The City of God I,9: Why Bad Things Happen to Good People

So, I am reading Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans. Since I kind of want to do political theology based on the early Church, it is more or less mandatory reading, isn't it? I'll be posting down the things that strike me as interesting, mostly for future reference. I have only read parts of it before, even though Augustine was a kind of first love to me as a undergraduate.

Augustine's argument here is simply that everybody do commit some sins, so everybody deserves the bad things that happen to them. He qualifies this a bit later on, but what strikes me about this is how very "western" this kind of thinking in, perhaps even Augustinian. Augustine refers to the difference between laymen and ascetics. Even those that have chosen "a higher order of life" do commit the sin of not rebuking other peoples crimes.

This, I would argue, is an idea that is not very likely to show up in the eastern fathers. First of all, they would not actually refer to sin to answer the question, they would say that God lets bad things happen to people in order to make it possible for them to improve their way of life. "Without temptations, no one could ever be saved". (Isaac of Nineveh)

Secondly, at least among eastern ascetics, to argue that people should pay more attentions to other people's sins would be very unusual. In fact, I think that would be considered a very grave temptation!

Sin and Deification

While the deification view may at first glance appear to take sin and evil less seriously than the atonement view, it actually takes them more seriously. It views them not simply as individual failings for which human beings need forgiveness, but rather as all the forces - individual, systematic, institutional - that thwart the flourishing of God's creation. "Sin" is not mainly or only a personal problem, the solution for which is divine forgiveness. Rather, sin is living a lie, living contrary to the way the christic lens tells us is God's desire for all of us. "Evil", in this understanding, is to collective term for the ancient, intricate and pervasive networks of false living that have accumulated during human history.
Sallie McFague, Life Abundant, p. 185-186.

I think this understanding of sin and its relation to salvation has a lot of potential. McFague is here not actually dealing with sin in particular, and maybe it should be worked out a bit more. But I think a reading of the eastern fathers, for whom deification was the obvious way to understand salvation, would prove that McFague's interpretation is sound. They tend to use the tricky term "nature" to describe what is corrupted, but it would certainly be wrong to reduce this term to biology as we perhaps tend to do. History certainly place a great part in creating human nature.

Original Sin

All of the 20^th century theologians that I have read seem sceptical about the possibility of a meaningful use of the symbol “Original Sin”. There is just to much baggage attached to it. Especially in German and other languages that has a term that signifies “inherited sin” it is very problematical. Of course it is not about inheriting anything, not even Augustine believed that. And, no: it’s not about sex either.

Still I cannot see how we could possibly do without it. While sin in the sense I talked about yesterday has the individual as subject, for original sin the subject is humanity as a whole. Rahner has a very good point when he says that original sin is not really sin in the proper sense of the word, but only in an analogous sense. Exactly as sin is about the individual not being what he or she essentially is – free – Original sin is about humanity not realizing its freedom.

From the point of view of humanity, original sin is a tragedy. I will not enter into the discussion on the causes of original sin, I will just refer to Tillich, because his reading of genesis three is pure poetry. But from the point of view of the individual, original sin is a source of comfort. What original sin says is that it is not always within the power of the individual to do what is right. When we fail the guilt is not 100% ours to carry. Original sin is about adding the context to the formula. When an individual is making a choice, it is not only the free will of the person making the choice. This choice is affected by millions of previous choices, made by other people. When a person makes a choice, that person is affected by the social context, by upbringing and education, by values in the society and so on. The sum of all these things outside of the person that affects a moral act makes up original sin.

This is why original sin is a key concept when we want to understand the current cultural situation. There are structures in our culture that make it impossible to live a life that is not destructive. We all participate in those forces that are bringing the world to ruin, and more often than not because of lack of alternatives. The international trade laws and the way we produce food are good examples. It is near on impossible to go buy groceries without inflicting suffering and increasing the injustice in the world. Still we need groceries.

The thing with original sin is that its cause is not known. Even the myth in genesis three leaves the final cause open, it only shows the structure of sin. We cannot point our fingers and say: he did it. It is just there, and we have to live with it. But it still diffuses a bit of the guilt of the evil we cause. Even though we are the acting subjects, we are not totally free in the act.

It is, however, not a reason to resign. By trying to understand the history we can try to separate ourselves from the system that affects us, and by being aware we can limit the impact original sin has on our daily life.

Is there salvation from sin? This is what Christianity claims. In what way is the Christ-event related to this situation? This well have to be addressed in another post.

Sin, Identity and Destructive Culture

To write a book on sin is definitely on my list of things to do in life. This is not the appropriate moment for that, so here I will only share some ideas that I find important and relevant. I’m borrowing loads from Augustine and other fathers, as well as Tillich and Rahner here.

The doctrine of sin is one that is a bit different in the various Christian traditions. As with doctrinal differences in general this is a difference in language, (there, I said it!) and one can use whichever one want to, as long as one is aware of the differences. Protestants – if they know what they are talking about – tend to talk about sin as something in the human person, while Catholics and Orthodox tend to use the word for the an act or choice. They do not, however, teach that a sin is to brake moral code. This is not a Christian idea.

A proper doctrine of sin is a matter of balance. What one is trying to balance is the individuals freedom: On the one hand we are responsible for ourselves, on the other hand we are limited by our nature and history. Christian theology has gone to far in either direction many times. To over-emphasize responsibility is called Pelaginaism, and to over-emphasize dependence is somewhat misleadingly called Manichaeism.

In its essence sin is about turning away from God. But to understand sin one have to realize that to turn away from God is at the same time to turn away from oneself. This is, to me, the key to understanding sin – and at the same time, redemption. Sin causes us to be something else than we really are. And here we have another key point: sin is not our true nature: deepest down in our selves we are not sinners, but the Image of God. Sin is a layer above this image that distorts it, but does not destroy it. This means there can never be a conflict between what God wants me to be and what I want to be myself. Sin is what hinders me from being who I in “my heart of hearts” want to be.

So sin is about identity. But this could easily make us think that sin so defined has little to do with our day-to-day life. This is not the case. Sin in its essence is about who I am, but I am who I am only in my day-to-day life. Thus we are talking about choices and acts that are very ordinary, very practical. It can be anything, and everything. When we start to define certain acts as sins we are always missing the point, because there are no acts that are sins in themselves. They are only sins if they are betrayals of our true identities.

In an earlier post I said that God is against us as a culture that is on the way towards ruining the culture. If we understand ourselves as individuals as the Image of God in our innermost, than it should be clear that to take part in such a destructive culture is not to be in accordance with our true identities. When we, as we do, take part in a culture that lives on destroying the environment and creates human suffering in poorer countries, we are betraying ourselves and God in us.

According to Christian doctrine it is beyond the power of the individual to overcome sin. Only God can overcome sin and help us become ourselves.

As I said, I’m basing this to a degree on Tillich and Rahner. I would be intrigued to know what your favourite theologian has to say on the subject, as well as your own thoughts, of course!

God the Father and a Creation in Crisis

After warming up now in a few posts I think it is time to tackle what I consider a serious problem for Christian theology in a time of decline like ours. The most fundamental aspect of the Christian faith is the belief in God as creator of all there is. Some theologians like to separate between Gods creating work and his upholding work (i.e. Pannenberg) but I prefer to see the latter as a continuation of the first, and thus essentially two aspects of the same thing.

This doctrine is all the more important because it is a part of Christian doctrine that I think is quite accessible even to secularized humans, provided that you acknowledge the myth-status of the creation narratives in Genesis. Most human beings experience reverence faced with the grandness of nature, the miracle of new life and the joy of beauty, and many find it plausible to connect this reverence with something we can call God. Thus the doctrine of God as originator has long been considered a solid part of the Christian dogma on which one can build new interpretations of more tricky aspects of Christianity, such as the doctrine of sin and of salvation.

Because of this it can be considered deeply unsettling that this doctrine seems to prerequisite a belief that creation is stable, something that can be ended only by its Creator. Can we really believe that the world as something that flows out of Gods ongoing creation, if we recognize that there are considerable threats to the continuation of life in this creation, threats that originate within this creation itself? This would indicate that there is a power within creation – humanity – that has in fact become powerful enough to counter the will and power of God. If the destructive power of man outweighs the creative power of God, what kinds of consequences does this have for our concept of God? Is such a God really pantokrator?

We can easily see that this situation is caused by the sin of humanity. The question is: is this the ultimate form of hubris, of believing to be god, something that God ultimately will not tolerate? Or is this too something that must be accepted as a consequence of man’s freedom of will?

And if God will not tolerate the destruction of creation, will this result in a nemesis that is the destruction of humanity? This is not difficult to envision, but theologically impossible. It goes against all we believe about God as loving and graceful. But one still has to ask: even if there is grace for every possible transgression a person can do, is there a limit to God’s grace that consists of the destruction of the World?

There is of course hope for the world. It consists of the possibility that our civilization collapses before the environment does. I doubt there is a solution based of the good will of man. But I think a slow decline is more likely, and if it is not fast enough, it will not cause the changes in lifestyle that are necessary.

How do we believe in God in a scenario like this? I think we must start by recognizing that our way of life is not acceptable in the eyes of God. To be able to uphold a belief in a God who is Love, who is Creator and who wants to save the kosmos, there needs to be a repentance, a recognition that as long as we live the way we live now we stand against God who stands on the side of creation. There needs to be a full metanoia: a turning away from life based on consuming to a life based on other values.

Of course God’s almightiness is not to be understood as an ability to do anything. Rather I think Tillich’s interpretation is useful: That God is the one who is able to stand against the non-being. Faith in a world on the edge of destruction must be to trust that God can stand against the non-being we are letting loose, and to enter into a community with God that consists of joining God in the creating work to keep upholding the creation.