'I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,' said the man. 'You are wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.' — Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
“But what is sin? Is it a substance? An energy? Or is it just that pall of darkness I see hanging around all the girls?” – a joke I once told
Talk about sin for long enough, and sooner or later people will begin to think you aren’t talking about anything at all. While it is fairly easy to come to some consensus that the world is indeed somewhat and even massively wrong, even essentially and inherently corrupt, it is quite some distance to go from that to talking about why you believe that unbaptised baby will be sent to torment in hell for all eternity.
If you start talking about sin-stuff as opposed to grace-stuff and no one can see or touch or find any of it, it’s hard to get people to take you seriously that way. And rightly so. By its own account, all the talk about sin must be at least as corrupt as sin itself. These are only humans speaking and writing it, after all. Take, for example, the discussion of Adamic vs. tragic sin in this reading: Adamic? What happened to Eve, Evenic sin?
You mean she can be the lure that causes men to sin but cannot even structurally participate in the transmission of sin itself? Do you mean that we have to frame the discussion of sin as though all the transactions concerning the image of God were simply between Adam and Jesus and men really do get to play both sides? No wonder some feel that Christianity is all a man’s game. Theology certainly sometimes seems to be. The true miracle might be that women feel involved at all. But this is not to go on some proto-feminist rant.
This is to go down the road that asks why discussions of sin and grace always end up becoming discussions about power. It was not for nothing that I called Satan “she” the last time, which never seems to happen anymore, though I understand it was more a medieval thing. People think that as women gain more power that they’ll actually make better lives. There is even the notion that everyone’s lives might actually get better. And that might be – there are certainly indications concerning women’s education.
But that also might not be. The movement of women into the structures of worldly power might also be the movement of women into the systems that make it so that men are Christ and Satan alike, metaphorically speaking. For example, do you have a work enemy? I don’t, never have. Few men do. But ask any woman in America who she hates at work and she’ll tell you for the next three hours. And it never lets up. New job, new enemy. Sin. I’m not saying they’re not welcome to it.
But I think some of that torrent of sin-talk Sponheim spouts means that Christian men and women alike should be realistic going forward. Sin and power, or powerlessness. That’s the conversation. Leave Traducianism to the ages. I want to know, as the postcolonial writer Jamaica Kinkaid wants to know, why the powerless think the powerful are sinful and themselves sinless, the powerful think precisely the opposite way, and everyone fails to see the way they sin against God and against each other the whole damned time.
I want to know why people think that goodness wins because it is more powerful – Jesus with a flaming sword – while Jesus came much closer to burning on the sword of the cross and said that only God is good. I want to know why goodness cannot “win” simply because it is goodness, and why sin cannot “lose” precisely because it is not good. I don’t know if that’s original. But I do know that it’s sin.
And no, I don’t actually see a pall of darkness hanging around all the girls. More of a shimmering, golden effect, like an ever-present backlighting. But that’s another story.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
On the Nature of Sin: Consonance
Way out on the galactic rim, out where the stars are far apart and all is dark and cold, an order of supernatural agents fights, precisely as it has always fought, in the very emptiness of space. They are not beings precisely, because they are mostly what they are not. They are un-beings. They are barely even agents, because they do far less than they undo.
Oh, their weapons change the very structure and nature of the universe, alter the laws by which this present order operates. But because they choose to undo that order with these weapons, they are themselves already defeated. Victorious, they will have no arena in which to be or do. They will have remade the universe in their image, which is nothing. They are the Undone, held together by the superabundance of their undoing.
And they are fighting toward the center of the sphere of time. They are fighting toward the core of all temporality, which is not a moment or a bang. It is not a beginning, thought it may be the place where all beginnings end. No, the center of a time is no event. It is a choice. Perhaps it is the only choice; it certainly was and is and will be the most important choice. But the Undone do not know this, because it is nothing like them. They are defiance. The choice at the center of time is something like surrender, and so they cannot know it. They only know that it may be their undoing, and so they attack it with the weapons that are destruction.
And their path is leading them right toward the Earth. The choice at the center of time is here. It may or may not have something to do with you. The Undone certainly suspect it does. As they come they infect everything they touch with their un-choice, with their Undoing. And the infection spreads. You are a little bit like them. When you choose the untrue choice you choose defiance and you choose against the choice at the heart of all time. And the universe changes, just a little bit.
You probably don’t notice, that is part of the undoing, but your neighbor probably does. Perhaps you say something unkind, the specifics do not matter. But because of you, it is now just fractionally easier for everyone to choose undoing than it was a moment ago. And the Undone creep just a little bit closer. And the universe slips just a little more, becomes slightly more undoing. You might say that this must have been happening for a very long time all over the world and everything must all be very hopeless, and you would be in some ways correct.
The infection has gone beyond pandemic. The sphere that holds all time shows many cracks. The Undone are soaring toward the core. It is nearly impossible to choose anything but them, to opt for anything but defiance. Their victory and the defeat of all the universe seems very much at hand.
But this, precisely, is the crux of the dilemma.
The sphere of time is and was and always will be much more affected by the occurrence of choices than by their duration, which is negligible. To put it another way, if you are particularly imaginative, you might be able to say that you undo because your ancestors undid, and this is partially correct. But it is much more true to say that your ancestors defied a thousand years ago because you defy today. And you are very much closer to the truth when you begin to understand that you are undoing today together, and that already you are conspiring in the undoing of tomorrow. Your choice undoes the way the universe is, was, and always will be.
The hope, of course, cannot be that you will somehow choose the choice at the center of time, that you will surrender to surrender. No, the hope is precisely that all these things are already concluded. The hope is that the surrender of time was and is and will be not to the Undone, which everyone sees, but to you, which no one could foretell. The hope is that the choice at the heart of time is the choice for you.
And because you would be thus be allied with and by and for the choice at the core of the sphere of time, and because the occurrence of events matters more than their duration, we hope that the cure will also be transmissible. The choice of surrender may already be spreading, and fast. After all, the sphere of time, unlike the Undone, is held together not the superabundance of its undoing, but by the overwhelming possibility of its becoming. Let us begin.
Oh, their weapons change the very structure and nature of the universe, alter the laws by which this present order operates. But because they choose to undo that order with these weapons, they are themselves already defeated. Victorious, they will have no arena in which to be or do. They will have remade the universe in their image, which is nothing. They are the Undone, held together by the superabundance of their undoing.
And they are fighting toward the center of the sphere of time. They are fighting toward the core of all temporality, which is not a moment or a bang. It is not a beginning, thought it may be the place where all beginnings end. No, the center of a time is no event. It is a choice. Perhaps it is the only choice; it certainly was and is and will be the most important choice. But the Undone do not know this, because it is nothing like them. They are defiance. The choice at the center of time is something like surrender, and so they cannot know it. They only know that it may be their undoing, and so they attack it with the weapons that are destruction.
And their path is leading them right toward the Earth. The choice at the center of time is here. It may or may not have something to do with you. The Undone certainly suspect it does. As they come they infect everything they touch with their un-choice, with their Undoing. And the infection spreads. You are a little bit like them. When you choose the untrue choice you choose defiance and you choose against the choice at the heart of all time. And the universe changes, just a little bit.
You probably don’t notice, that is part of the undoing, but your neighbor probably does. Perhaps you say something unkind, the specifics do not matter. But because of you, it is now just fractionally easier for everyone to choose undoing than it was a moment ago. And the Undone creep just a little bit closer. And the universe slips just a little more, becomes slightly more undoing. You might say that this must have been happening for a very long time all over the world and everything must all be very hopeless, and you would be in some ways correct.
The infection has gone beyond pandemic. The sphere that holds all time shows many cracks. The Undone are soaring toward the core. It is nearly impossible to choose anything but them, to opt for anything but defiance. Their victory and the defeat of all the universe seems very much at hand.
But this, precisely, is the crux of the dilemma.
The sphere of time is and was and always will be much more affected by the occurrence of choices than by their duration, which is negligible. To put it another way, if you are particularly imaginative, you might be able to say that you undo because your ancestors undid, and this is partially correct. But it is much more true to say that your ancestors defied a thousand years ago because you defy today. And you are very much closer to the truth when you begin to understand that you are undoing today together, and that already you are conspiring in the undoing of tomorrow. Your choice undoes the way the universe is, was, and always will be.
The hope, of course, cannot be that you will somehow choose the choice at the center of time, that you will surrender to surrender. No, the hope is precisely that all these things are already concluded. The hope is that the surrender of time was and is and will be not to the Undone, which everyone sees, but to you, which no one could foretell. The hope is that the choice at the heart of time is the choice for you.
And because you would be thus be allied with and by and for the choice at the core of the sphere of time, and because the occurrence of events matters more than their duration, we hope that the cure will also be transmissible. The choice of surrender may already be spreading, and fast. After all, the sphere of time, unlike the Undone, is held together not the superabundance of its undoing, but by the overwhelming possibility of its becoming. Let us begin.
On the Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910
If history can be caricatured as the pursuit of unintended consequences, the Edinburgh Missionary Conference can be counted as a turning point of Christian faith indeed. A mixture of causes and effects was already present in the very nature of the meeting. The president of the conference read greetings from Imperial German Colonial Office, the American president, and England’s King George V.
One must have gotten the sense that certain eyes and ears were watching – but whether or not they were watching for the advent of the Kingdom of God as the councilmen were is an answer best left for the ages.
What is a pertinent question is whether or not the councilmen were themselves to any degree watching for the same thing that the heads of state sought out: namely, the expansion of Western colonial power throughout the world. The year cannot have been inconsequential, and the talk of contesting civilizations and the immediate conquest of the world was about to be reiterated in the form of two world wars.
While the eight topics of gospel, mission, education, non-Christians, missionaries, their bases, and Christian unity did not address colonial aims directly, surely they might have together carried it. The missionary expansion of the century leading up to it, after all, had been decidedly colonial in flavor.
And the conference continued the persistent Christian trend of talking about people groups rather than talking to or with them: European Protestants comprised all but 18 of the 1,200 delegates. Small wonder than the conferees were divided amongst themselves as to whether Christianity was the last revelation of God or simply the best one: this was its triumphant ecumenical flavor.
The movement toward worldwide Christianity had begun, though one wonders if the delegates saw how very much the global churches were about to adapt rather than accommodate its European developments to non-white contexts. They ought to have. Missionary developments have always required indigenization and localization in order to bear fruit.
That Christianity was ready for such diffusion seems in retrospect apparent. The Enlightenment was ending the overt state interference that had plagued churches for some centuries – there were no kings or presidents actually in the room at this point – and replacing it with a rather more benign tolerance. More, the intermittent warfare that had plagued Europe for centuries was settling down as the nation-states grew in secular power and directed their own energies outward; it was precisely this outward-facing energy that would later pull missionaries along with it.
But for now the revivals were revitalizing Protestantism even as Napoleon’s humiliations of the Pope had eventually worked out a Catholic spiritual purification, manifest in the White Fathers and White Sisters. But the pietistic Moravian Lutherans had taken the onus of Protestant missionary zeal in the preceding century, and promoted the same focus on self- sufficiency for new converts that would serve Christianity so well in the countries of what would become known as the developing and Third World.
So by 1910 the churches were ready to think globally, and the preceding century had seen their more benevolent interests manifest in missional work such as David Livingstone’s antislavery in Africa and the energetic work of Protestant women, some of whom were even single. Such a diffuse expansion of Christianity had not happened since the persecutions, and the century leading up to Edinburgh had seen those persecutions in some ways renewed, as indigenous interests arrayed themselves against the zeal of many new converts. The numbers of these dead were and are staggering, and the casualties assured that, whatever the precise motives of the missionaries, the converts were certainly willing to separate themselves from worldly interests.
They were not, however, willing to sever entirely their ties with incumbent cultures and traditions, as the developments in Africa after Edinburg soon showed. Christianity was appropriated, not adopted outright. Consequently, the faith of the Two-Thirds world churches differs in no small and no few ways from the faith brought by the European missionaries, even as the numbers of their members continued and continue to soar. The Zionist movement combines confessional Protestantism with holiness teaching and Pentecostal healing to produce a Christianity compatible with the prophetic, exorcistic, ecstatic and ritually-oriented culture of much of Africa. Similarly, William Harris would preach destruction of fetishes, mass baptism, and healing to such effect and with such power that Africans came to note the premature deaths of those who opposed him. Such similarity is not to suggest that Africa is a unified culture, but is to suggest that a unity of law, observance, scripture, baptism, symbol and worshipping church may be developing on the continent.
That this is occurring also on the South American continent and Asia only means that Edinburg led not just to one translation of Christianity, but effectively to several. This diversity and diffusion the colonial-minded conferees could not have foreseen, and must perhaps be listed as its best salient unintended consequence.
One must have gotten the sense that certain eyes and ears were watching – but whether or not they were watching for the advent of the Kingdom of God as the councilmen were is an answer best left for the ages.
What is a pertinent question is whether or not the councilmen were themselves to any degree watching for the same thing that the heads of state sought out: namely, the expansion of Western colonial power throughout the world. The year cannot have been inconsequential, and the talk of contesting civilizations and the immediate conquest of the world was about to be reiterated in the form of two world wars.
While the eight topics of gospel, mission, education, non-Christians, missionaries, their bases, and Christian unity did not address colonial aims directly, surely they might have together carried it. The missionary expansion of the century leading up to it, after all, had been decidedly colonial in flavor.
And the conference continued the persistent Christian trend of talking about people groups rather than talking to or with them: European Protestants comprised all but 18 of the 1,200 delegates. Small wonder than the conferees were divided amongst themselves as to whether Christianity was the last revelation of God or simply the best one: this was its triumphant ecumenical flavor.
The movement toward worldwide Christianity had begun, though one wonders if the delegates saw how very much the global churches were about to adapt rather than accommodate its European developments to non-white contexts. They ought to have. Missionary developments have always required indigenization and localization in order to bear fruit.
That Christianity was ready for such diffusion seems in retrospect apparent. The Enlightenment was ending the overt state interference that had plagued churches for some centuries – there were no kings or presidents actually in the room at this point – and replacing it with a rather more benign tolerance. More, the intermittent warfare that had plagued Europe for centuries was settling down as the nation-states grew in secular power and directed their own energies outward; it was precisely this outward-facing energy that would later pull missionaries along with it.
But for now the revivals were revitalizing Protestantism even as Napoleon’s humiliations of the Pope had eventually worked out a Catholic spiritual purification, manifest in the White Fathers and White Sisters. But the pietistic Moravian Lutherans had taken the onus of Protestant missionary zeal in the preceding century, and promoted the same focus on self- sufficiency for new converts that would serve Christianity so well in the countries of what would become known as the developing and Third World.
So by 1910 the churches were ready to think globally, and the preceding century had seen their more benevolent interests manifest in missional work such as David Livingstone’s antislavery in Africa and the energetic work of Protestant women, some of whom were even single. Such a diffuse expansion of Christianity had not happened since the persecutions, and the century leading up to Edinburgh had seen those persecutions in some ways renewed, as indigenous interests arrayed themselves against the zeal of many new converts. The numbers of these dead were and are staggering, and the casualties assured that, whatever the precise motives of the missionaries, the converts were certainly willing to separate themselves from worldly interests.
They were not, however, willing to sever entirely their ties with incumbent cultures and traditions, as the developments in Africa after Edinburg soon showed. Christianity was appropriated, not adopted outright. Consequently, the faith of the Two-Thirds world churches differs in no small and no few ways from the faith brought by the European missionaries, even as the numbers of their members continued and continue to soar. The Zionist movement combines confessional Protestantism with holiness teaching and Pentecostal healing to produce a Christianity compatible with the prophetic, exorcistic, ecstatic and ritually-oriented culture of much of Africa. Similarly, William Harris would preach destruction of fetishes, mass baptism, and healing to such effect and with such power that Africans came to note the premature deaths of those who opposed him. Such similarity is not to suggest that Africa is a unified culture, but is to suggest that a unity of law, observance, scripture, baptism, symbol and worshipping church may be developing on the continent.
That this is occurring also on the South American continent and Asia only means that Edinburg led not just to one translation of Christianity, but effectively to several. This diversity and diffusion the colonial-minded conferees could not have foreseen, and must perhaps be listed as its best salient unintended consequence.
Thursday, December 3, 2009
On Sin and Grace: Dissonance
Of course, one might also say that Calvinist thought as a whole sounds as though it would in fact inhibit human agency. While one cannot disagree that “sin is pervasive in scope, debilitating in force, and stubbornly persistent,” one must surely become perplexed by a system of rhetorical theology which sees each and every human being as simply complacent or despairing.
One might also be, presumably, ignorant, frustrated, or provisionally optimistic. Recognizing that mankind is split along more than the saint and sinner axis is the requirement of a sin-talk that would do justice to the dynamic and multifaceted natures of both sin and grace. Jones starts down this corridor in places but fails to walk far down along it, presumably because of the dualistic thinking inherent in her tradition. To put it another way, Calvin might limit Jones’s agency even as Jones abdicates that agency herself, which is as close as I could come to comprehending the metaphysical somersaults concerning Calvinist original sin and our odd responsibility for it.
It must surely be difficult to comprehend that of which we can simultaneously say “sin is an imputed judgment that we are responsible for imposing upon our otherwise good natures. We impute it to ourselves” and “it is it a judgment we cannot escape, for each passing generation imposes this judgment upon the next.” So who, in original sin, is the responsible agent? Small wonder that Calvin resorted to high rhetoric and powerful metaphor if such was indeed his (theo)logical claim.
And small wonder if Jones’s feminist remapping of original and conscious sin would fail to conjure equally vivid metaphors to embrace the gracious life of faith against current patriarchal oppression. She simply seems not to have the ammunition. “Of what does faith consist,” she asks, “if not the gifts of sanctification and justification?” One would hope that faith would also consist of trust of, obedience to, and love for the One who bestowed those gifts to start with.
And one would also hope that a feminist remapping of sin would also lead to a Christian remapping of patriarchy but this indeed seems not to be the case, as talking about oppression as sin for her simply means “invoking a powerful sense of hope.” This is, to be sure, a good thing, but it is no more than the more fervent secular feminists would inspire. And while God certainly does will the flourishing of all persons, Jones does not describe why patriarchy prohibits this beyond the narrow examples of her Tuesday-night women.
She offers no definition of sin on her own but simply equates sin and oppression as such without ever saying precisely why. Perhaps this occurs in other chapters, but here it fails to offer a powerfully Christian alternative to secular feminist claims. She reminds us both that “these systems will be transformed in the years ahead” and that “emerging modes of social relations will carry marks of the past within them and harbor novel forms of oppression and domination, and that eradicating all forms of social sin is impossible.”
What, then, is the transformation? And who will do it: God, us, God through us or us through God? And how? Will there be particularly Christian solutions to entrenched social problems or will Christian rhetoric simply aim to baptize the solutions seen by the secular world? Yes, the Christian needs a “sheath, a skin to hold her together, to author her new becoming,” but what does this skin look like? Is it more women’s groups such as the one Jones participates in? It is the body of Christ compromised by the expectations of modernity? Is it the roles for women advocated by secular third-generation feminism?
And how do we get from a position of agency within society where “we are continuously invited to start over again…authoring the theological space of our becoming” to “a theological landscape where women flourish, difference abounds, power is shared, and justice is enacted as we are held together, fluid and multiple, in the envelope of God’s grace.”
It seems to me that we cannot do so without a less polar approach to thinking about sin and grace, and without a vision of human agency where grace becomes the fluidity that allows us to meet the constant adaptations of sin.
One might also be, presumably, ignorant, frustrated, or provisionally optimistic. Recognizing that mankind is split along more than the saint and sinner axis is the requirement of a sin-talk that would do justice to the dynamic and multifaceted natures of both sin and grace. Jones starts down this corridor in places but fails to walk far down along it, presumably because of the dualistic thinking inherent in her tradition. To put it another way, Calvin might limit Jones’s agency even as Jones abdicates that agency herself, which is as close as I could come to comprehending the metaphysical somersaults concerning Calvinist original sin and our odd responsibility for it.
It must surely be difficult to comprehend that of which we can simultaneously say “sin is an imputed judgment that we are responsible for imposing upon our otherwise good natures. We impute it to ourselves” and “it is it a judgment we cannot escape, for each passing generation imposes this judgment upon the next.” So who, in original sin, is the responsible agent? Small wonder that Calvin resorted to high rhetoric and powerful metaphor if such was indeed his (theo)logical claim.
And small wonder if Jones’s feminist remapping of original and conscious sin would fail to conjure equally vivid metaphors to embrace the gracious life of faith against current patriarchal oppression. She simply seems not to have the ammunition. “Of what does faith consist,” she asks, “if not the gifts of sanctification and justification?” One would hope that faith would also consist of trust of, obedience to, and love for the One who bestowed those gifts to start with.
And one would also hope that a feminist remapping of sin would also lead to a Christian remapping of patriarchy but this indeed seems not to be the case, as talking about oppression as sin for her simply means “invoking a powerful sense of hope.” This is, to be sure, a good thing, but it is no more than the more fervent secular feminists would inspire. And while God certainly does will the flourishing of all persons, Jones does not describe why patriarchy prohibits this beyond the narrow examples of her Tuesday-night women.
She offers no definition of sin on her own but simply equates sin and oppression as such without ever saying precisely why. Perhaps this occurs in other chapters, but here it fails to offer a powerfully Christian alternative to secular feminist claims. She reminds us both that “these systems will be transformed in the years ahead” and that “emerging modes of social relations will carry marks of the past within them and harbor novel forms of oppression and domination, and that eradicating all forms of social sin is impossible.”
What, then, is the transformation? And who will do it: God, us, God through us or us through God? And how? Will there be particularly Christian solutions to entrenched social problems or will Christian rhetoric simply aim to baptize the solutions seen by the secular world? Yes, the Christian needs a “sheath, a skin to hold her together, to author her new becoming,” but what does this skin look like? Is it more women’s groups such as the one Jones participates in? It is the body of Christ compromised by the expectations of modernity? Is it the roles for women advocated by secular third-generation feminism?
And how do we get from a position of agency within society where “we are continuously invited to start over again…authoring the theological space of our becoming” to “a theological landscape where women flourish, difference abounds, power is shared, and justice is enacted as we are held together, fluid and multiple, in the envelope of God’s grace.”
It seems to me that we cannot do so without a less polar approach to thinking about sin and grace, and without a vision of human agency where grace becomes the fluidity that allows us to meet the constant adaptations of sin.
On Sin and Grace: Consonance
Consonance
“Such a mirror might be held up…we behold a double image, not of one face but of many, infinite in number, moving in an endless variety of directions. Imagining the glass as uncracked, we see…flourishing in the context of faithful community, wrapped in the gifts of faith.”
The trouble that Christian and especially Protestant thought of sin has long been to make it surpassingly more interesting than grace. As a female friend of mine remarked when eating chocolate, “Nope, this isn’t God’s goodness. It’s too good! It must be sin!” One can see the same tendency in Milton’s leading character turning out to be, in fact, the Satan who would notoriously rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.
Static, Platonic notions of grace have long led to a heaven no one wants to live in and here in Calvin we see grace held up to us as a mirror which reflects only the way we ought to be. But if “Calvin defends the breadth and imprecision of his discussion here by explaining that sin is not a stable or static state but more a furnace burning with ever new flames or a spring unceasingly bubbling up from the earth…always changing, assuming ever new forms and traveling into ever new terrain,” then one could hope that, when pressed, love might do similarly exciting things.
The image of grace as a fractured mirror helps to explore such newly evolving territory. Grace at last becomes a multiplicity embracing a plurality of options even as it defines a field of options to choose from; life for Christians becomes selecting choices from the menu offered at the banquet of experience. Love becomes a fire burning with ever new flames, and grace becomes the spring bubbling up from the ground of all our being.
Grace is the boundary the defines a field of options, and the field of options consists of the selves awaiting in our preferred and promised futures. The Lord’s injunction that we shall be holy as the Lord is holy becomes a promise as much as a command, and while perhaps Jones might not want to take the notion so far, one would hope that whereas sin is the bondage of our will, righteousness would be that which sets our will free and increases our options in God.
‘If you but love God, then do as you will’ says Augustine, and one has no better a vision of heaven then this, not because grace is libertine but because it is liberating and always leads, one would hope, to a surfeit of options. This would be true both for men pressed into masculinity and women constrained by femininity alike – in the mirror of grace we face not simply the reverse of gendered constructs but indeed our truly human side.
Grace always changes. Grace assumes new forms and travels into new terrain. The images of grace are whole and holy, multiplicities unfractured by their separation – and here we note the postmodern allowance of disparate things to remain disparate yet contribute to a more harmonious whole. Sin fractures the glass precisely as it eliminates the future possibilities of humankind. The road of sin narrows as it goes unto desolation; the road of grace begins small but expands to embrace the humility, dignity and authority of agency.
Grace demands responsibility because it offers up to humans our first true choices. Grace implicates us in the story of our own sanctification not because we can become righteous on our own but because it makes all righteousness(es) possible. In my estimation the oppression of women is sin as such precisely because and to the degree that it limits the agency of women and denies them responsibility in the first place; this applies, obviously, to all disaffected, disenfranchised and marginalized people even as it embraces those who remain so caught in the system of sin that they deny the agency of others and act as oppressors in their own right.
That sin touches all must also imply the possibility that graces touches all or at least extends toward all, whatever they might make of it. Otherwise, Satan would presumably welcome both oppressors and oppressed into her dominion; I am sure she holds no preference otherwise. What grace and God prefer, however, is that we run out the scripts of righteousness precisely because they are both more compelling and more liberating than the monotonous and banal self-righteousness, self-deluding, and self-denying script of sin that the darkness would have us repeat ad infinitum.
“Such a mirror might be held up…we behold a double image, not of one face but of many, infinite in number, moving in an endless variety of directions. Imagining the glass as uncracked, we see…flourishing in the context of faithful community, wrapped in the gifts of faith.”
The trouble that Christian and especially Protestant thought of sin has long been to make it surpassingly more interesting than grace. As a female friend of mine remarked when eating chocolate, “Nope, this isn’t God’s goodness. It’s too good! It must be sin!” One can see the same tendency in Milton’s leading character turning out to be, in fact, the Satan who would notoriously rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.
Static, Platonic notions of grace have long led to a heaven no one wants to live in and here in Calvin we see grace held up to us as a mirror which reflects only the way we ought to be. But if “Calvin defends the breadth and imprecision of his discussion here by explaining that sin is not a stable or static state but more a furnace burning with ever new flames or a spring unceasingly bubbling up from the earth…always changing, assuming ever new forms and traveling into ever new terrain,” then one could hope that, when pressed, love might do similarly exciting things.
The image of grace as a fractured mirror helps to explore such newly evolving territory. Grace at last becomes a multiplicity embracing a plurality of options even as it defines a field of options to choose from; life for Christians becomes selecting choices from the menu offered at the banquet of experience. Love becomes a fire burning with ever new flames, and grace becomes the spring bubbling up from the ground of all our being.
Grace is the boundary the defines a field of options, and the field of options consists of the selves awaiting in our preferred and promised futures. The Lord’s injunction that we shall be holy as the Lord is holy becomes a promise as much as a command, and while perhaps Jones might not want to take the notion so far, one would hope that whereas sin is the bondage of our will, righteousness would be that which sets our will free and increases our options in God.
‘If you but love God, then do as you will’ says Augustine, and one has no better a vision of heaven then this, not because grace is libertine but because it is liberating and always leads, one would hope, to a surfeit of options. This would be true both for men pressed into masculinity and women constrained by femininity alike – in the mirror of grace we face not simply the reverse of gendered constructs but indeed our truly human side.
Grace always changes. Grace assumes new forms and travels into new terrain. The images of grace are whole and holy, multiplicities unfractured by their separation – and here we note the postmodern allowance of disparate things to remain disparate yet contribute to a more harmonious whole. Sin fractures the glass precisely as it eliminates the future possibilities of humankind. The road of sin narrows as it goes unto desolation; the road of grace begins small but expands to embrace the humility, dignity and authority of agency.
Grace demands responsibility because it offers up to humans our first true choices. Grace implicates us in the story of our own sanctification not because we can become righteous on our own but because it makes all righteousness(es) possible. In my estimation the oppression of women is sin as such precisely because and to the degree that it limits the agency of women and denies them responsibility in the first place; this applies, obviously, to all disaffected, disenfranchised and marginalized people even as it embraces those who remain so caught in the system of sin that they deny the agency of others and act as oppressors in their own right.
That sin touches all must also imply the possibility that graces touches all or at least extends toward all, whatever they might make of it. Otherwise, Satan would presumably welcome both oppressors and oppressed into her dominion; I am sure she holds no preference otherwise. What grace and God prefer, however, is that we run out the scripts of righteousness precisely because they are both more compelling and more liberating than the monotonous and banal self-righteousness, self-deluding, and self-denying script of sin that the darkness would have us repeat ad infinitum.
On the French Revolution
On The French Revolution
Christian historians have noted the locus of Christian influence shifting geographically over time. What began in Jerusalem soon shifted east toward Antioch, then west toward Rome, and north into France and Germany – even as the cultures, beliefs, and practices of those local peoples influenced Christianity going forward.
What the French Revolution did was to – rather abruptly – shift the axis of import of the Christian faith away from Northern Europe and into North America. That the turning point was in this case a secular cataclysm rather than a doctrinal dispute points toward the shifting nature of Christianity itself, and the change that would be produced.
The shift was largely secular, and the trend was to be for secularization. The French Revolution occurred for blatantly political reasons: tensions between monarchy and nobility, authority and reason, and the economic clash between aristocrats and the rising bourgeoisie. It produced overtly secular results: national rather than individual or religious sovereignty, the ostensibly purely rational critique of all things, the self-sustaining properties of the natural, secular world and the assertion of self-evident rights of national citizens.
The advent of the Enlightenment was the advent of the flame of Reason in the western world.
Yet the secular revolution swiftly took on proportions that could only be called religious. It may have been a mistaken notion when Samuel Miller preached a hope that the French Revolution would kindle a general conflagration sent to illuminate the darkest corners of the earth, but it was an understandable notion nonetheless. The de-Christianizing zeal displayed in renaming Notre Dame the Temple of Reason and populating it with Greco-Roman motifs and other idols certainly sounds like religious devotion in retrospect.
The remaining Christians of the day would have done well to note that ideals without mediation of accountability or pragmatic applicability inflict casualties no matter their origin, as the indiscriminate violence, fanatical ideology, citizen armies, executions, terrorism, and propaganda of the French Revolution soon showed. Toynbee was right, then, to later characterize this convulsion not as the abandonment of religion but simply “the fanatical worship of collective human power.” With the French Revolution, the nation had claimed for itself the shared public space long claimed by Christianity, or at least by Christendom.
This then might mark the greatest impact of the Enlightenment on Christianity: its privatization. The countervailing forces to the French Revolution inevitably imbibed some of its most prevalent characteristics: religion retreated from the public, intellectual and academic spheres and became personal and evangelistic as the theological responses to Enlightenment claims came up short of their mark.
Thus, while one is certainly wise to note the vigorous apologetics and Catholic reconsiderations that the Enlightenment produced, these can hardly be said to be its most powerful contributions or reactions. Rather, revivals, evangelism, faith healing and mission all appealed to the emotional sides of human nature more than the rational. Schleiermacher carried pietist upbringing into his later theology and called for a sense of dependence upon God even as biblical higher criticism called into question many of the assumptions that interpreters of Scripture had always held.
Meanwhile, sectarian movements sought to leave the influence of the world behind, whether in Protestant form through the Christian Brethren or in Catholic form through the reverence of the otherworldly Virgin Mary.
In other words, Christianity had become a fire nicely adapted for the pistons of the energetically individualistic and Romantic engine that was to be America.
Christian historians have noted the locus of Christian influence shifting geographically over time. What began in Jerusalem soon shifted east toward Antioch, then west toward Rome, and north into France and Germany – even as the cultures, beliefs, and practices of those local peoples influenced Christianity going forward.
What the French Revolution did was to – rather abruptly – shift the axis of import of the Christian faith away from Northern Europe and into North America. That the turning point was in this case a secular cataclysm rather than a doctrinal dispute points toward the shifting nature of Christianity itself, and the change that would be produced.
The shift was largely secular, and the trend was to be for secularization. The French Revolution occurred for blatantly political reasons: tensions between monarchy and nobility, authority and reason, and the economic clash between aristocrats and the rising bourgeoisie. It produced overtly secular results: national rather than individual or religious sovereignty, the ostensibly purely rational critique of all things, the self-sustaining properties of the natural, secular world and the assertion of self-evident rights of national citizens.
The advent of the Enlightenment was the advent of the flame of Reason in the western world.
Yet the secular revolution swiftly took on proportions that could only be called religious. It may have been a mistaken notion when Samuel Miller preached a hope that the French Revolution would kindle a general conflagration sent to illuminate the darkest corners of the earth, but it was an understandable notion nonetheless. The de-Christianizing zeal displayed in renaming Notre Dame the Temple of Reason and populating it with Greco-Roman motifs and other idols certainly sounds like religious devotion in retrospect.
The remaining Christians of the day would have done well to note that ideals without mediation of accountability or pragmatic applicability inflict casualties no matter their origin, as the indiscriminate violence, fanatical ideology, citizen armies, executions, terrorism, and propaganda of the French Revolution soon showed. Toynbee was right, then, to later characterize this convulsion not as the abandonment of religion but simply “the fanatical worship of collective human power.” With the French Revolution, the nation had claimed for itself the shared public space long claimed by Christianity, or at least by Christendom.
This then might mark the greatest impact of the Enlightenment on Christianity: its privatization. The countervailing forces to the French Revolution inevitably imbibed some of its most prevalent characteristics: religion retreated from the public, intellectual and academic spheres and became personal and evangelistic as the theological responses to Enlightenment claims came up short of their mark.
Thus, while one is certainly wise to note the vigorous apologetics and Catholic reconsiderations that the Enlightenment produced, these can hardly be said to be its most powerful contributions or reactions. Rather, revivals, evangelism, faith healing and mission all appealed to the emotional sides of human nature more than the rational. Schleiermacher carried pietist upbringing into his later theology and called for a sense of dependence upon God even as biblical higher criticism called into question many of the assumptions that interpreters of Scripture had always held.
Meanwhile, sectarian movements sought to leave the influence of the world behind, whether in Protestant form through the Christian Brethren or in Catholic form through the reverence of the otherworldly Virgin Mary.
In other words, Christianity had become a fire nicely adapted for the pistons of the energetically individualistic and Romantic engine that was to be America.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Notice: Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving all, and a wonderful start to the holiday season. I'll be doing research for longer papers all this week, so there won't be anything until next Monday, when I return with a full slate.
Cheers, and thanks for reading!
The Curious Monk
Cheers, and thanks for reading!
The Curious Monk
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