Category: Theology

Previously we saw Keith Ward offer an account of original sin that he thinks consistent with a broad evolutionary picture. As a result of a primal choice for evil and turning away from God, the human race finds itself estranged from God and unable to repair the breach.

Ward distinguishes between what he calls “forensic” and “soterial” accounts of sin. Forensic accounts are chiefly concerned with guilt and punishment, while soterial accounts focus on the way in which the self’s dispositions and inclinations are warped and in need of healing. A purely forensic understanding of sin sees spiritual death as punishment which we have incurred on account of our first parents’ sin. A soterial view, on the other hand, sees our alienation from God and the distortion of our desires as the inevitable consequence of sin rather than a punishment imposed according to a retributive understanding of justice.

The Christian tradition has both forensic and soterial elements, but certain strands emphasize one or the other more heavily. Ward sides with the Christian East (as I understand it) in rejecting the idea of original guilt (as distinct from original sin) and sees the problem for humans more in terms of repairing or healing the self and its relation to God. Original sin is “more like a disease or an incapacity than a crime” (p. 176). And he’s on solid Reformational ground, it seems to me, in holding sin to be not so much a series of discrete acts, but a fundamental orientation of the self – “curved inward” as Luther might put it. This self-centeredness is a result of the evil choices made by our ancestors and the fact that each of us is born into a world where it’s difficult to resist out selfish desires and in which our relationship with God has been shattered.

Consequently, Ward’s account of the Atonement avoids penal or debt-payment metaphors and emphasizes images of participation and healing. As the Incarnate Word of God, Jesus mediates God’s saving grace and forgiveness, making a new relationship possible. Jesus is both the perfect human response to God and a revelation of God’s compassion. Jesus’ life of perfect obedience, which culminates on the cross, results in his Resurrection and the outpouring of the Spirit. This makes possible our participation in new life with God. Salvation must involve a change in the subject and not just a remittance of punishment. The purpose of God’s act of Atonement, in Ward’s telling, is to restore humans to a proper relationship with God and to heal their disordered desires.

In Jesus, according to Christian belief, God acts in a uniquely clear, unhampered way, to evoke repentance by revealing the divine nature as suffering, redemptive, unitive love. God acts to show the life that is required of us, to establish a community in which such a life can be begun, to show that the human goal of divine-human fellowship is possible, and to draw people into such fellowship. Thus there will be particular, historical acts that establish this community, founded on a primal revelatory event in which divine-human fellowship is archetypally established. The Spirit is the power which made that event possible, as the icon, and formative pattern of the Spirit’s continued co-operative action throughout the world.

On this view, atonement, the liberation of human lives by God from selfish desire and their uniting in fellowship with the life of God, is necessary if human nature is to attain its intended fulfillment. Such atonement must involve the disclosure of God’s patient bearing of the sufferings of the world (a sacrifice or giving-up of unmixed bliss for the sake of the possible goods of human life). It must involve God’s revealing the pattern of perfected human life in God (a life of healing and forgiveness). It must also involve God’s effective transformation of humans from self-regard to the love of supreme beauty, in accordance with that pattern (the gift of the Spirit). This revelation must come in a particular history and context that is able to manifest God’s particular actions in the world, actions which begin and define the particular process of forgiveness and fulfillment that constitutes the Christian life. (p. 223)

This, in a nutshell, appears to be Ward’s answer to Anselm’s question “why did God become man?” He eschews penal or satisfaction motifs and appeals to what in some ways seems a more patristic understanding: God became human so that humans might become divine. The problem – that from which we need to be saved – is our estrangement from God. In Jesus God restores the possibility of fellowship. But, unlike certain patristic accounts which seem to rely on a reified Platonic notion of human nature, Ward’s appeal to the Spirit as the means by which we are healed and united with God and conformed to the image of Christ may be a more biblical way to think about it.

To connect it back to evolution, we can say that God created a world intended to give rise, through a long process of historical evolution, to finite personal beings capable of enjoying fellowship with God. However, due to a pre-historic choice of self over God, humanity’s progress toward that goal was derailed and we became alienated from God. But God comes to us in the person of Jesus to re-establish that relationship and get the human project back on track and to guide it toward its goal.

Clearly some aspects of Ward’s account deviate from the tradition. The rejection of hereditary guilt may bother those who understand sin and atonement in primarily forensic terms. However, it’s worth pointing out that, evolution aside, there’s never really been a compelling account of how someone can be guilty (and even deserving of damnation) because of a choice their distant ancestors made. Ward’s view manages to retain the insight that we are suffering the consequences of our ancestor’s choices and in need of deliverance from them, without embracing the notion of original guilt. His view also resonates with the Christus Victor motif in seeing humanity in need of rescue from “powers” that hold us in thrall and prevent us from establishing fellowship with God.

I enjoyed Keith Ward’s Pascal’s Fire so much (despite disagreement in places) that when I saw his Religion and Human Nature at a used bookseller for five bucks I snatched it up. RHN is part of Ward’s four-part “comparative theology” which also includes volumes on revelation, creation, and community. His methodology is to compare the treatment of these topics in various world religions as well as modern secular naturalism, and then to provide a Christian response, both where it can affirm and must deny aspects of the other views.

RHN contains really interesting and illuminating discussions of competing schools of thought in Hinduism and Buddhism in the earlier chapters, but for the purposes of this post I’m interested in Ward’s re-interpretation of the doctrine of Original Sin in light of modern evolutionary thought.

The basic picture offered us by evolutionary theory conflicts with the traditional Christian view of the fall and original sin at a number of points. Traditional Christian teaching has been that human beings lived in a state of blessedness and innocence until Adam’s sin, and that death and suffering entered the world as a result of sin. Adam and Eve transmitted to their descendents both a propensity or inclination toward sin and the guilt of the first sin (whence one argument for infant baptism).

Evolutionary theory, on the other hand, tells us that suffering and death long predated the existence of human beings, that our tendencies toward lust and aggression are part of our genetic baggage and probably helped our ancestors to survive long enough to propagate the species, and that there was likely no period when humans lived in harmony with each other and their world as depicted in the Garden of Eden story.

One popular way to reconcile these two accounts has been to see the story of Creation and Fall as a “myth,” not in the sense of a fairy tale or falsehood, but in the sense of a story that gives us a profound truth about the human condition. The way life is depicted prior to the Fall in the early chapters of Genesis represents creation not as it was some time in the distant past, but creation as it should be and will be when God’s purposes for it are finally realized. “Fallen” humanity is humanity as it is in this world.

While there is value in such an account, Ward says, it tends to sidestep the question of why a good God would create such inherently flawed creatures, and it even risks locating the source of evil in finite existence as such, rather than in a distortion of what is essentially a good creation. Instead he tries to develop a position that mediates between more literalistic and purely “mythic” ones.

Ward accepts that “Destruction and death are built into the universe as necessary conditions of its progress to new forms of life” (p. 160), but he suggests that it nevertheless is the case that moral evil entered the world at some point. Proto-humans (or whatever we want to call them) may have tendencies toward lust, aggression and greed as part of their constitutive make-up, but at some point it became possible for them to choose to indulge those tendencies at the expense of another:

Thus when humans first came into being, they were already locked into a world in which competition and death were fundamental to their very existence. In this long process of the emergence of consciousness, there was a first moment at which a sentient animal became aware of moral obligation. At some point, animal life emerged from a stage of what Hegel called “dreaming innocence,” at which moral considerations were irrelevant, since animals simply acted in ways natural to their species. At that point, a sentient consciousness discerned, or thought it discerned, an obligation to act in one way rather than another, an obligation which it was free to respond to or ignore. It seems to me plausible to say that it was at that point that truly personal consciousness first began to exist.

Two elements seem to be axiomatic about moral obligation. One is that, if a moral obligation truly exists, then it must be possible to meet it; otherwise it is not an obligation. The other is that it must also be possible to ignore it; otherwise it is not a matter of morality. It therefore seems to me beyond dispute that there must have been a first sin in the history of the planet. There must have been a moment when a conscious being decided to ignore an obligation, when it need not have done so. It is not an antique fable, it is an indisputable fact, that sin entered into the world through the free action of a conscious being which chose to do what it should not and need not have done. (p. 161)

Furthermore, this choosing of evil ruptures what may have been a “tacit” or “thematic” knowledge and awareness of God. “The Fall consisted in the loss of the sense of a felt unity with the sacred root of being, in the inability to co-operate with its gracious guidance, and so in the growth of that sense of solitude and estrangement which becomes the lot of humanity in a state of sin” (p. 162). Once this unity is ruptured, “spiritual death” is the natural outcome.

The ultimate human choice, from a theistic viewpoint, is not so much a choice between good and evil, abstractly conceived, as a choice between relationship with God, as the source of love and power, and a form of self-determination which inevitably leads on to self-regard. (pp. 163-4)

The effects of this choosing of evil reinforce human being’s already existing drives toward dominating and exploiting others, making it difficult, if not impossible, to not choose sin. And this condition is spread, Ward thinks, because future generations are born among those who’ve already turned away from God, making it even harder for them to choose the good, much less restore the lost unity with the divine. He therefore adopts a view that Original Sin is propagated by social and environmental conditions rather than being passed in some quasi-physical fashion.

The import of the Genesis story is that our world is one in which at a very early stage all humans rejected God. It is that original and massive embracing of desire that has drastically altered the moral situation of all subsequent human descendents. (p. 167)

For anyone born into such a world, the choice of good and evil is no delicately balanced, dispassionately contemplated decision. In a world of greed, hatred, and delusion, one must either be an oppressor, a victim, or a resister. One will be born as a child within one of these groups, and one’s historical responses and learned activities will be shaped accordingly. (pp. 168-9)

Even if someone managed to always make the correct moral decision, she would still not experience the unity in relationship with God that is the real purpose of human life. Instead of experiencing morality as the natural expression of a life lived in friendship with God, we usually experience it as a burdensome obligation and an obstacle to fulfilling our desires, at lest where it “pinches.” In our fallen condition our inclinations and our obligations are frequently at variance. To be delivered from our condition requires overcoming our estrangement from God, and the consequent transformation of our desires and inclinations. But this isn’t something we’re capable of pulling off.

To be continued (but not until next week probably, since I’m going camping this weekend!)…

This helpful post at Connexions argues that “liberal theology” should be seen more as a method or approach to theology than a set of substantive conclusions. In other words, there’s nothing about liberal theology per se that prevents one from, say, believing in the resurrection or the virgin birth or what have you. What’s distinctive about a “liberal” approach to theology is that it sifts religious claims in light of reason and experience and is open to the possibility that faith and practice will be revised as a result.

In that sense, I think pretty much all of us are liberals to some extent in that we have to navigate the relationships between our theological interpretations of the world with those offered by the sciences, the arts, other religions, and other competing perspectives. We live in multiple overlapping cognitive worlds and there’s no a priori way for most of us of resolving conflicts between rival interpretations. “Private judgment” is a fact of life.

Even if we submit to an institutional authority of some sort, we still decide to do so (though we may give an account of our decision that downplays the element of private judgment). No religious outlook or institution has the kind of givenness that may have been enjoyed by the church in previous ages.

I imagine for most Christians in the (post)modern west there is a great deal of cognitive dissonance or simply a bracketing of our religious lives when it comes to our lives as workers, citizens, parents, consumers, and so on. I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing, just that in many areas of our lives most of us have neither the need nor the inclination to invoke theological categories to make sense of what’s going on a lot of the time.

In his book An Examined Faith: The Grace of Self-Doubt, Christian ethicist William Gustafson argues that there is a spectrum of responses to secular accounts of reality that seem to challenge Christian belief. On one extreme is literalistic fundamentalism, which simply overrides any putative knowledge that seems to contradict the Bible by an appeal to the authority of revelation. On the other end is the person who allows the claims of secular disciplines to completely determine their theological commitments (Bishop Spong?). Most of us, Gustafson argues, exist somewhere in between, making some accomodations and not others. The important thing, he says, is for Christians to be self-conscious and honest about this because it’s unavoidable.

Despite the fact that we may yearn for an all-encompassing theological narrative that “absorbs” our experience of the world, I’m not sure it would ultimately be desirable even if it was psychologically possible (and I suspect for many of us it isn’t). As R.R. Reno argued before he jumped ship to Rome, we have fragments of a Christian worldview, but we don’t know how to fit all the elements of our experience into it. Theology no longer provides, if it ever did, a comprehensive ordering of all human knowledge.

But even beyond that, an attempt to do so might result in the creation of a closed system that was immune to new experiences and information that could alter our perception of the world. Christians have revised their beliefs and teachings in the light of new knowledge before (be it evolutionary biology or the historical criticism of the Bible or the manifest goodness of adherents of other religons) and there’s every reason to believe that will happen again. We don’t have the map of how it all fits together. But maybe that’s okay as long as we have enough light to take the next step down the road.

What do you think? Should theology aspire to a comprehensive account of the world and human knowledge? Or do we continue to muddle through trying to understand things piecemeal? Or is there some other way of looking at the issue?

I have to say this is something that I’ve never really felt the need to have a position on. Taking an definitive stance on either side (i.e. positively affirming that everyone will be saved or that not everyone will be saved) seems underdetermined by the evidence.

There are more or less plausible theological arguments one can make, of course, such as “A God of love would not allow anyone to be consigned to hell” or “God won’t force anyone to love him,” etc. But none of them seem really convincing to me. The New Testament seems ambiguous on the matter. There are definitely universalist sounding passages in Paul’s letters, but, on the other hand, Jesus certainly talks about Hell as a real possibility. (Ironically, this is a place where the stereotype of mean old Paul versus easygoing Jesus seems to cut in the other direction!)

I like what Lutheran theologian Gerhard Forde said about universalism, and think it applies to anti-universalism as well. He called it “an attempt to tie God’s hands with an abstraction.” He thought that abstract arguments about something called “universalism” actually distract us from the concrete proclmation of the Gospel to specific people, which is what the church should be about. God doesn’t save people in general, he saves them through particular acts – baptism, the preaching of the word, etc. The church is the place where those acts happen and its job is to perform them, not propound theories about whether or not God is obliged to save everyone. But we also aren’t privy to how God may deal with people outside of the work the church has been entrusted with.