12. Process and Event (55 pages)

October 1, 2008

I often use a language of process and event in spiritual direction. 

    (1)  If we let another person into our lives, we surrender control over what happens between us.  So I describe the dynamics of the shared journey into the unknown as a process.  (The opposites of person-to-person involvements:  hardness of heart, indifference, recourse to power and/or judgment.)

         As a metaphor, process enables me to show how the the involvement calls for passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions between those who want to share a journey into the unknown.

    (2)  To enrich the reference to process with a language of interiority, I suggest that, sooner or later, events on the journey will tap feelings distorted by our long-practiced repertoire of emotional reactions.  Since these reactions enable us to control potentially disruptive feelings, they may serve us well socially.  In person-to-person involvements, however, they silence cries from the depths.

    (3)  I.e, as we begin to become more deeply involved, we become more trusting and hence more vulnerable.  At this point in the journey, events tap the deep feelings which emotional reactions bury alive.  Hopefully, exchanges in the past have prepared us to sort out these tangled feelings.

         I like the metaphor, “We are tangles,” because it enables honest searchers to use a rich language of human interiority to understand how long-buried pain, anger, fear and shame can be tapped in ways that bring out the worst in us.  (E.g., at 40, anger that I had buried alive since childhood erupted in childish ways.  In effect, I reverted to the time when I acquired an extensive repertoire of judgments and strategies designed to hide my anger from me and from others.)

    (4)  When tangles are tapped, we are in a position to identify the ways that our emotional reactions violate a spoken or unspoken commitment to face honestly whatever happens on our shared journey.  And once we can identify and own what we are feeling, we can enter more deeply into the shared event without assigning blame.

    (5)  Tragically, some individuals remain captive to blown events.  But to allow the felt experience of a moment to rule future interactions, they must cultivate bitterness, resentment or indifference in one form or another.  In marked contrast, those who relive the event through vulnerable self-revelations enter the grieving process referred to in Jesus’ call to lose our lives (our self-created identities, our self-protective reactions and our often desperate efforts to control situations) in order to find new life in his love and the love of others.

    (6)  Since we have invested much effort in the creation of our identities, countering its hold plunges one into a painful process.  To set forth its dynamics, I invoke the grieving process which is succinctly encoded in the dictum, “Let go and let God.”  In this context, “letting go” is the opposite of abandoning personal responsibility for my reactions and responses.  It calls me to be honest with myself, with God and with my loved ones about what I feel and think, real or imagined.  Initially, whether I speak with a pretended detactment or a passionate urgency, I assume that my story presents an objective description of my motives and yours.  In effect, I may pretend to tell the authorized version of a story describing an interaction between us.  But a vulnerable self-revelation voices an implicit promise that I will use your description of my motives, intentions, judgments and strategies as well as your own to help me understand myself and you in life-giving ways.

    (7)  If we listen as well as speak, the interaction reveals that there are no authorized versions.  And even if there were, the ultimate meaning of any event in the past depends on whether or not we bring it into the process.  As such, its meaning lies in the future.

         (I guarantee individuals plagued by bitterness and resentment that learning how to identify and embrace long-buried pain, anger, fear and shame and to let go and let God work in their present involvements will bring healing.  God can work in honesty.  For new life in each other’s love, however, tangled individuals must take the risk of putting themselves into each other’s care and allowing each other to grieve before responding.)

Process and Event in Theological Discourse

Recently, my use of the language of process and event in spiritual direction triggered reflections on the way that theologies centered in sin privilege event over process.  Sadly, the meta-narrative which has dominated theological inquiries in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions for centuries is so centered.

The implications of this meta-narrative can be found in the preaching of many TV evangelists and in the hidden agenda of Catholics who insist that the Tridentine rite is and remains the only authentic way to celebrate the Eucharist.

    Regarding TV evangelists:  In staged events designed to foster group dynamics, these preachers call individuals to ritualize a confession of utter sinfulness and an acceptance of Jesus as their personal Savior by answering an altar call.  Many confidently promise that those for whom this event is a profoundly emotional experience are saved from past, present and future sins.

    Regarding proponents of the Tridentine rite:  These traditionalists reduce the Eucharist to a stylized re-enactment of a sacrifice which Jesus offered in reparation for human sinfulness.  For the extremists among them, this rite alone evokes an authentic response of sinful humans to a distant Lord, Lawgiver and Judge.

        (SUPPLEMENTARY ASIDE:  Explicitly or implicitly, the altar call ritualizes Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone.  In its contemporary form, that doctrine locates justification in two events, Jesus’ crucifixion and acceptance of Jesus as one’s personal Savior (on the part of those who accept the justification won for us by Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross).  Moreover, it implies that “backsliders” remain saved or justified, despite their lapses.  Occasionally, Baptist ministers voice their acceptance of this implication in confident assertions regarding the exact percentage of people in their state who are among the saved.  To arrive at this judgmental categorization, they count the number of those who have answered altar calls.)

    Revisiting this meta-narrative always deepens my conviction that its emphasis on two events, an original sin and the crucifixion of Jesus, trivializes the gospel message.  TV evangelists deflect attention from the trivialization by insisting that they read the Scriptures literally.  That insistence, rather than the promise of instant intimacy inherent in a doctrine which privileges events over process, becomes the issue.  Consequently, I can only hope that I can be forgiven the almost indecent delight that I take in exposing the mind-boggling assumptions needed to make the supposition that any text can be read literally even remotely plausible. 

Most obviously, those who pretend to read the Scriptures literally must assume (1) that they are better readers than anyone else, including me, (2) that the stories preserved in the Scriptures are accurate reports of historical events that their authors did not witness, (3) that God acted in very different ways in the events recorded in the so-called Old Testament and in the events in the life of the Word incarnate in the New Testament, (4) that they are not selective in their use of Scriptural passages and that those they invoke are literal translations of texts written over the course of over a thousand years, (5) that a text can be self-interpreting and self-referential, (6) that Augustine’s doctrine of original sin offers a literal reading of the story of Adam and Eve, and (7) that their personal histories do not influence their interpretations in any way whatever.

    As one who has lived many years as a committed Christian, I am horrified by the arrogance of these assumptions.  Here, I raise the question in order to expose the blasphemous conception of God implied by the meta-narrative which located the beginning of human history in Augustine’s harsh doctrine of original sin.  Thus, in Augustine’s violent mis-reading of the biblical story of Adam and Eve, the Creator placed Adam in a primordial state of nature.  As the story unfolds, God came to converse with Adam in this virtual paradise.  In Augustine’s mis-reading, however, the involvement between God and Adam was exclusively a natural relationship between Creator and creatures.  And since such a relationship anticipated the contractual form of God’s covenant with Israel, the Creator had to reserve authority over moral discourse to himself.

    Consequently, when Adam transgressed the prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, a just God had to declare that a single event (the sin of Adam) severed the relationship between Creator and Adam’s offspring completely (and, indeed, disrupted the entire natural order).  And since a natural rather than an intensely personal involvement was at stake, there was no way that a mere human being could make the sort of reparation needed to repair or restore the severed relationship.

    Regardless of how often I revisit Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, I am horrified by the conception of God it enshrines.  In my readings of the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians, I try to understand how such a depiction could pass without protest.  In the end, however, I must face the fact that this doctrine was used to trace Jesus’ entry into human history to a judgment that only a cruel and humiliating death of God’s own Son could offer the reparation needed to restore the severed relationship.

    To soften the horrifying brutality of this judgment, theologians forged a story which introduced divine mercy into the equation.  Presumably, God’s mercy wanted to restore the relationship.  In response to the urgings of mercy, however, divine justice had to demand a horrifying pound of flesh.  I.e., since no mere human could make fitting reparation for human sinfulness, divine justice had to demand the cruel and humiliating death of God’s own Son on the cross as the only fitting reparation for Adam’s arrogant attempt to be master of his own destiny.

    From an analytic perspective, a meta-narrative which centers Jesus’ saving activity in the crucifixion offers a coherent synthesis of a salvation-history framed by Augustine’s doctrine of original sin and a language of redemption which defines the crucifixion as a sacrifice demanded by God’s justice in reparation for the sin of Adam.  But I cannot believe in such a God.  And I need not, on two counts.  One, the story of Adam and Eve cannot be read as history.  And two, this meta-narrative cannot be reconciled with the incarnational theology inscribed in the hymn in the Prologue of the Gospel of John.

        (I might also point out that those who embrace the meta-narrative somehow sense that this conception of God could only be taken seriously if God had revealed this self-description in a text which could be read without interpretation.  In effect, they must sense that the Gospels do not inscribe either a doctrine of original sin which proclaims that Adam’s offspring are inherently and inescapably sinful or the doctrine of justification by faith alone.)

    To impose these doctrines on a respectful reading of the Gospels, therefore, anyone who insists that Jesus is the sole mediator between God and sinful humans must invoke a reading code derived from the tortured distinction between an Old and a New Covenant developed in the Pauline Epistles.  

    To voice my protest against the horrifying conception of God which lends coherence to this meta-narrative, however, I first target the notion of justice it legitimates.  To that end, I note that the harsh doctrine of original sin which Augustine pretends to find in the Yahwist’s story of Adam and Eve functions as the starting point in this meta-narrative.  Thus, if a reader pays close attention to the details in the story, it is obvious that the story was composed prior to the emergence of the language of justice and mercy in the Hebrew literary tradition.  Instead, Yahweh is depicted as a well-meaning, if uncanny artisan who is quite unable to anticipate the consequences of his actions.

    As colleagues in the English Department forced me to take details in the story seriously, my suspicions regarding Augustine’s reading of the story of Adam and Eve were given form and direction by the work of scholars who read the Scriptures as literature rather than history.  From this perspective, the fusion of Jewish and Christian sources in a single text, the Judaic-Christian Scriptures, requires a narrative structure capable of presenting a coherent account of the entire course of human history.  But this requirement raised a red flag, since I was also convinced that Derrida’s critique of Structuralism showed, beyond question, that every structure has a hollow center.

    At first glance, talk of the hollow center of a narrative structure may seem hopelessly abstract.  In fact, the reference encodes a critical apparatus capable of forcing narrators to decide whether to fill that center with a voice which pretends to speak as an omniscient narrator, hopes to evoke the felt experience of life in a repressive, sterile or disintegrating culture, expresses a tragic or comic view of life, promotes a hidden agenda, rationalizes a prejudice or countless other possibilities.

    From this perspective, Protestant fundamentalists who assume that the Scriptures speak as an un-mediated word of God must fill the hollow center of their meta-narrative with a dictation theory of inspiration which attributes the authorship of the Scriptures to a God who speaks in and through the text as an omniscient narrator.    In an analogous manner, Pope Benedict XVI fills the hollow center of the same basic meta-narrative with the assumption that reasonable beings who can occupy a god-like perspective on language, experience and reality interchangeably will ultimately agree with him.    In short, though Protestant fundamentalists and Pope Benedict invoke different literary conventions, they rely on constructs designed to foster the pretence that they do not speak in their own voices.

        (SUPPLEMENTARY ASIDE:  With considerable shame, I confess that I have often supposed that, in the judgments I passed, I spoke for God.  Unaware that I was acting as an accomplice to a process of socialization, I pretended to speak as an omniscient narrator who somehow knew how God was involved in the lives of those I spoke to.  Looking back, I see that I was normalizing the wounding judgments passed on me by individuals whom I had interiorized as a committee in my head.  And I also see that, in each such instance, I failed to act with intellectual honesty and personal integrity.)

     At this point, I gladly confess that learning to speak in one’s own voice also requires the use of a literary construct.  Moreover, an account of any event (including reports of scientific experiments) requires a story.  In this context, a report which narrates the construction of an experiment is designed to enable others to repeat the experiment as a way of ensuring the validity of the recorded outcome.  In marked contrast, a structure whose hollow center is filled with a narrative voice invites endless retellings of the story of any event.  The dynamic involved is straightforward.  To frame an event as a discernible moment in a process, a storyteller must choose an arbitrary beginning and end.  To offer a different analysis of the event, another storyteller might situate it in a more distant past or emphasize longer-term consequences.  Other storytellers might introduce characters ignored in the original story or add significant details to the setting of the scene.  The possibilities are multiplied by the critical apparatus encoded in this construct.  Forged over the course of centuries, this apparatus is designed to expose the ways that one’s beliefs, assumptions, judgments and experiences influence one’s predilection for a particular meta-narrative.  As a result, honest searchers who are willing to learn how to speak in a narrative voice enter a dialogue capable of teaching them how to speak in their own voice.  (And only those who learn how to speak in their own voices can become truly free.)

  

    The point at issue appears in the differences between the narrative voice at the center of Pope Benedict XVI’s meta-narrative and the voice at the center of the moral discourse generated by an incarnational theology.  In his Regensburg Address, Pope Benedict XVI fills the hollow center of the meta-narrative which frames his transcendalist theology with a conception of reason which Aquinas inherited from the ancient Greeks.  To endow this meta-narrative with authority, he assumes that reason provides a detached, dispassionate, disinterested and therefore god-like perspective on language, experience and reality which all reasonable beings can occupy interchangeably.  And he assumes that this assumption justifies his wedding of theology and philosophy and guarantees that, as the guardian of both faith and reason, he speaks anonymously, universally and timelessly.  From a postmodernist perspective, however, he merely speaks in a narrative voice shaped and formed by his personal history.  And from my perspective, the violence his retelling of the history of philosophy does to Scotus falsifies his wedding of faith and reason.

       (SUPPLEMENTARY ASIDE:  In this Address, the Pope uses Aquinas’s conception of reason to ground a faculty psychology which authorizes a distinction between intellect and will.  Though this distinction plays no role in pyschological inquiries today, the Pope needs it to justify the accusation that Scotus forged a voluntarism which laid the literary foundation for Neitzsche’s celebration of an unrestrained will to power.  In my extended commentary on this Address, I expose the violence done to Scotus by this reading.  Here, I merely note that the Pope consistently uses reason as a god-term capable of accrediting his belief that human beings created in the image and likeness of a rational and purposive Creator can read the natural laws which this Creator inscribed in the natural order by a natural light of reason.  In every instance, he fails to address the ways that postmodernist criticism reveals the impossibility of acquiring a god-like perspective on language, experience and reality.)

    Since I process my everyday experiences as a philosopher of language, I find that the language I acquired through a pervasive process of socialization informs (textures) my longings, passions, desires, perceptions, imagination, motives, intentions, agendas and aspirations.  Again and again, the painful awareness that my judgments are triggered by emotional tangles indebted to deeply rooted prejudices reminds me that a god-like perspective on language, experience and reality is forever beyond my reach.  Coupled with personal involvements which called for vulnerable self-revelations, this awareness constantly reminds me that, when we tell the story of a purportedly discrete event or an all-encompassing meta-narrative, we inescapably speak in a voice given shape and form by the contingent events which guarantee the historicity of events in our personal histories.  Consequently, if we are wise, we will use reason as a tool which subverts the assumption that a proper use of reason compels assent to authoritative judgments, and we will understand why we must let the story we tell or the meta-narrative we embrace speak for itself. 

    In this vein, I fill the hollow structure of the meta-narrative which frames an incarnational theology with a voice informed by the sympathetic imagination of Israel’s great prophets.  The resulting moral discourse differs radically from the moral discourse which Pope Benedict XVI derives from the supposition that a rational and purposive God authored the natural laws exposed by the theory of ethics sketched by Aquinas.  It also offers an alternative to his supposition that moral agents must choose between an objective morality and a purely subjective relativism.

 

    I develop that alternative in considerable detail in my Christian Ethics:  An Ethics of Intimacy.  [Editor’s note: Copies of this text are available from me on request.] In that unreadable text, I argue that, historically, ethical analyses enriched the search for a language capable of processing experience in ways that promote the quest for a fully human and uniquely personal existence.  I also argue that they have done so because the advocates of distinctive ethical theories have sought to show that their theory triumphs over all competitors.  But since an ethics of intimacy is centered in a framework which envisions human existence as a perpetual journey into the unknown, I am profoundly suspicious of any ethical theory which pretends to legitimate definitive moral judgments or agendas.  To say the least, that suspicion leads me to regard the polar opposition between an objective morality and a morally meaningless subjectivity as a misplaced debate.

    Like the Pope, I am convinced that a subjectivism (relativism) cannot support prophetic protests against the violence inflicted on individuals.  But I find the protests voiced by Israel’s great prophets far more compelling that the dictates of any supposedly objective morality.  Thus, in face-to-face encounters with Israelites whose identity and existence were threatened, Hosea wove the vision inscribed in the early stories which spoke of intensely personal interactions between God and Israel’s patriarchs and matriarchs into a metaphor which compared God’s covenant with Israel to a marriage-union.  From this positive center, he and those influenced by him insisted that, to hear the voice of God’s moral will, one must listen to the cries of those who are oppressed, dispossessed, marginalized or silenced by the prevailing culture.  Thereafter, an unrecognized interplay between the vision inscribed in the early stories and the metaphors of intimacy projected by the prophets generated a language which centered the workings of moral discourse in the sympathetic imagination which inspired the prophets.  (Biblical authors did not invoke a fictive voice of reason.)

    (SUPPLEMENTARY ASIDE:  I am scandalized by the way that Christians (including Paul) reduce God’s covenant with Israel to a covenant of Law.  This violent mis-reading of the Jewish Scriptures ignores obvious differences between (1) the categorical form of Yahweh’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants and (2) the conditional form of a Covenant which introduced the Mosaic Law as the mediator between a detached God and a stubborn and stiff-necked people. 

The story of God’s call to Abraham situates the covenant in the immediacy of person-to-person involvements.  Centuries later, the Deuteronomic strand in the Hebrew narrative tradition insisted that God’s involvement with Israel was mediated by a covenant of Law.  And this violence was compounded when the polemic between Catholic and Protestant apologists revolved around the polar opposition between faith and works which Luther used to replace the Law as mediator with a belief that Jesus is the sole mediator between God and sinful humans.

    In marked contrast, an incarnational theology recovers the immediacy of the early stories and the participatory involvement depicted by the prophetic metaphors of intimacy without lapsing into either a subjectivist or a relativist stance.  In the same vein, it replaces the economic model inherent in the stories which reduce the Covenant to a conditional contract with a focus on commitments implicit in person-to-person involvements.)

    From the perspective implicit in the metaphors of the prophets, therefore, the bitter polemic between Catholic and Protestant theologians over the past five centuries has been a tragically misplaced debate.  To this day, Protestants center the meta-narrative which frames their protests against a hierarchically structured institutional Church in some version of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone.  As a protest, this doctrine was designed to recover a lost sense of God’s immediate involvement in the lives of unique individuals.  Logically, it implies that individuals willing to confess their utter and inescapable sinfulness stand naked before God and that accepting Jesus as their personal Savior results in instant intimacy.  But the cost is prohibitive, since it reduces intimacy with the three Persons in the triune God to a single event.

        SUPPLEMENTARY ASIDE:  Here, I merely note that Luther’s doctrine is hardly a literal reading of Paul, much less of the Judaic-Christian Scriptures.  Luther adds alone to Paul’s references to justification by faith, and Luther’s debt to Augustine’s doctrine of original sin is obvious.

    In large measure, Luther extracted the doctrine from Paul’s tortured responses to Judaizers who wanted to bind all Christians to the observance of the Mosaic Law.  In Christian Ethics:  An Ethics of Intimacy, I argue that a doctrine derived from a polar opposition between faith and works cannot be reconciled with the first chapter of Romans or with the meta-narrative which gives form and structure to the hymn in the Prologue of John.  I.e., in the first chapter of Romans, Paul sets forth a vision of the primordial state of human existence indebted to the prophets.  In verses 19 through 21a, he describes that state as an intensely personal involvement with the Creator. 

Romans 19:21a – ¹⁹For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them. ²⁰Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse; ²¹for although they knew God they did not accord him glory as God or give him thanks . . .

In this context, there is no hint of a doctrine of original sin.  And Paul is not alone in reading the Jewish Scriptures in this way.  In I and Thou, Martin Buber reads the Jewish Scriptures through a code derived from the prophetic metaphors of intimacy.  As a result, he asserts that we begin life with an intensely personal relationship with God, and his commentaries trace the emergence of I-you and I-it relationships to experience.  Quite obviously, he finds no hint of a doctrine of original sin in the Jewish tradition.

    In verses 22-24, Paul traces a state of sinfulness to actions which treat others impersonally. 

²²While claiming to be wise, they became fools ²³and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for the likeness of an image of mortal man or of birds or of four-legged animals or of snakes. ²⁴Therefore, God handed them over to impurity through the lusts of their hearts for the mutual degradation of their bodies.

Situated as it is in a vision of God’s intensely personal involvement with human beings, this passage implicitly defines sin as infidelity rather than disobedience.  As a result, it sets the stage for verses 25-32 which describe a process which gradually mires individuals in the corrupt state that Luther traces to the consequences of Adam’s sin. 

²⁵They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and revered and worshiped the creature rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. Amen. ²⁶Therefore, God handed them over to degrading passions. Their females exchanged natural relations for unnatural, ²⁷and the males likewise gave up natural relations with females and burned with lust for one another. Males did shameful things with males and thus received in their own persons the due penalty for their perversity. ²⁸And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God handed them over to their undiscerning mind to do what is improper. ²⁹They are filled with every form of wickedness, evil, greed, and malice; full of envy, murder, rivalry, treachery, and spite. They are gossips ³⁰and scandalmongers and they hate God. They are insolent, haughty, boastful, ingenious in their wickedness, and rebellious toward their parents. ³¹They are senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless. ³²Although they know the just decree of God that all who practice such things deserve death, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

In this passage, Paul offers a list of concrete violations of person-to-person involvements which includes maliciousness, ill-will, greed, envy, murder, bickering, deceit, craftiness, insolence, boasting and ingenuity in wrong-doing.  And he implies that such infidelities, repeated again and again, transform individuals into people “without conscience, without loyalty, without affection and without pity.”

        (Summary of Paul and Luther:  A respectful reading of Romans 1 raises critical questions concerning Luther’s use of Romans as the primary source for his doctrine of justification by faith alone.  In later passages, Paul uses a polar opposition between faith and works to frame references to justification by faith.  But Luther’s addition of faith alone is unintelligible without Augustine’s harsh doctrine of original sin, as is the meta-narrative which depicts the crucifixion as the most significant event in the life of Jesus Christ.)

    On my part, I suggest that Luther used a polar opposition between faith and works for polemical purposes.  Tragically, he came by the use of a polemically structured belief-system quite honestly.  Indeed, I suspect that the role he assigned the crucifixion can be traced to polemical works by early Christian defenders of the faith.  Like any polemically structured text, these compositions were designed to set forth the strengths of a belief-system embraced by their authors and to expose weaknesses in contending belief-systems.  Read from this perspective, they bear ample witness to a determination to counter (1) Jewish opponents who regarded the proclamation of the divinity of one who died a cruel and humiliating death of a cross as blasphemy and (2) pagan critics who mocked the proclamation as utter foolishness.

    Regarding the pagans:  Gilbert Murray notes that pagans worshipped their deities because they were powerful, not because they were moral.  A god who suffered a humiliating death on a cross was inconceivable.

    Regarding the Jews:  The Deuteronomic strand in the Hebrew narrative tradition depicted God as a Lord, Lawgiver and Judge who was jealous of his honor.  The contract-model of the Covenant encoded in its stories fostered a belief that God rewards the good and punishes the wicked.  To use the Jewish Scriptures for their own purposes, Christian apologists who authored texts entitled Against the Jews mined an Old Testament theme which emphasized the need to offer sacrifices as reparation for the sinfulness of God’s Chosen people.  And the polemical structure of their arguments blinded them to the implications of passages in Hosea and Second and Third Isaiah which compare the covenant between God and human beings to a marriage union.  As a result, they had little interest in reconciling their focus on sin with the assertion which the author of John attributed to Jesus, “I have come that you may have life, and have it more abundantly.”

    In sum, I suggest (1) that the search for a comprehensive and closed belief-system generated a polemically structured dialogue among medieval theologians; and (2) that the thrust of this dialogue blinded Catholic and Protestant theologians at the dawn of the Modern Era to the fact that arguments so structured distort even the best efforts to read the Scriptures as a living word.  In that vein, the promise of liberation from the dead hand of traditional interpretations may foster the illusion that the Scriptures can now speak as a living word.  But a “liberation from” never enables those so liberated to understand what is required to transform the longing for a more fully human and uniquely personal existence into a realizable quest.)

    In this regard, I readily acknowledge that my reading of the story of Adam and Eve in Christian Ethics: An Ethics of Intimacy is indebted to the insights offered by Ong’s analysis of the anxiety experienced by individuals at a time when literacy displaced orality as the foundation of Jewish culture.  This textualization of Israel’s understanding of God’s involvement in her history began centuries before the birth of Jesus.  And it reached a climax when Israelites returning from the Babylonian Exile (1) adopted a sprawling text stitched together by scribes in Babylon as the word of God and (2) believed that this word called them to a strict observance of the codified laws preserved in stories which transmitted the Deuteronomic vision of God’s involvement with their ancestors.  Since their commitment to this text generated endless commentaries. they never fell into the trap of supposing that a literal reading would yield a closed system of doctrines.  Still, the way that they embraced the text led others to characterize them as the people of the Book.

        (Note in passing:  The urge to impose closure on endless commentaries surfaces again and again among individuals who present themselves as orthodox members of the Jewish community, but the Jewish tradition has never surrendered control over commentaries to a single authority.  I have never undertaken a serious study of these commentaries.  For my understanding of the stories and the utterances of the prophets preserved in the Jewish Scriptures, I am indebted to the works of biblical scholars who read the Hebrew narrative tradition as a highly literary dialogue among authors who used stories to process Israel’s historical experiences over the course of more than four centuries.  I do so because I am convinced that literature frequently illuminates dimensions of existence ignored by philosophical or theological analyses of the same experiences.)

    In this context, anyone who reads the Jewish Scriptures as literature must address thorny issues encoded in the juxta-position of stories which depicted immediate interactions between Yahweh or El and Israel’s patriarchs and matriarchs with stories which celebrated the Mosaic Law as the mediator between God and Israel. 

(Viewed as literary efforts to voice the felt experience of everyday life in changing conditions, this juxtaposition bears bear witness to a transition from the immediacy of face-to-face involvements to the authority of a gradual textualization of Hebrew culture.  As such, it also shows that a belief that the Law related the whole of everyday life in Israel to God and set Israel apart from her idolatrous neighbors is the biblical source for doctrines of exclusive election so favored by the Protestant reformers.)

                      

Summary

    Luther’s doctrine of original sin is literally inconceivable without Augustine’s harsh doctrine of original sin.  To extract this doctrine from the story of Adam and Eve, Augustine had to read the story as an accurate account of an historical event.  But such a reading does obvious violence to details in the biblical text. 

     Intriguingly, the importance it attaches to its interpretation of some events in the story violates the hermeneutical theory which Augustine had devised to show that the Christian Scriptures inscribed a code which could generate definitive readings of stories in the Jewish Scriptures.  In this vein, the theory validated readings designed to show that events in Israel’s history pre-figured ways that God would later act in and through Jesus of Nazareth and that characters in these events were archetypal figures.  Consequently, it privileged readings designed to present a vision of the entire course of human history.  But the reading which found a doctrine of original sin in the story of Adam and Eve had to function as an historical account in its own right before it could be used to contrast the disobedience of Adam with Jesus’ obedient submission to a sacrificial death on the cross in reparation for Adam’s transgression.

    At any rate, over the course of centuries, the authority of Augustine led theologians to read the story of Adam and Eve as history.  Since this supposition is patently absurd, I am left to wonder why Augustine’s doctrine of original sin has continued to influence theological discourse far more than the passion for intellectual integrity so evident in his seminal writings on other issues.

    (SUPPLEMEMTARY ASIDE:  A traditional reading of the story in which God purportedly commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, the child of the promise, exemplifies the way that Augustine’s hermeneutical theory works.  To bolster the belief that God’s justice had to demand a sacrificial death of his own Son as the price for restoring a natural relationship severed by Adam’s sin, theologians celebrated Abraham’s willingness to obey this brutal command as a pre-figuration (or type) of God’s willingness to sacrifice his own Son.)

    To account for Augustine’s defense of his doctrine of original sin, I suggest that, in his old age, Augustine’s early fascination with Manichean dualism re-surfaced as an attempt to reconcile Paul’s reading of the Jewish Scriptures with the vision of human history he himself had set forth in magisterial work entitled The City of God.  In Romans, Paul’s supposition that God’s involvement with Israel revolved around a covenant of Law reveals a compulsive need to reconcile his youthful commitment to the strict observance of the Mosaic Law with his determination to counter the so-called Judaizers who insisted that converts to Christianity must submit to practices dictated by this Law.  In passages in his Confessions in which Augustine offered glimpses into the internal turmoil which had plagued him in his youth, he had echoed the passage in Romans, 7 in which Paul laments the fact that he often found himself unable to do the good that he would do.  Now, in his old age, the doctrine of original sin offered an explanation for that fact.

        Supplementary aside:  Augustine had little difficulty in using his doctrine of original sin to transform Paul’s polar opposition between faith and works into a distinction between ordered and disordered love.  For a clear exposition of the supposed workings of ordered and disordered love, see Dante’s Purgatorio.  In his theory of ordered and disordered love, Augustine moved from the Johannine formula which presented God as Love to the conclusion that human beings made in the image of God inevitably love.  But he ignored the primacy of love in the doctrine of original sin.  To disguise that lapse, he attributed disordered love to the consequences of Adam’s sin.  And this synthesis allowed his literary heirs to ignore questions raised by the description of love inscribed in the hymn in the Prologue of John and to reconcile this description with the reductive import of a meta-narrative which described God’s love as an interplay between justice and mercy.

        Clearly, the primacy accorded justice and mercy over love in the meta-narrative which reduced the Incarnation to an act of reparation for Adam’s sin depended on a reading which placed Adam and Eve in a purely natural order and asserted that Adam’s transgression of the prohibition against eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil severed a natural relationship between Creator and creature and disrupted the entire natural order.  The prohibition implied that God reserved authority over moral discourse to himself.  In the constrictive belief-system inscribed in Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, a rational and purposive Creator had no need to reserve moral authority exclusively to himself by a spoken prohibition, since human beings were rational animals who could read the natural laws which the Creator had inscribed in the natural order by the natural light of reason.  And since those laws presumably illuminate any and all experiences, human beings need not learn what it is to be fully human from experience.

        Nonetheless, the implications of an ethics of law or principle can easily be subjected to the test of experience.  (1)  Experience reveals that there is no formula for love.  (2)  In Aquinas, reasonable beings are called to conformity to the natural law.  (3)  But love plunges unique individuals into a shared journey into the unknown, and events on this journey call for creative responses, not conformity to an abstract conception of what it is to be fully human.  The journey is one of discovery.

        On a more abstract level:  Aquinas’s synthesis of philosophy and theology bears the imprint of the medieval metaphor of the Two Books.  This metaphor posited a distinction between (1) an autonomous Book of Nature whose teleological structure enshrined the Creator’s moral will and (2) a Book of Salvation-History which revealed God’s saving responses to the disruption of the entire natural order effected by Adam’s sin.  In this context, Aquinas used a theory of knowledge abstracted from his baptism of Aristotle to justify the claim that an autonomous Book of Nature could be read by the natural life of reason.  For the reading of the Book of Salvation-History, he respected the thesis that grace builds on nature transmitted by Tradition (with a capital T).  However, since he also shared the medieval assumption that “authority has a wax nose,” he would hardly approve of the way that he is invoked as an authority.

        This authority accorded the metaphor of the Two Books is highly suspect.  The early Christians had no sacred texts of their own.  Initially, preachers invoked passages from the Jewish Scriptures to enhance the intellibility of the belief that God was active in a special way in and through Jesus of Nazareth.  Centuries later, leaders in an evolving Church established a canon of distinctively Christian texts consisting of the four gospels and 21 Epistles (including the Epistle of James which Luther rejected).  In the meantime, the polemical structure of apologetical texts fostered hermeneutical theories designed to present the Jewish Scriptures as the Old Testament, i.e., as an historical witness to a covenant of Law which God established with Israel, and the Christian Scriptures as the New Testament, i.e., as the proclamation of a new and everlasting covenant centered in Jesus Christ.  In turn, this polemical structure contributed to an emerging distinction between orthodox and heretical interpretations of the canonical text.

         In the bitter polemic between Catholic and Protestant apologists at the dawn of the Modern Era, authors on both sides invoked passages in the Scriptures as “proof-texts,” i.e., as texts which validated the doctrines they espoused.  To resolve at least some of the issues involved in this mode of argumentation, the champions of orthodoxy on both sides devised hermeneutical theories designed to save the traditional belief that the New Testament inscribed a reading code capable of governing interpretations of troublesome passages in the Jewish Scriptures.  In the following centuries, this belief contributed significantly to the violent appropriation of the Jewish Scriptures inscribed in the meta-narrative which concerns us here.

Return to the Point at Issue

    To set the stage for a critique of the meta-narrative grounded in two discrete events, Adam’s sin and Jesus’ crucifixion, I offer a brief commentary on hermeneutical issues.

    Focusing on discrete events is artificial, yet fruitful.  By imposing an artificial beginning and end, the focus generates analyses of language and experience designed to explore the dynamics of an event in depth and detail.  In this vein, meta-narratives weave stories of discrete events into coherent wholes. The meta-narratives that concern us here promise an accurate and all-encompassing overview of the entire course of human history.  As such, they must offer assessments of the ways that the literary, philosophical, theological and scientific traditions have contributed to the evolution of western civilization.

    From this perspective, the meta-narrative espoused by Benedict XVI promises a definitive account of the way that God has been active in human history and in the lives of each and every unique individual.  And Benedict burdens the traditional version of this meta-narrative with two additional claims.  Thus, in his Regensburg Address, he explicitly claims that divine inspiration was at work in the wedding of the biblical and philosophical traditions.  And he grounds his protests against the secularization of western culture in a vision which posits an inseparable tie between Christianity and that culture.  (From a practical perspective, he does nothing to curb the pretensions of members of the Curia who claim authority over translations of liturgical texts.)

For its starting point, this meta-narrative utilizes the stage set by Augustine’s violent mis-reading of the story of Adam and Eve.  The mis-reading begins with the fusion of the two creation accounts in Genesis.  As this revision of the story unfolds, the fusion justifies the assertion (1) that the God who created the universe through spoken words placed the first parents of the human race in a purely natural state of existence in which they lacked nothing, (2) that as long as this natural state endured, human beings would experience neither death nor the inner turmoil which plagued Augustine, and (3) that the endurance of a natural relationship between Creator and creature depended on Adam’s unquestioning obedience to a prohibition of moral discourse.

    Note in passing:  Regarding (2), my reading of the story of Adam and Eve suggests that, since they lacked the self-consciousness which triggers in us the awareness of being naked, Adam and Eve could not have been aware that moral issues lie, inextricably, at the core of human actions and assertions.  And this lack of awareness prevailed in a state of existence prior to the invention of writing, since the eruption of self-consciousness awaited the detachment inherent in the interiorization of literacy as an interrogatory stance and the emergence of languages laden with uses of words preserved in enduring texts.  Once the words took on lives of their own, however, they were incorporated in languages which took on lives of their own, and these languages transmitted a discourse which interwove the eruption of self-consciousness with formulations of moral issues implicit in the awareness of different dimensions of human existence.

    Since the Yahwist wrote the story of Adam and Eve at a time when literacy was displacing orality as the foundations of culture in Israel, I read Yahweh’s prohibition as a futile attempt to preserve the prevailing power-structure in which Adam was master of the animals by silencing Eve, who existed on the margins.  By extension, the eruption of self-consciousness in Eve triggered her longing for more than a superficial conversation with Adam.)

    As the story unfolds, Yahweh notices that Adam is lonely.  Intriguingly, this loneliness is not accompanied by inner turmoil.  To introduce this turmoil, Augustine succumbed to his youthful fascination with dualism in a reading which implied that the talking serpent surfaced in an interpretation which equated the talking serpent as God’s adversary, Satan, the father of lies. 

    The identification was not without biblical warrant.  The gospels attribute a story about the fall of angels to Jesus, and a passage in an epistle attributed to Peter asserts that a Satan continued to roam around the world seeking whom he might devour.  Functionally, the identification also accounted for the entry of evil into a thoroughly good existence by tracing it to an outsider who tempted Eve who in turn seduced Adam.  But it also created a problem by implying that a single transgression effectively transformed Adam’s allegiance to his Creator into an allegiance to Satan, though an individual devoid of a developed self-consciousness could hardly have intended this momentous consequence.

    Over the course of centuries, the strand in the theological tradition governed by the metaphor of power and judgment resolved the problem in a way that I abhor.  To save the doctrine, its advocates insisted that Adam’s transgression compeled a God who was just by nature to severe a natural relationship with human beings completely.  In unacknowledged ways, this insistence generated a pernicious distinction between a natural and a supernatural realm of existence.  In an equally pernicious way, it led many theologians to fill the hollow center of this distinction with the economic model implicit in a conditional formulation of a covenant of Law and a language of redemption.  Inexorably, the logic of a fusion of the distinction between a natural and a supernatural realm of existence and the economic model implicit in a language of redemption reduced the crucifixion to an act of reparation demanded by divine justice.  And to close the hermeneutical circle, proponents of this meta-narrative forged a rhetoric which, by emphasizing the enormity of Adam’s offense, justified the horrifying conception of a God whose justice forced him to decree that no merely human being could make the sort of reparation needed to restore the severed natural relationship.

    Elsewhere, I devote considerable attention to the Wittgensteinean thesis that some metaphors generate distinctive forms of life capable of promoting the realization of distinctive purposes.  The metaphors of intimacy generated such a form of life.  But try as I might, I have never been able to derive a distinctive form of life from the frequent references to justice in the philosophical and biblical literary traditions.  Quite obviously, whereas metaphors of intimacy generate a language capable of illuminating the quest for deepening person-to-person involvements, the use of justice as a moral notion can be used for a variety of diverging purposes.

    Given its focus on person-to-person interactions, the language which transforms the longing for intimacy into a realizable quest is deeply indebted to the metaphors of intimacy projected by Israel’s prophets.  As the source of descriptive linguistic formulations, these metaphors generated a language of human interiority which offered glimpses of unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.  As the literary foundation for a moral discourse, they call for the exercise of one’s sympathetic imagination.

    In marked constrast, justice emerged as a moral notion designed to resolve two inter-related issues, the threats to isolated individuals from abuses of power in any shape or form and the dawning awareness of the cultural relativity of values, norms and practices.  As one who was suspicious of the gradual triumph of literacy over orality as the foundation of culture, Plato saw clearly that the hollow center of detached relationships can easily be filled by a will to power.  In the Republic, he developed a notion of justice designed to counter a dictum he placed in the mouth of a fictive Thrasymachus, “Might makes right.”  And to endow this notion with moral authority, he filled its hollow center a conception of reason which promised a detached, disinterested, dispassionate and god-like perspective which rational individuals could occupy interchangeably.  In this context, justice was supposed to function as the god-term in a moral discourse capable of generating clear and distinct definitions of the virtues which promoted and vices which obstructed the quest for fullness of life in the city.  To speak with moral authority, however, the hollow center of this god-term had to endow the interchangeability promised by reason with the power to compel assent and consent to descriptive and moral judgments capable of replacing the prevailing relativity of cultural norms and practices with consensus on universal and timeless ideal forms.  (Note in passing:  In Plato, the supposed interchangeability of rational beings implied that all were equal.  But he used his tri-partite model of the human psyche to justify the exercise of power over life and death by those endowed with a greater proportion of reason.

    Nonetheless, the rationalist tradition inscribed an interrogatory stance in the center of its conception of reason, and that stance endowed reason with the power to subvert the judgments it supposedly legitimated.  Ong’s Orality and Literacy illuminates the point at issue.  Prior to the invention of writing, the participative existence fostered by face-to-face communication validated an illusory sense of immediate presence, fullness and totality.  (The characteristics which the story of Adam and Eve assigned to human existence in the Garden of Eden.)  As a result, inhabitants of orally transmitted cultures could not imagine a detached perspective capable of transforming endless questioning into fruitful inquiries.  But the detachment inherent in writing and reading generated a vast expansion in the power of language which promised a language capable of presenting the whole of reality transparently.  Nonetheless, a detachment interiorized as an interrogatory stance could never be erased or silenced by the totalizing thrust of language or the will to power of those who mastered the workings of everyday languages.

        SUPPLEMENTARY ASIDE:  In its own right, this interrogatory stance licensed endless questioning.  But literary geniuses in the Hellenic tradition discovered that it could be used to formulate questions which mute nature could answer.  Over time, their offspring in the scientific tradition resurrected the interrogatory stance in the insistence (1) that, to be fruitful, inquiries designed to provide answers to questions regarding either human motivation or the workings of natural forces had to be falsifiable, (2) that, to be falsifiable, the proposed answers have universal import, (3) that, to explore all the implications of any linguistic formulation, the interrogatory stance had to be transformed into a critical apparatus capable of drawing testable implications from ordinary language and from philosophical and theological posits, (4) that, after Descartes, the critical apparatus privileged methodological issues over the sorts of inquiries generated by metaphyical systems, (5) that methodologies capable of subjecting linguistic formulations with universal import to the test of everyday experiences promised to impose closure on endless questioning without arbitrariness or violence, and, finally, (6) that, since the languages which transmit the varied forms of western culture are products of a literary tradition, that hermeneutical inquiries now address issues obscured by prescriptive metaphysical and methodological theories.

    In this context, the postmodernist movement emerged as a critical response to ideal language programs, to ideologies which pretend to offer an all-encompassing vision of the course of human history, and to the Cartesian promise of a methodology capable of yielding definitive answers to any and all questions.  The gurus who gave form and direction to this amorphous movement used the critical apparatus generated by the interrogatory stance to target authority in any shape or form.  To avoid re-inscribing authority in their own texts and utterances, they embraced a hermeneutics of suspicion which legitmated reading strategies designed (1) to lay bare the myriad ways that western culture rests on literary foundations, (2) to subvert its authority through deconstructive re-readings of the foundational texts in this literary tradition, (3) to inscribe their critiques in archeologies of knowledge and genealogies of morals which expose the will to power at the center of any text or utterance that pretends to speak from a god-like perspective, and (4) to ensure that those who subvert authority relentlessly do not re-inscribe authority in their own texts or utterances.

     Faced with a choice between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a use of reason which promises an objective morality, I would have to submit to the dictates of the hermeneutics of suspicion.  To this day, I gratefully acknowledge that, by forcing me to realize that any moral discourse grounded outside of human reality is inherently dehumanizing and depersonalizing, the hermeneutics of suspicion forced me to search for a moral discourse without foundations.  In that search, however, my experiences in person-to-person interactions force me to reject a stance of suspicion because it cannot provide a moral center for individuals who long to escape from the formative power of the language they learned in childhood.  And to support that rejection, I confidently assert that an ethics of intimacy speaks for itself because it (1) evokes a deep longing for intimacy, (2) generates a language capable of processing everyday experiences in ways that transform that longing into a realizable quest, (3) shows that this quest yields an ever-more fully human and uniquely personal existence, and (4) does so because it enables those who commit themselves to a shared journey into the unknown to voice vulnerable self-revelations.

        (SUPPLEMENTARY ASIDE:  Driven by the totalizing thrust of reason, ethical theorists seek to ground moral discourse in a foundation capable of guaranteeing that the judgments it accredits are not arbitrary or conventional repositories of violence.  This focus on definitive judgments has enriched moral discourse precisely because it functions as an arena in which theories centered in a particular dimension of human existence vie for supremacy.  Historically, the god-terms in these theories include (1) efforts to endow an abstract voice of reason with the power to compel assent and consent to its dictates, (2) conceptions of human nature indebted to Plato’s realm of ideal forms or Aristotle’s description of human beings as rational animals, (3) the will of a rational and purposive Creator inscribed in a teleologically structured natural order (Aquinas), (4) Kant’s abstract conception of autonomous individuals who can become free by subjecting the natural necessity of desires and passions to the rule of reason, (5) Nietzsche’s celebration of an unrestrained will to power, (6) Marx’s thesis that human history was propelled by a dialectical materialism, (7) Heidegger’s embrace of the notion of Being forged by the pre-Socratics, and countless others.  And each contributes to the moral discourse incorporated into everyday English by generating inquiries which explore a particular dimension of human existence in depth and detail.)

    By definition, vulnerable self-revelations must speak for themselves.  By extension, a moral discourse which calls for such involvement must be a discourse without foundations.  In this regard, the metaphor of intimacy replaces god-terms designed to justify closure on questioning with a metaphor centered in an elusive longing, and the language generated by this metaphor marks a significant distinction between the ways that we surrender that longing and the ways that we allow the longing to speak for itself as it transforms it into a realizable quest.

    The language can do all this because it is the product of a repeated instances in which implications of the metaphor were put to the test in everyday experience.  As a result, it does not derive its moral authority from the metaphor that generated it.  Indeed, since it calls for vulnerable and respectful interactions, it prohibits efforts to compel another person to undertake the quest, and shows that stifling the longing distorts any quest for an ever-more fully human and uniquely personal existence.

    For my understanding of how moral discourse works, therefore, I am indebted to postmodernist readings which show that ethical theories grounded outside of human reality enshrine a will to power.  But this insight also forced me to clarify my suspicions of a hermeneutical theory which allowed only hollow protests against the will to power enshrined in any claim to know what counts as a fully human existence.  Consequently, though I could agree that it is quite impossible to acquire a god-like perspective on language, experience and reality, I also became aware that intensely personal experiences on a journey to deepening intimacy with individuals who initially entered by life as the Other falsified the conclusion that individuals cannot learn how to speak in their own voices in vulnerable self-revelations.

    I suggest, therefore, that the transforming power of passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful interactions falsifies the meta-narrative which traces the crucifixion to an interplay between justice and mercy.  Conceptual analyses show that this meta-narrative is the offspring of a shotgun wedding between (1) a doctrine of original sin which assumes that the original relationship between God and Adam was purely natural and (2) the supposition that the Judaic-Christian Scriptures assert that the restoration of a relationship severed by Adam’s transgression depended on the willingness of the eternal Word to accept death on the cross in reparation for a single sin.  But a doctrine of original sin which reduces God’s original involvement with Adam to a natural relationship implicitly privileges an inherently impersonal relationship over the intensely personal involvement of God with Israel’s patriarchs and matriarchs in the early stories of the Hebrew narrative tradition.

    In the same vein, the play on natural necessity supports the supposition that, to be true to his own divine nature, a just God had to decree that a single transgression irreparably severed the relationship between Creator and creatures.  The most that can be said for this horrifying decree is that it replaces compassion with a brutal impartiality.  And when compassion does come into play, it appears as mercy dispensed from above, not passionate involvement.

    In sum, when I move from analyses of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin to the passages in the Scriptures that intrigue me most, I cannot see how a meta-narrative centered in relationships among detached individuals is compatible with the description of God’s over-flowing love in the hymn in the Prologue of John or the metaphorical description of the Covenant as a marriage union in Hosea and Isaiah.  And since my involvement with others as a spiritual director is informed by a language of process generated by an incarnational theology, I must point out that the use of the language of justice to resolve situations in which individuals find themselves at cross-purposes with loved ones will transform misunderstandings into futile struggles.

    I grant that, in the political arena, justice has a long and honorable history as a moral notion.  Thus, at a time when literacy was displacing orality as the foundation of culture in ancient Greece, the texts of Plato and Aristotle (1) grounded moral discourse in a metaphor which envisioned the city as the cradle and crucible of culture and civilization and (2) filled the hollow center of moral discourse with political issues inherent in interactions between and among increasingly detached individuals.  Given the role of the ruling metaphor, it is hardly surprising that these texts privileged political over personal issues and that both Plato and Aristotle included justice in their list of virtues on which social life depended.

    But the way that justice can be used as a moral quagmire was anticipated by the influence which the Sophists had on dialogue within Athens.  Historically, the Sophists were the first to exploit the insight that a knowledge of the workings of languages indebted to literacy endowed language-users with power over the masses.  In his Republic, Plato sought to expose the immorality of their promise to impart this knowledge to citizens who sought to enlist the masses unwittingly in their quest for power.  To frame the issue, he placed the assertion, “Might makes right” in the mouth of Thrasymachus.  Then, to counter this blatant appropriation of an emerging moral discourse, he formulated a definition of justice which incorporated traditional efforts to legitimate restraints on exercizes of power by individuals or by the state (and on frenzied eruptions of desire and passion.)  But he seems to have realized that justice could not function as a self-standing moral notion, since he placed responsibility for giving individuals their due in the hands of philosopher-kings endowed with a larger share of reason and who had lived long enough to acquire wisdom.

    Over the course of centuries, the use of justice as a moral notion perpetuated the focus on relationships among increasingly detached individuals who had interiorized literacy as an interrogatory stance.  In this context, a genealogy of morals shows (1) that a notion of justice was literally inconceivable in the participatory existence fostered by Orality, (2) that the workings of the interrogatory stance replaced with metaphors of individuality the sense of collective responsibility which governed orally transmitted cultures, (3) that interactions between and among newly empowered individuals were subjected to the rule of a metaphor which depicted the city as the cradle and crucible of culture and civilization, and (4) that, in this context, a Kantian morality grounded in the supposition that rational beings were by nature autonomous individuals was literally inconceivable.

        (AN ASIDE TO A SUPPLEMENTARY ASIDE:  Early uses of justice as a moral notion illuminated emergence of distinctions among the natural, personal, social and political dimensions of life that are so dramatically exposed in the great tragedies composed in Athens.  I suggest these tragedies continue to speak across the ages because tragic events occur in every age.  In Sartre’s terms, tragedies remind us that there is no exit from the human condition.  Sadly, some Christian theologians pretend that the cross-resurrection theme encoded in the gospel message sounded the death-knell of the tragic view of life.  Presumably, this theme can inspire hope in even the most horrendous situations.  Nonetheless, many of these same theologians feel the need to supplement the eschatalogical themes in the Scriptures with arguments designed to absolve God of any responsibility for the evil and suffering in the world.

        In this context, the belief that the crucifixion was a sacrifice offered in “reparation” for Adam’s transgression mires those who adopt it in a conceptual quagmire.  It requires a belief that God placed the first human beings in a primordial state of existence in which they and their offspring would experience neither suffering nor death.  By attributing the total disruption of this natural state to a single transgression, the doctrine of original sin absolved the Creator of any responsibility for suffering and lent legitimacy to the supposition that a just God had to demand the sacrificial death of his own Son as the only fitting reparation for Adam’s sin.  At first glance, talk of reparation for sin is more acceptable than talk of punishment, especially since it can easily be reconciled with a language of redemption.  But the supposition that this reparation “repairs” a severed relationship is parasitic on the supposition that divine justice demanded a brutal expulsion from a garden of plenty as fitting punishment for Adam’s sin.  And the quagmire deepens if the demand for “reparation” implies that Adam’s sin somehow “injured” God’s honor or lessened his dominance.

        In effect, the application of justice to actions which inflict injury reveals the dark side of the notion by encoding a supposed interchangeability of detached individuals in a principle which functions as a conditional:  “If you injure me, justice demands that you be injured in a roughly equivalent way.”  (“An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.”)

            (Today, the dark side of this notion of justice surfaces in rhetorics used to justify capital punishment.  These rhetorics encode a moral algebra which promises that the execution of a murderer will bring closure to the grieving process of those who loved the murder victim.  But experience shows that any use of “an eye for an eye” as a moral principle cannot produce what it promises.  The execution may bring temporary relief from pain and rage, but only the process of forgiveness can bring a healing of wounds and the freedom to embrace the fullness of life promised by the cross-resurrection theme noted above.)

          To summarize the thesis:  Augustine’s doctrine of original sin implies that death, inner turmoil, the sort of violence illustrated by the story of Cain and Abel, and suffering from natural disasters are all just punishments for Adam’s sin.  But the belief that Adam’s offspring are being brutally punished for a single transgression on the part of one who lacked a self-consciousness enriched by a literary tradition rests on a horrifying conception of just God who must demand that Adam’s sin be so punished.  By extension, it fosters conspiracy theories which locate responsibility for the horrifying prevalence of violence in the human world in a single individual, whether it be God, the devil or a human being.  (Note the way that the Pope is demonized by some Protestant traditions.  Note, too, that fundamentalist Christians tend to demonize Presidents who do not support their agendas.)

          For centuries, one strand in the biblical tradition encoded this understanding of justice in a simple formula:  God rewards the good and punishes the evil.  But instances in which bad things happen to good people were already addressed in Job.  To save the formula from experiential and biblical challenges, too many preachers hasten to assure good people who suffer bad things that they will be rewarded in the after-life and to remind those who suffer that hope is one of the three cardinal virtues.  But when this rhetoric is used to justify capital punishment, it effectively silences the gospel call to forgive.  After all, if a just God must punish perpetrators of violence with eternal damnation, those who have been deeply wounded by another person can hope that their abusers will suffer as they do.  And there is ample biblical warrant for this convoluted argument in the conception of God encoded in the conditional formulations of the covenant found in stories in the Deuteronomic strand of the Hebrew narrative tradition.

         From a literary perspective, however, this narrative tradition was framed by the vision of an incomprehensible God involved in intensely personal ways with Israel’s patriarchs and matriarchs.  In the early stories preserved in the canonical text, this vision revolved around a categorical formulation of the Covenant.  Throughout my reflections, I attempt to show that this vision cannot be reconciled with later stories which fill the hollow center of the narrative structure they project with a contractual (conditional) formulation of the covenant.  I do so because the use of a contractual model to process everyday experiences stifles cries which issue from our deepest longing for intimacy with a God whose love is ever-faithful.  And once these cries are silenced, so are objections to the use of a doctrine of original sin to absolve God from any responsibility for suffering or violence.

        In sum, the desire to absolve an all-loving God of responsibility for suffering makes no sense in a theology which asserts, categorically, that the Incarnation was and is an outpouring of creative love.  This theology asserts, categorically, that the eternal Word became fully human in order to share fully in the suffering of individuals, including those who are unaware of Jesus’ loving presence in their lives.  And it implies that Jesus was more concerned with empowering individuals to embrace the quest for a more fully human and uniquely personal existence than with rescuing them from the consequences of sin.  As the wounded Healer, he is compassionately involved with us in our pain, shame, anger and fear, and as a tremendous Lover, he is involved in ways that can bring ever-more abundant life to those who let him love them.

         Again, lest any reader assume that I am tilting against windmills or setting strawmen up for the flames, I can only share the shock I initially experienced in a course in the Philosophy of Religion.  The introductory texts in this discipline include a chapter on “the problem of suffering.”  In every instance, these texts included an argument grounded in the thesis that an all-loving, all-knowing and all-powerful God could not allow the suffering that abounds throughout the world.  Given the composition of our student body, the majority of those enrolled in the course were Christians.  Invariably, most were shaken by this thesis.  To counter it, they would repeat stories of grandparents or parents who were convinced that God’s love carried them through painful experiences.  In effect, they responded to formulations of the problem centered in a conception of a just rather than a loving God with the testimony of individuals who had a personal involvement with Jesus.

       As we addressed the issue from a philosophical perspective, therefore, I was struck by the fact that, in a surprising number of instances, students from Protestant denominations regarded the belief that a just God rewards the good and punishes the evil as a succinct formulation of “the good old gospel message.”  Since these same students invoked the experience of significant people in their lives, these reactions forced me to explore conceptual issues inherent in indiscriminate references to a just God and a God of ever-faithful, all-inclusive love.

        As I drew out the implications of an incarnational theology, I became convinced that formulating the problem of suffering as a dispute between atheists and those who believe in a God who is personally involved with human beings is yet another misplaced debate.  To dramatize the point at issue, I suggest that finite individuals made in the image of a God who is Love are plunged into a journey into the unknown.  As the journey progresses, they acquire the language which transmits the culture in which they dwell.  In George Herbert Mead’s terms, this language enables them to process everyday encounters with individuals whom they view as significant and generalized Others.  Those who try to process their experiences by using a formulaic belief that God rewards the good and punishes the evil are inevitably wounded by the absence of instant intimacy with God and with loved ones.

        This inevitable woundedness is inescapable since those who take the risk of loving are unique individuals endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.  (Any reading of the story of Adam and Eve must account for a telling detail, their awareness that they were naked.  Augustine’s reading interprets that awareness as the shame they experience when they acknowledge their guilt.  My reading interprets the awareness as an eruption of self-consciousness indebted to the interiorization of literacy.  In the story, it encodes the woundedness inherent in vulnerability inherent in an initial separation-anxiety and a subsequent anxiety of authorship.  To avoid yet another meandering digression, I merely note that a commitment to co-author a story which enhances the uniquely personal existence of each of the co-authors is fraught with promise and peril.  The story of Adam and Eve, then, can function as a myth of origins, but as one designed to articulate the sense of anxiety inherent in the eruption of self-consciousness, not one designed to rationalize a dualistic vision of human existence.)

    Regarding the formative power of everyday languages, everyday English incorporates many forms of life.  This includes a distinctive form of life which enables those who dwell within it to transform a longing for ever-deepening intimacy into a realizable quest as well as includes forms of life designed to enhance existence in the social, economic, aesthetic and religious dimensions of life.  In this context, history records too many instances in which citizens committed to a religious tradition or an economic system have imposed their beliefs, values, norms and practices on others.  And since these impositions are disguised exercises of a will to power, they provoke conflicts which tend to politicize moral issues.  In turn, the politization serves to normalize the victors whose will to power is supposedly legitimated by a commitment to a particular form of life.

    Nonetheless, since the actions of individuals who have no personal ties with one another effect everyone, every society needs a distinctively political discourse.  Ideally, this discourse functions as an arena in which forms of life designed to enhance distinctive dimensions of existence converge.  But the arena can be used as either a battleground for contending wills to power or as a discourse which fosters an on-going dialogue among citizens. Such an arena is implicit in references to the American experiment in Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.  This masterpiece voices a profoundly moral concern as a question whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal can long endure.

        This question was implicit in the political arena constructed by our Founding Fathers.  I.e., many citizens had undertaken a perilous journey to America in order to escape from persecution for their religious beliefs, and many were disillusioned by the lack of religious freedom in some of the original colonies.  In this situation, the Founding Fathers devised a form of government whose purpose can be succinctly stated:  Protect the freedom to practice one’s religious beliefs while preventing adherents of a particular religious denomination from imposing their beliefs or behavioral codes on others.  In effect, religious people have a voice in a dialogue designed to formulate policies and laws, but they, like others, must commit themselves to respectful efforts to convince others of the morality of the imperatives they embrace.

        Today, however, the boundaries of the arena which governs the question of the role of religious beliefs in the political arena reflect several centuries of contentious dialogue between adherents of the Hobbesian and Lockean versions of the social contract.  Both versions focus on relationships among detached individuals;  both eliminate any reference to religious beliefs from the form of life defined by their diverging versions of the social contract;  and both endow the assumption that self-interest governs interactions between and among individuals with moral authority.  And when this analysis of human motivations dominates, a political discourse indebted to Hobbes and Locke seems to be validated by experiences generated by a repertoire of judgments and strategies whose appearance of spontaneity hides their formative power on longings, passions and desires.

            (POLEMICAL ASIDE:  This political arena licences endless configurations indebted to Hobbes’ totalitarianism, Locke’s individualism, Luther’s insistence on the autonomy of the secular realm, Calvin’s efforts to implement a theocracy, and assorted biblical themes.  Each configuration encodes a conceptual quagmire.  Thus, Christians who embrace the Republican party as the repository of gospel imperatives replace the concern with social justice voiced by the prophets with a bizarre wedding of a rank individualism and a hidden violation of the autonomy of the secular realm.  To justify their exercise of political power, they wed Luther’s championing of the individual with Calvin’s commitment to a theocracy.  In this context, the echoes of biblical themes which they hear in President Reagan’s rhetoric allow them to accept his political agenda as the good old biblical belief that God rewards the good and punishes the wicked.  By definition, what they have is theirs because they earned it, and it ought not be taken from them to finance welfare programs for those who are unproductive.

             Consciously or not, President Reagan was a master at evoking visceral responses from Protestants.  His agenda is clearly stated in both his inaugural addresses.  In a marked departure from predecessors who invoked what Robert Bellah refers to as the American secular religion, he presented capitalism as a form of life that would ultimately restore sinful humans to a paradisical existence, reveal the mysterious ways that God works in human sinfulness (greed), and validate the belief that God rewards the good and punishes the evil.  And in a disguised appeal to the Protestant protest against salvation through obedience to law, he insisted that government intervention (regulation) obstructed the ability of capitalism to fulfill its promise.  Faith, in turn, called for a trust in the operation of “an invisible hand.”

            In sum, President Reagan presented Capitalism as a divinely constituted form of life that would reveal how God’s activity in human sinfulness was working to recover a paradisical existence for all human beings.  From my perspective, however, this promise merely carries the economic model implicit in the Deuteronomic understanding of God’s covenant with Israel to its logical extreme.

           Sadly, the rhetoric of Democrats is also corrupted by a commitment to the Lockean theory which reduces human motivation to enlightened self-interest.  Though Democrats pretend to speak as prophets who give voice to the cries of the oppressed, dispossessed, marginalized, silenced and outcast in society, they easily become captive to special-interest groups who trade support for their agendas for support at the polling booth.  When they do, they diminish claims to speak with moral authority by participating in a discourse which fosters conflict by politicizing moral issues.

           In this arena, the Republican objection to welfare programs voices a determination to deny aid to wounded or disadvantaged individuals who find it difficult to take responsibility for their own lives.  To justify this stance, they frame the issue as a choice between Capitalism (with a capital C) and Socialism (as an attenuated version of a god-less Communism).  However, since these are hardly the only alternatives, I must reject a debate framed by a polar opposition between a Hobbesian commitment to a belief that “big government knows best” and a Lockean trust that individuals will act out of enlightened self-interest.  To reformulate the issue, I begin with a distinction between the personal and the political dimensions of human existence.

           The uses made of a language of rights illuminate the point at issue.  This language has a rich heritage.  As a conceptual offspring of a biblical concern with righteousness, it found expression in a rhetoric which invoked a “divine right of kings” to legimate the dictum, Vox Regis, vox Dei.  (“The voice of the king speaks as the voice of God.”)  In this context, however, the language of rights was designed to protect a hierarchically structured social order.  Centuries later, the belief in “natural rights” was wedded to belief in God in the passage in the Declaration of Independence which asserts that individuals are endowed with certain rights by their Creator.  But the deconstruction of a literary construct which depicted God as the author of natural rights had already been anticipated in and through the desacralization of society which ushered in the Modern Era.  Thus, in his contract-theory of society, Hobbes posited a natural “right of all to all” as the premise for his thesis that conflict among individuals legitimated by this right would provoke the “war of all against all”.  Centuries later, Locke subverted Hobbes’ thesis by redefining the notion of property.  Thus, to prevent the accumulation of property by emerging capitalists, he limited property to natural resources which one had transformed by one’s own labor.  And in place of a natural right of all to all, he endowed individuals with an equally natural, yet inalienable right to freedom.  (NB:  Marx exploited the language of rights implicit in Locke’s definition of property in the role he assigned to the notion of alienation in his system.)

        In this context, Wittgenstein’s insight that the meaning of a word is determined by its use in a distinctive form of life is once again revelatory.  Thus, when rights are used to protect an inalienable right to freedom by individuals who regard property as the source of security and the sign of accomplishment, they are transformed into personal possessions which must be jealously guarded and fiercely asserted.  So understood, they foster a stance which regards others as the Other and a process which generates a litagacious society.  -  But rights have a very different meaning in a political discourse which centers the social contract in a shared vulnerability.  Since a shared vulnerability voices a call for a participative involvement with individuals whose words or religious practices might even repell me, I willingly  support your right to speak or worship freely because I trust that you will support my right if I am in a comparable situation.  

            (Note in passing:  The use of respect as a moral notion suffers in rhetorics which exploit the language of enlightened self-interest fostered by both the Hobbesian and Lockean versions of the social contract.  In sum, these languages transmit an extensive repertoire of self-protective and/or manipulative judgments and strategies which are designed to silence any call for vulnerable and respectful self-revelations.  -  In marked contrast, an incarnational theology proclaims (1) that each of the three Persons in the triune God long to share intimately in the lives of all human beings, (2) that this longing urged the eternal Word to dwell among us, (3) that, because the Word incarnate is fully human as well as fully God, he loves all human beings passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully, and (4) that, because he experienced the same woundedness in his involvements with his closest disciples that we do with our loved ones, he is intimately involved with wounded individuals in potentially life-giving ways.  (NB:  His intensely personal involvement with them does not in any way minimize the tragedies experienced by some individuals.)

        To return to my objections to the notion of justice required by the meta-narrative which presents the crucifixion as reparation demanded by a just God for the sin of Adam:  Augustine’s doctrine of original sin provides a paradigm example of a theory designed to absolve God of responsibility for suffering and violence.  I.e., this doctrine asserts categorically that Adam’s sin was solely responsible for the radical disruption of a primordial state of existence designed to preserve the innocence of Adam and his offspring and to gratify their natural desires, and it attributes the condemnatory judgment inscribed in the doctrine to the workings of divine justice.  In so doing, however, it implies that a just God was compelled by a necessity of nature to declare that a single transgression irreparably severed any relationship between Creator and creatures. 

        This assumption implied that God’s judgment was merely a declaration of fact.  However, since Augustine’s reading of the story was influenced by the metaphor of power and judgment, it did not preclude an interpretation which viewed the expulsion from the Garden as punishment.  As a result, the language of reward and punishment shaped theological inquiries which promised a comprehensive and coherent system of doctrines in two significant ways.  One, the language itself used an uncritical acceptance of the metaphor of power and judgment implicit in Augustine’s doctrine of original sin to define the Covenant as a contractual relationship between God and creatures.  Two, in unrecognized ways, the metaphor of power and judgment located theological inquiries in a hierarchically structured vision of the whole of reality.  As a literary construct, this vision was indebted to the Babylonian myths which projected an empty literary space between a realm of deities and a realm of nature as the place where human agency and culture might flourish.  More directly, it was indebted to the medieval metaphor of the Two Books, which wove this empty literary space into the conception of an enduring, bounded text written in continuous prose.

       Given the role assigned to an empty literary space in this metaphor, it is hardly surprising that theologians who center their meta-narrative in a doctrine of original sin depict heaven, hell, purgatory and limbo as places and that purgatory is a place governed by time.  (If time is not an issue in eternity, there is no reason to suppose that Popes have the power to grant of Indulgences capable of shorting the stay of loved ones or oneself in purgatory.)

    Aquinas’ Summa Theologica will forever stand as the paradigm example of a theological inquiry designed to convince believers at all times and places of the truth of the comprehensive belief-system inscribed in a bounded and enduring text.  In this text, Augustine’s focus on a natural order provided a literary space for the natural law theory which Pope Benedict invokes as the grounds for an objective morality.  Here, I merely note (1) that God’s words to Abram, son of Terah, implicitly ruptured his natural ties to tribe and place and sent him forth on a journey into the unknown as Abraham of Yahweh and (2) a natural law ethics echoes Commandments codified as a definitive list of prescriptions and prohibitions.

    On my part, I frame my theological inquiries in biblical stories which call for passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful intereactions between and among unique individuals, not conformity to an objective moral order.  As I note repeatedly, these stories inscribed the vision of an incomprehensible God who entered human history at assignable places and times in face-to-face encounters with human beings endowed with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom.  As such, the writers who used stories to process Israel’s historical existence engaged in a dialogue of text with text designed to forge a language capable of discerning how this incomprehensible God was involved in situations involving interactions between and among individuals.  They were not concerned with metaphysical inquiries designed to expose a natural order.

    During the period when Israel’s identity and existence hung in the balance, stories consigned to writing provided the literary framework for the creative responses of Israel’s prophets to the potentially destructive situations in which the oppressed, dispossessed, marginalized, silenced and outcasts found themselves.  In effect. they wove the language forged by the narrative tradition into metaphors of intimacy which called those who wished to cooperate with God’s care and concern for the vulnerable to exercise a sympathetic imagination which enabled them to hear the cries of the wounded, though these cries would disturb their comfort zones and raise existential questions concerning the violence enshrined in the power-structures designed to protect the privileges of the powers-that-be.

                           ----

    From this perspective, I am horrified by the conception of God which functions as the god-term in the meta-narrative espoused by Pope Benedict XVI.  To present the Incarnation as a response to the sin of Adam, this conception must incorporate a belief that a decree demanding the cruxifixion of God’s own Son in reparation for human sinfulness was somehow just.  First and foremost, I cannot believe that the incarnation was a response to Adam’s sin.  And as a committed opponent of capital punishment, I cannot believe that condemning anyone to a cruel death is morally justifiable.

     Since I read the Jewish Scriptures as literature, I must also question Augustine’s doctrine of original sin which, at the dawn of the Modern Era, played an essential role in the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant polemicists.  Here, Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith provides an easy target.  Traditionally, being saved involved being transformed.  To replace a traditional language of salvation with a language of justification, Luther had to insist that a previously severed relationship between God and the individual was transformed, but not the individual.  In effect, he had to insist that the call to accept the reparation made by the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross as a pure gift restored the relationship severed by the sin of Adam , but left the justified totally sinful.  (His famous description of the effects of justification by faith alone:  Totus simul justus et peccator.  (“Simultaneously totally justified and totally sinful.”

      Returning to the Distinction between Event and Process 

    Because the justification of a severed relationship left individuals totally sinful, it had to occur as an event rather than as a transforming process.  Nonetheless, the working of justification echoed the traditional Catholic belief it was designed to replace.  That belief held that Jesus’ sacrificial death on the Cross merited a repository of sanctifying grace which individuals merited by doing good works, receiving the Sacraments and fulfilling the conditions required to gain an Indulgence.  To reduce the gospel message to a doctrine which offered certainty of salvation, Luther rejected the efficacy of a Sacramental system administered by an ordained clergy, the transforming power of good works, and the scandalous way that the conditions for gaining Indulgences were tied to monetary contributions to a hierarchically structured institution.  To dramatize his protest, he insisted that justification by faith alone was pure gift.  But he supplemented the dictum, Totus simul justus et peccator, with a metaphor which compared the resulting state of existence to “snow on a dung heap”.  And any literate reader must note that the metaphorical reference to snow echoed the the traditional belief that Jesus’ sacrificial death merited “something” that could be applied to sinful individuals.

           (At Revival Meetings, the event which justifies is usually defined as the acceptance of Jesus as one’s personal Savior.  Presumably, a process involving a confessions of utter sinfulness and the acceptance of justification by faith alone does not count as a work.  Presumably, too, it replaces the impersonality of mediated relationships with an intensely personal relationship.  But I know of no such relationship which is not profoundly transforming.)

     Here, then, I must question the economic model inscribed in Luther’s description of the workings of justification by faith alone and in a meta-narrative which implies that the eternal Word would not have become incarnate if Adam had not sinned.  At first glance, Luther’s rejection of the supposition that grace could be merited appears to replace the economic model with a language of gift.  From this perspective, a confession of one’s inescapable sinfulness and the profession of the belief in the efficacy of Jesus’ sacrificial death would be a preparation to receive the gift, not a work which merited salvation.  But the economic model is foundational to a doctrine which describes Jesus’ sacrifice as a act which made fitting reparation for our sinfulness.  As a result, the language of justification echoes the language of redemption, metaphorical references to a depository of sanctifying grace, and the belief that God rewards the good and punishes the evil which is implicit in any promise that this grace can somehow be merited.

    In marked contrast, an incarnational theology rejects the use of the economic model entirely.  On the foundational level, it offers an alternative to Luther’s transformation of a traditional distinction between faith and works into a polar opposition.  In its own right, this alternative enables lovers to process experience in ways that discern the many ways that Jesus’ love for us often comes to us through one another.  And to aid the processing of experiences with others, it takes seriously Jesus’ statement, “Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me.”

    In my years as a priest, I have experienced countless ways that Jesus has come to me and to others with whom I have been passionately, vulnerably, respectfully and faithfully involved.  His presence has been particularly apparent in encounters with individuals who were able to pour out their pain, anger, anxieties, shame and guilt because I was willing to listen without judgment or agenda.  These graced moments were never simply given.  In some instances, trust remained a constant issue.  But processing graced moments did not involve a confession of utter sinfulness, a belief that Jesus’ death paid the price for our sinfulness, or a hope that this encounter would count as a good work which merited sanctifying grace.  The misplaced debate generated by the distinction between faith and works was simply irrelevant.  (The processing of experience always involved a determined exposure of the limitations of linguistic formulations framed by an either - or.)

        (To transform a traditional distinction between faith and works into a polar opposition, Luther had to add “alone” to Paul’s distinction between justification by faith and salvation through works.  And he then used this addition to legitimate his exclusion of the Epistle of James from the Canon of the New Testament writings which Christian theologians had accepted without question for centuries.  But my involvements with wounded persons make it quite impossible for me to imagine how a confession of inescapable sinfulness is supposed to work.  As I grow older, I spend more and more time coming to terms with my past history.  And I am often filled with gratitude for the way that Jesus’ involvement with me has brought new life out of events in my past that I most regret.  When I compare these experiences to the call for a confession of utter sinfulness, I must conclude (1) that such a confession is textured by a doctrine of original sin rather than by a word spoken to me by the indwelling Spirit and (2) that group dynamics contributes significantly to the emotional intensity evoked by a response to an altar call.  At the moment, this intensity seems to bear witness to the profundity of the experience, and its ecstatic character seems to carry one beyond a self-centered existence.  In biblical terms, however, it is a mountain-top experience akin to the experience of Peter, James and John on Mt. Tabor.  In this story, Jesus countered Peter’s desire to capture this experience timelessly, voiced as a desire to erect an altar, by taking them down from the mountain-top and involving them in a journey designed to transform them through their responses to others in everyday situations.  From this perspective, it seems obvious that a momentary sense of being utterly sinful, fatally flawed, inherently  corrupt or irredemably self-centered may remain superficial if it does not draw one to be involved with others in transforming ways.

        In the same vein, I cannot see how reflections capable of probing one’s in-most depths do not count as work.  Consequently, I suspect that those who pretend to read the Scriptures without interpretation suppose that an intense and ecstatic experience frees them not only from sinfulness, but also from prejudice, a will to power, or any other potentially distorting human failing.  As I noted earlier, however, the assumption that any text can be read literally is as suspect as the supposition that a single emotional experience can penetrate tangled feelings and touch the very core of one’s being.

         As an analytic philosopher, therefore, I suggest a parallel between Luther and Descartes.  Both played crucial roles in the restructuring of thought that ushered in the Modern Era.  The medieval world-view depicted a hierarchically structured universe with the earth at its center.  As the creation of a rational and purposive God, the earth inscribed a moral order which called for conformity on the part of all God’s creatures.  As the Modern Era dawned, the collapse of this constrictive world-view evoked enthusiasm for discovery and creativity.  And in this context, Descartes and Luther emerged as champions of a myth of pure beginnings populated by unique individuals.

         On his part, Luther assumed that a confession of utter sinfulness would strip away human flaws and allow the Scriptures to speak to sinners as an unmediated word of God which calls them to stand naked before God and accept justification by faith alone.  In a way that is largely ignored by his literary heirs, he encoded the metaphor of individuality implicit in this call in a slogan which celebrated “private interpretation” of the Scriptures.  (As a reaction to a medieval ecclesiology which reserved interpretation of both Scripture and Tradition to the Pope, the slogan annointed individuals as their own Popes.)  In the same vein, Descartes promised that a rigorous application of his methodical doubt would yield a certain starting point for inquiries which allowed reality to show itself without distortion.  Quite explicitly, both the confession of utter sinfulness and the methodical doubt were designed to free honest searchers from the hold of “a dead hand from the past” and from the assumptions, prejudices and pretensions of the theological and philosophical traditions.

         I must note, however, that postmodernist genealogies of morals and archeologies of knowledge have shown the impossibility of escaping entirely from the formative power of one’s personal history.   Or, from another perspective, they have shown that even the most rigorous application of the methodical doubt cannot yield a god-like perspective capable of sorting out the tangled relationships among language, experience and reality exhaustively.

        Albeit from a different perspectve, my formulation of the differences between a meta-narrative grounded in a doctrine of original sin (and a conditional formulation of the Covenant) and one framed by the hymn in the Prologue of John exposes (1) the conceptual sleight-of-hand encoded in the promise that a confession of utter sinfulness would allow the Scriptures to speak as an unmediated word of God and (2) the will to power enshrined in Pope Benedict’s efforts to silence voices which question his authority over the Catholic theological tradition.

        The parallel between Luther and Descartes does not imply that Luther’s literary heirs assume that they speak from a god-like perspective.  Rather, they pretend that their “literal readings” issue from a purified core of their being.  Historically, this assumption is encoded in the slogan which Luther used to endow individuals right to the “private interpretation” of the Scriptures.  Today, however, Fundamentalists impose an orthodoxy which would ensure my explusion from a community of the elect.)

    I suggest, therefore, that Luther’s reading of the Scriptures involves a conceptual sleight-of-hand.  His call for a confession of utter sinfulness is designed to enable individuals to stand naked before their God, while the reference to nakedness validates a reading which attributes the awareness of nakedness to a transgression of the prohibition against moral discourse.  In this story, Adam exists in a state of immediate presence, fullness and totality.  He does not experience internal turmoil, and he and Eve are not aware that they are naked.  Nonetheless, his aching sense of loneliness implies some awareness of a longing for deepening involvement with another person.  By extension, it suggests that he has a moral center which cannot be acknowledged as long as he obeys Yahweh’s prohibition against risking the discovery of the difference between good and evil.  In his doctrine of original sin, however, Augustine does not question the morality of Yahweh’s blatant effort to exert authority over moral discourse.  Instead, he traces his own inner turmoil to Adam’s transgression and supplements this attribution with the suggestion that Satan, the father of lies, orchestrates the many ways that we try to avoid standing naked before God.

    In my Christian Ethics:  An Ethics of Intimacy, I suggest that Luther’s use of a metaphor which calls individuals to stand naked before God can be traced his own longing for intimacy.  But his embrace of the metaphor of individuality inherent in Augustine’s inward turn trapped him in a discourse which could only promise instant intimacy (without the need for transforming interactions).  As a result, the use he made of the meta-narrative which generated and legitimated a language of redemption grounded his doctrine of justification by faith alone in the very economic model he sought to escape.

    Sadly, Catholic polemicists allowed Luther’s reformulation of a traditional distinction between faith and works as a polar opposition to set the terms for a misplaced debate.  But my reading of Romans revolves around passages in the text which subvert a doctrine of justification by faith alone.  Thus, in Chapter One, Paul’s description of a primordial relationship between God and human beings is closer to the description developed in Martin Buber’s I - Thou than to the doctrine of original sin which is an essential component in a doctrine of justification by faith alone.  Moreover, in Chapters Seven and Eight, Paul assigns the Spirit a significant role in a transforming process which fosters an ever-deeper intimacy with Jesus or opens one to the gifts of the Spirit enumerated in Galations.  And as an analytic philosopher who respects the workings of words, I cannot see how these pregnant passages can be reconciled with a doctrine which asserts that justification works like snow on a dung-heap.

    When I read Romans, I also find intimations of an incarnational theology.  But the literary framework of such a theology awaited the inclusion of a liturgical hymn in the Prologue of John.  Since this hymn begins with a God who is Love rather than a doctrine of original sin, it presents a vision which is closer to Buber’s reading of the Jewish Scriptures than to either Paul’s or Luther’s.  More importantly, it explicitly places the eternal Word at the center of (1) a God who is Love, (2) the act of creation, (3) the course of human history, and (4) the lives of each and every human being.  With its reference to “love following on love”, it presents the incarnation as the willingness of the eternal Word to share intimately in the lives of all human beings.  And once the doctrine of the Trinity was explicitly formulated, this reference to God’s over-flowing love was enriched in a way that endows the Father and the Spirit with the same longing for intimate involvements with each and every unique individual.

    In sum, the Prologue describes God’s over-flowing love as both ever-faithful and all-inclusive.  And there is no way that this description can be reconciled with either a belief that a single sin severed the relationship between God and Adam’s offspring or the doctrine of exclusive election implicit in a doctrine of justification by faith alone.  Consequently, I am horrified by a theological discourse which implies that the requirements of divine justice compelled God to demand a cruel crucifixion in reparation for any sin whatever and that divine mercy sent the eternal Word to suffer a painful and humiliating death as the only way to placate a wrathful Judge.  So I cannot apologize for critiquing that discourse in a way that may border on over-kill.

    To conclude this section, I must note that a recent talk by Pope Benedict XVI reveals, starkly, his debt to Augustine’s doctrine of original sin and to the language of redemption.  (The talk also reveals significant points of contact between his use of the meta-narrative I reject and Luther’s use of the same meta-narrative.)  Thus, in an address given to a general audience in early December, 2008, the Pope framed his message with the assertion that it is palpably evident to everyone that original sin exists because we all see that “a contradiction exists in our very being”.  To dramatize the point at issue, he added:  “From this power of evil over our souls a filthy river of evil has developed that has poisoned human history.”  For his positive message, he asserted with equal confidence that this contradiction provokes a desire for redemption, and he described the promised redemption in a metaphorical reference to a “world of justice, peace and goodness”.  Strangely, there is no reference to the transforming power of a love which heals a deep woundedness.

    The meta-narrative I embrace begins with God’s over-flowing love rather than with an original sin.  Since we are made in the image of a triune God who is love, we long for deepening person-to-person involvements.  However, because birth plunges us into a journey into the unknown, we are often wounded, and the language we use to process our experiences favors emotional reactions that may serve us well socially, but do violence to the longing for intimacy.  As a result, sin is a break with intimacy, and we break with intimacy because we are wounded, not because we are wicked.

    In some cases, vulnerable individuals who have been shamefully abused in their early years seek to normalize the betrayal by inflicting abuse on others.  Without question, they do evil things.  In other cases, the powers-that-be do anything necessary to protect the social and economic structures which benefit them.  To do so, however, they must blind themselves to a complicity in evil which is palpably evident to the heirs of Israel’s great prophets.

    Those who smugly dismiss the cries of the afflicted did not begin life as inherently or inescapably self-centered, and the internal turmoil which moral agents experience is not generated by a contradiction at the core of our existence.  Such turmoil is the result of an eruptive self-consciousness that makes vulnerable self-revelations possible.  And the call for such self-revelations reveals that human discourse is moral discourse and that moral issues lie, inextricably, at the core of every human action and assertion.

     In the address noted above, therefore, the Pope reveals a tragic inability to free himself from the dualism which lies at the center of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin.  Even his metaphorical description of the results of redemption are centered in relationships among detached individuals, not in passionate, vulnerable, respectful and faithful involvements between and among all human beings.

         The Literary Origins of the Meta-Narrative

 

    Earlier, I suggested that a language of redemption which reduces the crucifixion to an act of reparation for an original sin trivializes the gospel message.  Quite obviously, those who use a doctrine of biblical inerrancy to supplement the pretence that they read the Scriptures literally ignore the literary origins of the doctrine of original sin and of the language of redemption which medieval theologians extracted from the Scriptural text.  In sum, they pretend to read this text as people without navels.

    On my part, a compulsion to live with intellectual integrity has made me painfully aware of the difficulties involved in freeing my thought and experience from the hold of a theological discourse that perpetuated the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant authorities.  At the same time, my compulsion to write forced me to search for a structure capable of integrating my tangled assumptions, divergent strands in the Hebrew narrative traditions, traditional formulations of theological issues, and insights indebted to others in my understanding of how God was active in human history and in my own life.

    For honest searchers, such narrative structures are neither self-evident nor merely given, and even fruitful ones never resolve all anomalies or eliminate all loose ends.  E. g., Derrida’s critique of Structuralism both enriched and complicated my search by showing that every structure has a hollow center.  In his use of this critique to expose the hierarchical structure implicit in any claim to speak with authority, Derrida noted (1) that anyone who hoped to forge a coherent vision capable of imposing a non-violent closure on endless questioning would have to fill the hollow center of its structure with a god-term and (2) that the god-term chosen by individuals who pretended to speak with authority revealed more about the individuals themselves than about the interplay among language, experience and reality.  Once I grasped the radical import of this critique, I was able to understand works on literary criticism which argued that individuals cannot pretend to speak in their own voices.  By implication, if neither the god-term I advocated nor my own convictions could legitimate the beliefs or values I advocated, I could not pretend to speak with authority, and I could not expect others to accept without question the god-term I used to lend coherence to the moral discourse or the belief-system I espoused.  Consequently, to discover my core beliefs and values, I had to commit myself to a search for a god-term that would allow the moral discourse and a belief-system I espoused to speak for itself.

        (Yeat’s lament, “The center will not hold”, signaled the collapse of Modernism.)

    In this regard, Pope Benedict’s reliance on Aquinas’ hierarchically structured world-view reveals an embarrassing ignorance of the import of the postmodernist question, “Whose voice is language?”.  In the domain of moral discourse, he presents himself as the divinely annointed guardian of a voice of reason which is threatened relativistic and subjectivist philosophies and as the valid interpretor of a tradition propelled by a creative tension between faith and reason.  Here, I do not mean to question the sincerity of his belief that an honest use of a conception of reason which generated Aquinas’ synthesis of theology and philosophy would convince reasonable individuals of the truth of the meta-narrative he seeks to impose,  But I confess that inability to probe the ways that his own personal history informs his determination to silence dissent on a range of theological inquiries fills me with sadness, and I grieve over the violence inflicted on honest searchers by the terms he seeks to impose on Catholic theologians.

    This violence is especially evident in the Pope’s position on the thorny issue of ecumenical dialogue.  To bolster his position, the Pope must invoke the meta-narrative which describes the workings of God’s saving activity throughout human history in a way that perpetuates the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians.  Given the ways that this debate has formulated theological issues, it is hardly surprising that Catholic theologians too often embrace the meta-narrative which TV evangelists use to justify their insistence that Jesus’ submission to a cruel cruxifixion offered the only sacrifice which could make fitting reparation for the sinfulness of Adam and his offspring.  In a more subtle way, the Pope uses this same meta-narrative to legitimate the language of redemption encoded in his emphasis on the Eucharist as a ritual re-enactment of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross.  And in a less subtle way, he needs the economic model implicit in the language of redemption to justify his revival of the practice of granting Indulgences.

        (A REPETITIOUS SUMMARY:  From a critical perspective, the meta-narrative in question reduces God’s love to an interplay between justice and mercy.  In its own right, this interplay implies that God is more concerned with human sinfulness than with intimate involvement with human beings.  In turn, that focus on sin lends legitimacy to the contractual model of the Covenant signed and sealed by the incarnation of the eternal Word and to a language of “redemption”.  In this language, the implication implicit in the connotations of  “buying back” depends on a notion of justice implicit in the biblical stories which depict the covenant between God and Israel as a conditional contract imposed by God on a stubborn and stiff-necked people.

       (As I noted earlier, these stories counter complaints that Israel’s God had abandoned her or betrayed the terms of his covenant with her.  By implication, any punishment a just God inflicted was merely giving Israel her due.

       (I can understand how the formative power of this language obscured an irreconcilable difference between a meta-narrative which implies that the eternal Word would not have become incarnate if Adam had not sinned and the centrality of the Word in the very act of creation in the Prologue of John.  But I cannot understand how both Catholic and Protestant theologians failed to question the rule of a metaphor of power and judgment over the meta-narrative which centered Jesus’ saving action in the Crucifixion.  From a biblical perspective, this meta-narrative ignored passage which compared God’s involvement with all human beings to a marriage union.  And from an experiential perspective, its emphasis on reparation fails to give voice to the universal human longing for intimacy with God and other human beings.

       (Sadly, the language of redemption (with its connotations of reparation) seems to satisfy those who repeat formulaic assertions that Jesus’ sacrificial death paid the price for our sins or that we are saved by the blood of Lamb.  But I can only attribute its seductive power to the ability of this meta-narrative to generate countless re-configurations of the doctrines and conceptions it privileges.  (Raise a question, and some theologian will formulate a variation which defuses its threat.)

        (Some re-tellings of the meta-narrative border on the bizarre.  One such version uses Paul’s frequent description of sin as slavery to justify the assertion that Adam’s rejection of God’s dominion at the urgings of Satin condemned him and his offspring to slavery to Satan.  In this version, Satan, not divine justice, demands the cruel and humiliating death of God’s own Son as the price to be paid for his willingness to surrender total control over his slaves.  In this demand, Satan appeals to divine justice, but it, too, uses the notion of divine justice that I find so horrifying.

        (The suggestion that a single act could transform Adam’s natural allegiance to God into an unnatural allegience to Satan would lend a certain legitimacy to a pretence that the enormity of the betrayal merited such a harsh sanction.  And since the story revolves around Yahweh’s demand for total obedience to his prohibition, the invocation of a language of betrayal invokes overtones of a language which defines sin as infidelity to a commitment to share a journey into the unknown.  But the rule of the metaphor of power and judgment implicit in the doctrine of original sin privileges a definition of sin as the transgression of a prohibition against moral discourse.

         (To repeat once again:  Details in the Yahwist’s story of Adam and Eve suggest that the earliest humans lacked the knowledge and experience to make the commitment in question to either Yahweh or Satan.  Consequently, I suggest that only those who view human existence as a battleground on which God and Satan vie for supremecy can suppose that the serpent in the story was Satan in disguise and that this adversary of God used God’s own understanding of just relationships to demand the crucifixion of God’s own Son as the price to be paid to him for releasing sinful humans from this commitment.

          (Here, I note with sadness the way that distinction between mortal and venial sin inscribed in the Baltimore Catechism endowed a single event with momentous consequences.  Presumably, moral sins severed the relationship between God and the sinner completely, though participation in the Sacrament of Reconciliation could repair the damage.  In the same vein, I note with sadness the way that the dualism at the core of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin legitimated a distinction between a natural and a supernatural realm.  And since this distinction in turn lent credence to the supposition that the eternal Word would not have become incarnate if Adam had not sinned, an analysis of the way that the spatial metaphor enshrined in medieval distinctions among four enduring places, heaven, hell, purgatory and limbo raises questions concerning the meta-narrative itself.

          (Thus, iIn the medieval period, this spatial metaphor was framed by a more encompassing metaphor which situated the earth at the center of a “Great Chain of Being”.  For our present purposes, we need only note that Aquinas’ baptism of Aristotle committed him to the vision of hierarchically structured universe which yielded a strange thesis contained in the theological manuals used in most seminaries in the middle of the twentieth century.  According to this thesis, the Pope must reside in Rome because Rome is the center of natural order implanted in the earth and in each of its inhabitants by a rational and purposive Creator.  In a more popular form, the argument found expression in the metaphorical assertion that all roads lead to Rome.

           (In this context, the logic of the spatial model implicit in this vision committed Aquinas and his literary heirs to a curiously impersonal understanding of the workings of God’s saving activity.  Concretely, the influence of the distinctions inherent in references to heaven, hell, purgatory and limbo can be found in the categorization of sins which defined mortal sins as single events which condemned unrepentant agents to hell, while Purgatory was a place of suffering designed to purify flawed individuals for entry into heaven, and the length of anyone’s stay was determined by a need to offer reparation for sins they had committed.  To close the circle, unbaptized infants were consigned to Limbo, a place of natural happiness, since they had done nothing to deserve hell.

            (As a framework capable of legitimating a place called Limbo, this strange description of God’s activity required a distinction between a natural and a supernatural realm of existence.  On its part, the distinction is indebted to the Aristotelian assumption that references implicit in descriptive concepts must place the entity in question in a clear and distinct category.  Inexorably, this assumption led theologians to assume that references to grace, like those which referred to nature, must point to a created entity, and this conclusion was encoded in a metaphorical reference to a repository of sanctifying and actual graces purportedly merited by Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. (Since unbaptized infants had never received or merited the sanctifying grace, they could not participate in a supernatural realm of existence.)

             (In his protests against the granting of Indulgences, Luther targeted references to Purgatory, but he could not escape entirely from the theological discourse he rebelled against.  Consequently, it is hardly surprising that his doctrine of justification by faith alone implied that Jesus’ sacrifice merited something.  Thus, in the metaphor he used to supplement his famous dictum, Totus simul justus et peccator, he compared the result of the rectification of a severed natural relationship between God and Adam’s offspring to “snow on a dung heap.”  (Recall that his dictum explicitly asserts that those who accept justification by faith alone are totally (timelessly) justified, yet remain totally and inescapably sinful.  The comparison with “snow on a dung-heap” implies that justification clothes one with something.)

            (On a broader canvas, Luther’s protest targeted the role of the clergy in the Sacramental system.  Nonetheless, Catholic and Protestant polemicists shared the belief that, since Jesus was the divine Son of God, his sacrifice merited an unlimited deposit of grace.  The difference between them can be found in the question I find so obnoxious, “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Savior?”.  As the question reveals, the Protestant tradition sought to replace the impersonality inherent in a doctrine of sanctifying grace with a personal relationship with Jesus.  Sadly, it replaces the call for a life-long quest for deepening intimacy with Father, Jesus, the Holy Spirit and loved ones with an illusory promise of instant intimacy.

            (Here, I freely confess that, for years, I did not question the role played by the spatial and economic models implicit in the theology I received through the Baltimore Catechism and the manuals used by my professors in courses designed to prepare me for my life as a priest in a hierarchically structured institution.  As a young priest, my sermons presented the Sacraments as channels of sanctifying (and actual) grace to those who received them worthily, not as intensely personal encounters with Jesus at critical moments in one’s life.  And I promoted Indulgences to be gained on November 2nd (the feast of the Poor Souls) as ways to hasten the passage of souls in Purgatory to eternal bliss.

                 (For those who have never been exposed to practices “guaranteed” to make reparation for one’s own sins or the sins of others, the practice of granting Indulgences involves an interplay between the belief in a deposit of sanctifying grace and the distinction among states of existence.  Theologically, the practice implies that the Pope is a divinely constituted dispenser of a deposit of sanctifying grace.  By definition, a reigning Pope had the power to dispense this grace in a way that released sinners (oneself or others) from time they would otherwise have spent in Purgatory.  But even the Pope had no power over the place called Limbo.  In this place, infants who died without baptism would enjoy a purely natural happiness, but, because the sin of Adam severed a natural relationship between God and Adam’s offspring, they would be forever separated from parents who entered the kingdom of heaven.

                  (For centuries, ecclesiastical authorities ignored the incredible pain which references to Limbo inflicted on women who had miscarriages.  Recently, however, Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged that belief in Limbo was not part of the deposit of faith.  But he failed to disown the spatial and economic models at the center of the distinction among places, since this critique would undermine his commitment to a transcendalist (hierarchically structured or vertical) depiction of the human quest rather than an incarnational (horizontal or participative) theology.  In the same vein, whether he acknowledges the fact or not, his determination to perpetuate the granting of indulgences baptizes the spatial and econmic models inherent in Thomism.  And this worries me as much as his pre-dilection for Eucharistic celebrations designed to lend authority to a conception of a hierarchically structured institutional Church which I must reject.  My greatest disappointment, however, concerns his use of the language of redemption.  I object to this language on the grounds that it reduces God’s covenant with human beings to a contract and implies that salvation comes from without, not through transforming interactions.  To support these objections, I suggest (1) that the early stories in the Hebrew narrative tradition are centered in immediate interactions between God and Israel’s patriarchs and matriarchs, (2) that the vision inscribed in these stories differs radically from the vision inscribed in later stories which ties Israel’s positive and distinctive identity as God’s chosen people to observance of the Mosaic Law, and (3) that Israel’s great prophets projected metaphors designed to assure the Israelites of God’s intensely personal involvement in the lives of all.

         In sum, the early stories are centered in personal involvements between God and unique individuals and framed by a categorical form of the covenant which generated the prophetic celebrations of God’s ever-faithful love.  In marked contrast, the Deuteronomic storytellers reduced this Covenant to a conditional contract which, in turn, fostered the belief that God rewards the good and punishes the evil.  Given the period in which it flourished, this conditional formulation was used to save a belief in Israel’s exclusive election as God’s Chosen People and to counter complaints that promises made to Abraham were being endlessly deferred.  But this use required storytellers (1) to read the promises of land, prosperity and countless offspring literally and (2) to trace the insertion of the Mosaic Law as a mediator between God and Israel to theophanies in which Moses encountered God face-to-face.  (The insistence that no one can see the face of God and live is a later addition.  It is mocked in the story in which God shows Moses his backside.)

         To belabor the point at issue:  In the Yahwist’s story, the promises of land, prosperity and offspring functioned as symbols of a fullness of life.  When they were taken literally, they served a very different purpose.  When Israel prospered in the so-called promised land, they functioned as signs of Israel’s election as God’s chosen people.  And when Israel’s very existence was threatened, they could be used to place the blame for the seemingly endless deferral of the fulfillment of concrete promises on Israel’s failure to observe the prescriptions and prohibitions encoded in the Mosaic Law.

         Sadly, early Christian polemicists were more inclined to accept Paul’s characterization of God’s covenant with Israel as a covenant of Law than to wrestle with the implications of Hosea’s use of a marriage-union model to describe God’s covenant with Israel.  And as the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians shows, the cost has been immense.  First and foremost, the conditional formulation of the covenant emphasizes obedience to a God who is Lord, Lawgiver and Judge rather than fidelity to a God of ever-faithful love who is intimately involved with all human beings.  By definition, a demand for obedience inscribes a power structure which, in any form whatever, stifles calls for the vulnerable self-revelations which alone promote a quest for ever-deepening intimacy.  And from a biblical perspective, a relationship so structured does violence to the Yahwist’s and Elohist’s fascination with intensely personal interactions between Israel’s patriarchs and matriarchs.

        In this context, I suggest that an aging Augustine fell victim to his youthful fascination with a Manichean dualism when he attempted to impose his doctrine of original sin on a polemically structured theological discourse.  First and foremost, any polemically structured discourse evokes a hidden will to power in those who enter the fray.  As a result, Augustine’s determination to counter the works of Pelagius evoked a will to power that blinded him to implications of his own hermeneutical theory.  In its own right, this theory promised to integrate readings of the Old and New Testaments in a coherent vision of the entire course of human history.  But it did not imply that biblical stories could be read as factual accounts of actual events.  In his use of the story of Adam and Eve as the biblical warrant for his doctrine of original sin, however, he read the story as history.

      

            Augustine’s Doctrine of Original Sin

    Augustine wove the creation account composed five centuries later by the so-called Priestly Author into his violent misreading of the story of Adam and Eve.  (If details matter, the story depicts Yahweh as a craftsman who fails to anticipate that Adam would be lonely.)  In the resulting synthesis, the spoken word of God created a natural order as a place of immediate presence, fullness and totality and, to protect this primordial state, denied Adam access to the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  At first glance, Yahweh seems to be acting like an oriental potentate who demands total submission to his every whim.  In the synthesis, however, the demand for obedience can be viewed as Yahweh’s effort to protect human innocence and a fulfilled human existence.  In either interpretation, the prohibition course reserved authority over moral issues to a Creator rather a craftsman.  And if the two are kept in play, the first implies that a transgression which violated the natural relationship between Creator and creature disrupted the entire natural order, while the second projected a literary space for a notion of justice which erased hints of arbitrariness on the part of Yahweh.

    Over the course of centuries, differing descriptions of the disruption played crucial roles in theologies which implied that the eternal Word would not have become incarnate if Adam had not sinned.  Thus, in Augustine’s misreading of the story, a God who is Lord, Lawgiver and Judge had to decree that Adam’s transgression forever severed the natural relationship between Creator and creatures.  Here, however, Augustine made ambiguous use of his own hermeneutical theory.  In its own right, the theory generated readings designed to show that characters and events in Jewish history pre-figured characters and events recorded in the Christian Scriptures, as a means of showing that the Judaic-Christian Scriptures set forth a coherent vision of the entire course of human history.  As such, the theory could use a reading which presented Adam as an archetypal figure to support a conclusion that his archetypal sin was somehow imprinted on his offspring in a way which left them unable to escape from the same self-centered existence.

    In subtle ways, however, Augustine’s juxtaposition of Adam’s disobedience with the obedient submission of Jesus to a sacrificial death on the cross supplemented his reading of the story as a factual account of an actual event with connotations indebted to his hermeneutical theory.  In a futile effort to transcend the dualism at the core of his doctrine of original sin, he suggested that the grace merited by Jesus’ sacrifice repaired the severed relationship and elevated the saved to a supernatural existence.           (I suggest, therefore, that Augustine’s youthful embrace of a Manichean dualism contributed in subtle ways to his doctrine of original sin.  I suggest, too, that this dualism is operative in Pope Benedict XVI’s reference to the “experience” of a contradiction at the core of our being.)

    Centuries later, Luther encoded the dualism at the center of Augustine’s doctrine of original sin in a doctrine of justification by faith alone which implied that the rectification of a severed relationship between Creator and creatures left those who received it both totally sinful and totally justified.

    In the late Middle Ages, Scotus sought to formulate an incarnational theology capable of transmitting the way that Francis of Assisi had lived the gospel message.  In so doing, he laid the literary foundations for a form of life which offered a very different understanding of the effects of structures which perpetuated violence against human beings.  The differences between his interpretation of the gospel message and the interpretation encoded in Aquinas’ Summa Theologica are striking.  Thus, the vision encoded in the meta-narrative embraced by Aquinas (1) depicted God as a Lord, Lawgiver and Judge who had to demand the sacrificial death of his own Son in reparation for Adam’s sin and (2) implied that the incarnation of the eternal Word would not have happened if Adam had not sinned.  In marked contrast, Scotus’ philosophical inquiries led him to emphasize the infinity of God.  In its own right, this vision (1) recovered the emphasis on the incomprehensibility of God in the early stories in the Hebrew narrative tradition and in the prophets and (2) committed him to the meta-narrative inscribed in the Prologue of John which places the eternal Word at the center of the act of creation, describes the motivation for both creation and the Incarnation to an over-flowing love, and emphasizes a later passage in John which asserts that the Word became incarnate so that we might have life and have it more abundantly.

    This meta-narrative recovered the insistence of Israel’s prophets that tangled moral issues lie, inextricably, at the core of human actions and assertions.  In Scotus’ incarnational theology, the prophetic insight revealed that human discourse is moral discourse.  From this perspective, Yahweh’s prohibition of moral discourse was both dehumanizing and depersonalizing.  Since Scotus centered his analyses of moral issues in a belief in an infinite, incomprehensible God, he had to insist that the intensely personal involvement of such a God in the lives of unique individuals could not be limited by an objective moral order, even if that God had created such an order.

                         Summary

    Augustine’s doctrine of original sin set the stage for the misplaced debate between Catholic and Protestant theologians.  In the present day, its supposition that Adam’s sin severed a (solely) natural relationship continues to generate theological inquiries designed to provide the authoritative definition of the way (or ways) that God was involved with Adam, with the Israelites, and with the followers of Jesus Christ.  Sadly, those who engage in the misplaced debate do not question a reduction of divine love to an interplay between divine justice, which had to declare that Adam’s sin severed the natural relationship between Creator and creatures, and divine mercy, which sent God’s own Son to offer fitting reparation for sin.  And the uncritical acceptance of this supposition allows them to ignore repeated references to God’s ever-faithful love in the Scriptures as well as the description of divine love as God’s longing for intimate involvement with human beings which is implicit in the Prologue of John.

    To belabor a point made earlier:  This hymn places the eternal Word at the center of the act of creation and attributes the Incarnation to “love following on love.”  Scotus encodes this description in his famous dictum, “Amor est diffusivus sui” which can be translated as “love is self-diffusive”.  As the description of a process rather than an event, this understanding of divine love replaces the languages of redemption or justification with the assertion that the author of John attributed to Jesus:  “I have come that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”

    I suggest, therefore, (1) that a meta-narrative which refers to the crucifixion as the event that defines Jesus’ saving activity trivializes the gospel message, (2) that this meta-narrative enshrines a horrifying depiction of God as a just Judge who demands the cruel crucifixion in reparation for the offence against his honor, (3) that centering God’s saving or justifying activity in two discrete events does violence to the repeated references to God’s ever-faithful love in the Scriptures, (4) that the meta-narrative fosters the pretence that those who embrace it (and they alone) read the Scriptures literally, when, in point of fact, they read the Scriptures through a sophisticated literary code derived from Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, the belief-system forged by medieval Scholastics, and polemical interchanges between Catholics and Protestants over the past four centuries.

    One final note before I move on to other topics:  As I hop channels in search of something capable of attracting my interest, I occasionally pause to watch TV evangelists at work.  At first, I had difficulty in understanding why they so often invoked passages from the Old Testament, especially when they read these passages as factual records of historical events.  But repeated exposure to their preaching evoked a profound cynicism.  Quite obviously, they select passages which depict God as a wrathful God, prone to anger, because that they need such a conception of God to lend authority to the conception of God which is enshrined in Augustine’s harsh doctrine of original sin and in the distinction between justice and mercy at the core of the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

    Here, Pat Robertson can serve as the paradigm example of a TV evangelist who invokes the conception of a wrathful God for his own purposes.  In more than one instance, he has claimed that his prayers averted natural disasters which would otherwise have occurred because a just and wrathful God withdraw the shield of his protection from a people who dared to vote for Democrates.  In other utterances, he has described natural disasters as God’s punishment on a liberal tolerance of homosexuality.  Here, I make no apology for the suggestion that, by his use of this conception of God to legitimate his pretensions, he prostitutes the gospel message as a means to generate continued monetary support for his presence on TV. 

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