. Sixty years ago it was bad taste to be an avowed atheist. Then came the Bradlaughites, the last religious men, the last men who cared about God; but they could not alter it. It is still bad taste to be an avowed atheist. But their agony has achieved just this– that now it is equally bad taste to be an avowed Christian. Emancipation has only locked the saint in the same tower of silence as the heresiarch. Then we talk about Lord Anglesey and the weather, and call it the complete liberty of all the creeds.

Some More Words I Shouldn’t Say

Touchstone Magazine’s blog is hosting a lively debate in its comments box on whether Christians should use dirty words. (My previous post on this topic is here.) I particularly liked Tony Esolen’s observation that “Coarseness or vulgarity is, in itself, not sinful, and in fact we can commit the sin of pride by pretending that we are too high and mighty to hear certain words; and we can commit the sin of uncharity by using certain words among those who would find them scandalous. The drill sergeant had damned well not speak like a lady; and the man addressing the PTA had damned well not speak like a drill sergeant.” Alas, I’ve been known to do both.


When I was in junior high school, I prided myself on never using profanity. Of course, I also prided myself on eating only preservative-free food, not wearing makeup, and not knowing the names of any rock bands except the Beatles. Boy, did I have a rod up my…donkey.

Same-Sex Love and the Bible

Kim Fabricius has a rigorous and (to me) reassuring post up at the Faith and Theology blog, “Twelve Propositions on Same-Sex Relationships and the Church”. Highlights:


I take it that homosexuality – and certainly the homosexuality I am talking about – is a given, not a chosen (a “life-style choice”); a disposition recognised, not adopted; a condition as “normal” as left-handedness – or heterosexuality (whether by nature or nurture is a moot but morally irrelevant point). I also assume an understanding of human sexuality that is not over-genitalised, where friendship, intimacy, and joy are as important as libido, and where sexual acts themselves are symbolic as well as somatic….Fundamentally, homosexuality is about who you are, not what you do, let alone what you get up to in bed. This is a descriptive point. There is also a normative point: I am talking about relationships that are responsible, loving, and faithful, not promiscuous, exploitative, or episodic….

[W]e must certainly examine specific texts – and then (I submit) accept that they are universally condemnatory of homosexual practice. Arguments from silence – “Look at the relationship between David and Jonathan,” or, “Observe that Jesus did not condemn the centurion’s relationship with his servant” – are a sign of exegetical desperation. No, the Bible’s blanket Nein must simply be acknowledged. But Nein to what? For here is a fundamental hermeneutical axiom: “If Biblical texts on any social or moral topic are to be understood as God’s word for us today, two conditions at least must be satisfied. There must be a resemblance between the ancient and modern social situation or institution or practice or attitude sufficient for us to be able to say that in some sense the text is talking about the same thing that we recognise today. And we must be able to demonstrate an underlying principle at work in the text which is consonant with biblical faith taken as a whole, and not contradicted by any subsequent experience or understanding” (Walter Houston)….

The first condition is not satisfied. The Bible knows nothing about homosexual orientation, or about homosexual relationships as defined [above]. In the Old Testament, the stories about Lot and his daughter (Genesis 19) and the Levite and his concubine (Judges 19) are about gang-bangs, while the prohibitions against homosexuality in the Holiness Code (Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13) are about (a) cultic cleanliness and (b) male dominance (i.e. a man should not treat another man like a woman). While purity concerns are not entirely anachronistic, Brueggemann is surely right to say that if push comes to shove, justice trumps purity….

It is at least noteworthy that Paul deploys the language of dishonour and shame, rather than sin, to describe male-male relationships, which, in any case, are but a specific instance of the universal distortion of desire that enters the world as a result of the primal sin of idolatry….There is also the question of the rhetorical function of Romans 1:18ff. – or rather Romans 1:18-2:5. As James Alison observes (rightly ignoring conventional chapter and verse denotation), Paul’s argument works by condemning Gentile sexual practices – why? – so as to set his Jewish-Christian “hearers up for a fall, and then delivering the coup de grace” (Romans 2:1), such that “the one use to which his reference could not be put, without doing serious violence to the text, is a use which legitimates any sort of judging” such behaviour.

More to the point, again, is the question of the nature of the homosexual relationships being condemned. Are they the kind of relationships defined in Proposition 2? Is, therefore, the first condition of the hermeneutical axiom stated in Proposition 3 satisfied? The answer is No to both questions. The Hellenistic homosexual relationships that Paul condemns, if not forms of cultic prostitution, would normally have been both asymmetrical in terms of age, status, and power (the “approved” form was pederasty) and therefore open to exploitation, as well as inherently transitory. And as Rowan Williams reflects on Romans 1: “Is it not a fair question to ask whether conscious rebellion and indiscriminate rapacity could be presented as a plausible account of the essence of ‘homosexual behaviour’, let alone homosexual desire, as it may be observed around us now,” let alone in the church?

Summing up the Old and New Testament texts as they contribute to the contemporary discussion on homosexuality, the late Gareth Moore says: “In so far as we can understand them, they are not all concerned with the same things, they do not all condemn the same things, and they do not all condemn what they do for the same reasons. Most importantly, they do not all condemn same-sex activity, some of them do not condemn same-sex activity, and none of them clearly condemns homosexual relationships or activity of a kind which is pertinent to the modern Christian debate.”

One thing I particularly liked about this post was that it finds Scriptural support for allowing empirical discoveries in science, psychology and history to change our interpretation of the Bible.

Saving Jesus (Episode 3): Book ‘Em, Danno

Last night’s Saving Jesus DVD was titled “What can we know about Jesus and how?” but the real topic was the unreliability of the Bible. I found myself in the peculiar position of defending the authority of Scripture, just hours after a conversation with a local evangelical pastor where I took the role of theological liberal. If my theology were put on a T-shirt, it would say “BUT…” Whence my compulsion to provide the missing vitamin in every discussion? I may have to give up disagreeing with people for Lent.

Anyhow, so Marcus Borg (yes, I’m going to hell for that — correct link here) opens the presentation by saying that the Bible doesn’t tell us how God sees things, only how the early Christians saw things. When we read the Bible, we should not ask “Why is God saying to me through this story?” but “Why did the writers of the Bible tell this story this way?”

(pause here for the sound of me spluttering incoherently, channeling the spirit of Frank Costanza — “Serenity now, dammit!”)

Number one: How the @#$%! does Borg know that the Bible does not express God’s message to humanity? God is God — who am I to say He couldn’t work this way if He wanted to? And since millions of people claim to have received His guidance through reading the Bible, it would be unreasonable and presumptuous for a Christian theologian, of all people, not to give some credence to their own interpretation of their experience.

Number two: If the Bible is purely a historical document, and the Holy Spirit is not at work in it, why should we bother with it? This class constantly puts the canonical and non-canonical “gospels” on an equal footing, and scoffs at the whole idea of orthodoxy versus heresy, because either these theologians don’t honestly believe there is any reasonable way to evaluate the merits of different doctrines, or they’re more afraid of sectarian strife than they are of falsehood. But if we’re not allowed to debate which version of the gospel best explains our shared reality, why should I care about anyone’s experience of Jesus except my own? 

Number three: The above question not only makes it pointless to read the Bible, but also makes it pointless to share our personal experiences of God here and now.


The deeper problem with this series, and the school of liberal theology it represents, is its hidden assumptions about what constitutes true knowledge — assumptions that postmodernism blew out of the water a long time ago.

Take this (unattributed) quote from the handout: “The literary genre of ‘gospel’ is anything but objective biography. The best that can be expected from these sources is a subjective representation of Jesus aimed at a particular community of believers. Gospels are not divine dictation of what happened or even ‘history’ as we understand it today.” Elsewhere on the DVD, pastor Bill Nelson asserts that the gospels are “not biography but propaganda.”

Right here we have a post-Enlightenment, scientistic (as opposed to scientific) assumption that knowledge is only reliable to the extent that it is divorced from personal commitment and emotion. The false ideal of “objective biography” implies that the person who views Jesus as a detached object of study will understand him better than someone who has staked her life on knowing and doing Jesus’ will.


Contrast this with the insights of Fr. Luigi Giussani in The Religious Sense. Here, the founder of the Catholic renewal movement Communion & Liberation considers how we can avoid bias and wishful thinking, without denying our personal stake in the quest for spiritual knowledge:



The more something interests an individual, that is to say, the more value it has (worth for a person’s life), the more vital it is (that is, interests life), the more powerfully will it generate a state of soul, a reaction of antipathy or sympathy — “feeling” — and the more forcefully will reasoning, in the act of knowing that value in relation to our lives, be conditioned by this feeling.  Thus our rationalistic culture can say: “It is clear that objective certainty cannot be reached when dealing with these types of phenomena because the factor of feeling plays too large a role. All questions concerning destiny, love, social, and political life and its ideals are a matter of opinion because one’s personal position in its mechanical aspect as a state of soul and feeling plays too large a role…. (p.26)

It may seem correct from a purely abstract point of view that man, when he judges something, should be absolutely neutral or altogether indifferent toward the object he judges. However, this cannot work well when vital values are involved. It is truly a mystification — not a utopia — to imagine that a judgment (the attempt to reach the truth of the object) made when one’s state of soul is perfectly untouched and completely indifferent is more worthy and valid. First of all, making such “indifferent” judgments is, above all, impossible, due to the very structure of human dynamism. The impact of feeling does not diminish, but increases where the object becomes more filled with meaning. Besides, judging a proposal regarding the meaning of our lives with absolute indifference would be like treating the problem as one would treat a rock…. (pp.28-29)

It seems evident to me…that the heart of the problem of human knowledge does not lie in a particular intellectual capacity….The center of the problem is really a proper position of the heart, a correct attitude, a feeling in its place, a morality….

[I]n order to give an object my attention, I must make some sort of judgment about it, I must take it into consideration and, to do so, I insist, I must possess a certain interest in it. What does this interest mean? It means I must have a desire to know what the object truly is….

Applying this to the field of knowledge, this is the moral rule: Love the truth of an object more than your attachment to the opinions you have already formed about it. More concisely, one could say, “love the truth more than yourself.” (pp.30-31)


This submission to the object of knowledge (Jesus or the Bible) seems alien to the hyper-individualism of “Saving Jesus”. Perhaps that’s why the program’s leadership is so wedded to a hermeneutic of suspicion. When discussing a discrepancy in the Bible, such as the fact that only one gospel contains the story of Peter receiving the keys of the church, my minister immediately looks for an ulterior motive: this must have been added later to bolster Peter’s claim of authority during a power struggle in the particular community for whom Matthew’s gospel was written. Similarly, last week he dismissed original sin as the product of St. Augustine’s guilt about his own sexuality, and the week before that, the divinity of Christ as the result of the Roman Empire co-opting the church. It’s inconceivable to him that the content of the doctrines or stories had anything to do with their acceptance into the canon, because that would mean we had to consider their truth-claims.

It breaks my heart to see my fellow parishioners being led around in circles, wasting their energy on endless intellectual debates, and whipped up into paranoia about the Bible and the church. Learning begins with an act of trust. I don’t understand how to read most of the Bible, but some of the parts I do understand saved my life, and so I’m going to keep at it. There’s no way I can do that unless I listen to others who have read it before me. I’m a firm believer in the “Anglican synthesis” of scripture, tradition, reason and experience. It seems to me that my church has cut the first two legs off the stool, while some of the more conservative churches have cut off the other two (or at least made them a lot shorter and more wobbly). To paraphrase Martin Luther, Here I sit — I can do no other!

Saving Jesus (Episode 2): You’re an Original, Baby

Last Wednesday’s installment of Saving Jesus at my church took aim at original sin, but it quickly became obvious to me that neither my minister nor the theologians featured on the DVD had any idea what the doctrine meant. Wikipedia, that source of all that is good and true, has a reasonably good overview here. Highlights:


The Augustinian tradition makes a clear distinction between sin which is the result of freely and consciously chosen actions, and the impersonal nature of original sin; namely the unchosen context and situations into which the child is born and which surrounds the baby, and into which the child might be educated and formed. Effectively, the Augustinian teaching says that even though the baby has not made any conscious choice, it is nevertheless personally affected by—and subject to—sin, and that God’s grace is essential to give hope and salvation. The Augustinian view is seen by some scholars as a negative view of human nature, since Augustine of Hippo believed that the human race, without God’s help, is depraved.

Original sin, from the Augustinian perspective, is not a free and individual choice by a baby; but rather the effect of the sum total of “world sin”, taught analogously through the story of the sin of Adam and Eve. The Augustinian doctrine of original sin teaches that every individual is born into a broken world where sin is already active; that they are inevitably influenced personally by the actions of others and the consequences of choices made by others. The Augustinian effectively believes that human nature—and hence every individual person—is flawed. The Augustinian remedy for original sin is baptism; the ritual washing away of the unchosen but inevitable condition of birth sin; and a vigorous declaration by Christians that sin shall not prevail, but that God’s grace can overpower it with our free cooperation….


The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that in “yielding to the tempter, Adam and Eve committed a personal sin, but this sin affected the human nature that they would then transmit in a fallen state … original sin is called “sin” only in an analogical sense: it is a sin “contracted” and not “committed”—a state and not an act” (404). This “state of deprivation of the original holiness and justice … transmitted to the descendants of Adam along with human nature” (Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 76) involves no personal responsibility or personal guilt on their part (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 405). Personal responsibility and guilt were Adam’s, who because of his sin, was unable to pass on to his descendants a human nature with the holiness with which it would otherwise have been endowed, in this way implicating them in his sin.


Though Adam’s sinful act is not the responsibility of his descendants, the state of human nature that has resulted from that sinful act has consequences that plague them.

It seems to me that of all the Christian doctrines, this one would be the easiest to believe. No one who takes an honest look at themselves, let alone the world, can deny that there is always a gap between our moral ideals and what we actually do. All the willpower and wisdom of our ancestors has failed to produce utopia. In fact, the grander our schemes to eradicate human evil, the more likely we are to descend into tyranny and totalitarianism, viewing others as mere obstacles to our plans to cleanse the species.

What a bummer.

So I understand the appeal of Matthew Fox’s alternative, “original blessing,” which was the focus of this week’s DVD presentation. Fox is a joyful mystic who reminds us that God’s original design for the world was good, and that we can still encounter Him in every aspect of creation. Classical theologians have often exercised far more imagination in painting the torments of sin and hell than in depicting the beauty and holiness of God. Fox invites us to see the “cosmic Christ” in all living beings (something like the “Buddha nature”). When we chop down a forest or drive a species to extinction, we are killing Christ, he says.

Anything that motivates Christians to care about the environment is fine with me; the post-Enlightenment West has been captured too long by a mechanical, exploitative view of nonhuman creatures. But…nature is more than just the waving trees and soaring seagulls on the DVD. When a lion eats a zebra, is he killing Christ? The Creation also fell when humanity sinned. Pain, suffering, death, the scarcity of resources that means we all live at another’s expense — these are original sin as applied to nature. The Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer’s famous engraving of Adam and Eve shows the moment before the fatal bite into the apple: Adam’s foot is on the tail of a mouse, while a cat watches stealthily, as if to signify that predation is about to enter the world.

Christianity exists to answer the life-or-death question: what do we do when we come up against the limits of our own goodness, individually and as a species? What if Atlas CAN’T hold up the world — because he’s part of it?


I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.

Therefore, there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus the law of the Spirit of life set me free from the law of sin and death. For what the law was powerless to do in that it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful man to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in sinful man, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit. (Romans 7:15-8:4, NIV)

I cited this passage in the discussion period of “Saving Jesus” last week, after my minister said there was no Biblical support for original sin, and he said, “Well, I’m glad that works for you, but the doctrine that you find appealing may be a turn-off to somebody else.” (He also said “heresies are neither right nor wrong, they’re just different expressions of how people experience Jesus”.)

And that’s the heart of our disagreement. For the “Saving Jesus” crowd, religion is about producing spiritual experiences. For me, it’s about understanding and coping with reality. Heresies are heretical because they don’t work. They fail to explain important aspects of human nature, or lead us further from ethical behavior, or produce cramped and judgmental souls instead of strong and joyful ones, or just make no logical sense. “One true faith” is no more imperialist than “one true science”. I would like to see Christianity become more like science in this sense: to once again understand itself as a truth-seeking enterprise, premised on a single shared reality, yet recognizing that its descriptions of that reality are evolving approximations, and displaying a democratic and humble openness to consider new information from every source. Now that would be original.

What Makes Me Important

For several years after I became a Christian, I worried a lot about my mission in life. I felt it was no longer enough to use my abilities in the way that made me happy. God had rescued me from some very dark times in my life, so I felt obligated to respond — perhaps not to “deserve” it, which would be impossible, but to show that I was grateful and to try to act like someone worth saving. This is a surefire recipe for writer’s block if one focuses on making the outcome worthwhile, as opposed to seeking God in the process, as I’m just now beginning to do.

Anyway, I used to be anxious that if God did have a secret destiny planned for me, it would either be something really unpleasant involving Third World standards of hygiene, or something that made my individuality completely irrelevant. What if all this writing, thinking, relating, etc. were beside the point, and my sole reason for being here was to drop the banana peel that the Antichrist slipped on?

Well, maybe it is, but I no longer think that would be such a bad thing. In the Old Testament, there are several troubling stories where God seems to be killing large groups of people in order to make a point to the ones left alive. Not all of these people are personally guilty of anything, such as the infants in Jericho. This sort of thing fed my fears for a long time till it suddenly occurred to me: We all have to die. It’s not as if we’re entitled to a default state of happiness or immortality. In that case, there are worse ways to go than being used by God to save others.

One of the main themes of my novel-in-progress is this often humorous, random way that people’s destinies can interact, so that our attempts at virtue may alienate us from one another, while our vices may ultimately bring us down the only road that leads to reconciliation. We can’t engineer this paradox from the outset: “Let us sin that grace may abound? Certainly not!” says St. Paul. It simply happens, and reminds us not to think we know our own or others’ worth in God’s eyes. I love the 19th-century novels that are so full of these providential coincidences (Dickens and Victor Hugo were especially fond of them); whereas in the modern secular novel, the failure of our self-made meanings often ends in despair, not grace.

A good article on this topic can be found on the Hasidic website Chabad.org here.

N.T. Wright Interview: Presenting the Gospel in a Postmodern World

The incomparable New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, who is the bishop of Durham, England, talks in this January 2007 Christianity Today interview about his recent book Simply Christian, restoring the political dimension of the gospel, and the continuing appeal of Gnosticism. Some highlights:



“It is possible to say more or less all the orthodox Christian affirmations, but to join them up in the wrong story. It’s possible to tick the boxes that say Trinity, Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection, Spirit, Second Coming, and yet it’s like a child’s follow-the-dots. The great story—and after all the Bible is fundamentally a story—we’ve got to pay attention to that, rather than abstracting dogmatic points from it. The dogmas matter, they are true, but you have to join them up the right way.


“There’s a certain kind of modernist would-be orthodoxy, which uses the word God in something like the old Deist sense. He’s a distant, absentee landlord who suddenly decides to intervene in the world after all, and he looks like Jesus. But we already know who God is; now I want you to believe that this God became human in Jesus. The New Testament routinely puts it the other way around. We don’t actually know who God is. We have some idea, the God of Israel, or of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Creator God. But until we look hard at Jesus, we really haven’t understood who God is.


“That’s precisely what John says at the end of the prologue: No one has ever seen God; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the father, he has made him known. John’s provided an exegesis for who God is. And in Colossians 1 as well, he is the image of the invisible God. In other words, don’t assume that you’ve got God taped, and fit Jesus into that. Do it the other way. We all come with some ideas of God. Allow those ideas to be shaped around Jesus. That is the real challenge of New Testament Christology.


“What happened with the Enlightenment is the denarrativization of the Bible. And then within postmodernity, people have tried to pay attention to the narrative without paying attention to the fact that it’s a true story. “

      ****

“For generations the church has been polarized between those who see the main task being the saving of souls for heaven and the nurturing of those souls through the valley of this dark world, on the one hand, and on the other hand those who see the task of improving the lot of human beings and the world, rescuing the poor from their misery.


“The longer that I’ve gone on as a New Testament scholar and wrestled with what the early Christians were actually talking about, the more it’s been borne in on me that that distinction is one that we modern Westerners bring to the text rather than finding in the text. Because the great emphasis in the New Testament is that the gospel is not how to escape the world; the gospel is that the crucified and risen Jesus is the Lord of the world. And that his death and Resurrection transform the world, and that transformation can happen to you. You, in turn, can be part of the transforming work.”

Read the whole thing here.

Letters to Sam Harris

Evangelical theologian Douglas Wilson last November posted a series of “open letters” on his blog to Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation, that are well worth a read. Harris, following in the footsteps of atheist evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, is the latest popular writer to indict religion (i.e. Christianity) as divisive, oppressive and intellectually backward. A sample of Wilson’s responses:



Your next section asks the question, “Are Atheists Evil?” Your argument here rests upon a common misunderstanding of a standard Christian argument. In short, the issue is not whether atheists are evil, but rather, given atheism, what possible definition can we find for evil. The argument is not one about personal character but rather about what the tenets of atheism logically entail.


But there is another wrinkle as well. The Christian position is not that atheists are sinners, but rather that people are sinners. Consequently, when any false ideology (atheistic or theistic) gets hold of a collective group of people, there is bound to be an area where there are no brakes to restrain the natural sinful tendencies of the people involved. This will of course manifest itself in different ways according to the differences of the ideologies. It explains why nations that are formally atheistic are awful (and dangerous) places to live. But at the same time, we could all rattle off false ideologies that were theistic and which also turned the places they controlled into hellholes. This just means that men sin in different ways.


So all this happens because people are sinners — and the Christian faith accounts for the reality and influence of this sin.

Further along in the series, Wilson turns around the argument that a good and powerful God is incompatible with the suffering we see in the world:


You are exactly right that all Christians, if they are to be intellectually honest, must acknowledge that God is the ultimate governor of earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, genocides, and wars. This creates the “problem of evil” for us. How can a God who is infinitely just, kind, merciful, and loving (which we Christians also affirm) be the same one who unleashes these terrible “acts of God?” It is a good question, but it is one that can only be answered by embracing the problem. We solve the problem of evil by kissing the rod and the hand that wields it.

This sounds outrageous to you, I know, but it is the only way to genuinely deal with the problem of evil. It is either “the problem of evil,” which the Christian has, or “evil? no problem!” which the atheist has. Consider the tsunami, and what that event was, from your premises. You spoke of the day “one hundred thousand children were simultaneously torn from their mother’s arms and casually drowned” (p. 48). Now I can only understand being indignant with God over this if He is really there. But what if He is not there? What follows then? This event had no more ultimate significance than a solar flare, or a virus going extinct, or a desolate asteroid colliding with another asteroid, or the gradual loss of Alabama to kudzu, or me scratching my head just now. These are just atoms, banging around. This is what they do.


It is very clear from how you write that you do not believe that God is there, and you are also very angry with Him for not being there. Many of these people who were drowned were no doubt praying before they died. You throw that fact at us believers (which you can do, because, believing in God, we do have a problem of evil). But if we throw it back to you, what must you say about the tsunami and its effects? It was a natural event, driven by natural causes, and has to be seen as an integral part of the natural order of things. There was absolutely nothing wrong with it. These things happen.

Read the whole series here.