(Ir)religiosity

This is part four in an ongoing series on systematic (de)constructive theology. See part one for a longer introduction and please keep in mind that the following is provisional, unfinished, and ad hoc. In other words, it is truly theology not a dogmatics. I look forward to the dialogue.

Human beings are first and foremost created in the image of God and bear the divine mark upon their being; the most basic definition of sin, then, is the disintegration of the Imago dei and the disruption of the relational quality that binds humanity together.  Original sin, in this view, is not biological but sociological comprising the destructive and repressive structures in which all human beings participate yet still allow to exist.

What is the human condition?  The nature of the human person?  Is she inherently good or intrinsically tainted and driven to evil?  For centuries the Christian tradition has struggled to make sense of the reality that human beings are simultaneously capable of wonderful goodness and horrific monstrosity.  Since Augustine, Christian theology has been especially preoccupied with the notion of original sin, which, in its more extreme forms, suggests that human beings post-Eden are completely and wholly depraved lacking any inherent ability whatsoever to do good without divine intervention.  Issues of sexuality notwithstanding,¹  such a hard view of original sin is quite problematic, suffering from a shallow and otherwise underdeveloped doctrine of creation.  Whatever else is to be said about human beings, no discussion of theological anthropology can properly begin without acknowledging that humanity bears the mark of the Imago dei (Gen. 1:26-27) and is part of a creation that God originally called good, indeed, very good.  A doctrine of human nature that begins with humanity’s fallenness and so-called total depravity without considering that each human being is created in the image of God and is an integral part of God’s original, good creation is doomed for failure before it even starts.  To be sure, the Imago dei does not preclude any person from being subject to the finite situation that comprises the basic character of limited humanity nor should it be interpreted to mean that human beings are God (in fact, the latter is not a bad working definition of sin).  Even in the face of overwhelming beauty, human life is short, fragile, and unbelievably painful.  As Cornel West describes it with a certain rhythm and cadence:

[W]e’re beings toward death.  We’re featherless two-legged linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose bodies will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.  That’s us; we’re beings toward death.²

Being created in the image of God does not free us from finitude; it enables us to appreciate finitude. The Imago dei is simply a statement indicating that within each person, however evil or good they may seem, is a spark of the divine and the possibly of redemption and reintegration into the participation of the divine life, of the event of God.  There is always the possibility of renewed response to divine grace.

Still, even despite the important notion of the Imago dei it would be quite naïve, standing with the atrocities of the twentieth century at our backs, to claim that human beings are basically moral beings and that human nature itself is inherently good.  Evil and sin are visibly present in our world and any responsible discussion of theological anthropology, while rightly beginning with a sound doctrine of creation and the insistence of the Imago dei, must take those realities into account as well.  Contemporary Christian theology must therefore walk a very fine and seemingly elusive line.  Perhaps, then, Michael Hardt is a bit closer to the truth than those theologians who opt to easily relegate the character of human nature to either pure goodness or pure evil:

[H]uman nature [is] changeable…human beings can become different.  Human nature isn’t good or evil.  Human nature is constituted—it is constituted by how we act.  Human nature is in fact part of a history of habits and practices that are the result of past struggles, of past hierarchies, of past victories and defeats.³

Such a statement allows for some much needed freedom given the proclivities of theological discourse in the past, particularly the tendency to reduce all sin to a singular “root sin” from which various sins are derived.  For instance, Reinold Niebuhr famously claims that pride is perhaps the root sin, that “[m]an falls into pride when he seeks to raise his contingent existence to unconditioned significance; he falls into sensuality.”⁴  However, as many feminist theologians have pointed out Niebuhr’s proposal is a decidedly masculine one which does not seem to capture the concrete experience of most women.  Moreover, as Miroslav Volf has noted, the entire project of searching for a singular root sin “suffers from being too abstract” and fails “to explain all concrete sins of all human beings.”⁵ Following Volf’s lead and seeking to avoid the dangers of universality and abstraction, we shall not pursue the false — and quite modern — search for the most basic root sin, that is, “what lies at the bottom of all sins.”⁶ We can, however, speak of what which permeates “a good many of the sins we commit against out neighbors.”⁷

For Volf, this amounts to the various mechanisms and systems of exclusion by which persons and societies seek to marginalize or even eliminate the identity of the other.  Through these systems and mechanisms, which Volf claims are often named as virtuous in religious circles, otherness is named as anathema and the ultimate goal is a false, indeed poisonous, pursuit of purity, a pursuit which drives those in power to “push the ‘others’ out of [their] world” so they can remain pure themselves and “eject otherness from within [themselves].”⁸  This deadly logic of purity, a logic which Jesus unmasked and exposed, constitutes a social program which orders reality into various social worlds, inner worlds of those who are pure, and outer worlds of the others who are impure and thus excluded.  This program eschews difference and heterogeneity wholesale and seeks homogeneity at all cost.  Indeed, it is a deadly and “dangerous program because it is a totalitarian program governed by a logic that reduces, ejects, and segregates.”⁹ Preceding this social program of exclusion is the program of symbolic exclusion in which language is used by those who are “pure” as a weapon to rename the other as an abhorrence and a threat.  In this way, symbolic exclusion morally underwrites the program of social exclusion in such a way that it not only becomes justified but “necessary because not to exclude appears morally culpable” and “the rhetoric of the other’s inhumanity obliges the self to practice inhumanity.”¹⁰ Therefore, insofar as the Imago dei is a relational reality common among all persons, sin as exclusion is its willful disintegration and dissolution.

What, then, can we say of original sin?  Having rejected on the basis of its damaging universality and abstraction the tradition’s propensity to seek the common root of all sins, can we even speak of original sin per se?  In this respect, liberation and process theologians are correct to couch original sin not as a biological constituent passed on through sexual intercourse, but as a systemic reality passed on through collective maintenance of the status quo.  Though we might abandon the notion of a literal, prehistoric Fall given the discoveries of modern science we can nonetheless affirm that all human beings are fallen insofar as they are subject to finitude and the basic human condition, one of “captivity to structures of indifference,”¹¹ subjugation, and oppression.  Original sin, then, is “not so much the sin of our ancestral parents as it is our embeddedness in sinful structures,”¹² our indifference toward changing such structures, and our willingness to allow our collective imagination to be colonized by such structures, thereby limiting our conception of the possibility of new reality.  To be sure, this structural notion of original sin “in no way excuses our refusal to respond positively to the divine lure,”¹³ to the event and signification we call God.  In fact, keeping in mind our above discussion about the difference between the name of God which harbors the event of God, individual acts of sin might be tantamount to claiming the name is the event, that our conception of God is in fact God at God’s fullest.  Such totalizing claims no doubt lead to the exclusion of others.  Nevertheless, a structural conception of original sin does not preclude or minimize individual responsibility and culpability, “if sin is universal and social, it is nonetheless existential and willful.”¹⁴  Another way of putting it would be to, along with feminist-process theologian Majorie Suchocki, name sin as “the violence of rebellion against creation”¹⁵ which seems to include the structural aspect while especially highlighting the existential and individual component.  In this view sin is quite simply the refusal to respond to divine grace, a prevenient type of grace, to use a Wesleyan register, which is always already present in creation and beckons a faithful response.  Failure to respond is not only a violent rebellion against creation itself — and thus God — but a disintegration of the Imago dei and a disruption of the relational quality that binds humanity together as one.   The question then becomes: what does it mean to resist violence and to enter into communion with the other?  In other words, what does it mean to genuinely be human?

1. Augustine, of course, held that original sin was passed on biologically through sexual intercourse which has resulted in almost 2000 years worth of sexual “hang-ups” in the Christian tradition.   More recently, however, theologians are reclaiming the goodness sex and the diversities of sexuality.  See, for example, Lisa Fullman, “Sex in 3-D: A Telos for a Virtue Ethics of Sexuality,” Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 27, 2 (2007): 151-170 and Sarah Coakley, “Living in the Mystery of the Holy Trinity: Trinity, Prayer, and Sexuality,” Anglican Theological Review, 80, 2 (Spr. 1998): 223-32. [↩]
2. Astra Taylor, ed. Examined Life:  Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers (New York, New York:  The New Press, 2009), 5. Or, as Achilles puts it somewhat romantically in the film Troy (2004) “I’ll tell you a secret. Something they don’t teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.” [↩]
3. Ibid., 138. [↩]
4. Reinold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man (Louisville, Kentucky:  Westminster John Knox, 1996), 186. [↩]
5. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace:  A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, Tennessee:  Abingdon Press, 1996), 72. [↩]
6. Ibid. [↩]
7. Ibid. [↩]
8. Ibid., 74. [↩]
9. Ibid. [↩]
10. Ibid., 76. [↩]
11. Bryan P. Stone, “Process and Sanctification,” Thy Nature and Thy Name is Love:  Wesleyan and Process Theologies in Dialogue, eds. Bryan P. Stone and Thomas Jay Oord (Nashville, Tennessee:  Abingdon Press, 2001), 82. [↩]
12. Ibid. [↩]
13. Ibid. [↩]
14. Ibid. [↩]
15. Majorie Hewitt Suchocki, The Fall of Violence:  Original Sin in Relational Theology (New York, New York:  Continuum, 1994), 16. [↩]