Fear o' Hell II: John Casey's Critique of Calvinism

Do Double-Predestination and Total Depravity Still Make Any Sense?

The Sorcerer's Apprentice, John Calvin

Question 12: What are the decrees of God?

Answer: God's decrees are the wise, free, and holy acts of the counsel of his will, whereby, from all eternity, he has, for his own glory, unchangeably foreordained: Whatsoever comes to pass in time, especially concerning angels and men.

Question 13: What has God especially decreed concerning angels and men?

Answer: God, by an eternal and immutable decree, out of his mere love, for the praise of his glorious grace, to be manifested in due time, has elected some angels to glory; and in Christ has chosen some men to eternal life, and the means thereof: and also, according to his sovereign power, and the unsearchable counsel of his own will (whereby he extends or withholds favor as he pleases), has passed by and foreordained the rest to dishonor and wrath, to be for their sin inflicted, to the praise of the glory of his justice.

Question 14: How does God execute his decrees?

Answer: God executes his decrees in the works of creation and providence, according to his infallible foreknowledge, and the free and immutable counsel of his own will.

-- From the Westminster Shorter Catechism

A thought experiment...

Suppose that you have been found guilty of a capital offense and that you are in prison on death row with ninety-nine other guilty people.

Before your execution day comes up the governor makes an announcement. According to his sovereign power, and the unsearchable counsel of his own will (whereby he extends or withholds favor as he pleases), he has decided to grant you clemency and spare your life. The other ninety-nine are still consigned to death.

Bear in mind, the clemency granted to you had absolutely nothing to do with your merits in comparison to those of the other prisoners. It had nothing to do with your repentance, behavior in prison, amends, or restitution that you may have made in regard to the crimes you have committed. This decision was made by the governor in an inscrutable fashion, for reasons known only to him and which appeared entirely arbitrary to everyone else. In fact, if you had claimed any merits on your own behalf, or attempts at making amends at all, it probably would have been held against you. The governor hears petitions from no one who calls out to him on their own, only from those he draws to himself.

As you collect your belongings and pass through the gates of the prison into freedom, honestly, would you be crying tears of joy and gratitude that you had been spared the fate that still awaits the other ninety-nine? Would you swear your undying love to the governor and praise him for all eternity for showing you such kindness and mercy?

Or, rather, would you feel a certain quickening in your step as you leave, considering yourself merely lucky to have been the beneficiary of a strange, cruel and capricious whim on the part of a disciplinarian but volatile governor? That you had somehow escaped from the clutches of an unpredictable despot who gets a sense of satisfaction out of levying forms of justice and mercy that are understandable only to himself?

If you answered to the former, I suppose you would feel comfortable within the sect of Calvinism.

What if you were one out of ten instead of one out of ninety-nine? Would it change your answer? What if it was one out of two?

Well, considering how narrow the Calvinists consider the gate to be, the scenario would probably be more like one in a thousand. Maybe even one in a hundred-thousand. I've noticed that those who profess to believe the most in grace alone tend also to believe in the stingiest application of it.

What if the crime that you were guilty of was hereditary? It was for something a distant forefather had done, and was no fault of your own? Same answer?

What if the governor, rather than just letting you walk, actually punished his own beloved son in your place? Would you still be praising him for his glory, or would you think that he was a sociopath?

What if everyone was in the prison? According to the governor, we all deserve death for this inherited crime. Isn't it merciful then, for the governor to let some of us live, when none of us deserve to...?

I know, I know, elements of this can be seen in Catholic theology as well... We believe in the Fall, Original Sin, the necessity of grace for salvation, and that Jesus died to take away the sins of the world... We even have a place within our theology for predestination and foreknowledge... After all, St. Augustine was one of ours, we recognize Augustinianism when we see it, and what is Calvinism, really, other than Augustinianism taken to the nth degree?

There is an obsessive fixation within Protestantism, however, and within Calvinism in particular on the Koine Greek word dikaiosune (righteousness) and all of its variations along with an emphasis on the polemical texts in the gospels and Pauline letters that are used in regard to election and chosenness (taken out of the original historical context of the disputes between Jews and Christians and between Jewish-Christians and Gentile-Christians) that negates much of the broader theme of salvation history to be found throughout the Old Testament and New Testament.

All that talk in the Old Testament about taking joy out of contemplating, studying, and following God's laws? All that talk about the law being very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out (Deut. 30-14)? The way the Calvinists read Paul, God's giving of the law was like a father catching his son smoking and subsequently forcing him to smoke a whole pack of cigarettes in order to break him. In other words, the law was meant to convict man of his sin and show him his utter helplessness.

All of the Bible's exhortations to good works, looking after the needs of the widow, orphan, and stranger, of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, of Jesus' own words to the young man who asked what a man needed to do to attain eternal life, to the biblical exhortations to hate evil and love good, to let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream - All of this is subsumed in a system in which God in his wrath is determined to crush and destroy any puny and presumptuous human who dares to take credit for any good that he does... Even though that man's nature, faith, and fate were set up and predetermined by God from the beginning of all time anyway.

Now, if you were to tell a pair of Calvinists that you could never believe in such a monster god, they'd glance at each other, exchange a knowing smile, and one would likely turn back to you and say "I know." You see, they know that the mind of the unregenerate man isn't capable of understanding it. As for themselves, they are fine with it, because a potter has the right to do whatever he wants to do with his clay vessels, doesn't he? Who are you, O man, to answer back?

If you tell them that their theology makes God the author of sin and negates man's free will, they would respond, "Not at all. Man has free will, but due to his depravity his inclination is toward sin, so his free will can only lead him into sin and rebellion against God."

If you were to tell me that these answers were unsatisfactory in answering the charges, I would agree.

My son has a sandbox in which he keeps his toy soldiers. He gives them orders, he moves them about, he builds and takes apart their worlds; everything happens according to his plans. According to his own decrees, for good reasons known only to him, he decides which ones will live and which ones will die. Do his toy soldiers love him? In his own mind, I suppose he can imagine that they do, but in reality they are inanimate. If they could respond to him, it is more likely that they would merely fear him rather than love him, and any love expressed by them would be feigned. He has no real relationship with them.

But we each are capable of having a relationship with God in which we respond to him or refuse to respond, saints and sinners alike, saved and lost.

It's important to be as fair as I can about this before going further. As obnoxious and un-Christian the Calvinist doctrines of Double-Predestination (God has once for all determined, both whom he would admit to salvation, and whom he would condemn to destruction) and Total Depravity (every person born into the world is enslaved to the service of sin and, apart from the efficacious or prevenient grace of God, is utterly unable to choose to follow God or choose to accept salvation as it is offered) are to me, I must admit that they have an ironclad logic to them and plenty of scriptural support, as long as the scriptures are being read through a certain type of lens - as long as you accept certain anachronistic presuppositions that read 16th century European concerns back onto 1st century Near Eastern texts.

The definitions of some of these terms can be subtle as well, and are not always congruent with the way they sound at first hearing. For example, Total Depravity does not mean absolute or complete depravity. It doesn't mean that man is as bad as he can be. To say "total" is to say that the corruption extends to all aspects of the human personality in an extensive way, not an intensive way. It maintains that every part of man is corrupt, even if they are not completely corrupt. Under this doctrine, it is recognized that there are still good things that a person can do out of "common grace."

Nevertheless, Total Depravity assumes that man is dead in his sins and that the "good" that he does is self-centered and egoistic, not God-centered. To quote from here: "This means that his nature is so thoroughly corrupted by sin that it is incapable of producing anything good. There is nothing which the sinner can do which is pleasing in the sight of God. His heart is dead."

Is this credible? Is this supportable from what we know today about human nature? In the field of psychology, we have come a long, long way from the armchair theorizing of quacks like Sigmund Freud. Today we recognize that the capacity for good and evil is built into every one of us from our ancestral past. We have proclivities towards both altruism and selfishness. Humankind is not totally depraved. Neither is human nature a neutral blank slate which can only express evil if evil is learned from others. Both good and evil are coded into our DNA. We are capable of selfless acts of kindness and acts of utter brutality. We tend to base our relationships on reciprocity, and our altruism is usually directed towards kin and others we can categorize as being part of our in-group, and hostility and team aggression are directed towards those we consider strangers or part of an out-group. We are capable of enormous empathy, but we also have an inbred ability to turn it off and to treat others as less than human.

There are some evolutionary atheists like Richard Dawkins who might agree in a certain sense with the notion of Total Depravity, arguing that our altruistic characteristics are motivated at their very bedrock by selfishness. Other, like Frans de Waal, would be likely to disagree.

Take the example of a firefighter who lays down his life as part of his job. Is he selfishly motivated by the notion of posthumous honor and glory? Most probably not... What if he died in the service of rescuing someone of a different race or ethnicity? Did he die trying to unconsciously rescue his own set of recognizable (kin) genes? Again, probably not. Experience shows us that some people, even non-religious people, are capable of true goodness and altruism, with no self-serving motivations behind them.

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned Cambridge University scholar John Casey's book After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. He had an interesting take on some of these matters. In a chapter titled 'Predestination: Augustine to Calvin and Beyond' he takes on Total Depravity in particular....

Casey makes mention of when Erasmus of Rotterdam ('On the Freedom of the Will') took up his pen in a debate with Martin Luther ('On the Bondage of the Will').

Erasmus had, in fact, argued only for a modest contribution of the will to human goodness, and had allowed an extremely limited scope for the will's freedom. He asserted that if the will is simply enslaved, as Luther suggests, and if all human sins are predetermined, there would be no point in passages of scripture that seem directly to call people to repentance. For instance "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matt. 4:17; Mark 1:15) and Paul's adjuration: "Let us cast off the works of darkness" (Rom 13:12) along with Paul's demand for a "sloughing off of the old man and his acts." How, Erasmus asks, can we be ordered to throw off and strip off our old bad selves if we really cannot do anything for ourselves at all? Erasmus proposes a "middle way" in which the human will is not completely passive, but cooperates with God's grace. Just as reason had been dulled but not extinguished in those who lack grace, so "it is probable that the power of the will has not been absolutely extinguished in them either, but only rendered incapable of doing good."

Luther's rage at the middle way of Erasmus (which would later be confirmed as Catholic orthodoxy by the Council of Trent) may testify to his almost psychotic sense of sin and of personal impotence in the face of the perfection of God. It also shows, though, that he had a very good instinct for the way things were going. The Catholic Church, while keeping predestination in theory, would be in practice ready to soften it and adapt it to more humane instincts—indeed, to something like humanism.

Casey then moves on to describe how John Calvin's views built upon, and in some ways differed from, Augustine's.

It is possible that total depravity is even more certainly a doctrine of Calvin's than it is of Augustine. This is because Calvin does not seem to share Augustine's vision of evil as the privation of good. In the Confessions Augustine writes that all things are good even if they are corrupted. Man's being consists in his enjoyment of God's goodness; so if his corruption is so total as to deprave utterly, he would cease to exist... So Augustine's philosophical theory about the good does —just— mean his picture of human depravity is not quite as thoroughgoing as Calvin's. But it is a close-run thing.

Calvin does add something to Augustine's account of original sin and human depravity. For him man is totally depraved. Yet for Calvin the sense of impotence and even of despair that the conviction of sin engenders, the misery of the human predicament and the sense of a fallen world, are not purely negative, because he sees them as the starting point of our knowledge of God. "For, as a veritable world of miseries is to be found in mankind, and we are thereby despoiled of living raiment, our shameful nakedness exposes a teeming hoard of infamies. Each of us must, then, be so stung by the consciosuness of his own unhappiness as to attain at least some knowledge of God."

Calvin's views are also contrasted to those of Thomas Aquinas.

In the same Augustinian spirit, Calvin concludes that the whole of human nature is overwhelmed by original sin "as by a deluge," so that all which proceeds from man "is to be imputed to sin." It is not just the brute appetites that need to be obliterated, but the whole of man's corrupted heart and mind - indeed, his whole rebellious spirit. Calvin criticizes Plato and Aristotle for believing that reason, though clogged and sometimes conquered by the senses, nevertheless "like a queen governs the will." He rejects utterly their conviction that to be virtuous is, in the end, a matter of free human choice.

Thomas Aquinas had upheld a doctrine of predestination that looks very like that of Augustine. He taught that "some people God rejects" and that this rejection can properly be called "reprobation." There is hardly any softening — for instance, Aquinas says that reprobation does not indicate God's foreknowledge only, for as predestination includes the will to confer grace and glory, so reprobation "includes the will to permit someone to fall into fault and to inflict the penalty of damnation in consequence." Nevertheless, the reprobate abandon grace out of a free decision of their own. Within the general scheme of God's providence Aquinas allows a free choice of the individual will.

It is a tiny concession, but one not to be found in Calvin who (as we shall see) will teach the stern doctrine of "double predestination" — i.e., that God not only determines some souls, before their creation, to eternal bliss but a consigns others, in the unsearchable counsel of his own will, to everlasting torment. (Calvin's Catholic critics accused him of teaching that God actually wills the sins of the damned.) Calvin reserved some of his harshest strictures for those Catholic theologians who even hint that man can, of his own free will, cooperate with God's grace, or that he does, sometimes, even if ineffectively, "somehow seek after the good." He quotes with approval St. Augustine's insistence, in his reply to Julian of Eclanum, that without the Spirit the will is not free. Not even one single good work is possible without grace.

Casey than briefly explicates Calvin's central doctrines.

Since man's will is so corrupted, he actually sins willingly. So, although the will is not free, and man is subject to the necessity of sinning, his very wickedness ensures that he sins with gusto and determination—hence, guiltily. So he sins of necessity, but without compulsion.

It obviously follows that good works avail us nothing — and Calvin, while
grimly praising Augustine because "he admirably deprives man of all credit for righteousness, and transfers it to God's grace," complains nevertheless that Augustine does not go far enough, since he "subsumes grace under sanctification, by which we are reborn in newness of life through the Spirit."

Calvin moves without apparent hesitation to the conclusion that defines "Calvinism" — since man is totally depraved, and since only God's grace, freely granted, can save him, a grace that includes the gift of faith in Christ, which is both necessary and sufficient for salvation; and since God has known from all eternity whom he would chose to favor with his grace and whom he would pass over, it follows that all human beings are, from all eternity, predestined by God either everlasting bliss or everlasting torment — the notorious doctrine of double predestination comes in. As we saw, the Roman Church would put the darkest construction on Calvin's doctrine — that God does not simply permit the sins of those who will (as he foresaw) be damned —he actually wills them. Not only did he permit Adam to sin, he willed it. He furthermore wills every actual sin.

There is no doubt but that the doctrine of original sin, grace, and predestination as developed by Augustine and Calvin has a magnificent logic. If man's nature is indeed as depraved as the doctrine of original sin entails, so that moral evil proceeds not from the appetites and passions overcoming reason — as Plato and Aristotle thought — but in a taint that runs through all of human nature, then it is entirely plausible to conclude that from human nature alone nothing good can proceed. Hence, any good in man comes from the free granting of God's grace, which none of us merits. Therefore we are, through the unsearchable counsel of God's will from all eternity, either of the elect or of the reprobate, and if of the latter, we are condemned to an eternity of torment through a decision God took before time began.

Finally, Casey gets to the heart of the matter as to whether or not this view of Total Depravity holds water.

Post-Enlightenment pictures of human nature have tended to move toward an Augustinian pessimism. At any rate, our being in the grip of forces that we can neither acknowledge nor control is an idea to be found, in one way or another, in Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Augustine's account of concupiscence also finds echoes in modern philosophy. Sartre finds sexual love to be a locus of conflict, a source of impossibly self-contradictory desires. In desiring another, I want to reduce him to his flesh, to abrogate his freedom, convert his subjectivity into an object of my own will. My means of achieving this is to evoke in the Other sexual desire for myself... This has analogies with what Augustine says of concupiscence, and why he finds in the involuntary movement of the sexual parts in erotic love a deformity, a product of original sin.

But can evidence of perversity, irrationality, the power over us of unconscious forces support a doctrine of human nature since the Fall as fundamentally depraved?

In consequence of the horrors of the twentieth century it became quite common for people to say that they had rediscovered a belief in original sin. But did they really mean that they see human nature as so depraved that we cannot possibly bring about any good through our own efforts? For we can bring contrary evidence — of a mother acting with heroic self-sacrifice to save her child; of people sacrificing their lives for the good of their country, of those whose sense of justice overcomes self-interest; those with a generous love of fine qualities in other people; others who struggle with increasing success to overcome childish jealousies and resentments.

In pointing to such things, we need not be falling into some optimistic trap, a Panglossian view of human nature...

Were our understanding as depraved as Augustine and Calvin suggest, it is very hard to see how we could know our own depravity. They argue, of course, that we see our own blackness when we contrast ourselves with God. But this does not help their argument. Whatever our conviction of the supreme goodness of God, it does not follow that we have a clear idea of the profound depravity of man. Even though God be infinitely superior to us in goodness, that does not help us to understand how, say, a moment of irritation with someone is no different in its gravity from mass murder (as Newman appeared to suggest). Nor would the fact that God is entirely just show that we cannot see some human acts as more just than others. The very idea of depravity, of perversity, depends on our being able to think of some actions and motives as being better than others.

We could not understand human actions at all unless we were capable of seeing some people as acting courageously and honorably, others as moved by spite or envy, of distinguishing between kindness and sadism, generosity and mean spiritedness. We know that some people are more dominated by irrational fears than others, that some are more mature and others more childish. Some can subordinate their own urgent desires to the common good, can defer gratifications, can see a situation as it really is.

At any rate, some of us— probably, most of us — can exercise some of these virtues some of the time and fail in them at other times. If we acknowledge that for practical purposes — for the purpose of seeing intelligible patterns in human action —this is true but nevertheless add "But it is not strictly true, for we are helplessly depraved," then that remark and others like it would become simply a sort of incantation or a cog unattached to a wheel. It would be like saying "I have no real belief in the solidity of physical objects" while unconcernedly sitting on a chair or mounting a staircase.

If we accept that we can in practice understand the moral distinctions that we make all the time, but insist that these have no ultimate validity in theory, it is unclear what we are doing. It seems that we are denying that any evidence can come to bear. But this again would seem to be paying lip service to an idea that has no actual purchase on our experience.

Augustine based his belief in human depravity not primarily on experience but on revelation. The support for the idea that he found in experience — especially in sexual desire — was a sort of optional extra. But even revelation cannot make the idea of total depravity ultimately intelligible if does not answer to our experience, and, indeed, if it conflicts with it.

Augustine's picture of fallen nature has power and persuasiveness, but it can never escape its inherent paradoxicality. To refuse to distinguish between different degrees of goodness, or virtue, or benevolence in human motivation makes it impossible in the end to understand human actions at all.

An Unconventional Palm Sunday Reflection

Shrugging off Atlas Shrugged. The Kingdom of God continues to be obscured for Pie in the Sky... or even less. Fighting the Hijacking of Christianity by Objectivism


Christ Driving the Moneychangers from the Temple, by El Greco (1570)

They make a lot of garbage films in Hollywood and elsewhere these days, but did anyone notice this weekend that the Drudge Report had a link cooing about the release of a film adaptation of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged? I guess it's been a long time coming, but I'm still surprised that someone made a movie out of that stack of trash. With the rise of the Tea Party, I suppose someone thought it was an opportune moment to make it. As distasteful as Tea Party values are to me on a purely secular and political level, what bothers me more is that it seems to have gained credibility and a certain cachet with Christians too, and sadly, young Catholics in particular. They'd never admit that they've bought into Objectivism (an atheistic and virulently anti-Catholic philosophy), but in effect, that is what they have done. By contrast, many young evangelicals seem to be coming to their senses in the opposite direction. They've been down that road enough times to know that they've been used by people who actually disdain them.

Time to dust off and re-present Supply Side Jesus:



By the way, Andrew Sullivan at The Dish absolutely nailed this with a post called Ayn Rand vs Jesus Christ. He reposts some great contrasts between Objectivism and the scriptures from another article, and makes this devastating observation of his own:

It is possible to read the Gospels as entirely a personal and not political message, and certainly not view Christianity as a short route to socialism. But it is impossible even in one's personal life to be a Christian and to be a Randian. The whole point of the Gospels is that Rand's value system leads to profound misery and spiritual loss. And the whole point of Rand is that Nietzsche was onto something.

Fear o' Hell: John Casey on the Biggest Change in the Catholic Church

Militant and Triumphant. No nonsense in Boston, 1943 (my mother, top-row, far-right)

I noticed the cover article in Time magazine this week - Is Hell Dead? It's about a book by evangelical pastor Bob Bell called Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Its universalist message isn't going down well with many of the other well-known preachers in the evangelical community. As for my own community, it just might.

A priest in my parish has been heard to say, "There are things that are important, and there are things that are only important on the internet." He would certainly know, as he himself is the subject of a rather strange blog that is uniquely dedicated to "exposing" him.

He's right, of course. Looking at the Catholic blogosphere you would think that the most important issue gripping the Church today is the reception of Summorum Pontificum and the availability of the Tridentine Mass. It's either that, or tales of liturgical abuse, as if every parish in the nation was inundated by wymyn-priests in clown wigs liturgically prancing across our altars every Sunday.

In your average parish, however, day-in and day-out, these issues are practically unheard of and count for nothing. Vatican II did usher in great changes, and I don't mean to totally underplay the impact of the changes in the liturgy, but I don't think that was where the biggest change in the life of the Church occurred. As I've said here before, my own catechesis was a combination of what was presented in the pre-Vatican II and post-Vatican II Church. The council occurred during my childhood, and it took a while for things to change at the local parish level in any event. My training for my First Confession (before they called it Reconciliation) and First Communion were decidedly pre-conciliar. It was pretty tough stuff. Things changed significantly later.

During the 60's there were enormous changes in the role of women and young people in society. The introduction of the birth control pill changed the trajectory of human society more than any technological innovation that I can think of, and that's saying something. In the wake of the Viet-Nam War, the assassinations, and Watergate, there was an enormous loss of public trust, and authorities were not held in the same unquestioning esteem as they were before. Some would say Humanae Vitae had the same effect on the Church. As society changed, the life of the Church changed as well. Fr Andrew Greeley likes to say that The “Catholic Revolution” lasted most generously from 1965 to 1974, but was more accurately within the period from 1966 to 1970. In my own experience, I'd put if from 1968 to 1972. In my view, the world was one way before the pivotal year of 1968 and was completely transformed by the time 1972 came along. For all the sturm and drang over litugy, or Humanae Vitae, the role of the laity, the crash in the number of vocations, or whatever hot topic we want to bring up, it doesn't touch what the biggest difference is. Some traditionalists do like to mention it, and in at least this much they aren't wrong...

The biggest difference I can see, is that in the pre-conciliar Church, before 1968 or so, Catholics were deathly afraid of going to hell.

Hell was mostly what you heard about in Catholicism. It was a fire-and-brimstone church.

In the post-conciliar period, for whatever reason, after 1972 or so, nobody talked about hell anymore and nobody was afraid of going there. Well, perhaps I can amend that... They were no longer interested in hearing any priest telling them that they were going there.

I remember some people referring to themselves as "Recovering Catholics" a few years back. If they still do, well, I'm sorry. With the very important exception of people who've suffered from sexual abuse (I ignore that by no means), if you are under the age of 45, you haven't got much to recover from. You never got hit with the brimstone like we did.

A couple of years ago, Cambridge University scholar John Casey wrote a book called After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. In the introduction he summed up this sea-change in his own Catholic Church quite succinctly.

Beliefs held almost without question for centuries, and enforced by the authority of venerable institutions, can unpredictably evaporate.

For almost nineteen centuries the great majority of Christians had accepted, even embraced fervently, certain doctrines about man's final end.

These beliefs were at the center of the Christian imagination. Among Protestants in Northern Europe there had been some dilution of belief among intellectuals and the growth of liberal theology; but this did not begin to affect the masses until the early twentieth century.

The Roman Catholic Church preserved the orthodox teaching on heaven and hell with energy and rigor until the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), after which the deliquescence of serious belief in damnation (heaven remained an attractive, if vague, possibility) was astonishingly rapid. Although the doctrines remained officially in place, they were played down and lost most of the resonance they used to have with the faithful. It could be that the new model army of enthusiastically orthodox priests, which emerged during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II (1978-2005), will eventually reconvert Roman Catholics to a lively terror of the possibility of damnation—but at the moment that seems unlikely. You will rarely meet a Catholic who believes (to use Browning's words) that God watches him "As he believes in fire that it will burn, / Or rain that it will drench him...”

Yet in the nineteenth century, and even in the twentieth, people converted to Roman Catholicism in the conviction that by this means, and this only, could they save their immortal souls. Gerard Manley Hopkins was afraid that his favorite composer, Henry Purcell, was in hell because he was a heretic. Graham Green wrote novels in which damnation was the central them. A vivid assent to the reality of another world was everywhere to be found...

It is hard for modern Christians – at least in the West – to conceive how seriously all this was taken not much more than a generation ago… The integrity of the "deposit of faith" in the world of Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Stalin, and Hitler was preserved by an authoritarian, managerial discipline. That is why the valiant attempt of Rome to hold on to the ancient convictions is more striking than what happened in Protestantism.

It is also why the changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council were also of great significance. For although that council did not formally change any articles of faith, it produced a climate in which some central doctrines seemed to lose their purchase on the Catholic imagination, shaped as it had been by the Counter-Reformation. The cultural change is still working itself out and its full implications may not be understood until many more years have passed. Before the council, many even among those who rejected the faith were profoundly colored by it. In the early twentieth century there were those brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition who both intimately and imaginatively understood the doctrines about the next life, but who found them so at variance with modem experience that they could only treat them with a profound — if not necessarily unsympathetic — irony.

I'll let individual readers discern on their own whether or not this was a good thing. It's my own opinion that the actual theology discussed and presented in the Vatican II documents was excellent theology - much better than the legalistic neo-scholastic manuals that were in use in the period just prior to that. Can the subsequent collapse be blamed on good theology? Maybe. Maybe a lot of people really do prefer motivation by fear - or prefer "religion" over real faith. That would be a shame if was really the case.

To stress God's love and mercy over the pain of hell was probably the right thing to do, the healthiest thing to do and the truest to Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, in a materialistic, consumeristic society in which virtues have been largely forgotten, and the most elementary trust broken down between both individuals and groups, isn't it a tragedy that we've lost a collective sense of what sin is, and of our own sins?

More on Male Team Aggression...

Just in case the last post on Team Aggression failed to convince, here it is in a nutshell...

Short of outright warfare, I'd say rugby epitomizes it at the the most primal level, even more than American football. Pretty cool... This is the way to work aggressions out.

Congratulations go out to England for winning the Six Nations Tournament last month, but they were denied the prestige of winning the coveted Grand Slam title (wins in all six matches) by the 2009 Grand Slam champs Ireland, who thumped them pretty good by a score of 24-8.



Italy did not fare very well, but they did have the honor of having the player of the tournament in Andrea Masi.

After receiving the award yesterday, Masi said: "It has been a championship of highs and lows for the Italian team, our win against France will go down in rugby history but to finish sixth frustrated us all. However, to be named the RBS Player of the Championship is a fantastic way to end what has been one of the most competitive Championships I can remember. We have worked hard this year and can be proud of our achievements. Italian Italian rugby continues to strengthen and we are very happy with our progress as a team."

A nice highlight reel of the tournament as a whole, featuring all the nations...

Genghis XXXII ?

Temujin's progeny and the Founder Effect


A young boy in Kyrgyzstan

In a 2009 post called Is it the "Religion" Gene or the "Tribal" Gene They Should be Worried About? I explored the accusation made by the most prominent of the New Atheists that religion is the primary motivation behind human violence, or at least for war. I doubted this, and was more inclined to think that the primary motivation for war was a tribal instinct bequeathed to us by our evolutionary past. Looking at the raiding behavior to be found in pre-literate, hunting-gathering societies, and in our chimpanzee cousins, I cited author William F. Allman in making my case:

A comparison of the warfare patterns in forty-two foraging societies worldwide reveals that when people live near vital resources such as fertile land or watering holes, the group-against-group aggression is typically over control of these physical resources. Yet, ultimately, these resources are also tied to access to females: Those individuals in the society who accumulated the most wealth typically had the most wives, and so gaining resources is an important factor in access to women.

Recently I’ve been reading a book called Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World, by Malcom Potts and Thomas Hayden. Echoing William Allman, Potts and Hayden propose that the male of the human species is primarily to blame for warfare, and that human males have evolved to define, or, as primatologist Jane Goodall would put it, “speciate” between in-groups and out-groups, and that out-groups can become the dehumanized targets of our “team aggression.”

Human warfare and terrorism require a special sort of violence in men, which we will call team aggression. This behavior is not limited to humans and we will document how in a handful of social mammals, a highly specialized behavior has evolved in which teams of adults—almost always males—attack and kill individuals of the same species. In the process they enlarge their territory and increase the resources available to the group to which they belong, with the side benefit of eliminating potential sexual competitors. In the case of chimpanzees and human beings, the chief practitioners, males are the primary beneficiaries of this kind of team aggression.

Well, there you have it, and who can really argue with this? Perhaps St. Augustine had it mostly right in spite of the ever-increasing proof and acceptance of evolutionary theory. If evolution really did mark our DNA with a kind of “original sin,” it all basically comes down to the sex drive after all, just like Augustine thought (although he may have actually laid more of the blame on women than on men).

Anyway, one of the most intriguing things I’ve seen in the book so far is the assertion made by Potts that certain warlords of history have had a rather outsized effect on the gene pool. If it's true, no wonder we’re so warlike.

Ultimately, the evolution of every living thing has been driven by competition. It is a simple, universal fact that all living things, from bacteria to giant redwoods, reproduce more rapidly than the resources in their environments can support. And thus all living things must compete against not just other species, but also their own kind in order to survive. Competition was there, at the molecular level, when life first began literally billions of years ago, and it has continued to shape the evolution of life in increasingly complex ways ever since. Evolution as a result is a painful, callous process of separating winners from losers, driven by what Charles Darwin called the “war of nature.”

Actually, there are some evolutionary psychologists and primatologists such as Frans de Waal who would dispute this, saying that cooperation and empathy count as much as competition, but this is Potts’s theory we're exploring for the moment…

In complex animals, such as birds or mammals, this competition for survival is frequently associated with violent behaviors. This occurs between species, within species, and even between males and females of the same species. Nowhere is this war of nature made more explicit than in the battles males of many species must win in order to mate. The male deer or bull elephant seal that competes successfully against his brethren and impregnates many females will pass his genes on to future generatlions; his losing competitors will not. Human behavior is considerably more complex than that of deer or seals, but for our species, too, it appears that more competitive, aggressive males have often made outsized contributions to the gene pool—a contribution that inevitably reinforces our warlike tendencies.

Take Genghis Khan. In 2003, an international team of geneticists published a DNA analysis of central Asians. Remarkably, the authors found, 8 percent of the men in central Asia have virtually identical Y chromosomes. Much more than a curious biological footnote, this finding offered a profound insight into our collective past. The Y chromosome defines maleness, and men who share a Y chromosome are all descended from the same man.

The fact that one in twelve men in Central Asia has the same Y chromosome can mean only one thing: At some point in history probably within the last thousand years, one man had a vast number of offspring. And Genghis Khan, Mongol Emperor from 1206 A.D. until his death in 1227, is the one historical figure who fits this role.
Still revered as a great leader in parts of Central Asia and reviled elsewhere as the ultimate barbarian, Genghis Khan presided over one of the greatest military expansions of all time. In just over twenty years, he united the tribes of the Central Asian Plateau, and extended the reach of the Mongol Empire from the Sea of Japan in the east to the Caspian Sea some 6,000 kilometers to the west. He reinforced loyalty by sharing out the spoils of war—including vanquished women—after every battle, but the Great Khan saved the most beautiful women for himself, and he boasted of the pleasure of violating other men’s wives and daughters.

Just a century after his birth, a Chinese historian claimed that Genghis Khan already had 20,000 descendants, and whether that was an exaggeration or not, modern science suggests that today the number of his descendents has grown to 16 million worldwide. Put another way, fully one in 200 of all men now alive on this planet are likely descendants of Genghis Khan.

I’m just going to butt in for a second... If Genghis Khan really had that many descendants, I’ll venture to guess that one of them was certainly not John Wayne, who was horribly miscast as Genghis Khan in the 1956 film The Conqueror. What was “Duke” thinking in taking on this role? I can’t think of a worse case of Hollywood miscasting off the top of my head, except maybe Marlon Brando as a Nazi SS officer in The Young Lions.

Sez the Duke to Susan Hayward: Dance, Tartar woman!



I digress. Potts continues….

If Genghis Khan is the most dramatic example of this ‘founder effect,” he is hardly the only one. Another recent Y chromosome study, conducted on almost 800 men in Ireland, found that 20 percent shared a common genetic signature thought to show descent from a Middle Age king called Niall. In all, the study’s authors estimated that as many as one in twelve people in Ireland—and perhaps two to three million people worldwide— could be descended from King Niall...

If evolution judges success by the number of an individual’s progeny, then Genghis Khan, King Neill, and other, lesser warriors are among the most “successful” men in history (None of them lived long enough ago to be credited with the evolutionary invention of aggression or war, however. They, like all of us, were the products of evolution occurring over millions of years before their time on Earth.) Fortunately, human beings have also evolved as social animals capable of empathy, altruism, and love. But even if most of us would prefer to live in a world where the Genghis Khans do not win, we can’t begin to understand the raids and wars that still permeate our present world without understanding why they so often won in the past.
Throughout history and across cultures, rich and powerful men typically have had more sexual partners, and thus more offspring, than those lower in the social hierarchy The Bible tells us that King Solomon had 700 wives, and 300 concubines. Large harems were the order of the day for the Egyptian Pharaohs, the Aztec Kings, the Turkish Sultans, the African Kings, and the Chinese Emperors. Idi Amin, the Ugandan despot of the 1970s, had four wives and thirty children. Queen Victoria’s son, later King Edward VII, had several mistresses and many short affairs. From his box in a theater he would survey the women in the audience and send his equerry to invite the most attractive to join him—one hundred years later heavy metal bands echo the strategy, with roadies taking the place of squires. President John F Kennedy had several long-term extramarital sexual relationships and many one-night stands, aided by a kind of cultural acceptance that Bill Clinton must surely have envied.

Even if not all generals rape as did Genghis Khan, and not all kings and presidents are promiscuous—nor all philanderers violent—we still need to explain why in every society, across time and space, men on average are much more violent than women. We argue that our evolutionary history is the key, and that while. the different behaviors of men and women in relation to sex and violence are modified by our upbringing, they are also written in our genes.

The standard social science paradigm tells us that the differences between the sexes are almost entirely determined by culture.

An evolutionary paradigm, in contrast, recognizes biological differences in male and female behavior, put in place over millions of years of evolution.

This is not an argument that nature necessarily triumphs over nurture, nor that culture is unimportant and genes omnipotent: It is simply a recognition that humans are subject to the same biology as every other living species.

History demonstrates that a behavioral predisposition is not predestination, because we can choose to express the impulses and tendencies we have inherited in many ways, some of them peaceful or creative. Our genes certainly help to set our personalities and temperaments, but our behavior can be molded by our families, environment, and cultures—and by our own decisions—in a rich variety of ways.

Still Men and Women

Martin Luther King Jr was gunned down at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. He was in town to support striking sanitation workers represented by AFSCME Local 1733.

A public employee union.

Forget All That Mayan Stuff in 2012

The Countdown to Armageddon will begin on my birthday


The Last Judgement, by Peter Paul Rubens (1617)

I saw this in the Huffpo the other day:

Sorry, Maya. Just when peculiar apocalyptic interpretations of the ancient Mayan calendar were about to thrust you into the media frenzy sure to come in 2012, some knuckleheads cut in front of you by predicting the return of Jesus on May 21, 2011.

It's a reference to a bold prediction by Harold Camping, described in Wikipedia as the May 21, 2011 Doomsday scenario.

I hope I have a chance to finish my cake and ice cream first. Even more importantly, I hope my wife isn't raptured up if we're in the midst of canoodling. If there's anything to this Millerite or Darbyite reading of scripture, she has a better chance of getting raptured than I do. It would be just my luck...

Joking aside, where lies hope? Christians are supposed to be hopeful people by definition, but just what is it that we are supposed to be hopeful for? In his autobiography Just As I Am, the celebrated evangelist Billy Graham described a meeting he had with German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer shortly after the end of World War II, as Berlin still lay in ruins. Graham picks up the story as he stands waiting in the man's office as Adenauer gazes out of his window at the shattered city below.

Even more memorable was German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. One time when I was preaching in Germany, he invited me to his office. Coffee was served, but before my first sip, he started in.

“Young man, do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ?”

“I most certainly do,” I replied.

“So do I. If Jesus Christ is not risen from the dead, there is not one glimmer of hope for the human race. When I leave office, I’m going to spend the rest of my life studying and writing about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s the most important event in human history.”

I don't know if he ever made good on that conviction or not, but I do know that Adenauer, a devout Catholic, skillfully led the rebuilding of Germany from out of the ashes with his Christian Democratic Union Party, which has dominated German politics almost up to the present day. After the war, Prussia lay behind the Iron Curtain. As a result, Catholics from the south and the west were quite influential in leading the way towards building a society and a body-politic in West Germany that was heavily influenced by Catholic social teaching and the principles of social justice. Germany became a highly prosperous and efficient social democracy, respecting both the rights of capital and labor (union members sit on corporate boards and consult with management at every level), while providing universal health care and affordable education to its citizens. Even today, despite having high labor costs, it is a creditor nation, a net exporter of goods, and has even been able to bail out struggling neighbors after having successfully absorbed and re-integrated a failed socialist state. Perhaps in all this, they've been too successful. In parallel with this lofty and enviable level of security and equality, the practice of faith in Germany has fallen through the floor in a manner that surely would have distressed Konrad Adenaur.

On the other hand, in a land with far less security, equality and public trust, Billy Graham's son Franklin has been parlaying a less hopeful message about what lies ahead for mankind to the benefit of his own success (examples here and here) in a manner his father probably never would have.

So who's right?

Ironically, to borrow the German term of "schadenfreude," many so-called evangelists in the USA have been doing very well for themselves presenting a vindictive vision in which their enemies - the secularists, the unbelievers, the liberals, the skeptics, the scoffers - will suffer their just deserts at the hands of a wrathful God, while they themselves are whisked away from the awful tribulation beforehand.

This represents no small fringe movement in the USA. Hal Lindsay's The Late Great Planet Earth was one of the biggest selling books of the 1970s and 1980s, and the books in Tim Lahaye & Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind Series have been some of the biggest sellers of the 1990s and 2000s. There are even video games based on them.

Earlier this week on Drudge there was a big hoopla about a CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) report that the clerics in Iran are saying that recent world events point to the imminent arrival of the Mahdi (also known as the "Twelfth Imam") and a series of apocalyptic events to shortly follow.



With alarmist tones, and with typically superficial simplicity they make it seem as if the entire Islamic world puts stock in this. Never mind the fact that the majority of the world's muslims are Sunnis who discount it, resent Iran's muscle-flexing, and reject "Twelver Shi'ism" out of hand.

In any case, why all this alarm on the part of the CBN? Well, actually, I know why. It's because they are heavily lobbied and funded by AIPAC to show alarm over it, but in their heart of hearts, don't they actually predict (and actually hope for) essentially the same thing?



Now, it's true that it is a tenet of faith for all Christians that Jesus will return. After all, we recite in our Creed at every Mass "He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end." When we consider, however, the "End Times," or the "Last Things," what is it that we are hoping for?

It is certainly fair enough to hope for a transformed world, of God finally setting the world right and of peace and justice to reign. Professors like Bart Ehrman are quick to point out that in the academy, it is the widely accepted view among New Testament scholars, first posited by Albert Schweitzer a century ago, that this was exactly the agenda of Jesus - that Jesus was just who he said he was - An Apocalyptic Prophet for the New Millenium (think of the Son of Man as described in the Book of Daniel).

When we look at the fear-mongering going on, however, isn't it important to stress that no one knows the hour? Instead of looking for signs according to earthquakes, floods, famines, war, and rumors of war, isn't it at least equally valid exegesis to look at the words of St. Paul and realize that he thought all of these last things were to occur once the "full measure of gentiles" had been brought to faith (Romans 11:25-26)? By God's standards, who knows what that full measure might be? Nearly everyone? Everyone? Wouldn't that be a positive sign being manifested instead of the envious, vengeful, fear-ridden, and bitter scenario being pushed by the Armageddon peddlers?

Did God so love the world that he gave his only Son so that we may have eternal life, or did God hate the world so much that he punished his only Son so that a few elect could escape a doomed planet? This is one of those areas where the strength of the incarnational and sacramental emphases of our tradition can be brought to bear. Thomas Groome, in a recent review of a new book by Michael Leach, Why Stay Catholic, writes:

In my view, the two best reasons for staying Catholic, as the book stresses, are the twin principles of incarnation and sacramentality. Of course, Catholicism is incarnational in its focus on Jesus. Leach is convinced that the Jesus event and his paschal mystery is not about a God who needed to be appeased for our sins but one who came looking for us out of love....

The other side of the incarnational coin is the sacramental nature of Catholic faith. Again, this emphasis reaches a climax in the seven great liturgical sacraments that we celebrate in church, but these arise from and flow back into the sacramentality of the ordinary and everyday of life. Because “God is everywhere,” God looks for us and we respond through our lives in the world. In the words of St. Augustine, “If you have an eye for it, the world itself is sacramental.” It is the sacramentality of Catholic faith that makes it so humane, so life-giving. “Catholicism seen through the eye of a needle is a religion of rules and regulations.

Seen with the sacramental imagination, it is a unique take on life, a holy vision, a way of seeing the chosen part of things... These twin principles—the incarnational and sacramental—are what make Catholicism most worthwhile, why anyone can well stay, regardless of disappointments and complaints and the scandals that beset the church. Indeed, these very principles lend Catholic faith its rich spiritualities; “When it comes to spirituality, “the author writes, “the Catholic Church is a Garden of Eden.”

Now What? From the 47 Ronin to the Fukushima 50

The 47 Ronin assault Kira Yoshinaka's mansion

Last week we all witnessed the horror of a tsunami wave racing across the plains of Sendai like the wrath of some dark agent, destroying everything and everyone in its path.

Shortly afterward, we all became increasingly aware that the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima complex was more dire than initially reported.

It's a bit surreal to see the way all of this is unfolding, to see our reaction to it. There is widepsread reporting and awareness, of course, about the immensity of the tragedy that has struck Japan, but just the same, we seem to be whistling in the dark and trying to wish away the reality of what is occurring at Fukushima.

I watch the content of the news, I watch the content on Facebook, but for the occasional rumblings underneath, we are going about our daily lives trying to consider the ramifications of this as little as possible. As a society, we still seem to be obsessed with stories built around the likes of Charlie Sheen and Vanessa Hudgens. Pity the Libyans and the Bahrainis who have been suddenly forgotten altogether.

As of this morning, I'm hearing that the idea of pumping water into Reactor 3 has become too dangerous and risky due to the high levels of radiation, and the option of a water cannon is being contemplated. If the Fukushima 50, who seem to be on a one-way mission and upon whom so much of the world's hope lies, fails to get these reactors under control, it's likely that a Hail Mary pass will be thrown to the US miliary.

We read assertions that the Fukushima 50 is not afraid to die. They're three men over, but in their willingness to lay down their lives in what might become a suicidal effort, I'm reminded of the Japanese story of the 47 Ronin.

Trying to repair damaged cooling systems with battery power, pumping in sea water while containment buildings explode around the reactors, dropping water from helicopters, using water cannons from a distance.... has each measure become more primitive and desperate?

If none of these work....?

More on Atonement: Did Jesus Come to Die?

Was a Blood Sacrifice Necessary?

Pieta, by Lorenzo Lotto 1508

Previous posts on the meaning of atonement can be found here, here, and here.

Previous ruminations on the elasticity of scripture can be found here and here.

God did not need the blood of Jesus. Jesus did not just come "to die," but God used his death to announce the end of death.
-- Richard Leonard, SJ in Where the Hell is God?

It's a pure, noble, and uplifting sentiment expressed by Father Leonard. It sounds very pleasing to our ears in 2011, but how often these days are we allowing our postmodern sensibilities to shape our way of looking at Jesus and in looking at faith, rather than the scriptures themselves? Are we drifting away from meanings more clearly relevant to the Bronze Age, when those books were written?

It is true that in Catholic theology, following St. Thomas Aquinas, we affirm that the satisfaction model of redemption was not absolutely necessary. In other words, God could have chosen some other way to redeem us other than way He did.

Nevertheless, it does seem like Father Leonard's assertion does take rather lightly our historical understanding of how important blood was as a symbol of life in Second Temple Judaism, and also how several biblical passages strongly emphasize the necessity of shedding blood for forgiveness, both in the Old Testament...

Since the life of a living body is in its blood, I have made you put it on the altar, so that atonement may thereby be made for your own lives, because it is the blood, as the seat of life, that makes atonement.
-- Leviticus 17:11

..and in the New Testament...

According to the law almost everything is purified by blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. Therefore, it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified by these rites, but the heavenly things themselves by better sacrifices than these. For Christ did not enter into a sanctuary made by hands, a copy of the true one, but heaven itself, that he might now appear before God on our behalf.
-- Hebrews 9:22-24

They are justified freely by his grace through the redemption in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as an expiation, through faith, by his blood, to prove his righteousness because of the forgiveness of sins previously committed...
--Romans 3:24-25

Christ ransomed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, "Cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree."
--Galatians 3:13

Father Leonard advocates for a much different view of atonement in Chapter 5 of his book Where the Hell is God? How well does he make his case? Of particular interest is the way he takes the hymn How Great Thou Art to task for its shaky theology... I've never been very fond of it myself. Whenever I hear it at Mass, I find myself looking around to see if Elvis has entered the building.



Excerpts from Chapter 5 of Father Leonard's book:

We should be very careful about what we sing. Spiritual songs and hymns are not part of our liturgy to fill in time, accompany a procession, or annoy the tone deaf who are pressed into making a noise. Hymns carry theology. We sing scriptural texts or a poetic version of a fundamental Christian truth to affirm our faith. Setting these texts to music makes them popular and memorable. That is why they can be so powerful and important, but also dangerous.

Hymns matter, and one verse of one hymn has more to answer for than most. “How Great Thou Art” takes its place in the top five of nearly every survey of the most loved hymns in the English speaking world. Written by the Swedish Lutheran lay preacher and later parliamentarian Carl Gustav Boberg in 1885, “O Store Gud” (O Great God) was translated into English by Stuart Hine. Hine was an English evangelical missionary in Ukraine, where he learned the hymn in Russian. In 1939, he returned to England and the following year published the first version of the hymn we now call “How Great Thou Art.” Its worldwide fame can be attributed to Billy Graham’s international crusade in London in 1954, during which time this hymn was sung over and over as it accompanied the altar call, and was broadcast and televised to an audience of millions. It did not hurt the hymn’s fortunes that it was the Gammy Award-winning title song of Elvis Presley’s 1967 hit record.

The Protestant pedigree of this hymn Is important. A little history first. Building on the earlier work of St. Clement of Alexandria, St. Anselm of Canterbury, an 11th-century Benedictine monk, wrestled with the question why God came into the world as one like us. In his famous treatise, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Human), he developed a theory that Jesus came into the world to act as a substitute for us. We were the ones who had offended God, but rather than sacrifice us all, God sent Jesus to take our place in offering up his own life to the Father as restitution for our sins. He paid the ransom that God demanded to set us free.

This way of thinking relies heavily upon St. Paul, where on many occasions he calls Christ our Redeemer. The word redemption literally means, “buying back,” It comes from the practice in the ancient world where there were two types of slaves—those who were born or forced into slavery, usually for life, and those who paid off a debt or a crime by becoming a slave, usually for a period of time. The second type of slave could be set free when someone else paid their debts, or the ransom their master now demanded for them was settled. They would then either be the slave of the purchaser, or set free completely.

St. Paul introduced this metaphor into Christian theology to describe how we, who are enslaved by our destructive behavior, gained a liberator in Christ who entered into a sinful world, subjected himself to its violence and death, in order to set us free. At its best, the notion of Christ the Redeemer shows us that we do not have to live destructively anymore. Now claimed by the love of Christ, we are no longer slaves, but his friends; indeed, through the redeeming work of Christ we have been welcomed into God’s family.

The Protestant Reformers took up these substitution ideas and gave them a more biblical spin. Relying on a literal and tougher stand on the role of the Fall of Adam and Eve, John Calvin held that, because the first parents of humanity in the Book of Genesis rebelled against God, our whole human nature was corrupted forever. There was nothing we could do about it. God was so angry with us that, in time and in his mercy, and even though we did not deserve it, he decided to save us. However, because humanity could not do anything to save itself, to satisfy God’s wrath at Adam and Eve and all humanity’s subsequent ingratitude, the Word of God had to take our flesh, our place, and offer up the sacrifice of his own life in and through his suffering and death as atonement for our inherited and ongoing sinfulness. It is often called “satisfaction theology” because it was through the violent death of Jesus that God’s wrath was satisfied. It must be admitted that some elements of this satisfaction theology continue in Catholic theology as well, though we have never held that humanity was totally corrupt or depraved, and that God had only one option in appeasing his own anger.

There are libraries written on the stuff of the last couple of paragraphs, but for our purposes here, this wholly inadequate summary will have to do.

In its more stark form, satisfaction theology is given a full confessional expression in the third verse of “How Great Thou Art”:
When I think that God his Son not sparing
Sent him to die, I scarce can take it in.
That on the Cross my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to take away my sin.

Why does this matter? Well, if we keep singing hymns like this, then some people may think it is true, may remember it, and want it sung at all their family’s baptisms, weddings, funerals, and other rites of passage. And they do. But this hymn gives a very limited version of the truth it is trying to articulate, and the implications it holds in regard to where God is to be found in our suffering and pain cannot be underestimated. God’s will for Jesus affects everything about how we think God deals with us. If our God wants and sends suffering, even setting up a grizzly (sic) death for his only beloved son, then why should we complain when we get a disease, an illness, lose a child, or become a quadriplegic? We are getting off lightly in comparison to what some claim God wanted from Jesus.

For Christians, the paschal mystery—the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—is the central paradigm around which our faith in God is constructed, It is the central story through which we explain our own origins, meaning, and destiny. This hymn concerns itself with this mystery, and I can scarcely take in that God simply sent Jesus “to die,” and to die a gruesome and bloody death, at that. If that were baldly true, then why did God spare him from the outcome of the most unjust theological story in the New Testament—the slaughter of the innocents (Matt 2:13—23)? If Jesus was murdered by Herod at two years of age, then God could have gotten his blood sacrifice over nice and early.

Alternatively, If all God wanted was the perfect blood offering (echoes of Zeus here) of his only Son for the sake of appeasing his anger, why did Jesus not leave Nazareth, stir up plenty of trouble around Galilee (as he did), and then march straight into Jerusalem and offend everyone and get crucified early on? It would not have been hard. If Jesus was simply sent “to die,” then what was the point of his hidden years and the public ministry? They were not there for God’s sake, but for ours.

The simple truth is that the third verse of this beloved hymn is wrong. Jesus did not simply come to die. Rather, Jesus came to live. As a result of the courageous and radical way he lived his life, and the saving love he embodied for all humanity, he threatened the political, social, and religious authorities of his day so much that they executed him. This is, I think, an easier way for us to make sense of the predictions of the passion. Jesus was not clairvoyant; he was a full and true human being and therefore had informed but limited knowledge. His full and true divinity cannot obliterate his humanity or else he would be play-acting at being human. His divinity is seen in and through the uncompromisingly loving, just. and sacrificial way he lived within the bounds of his humanity.

Many of the most morally courageous people in history knew that their personal life and liberty were threatened because of what they were saying or how they were living. They may not have known beforehand that they would be executed or murdered or assassinated, but they could read the signs of their times well enough to predict that there were serious consequences to the freedom they were embodying and to which they were attracting other people. Sometimes they spoke or wrote about the cost of the stands they took. In this regard, they reflect Jesus Christ.

Our martyrs are not Christian versions of suicide bombers. They do not go looking for death in any active sense. That would be the ultimate betrayal of God’s gift of life. They know, however, that they may die as a result of witnessing to their faith and the demand for justice that must flow from it. In their lives and deaths they follow the pattern of Jesus. He did not seek death for its own sake, but would not and could not live any other way than faithfully hopefully, and lovingly. In his day, as in our own, this is immensely threatening to those whose power base is built on values opposed to these virtues. The world continues to silence and sideline people who live out the Christian virtues and values now, just as Jesus was thought to be ultimately sidelined in his crucifixion. But God had the last word on the death of Jesus: Life.

For most of Christian history, the question that has vexed many believers seems to be, “W’hy did Jesus die ?“ I think it is the wrong question. The right one is “Why was Jesus killed?” And that puts the last days of Jesus’ suffering and death in an entirely new perspective.

This is how we can stand before the cross and listen to Jesus in John’s Gospel say, “I have come that you may have life, and have it to the full.” This life is not about the perfect Son of the perfect Father making the perfect sacrifice to get us back in God’s good books, and thereby saving us. It Is the Trinity’s inner life overflowing to the world in Christ through the power of the Spirit.

Our God does not deal in death, but life. Everything in the New Testament shows this, even the grand apocalyptic narratives about the end of time, which show all the hallmarks of an inspired rabbinic teacher drawing big strokes on the largest of canvases. Jesus did not intend us to take this imagery literally. I assume the experience of judgment will not actually be a livestock muster of sheep and goats. However, the lesson behind the imagery is a real one for us to learn. God’s compassion and love will ultimately see that justice is done. He will hear the cry of the poor and we will be called to account in the next life for what we have done and what we have failed to do in this life.

In this context we need to look at one other gospel text. Some people quote Jesus in the garden saying, “My Father, if this cup cannot pass unless I drink It, thy will be done” (Matt 26:42) or “Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me ?“ (John 18:11) as conclusive proof that God wanted and even needed Jesus to suffer and die. It all depends on what we think the will or the cup of the Father is for Jesus. If it is, as the hymn sings, “to die,” then that is quite clear and final. However, if, as argued earlier, the will of God is that we are faithful, hopeful, and loving, then Jesus’ prayer is about the Father strengthening and emboldening the Son to stay on the Way, to speak and be the Truth, and to witness to the Life, even if it costs him his own. Such a life of transparent goodness is never easy; it always involves a cup of suffering. In the garden scene we have Jesus becoming aware of his impending doom and struggling to finally claim the power to confront death and destruction and sin head-on. Jesus’ anguish at whatever might be his fate is an entirely human response, one that consoles all of us as we face our own anxieties.

And think about what we have done to the cross of Christ. Many of us now wear small crosses and crucifixes in rolled gold. platinum, or sterling silver. They dangle around our necks or from our earlobes… This provocative and contemporary image brings home what Paul calls the scandal or “foolishness” of the cross (1 Cor 1:18—26). The cross of Christ is not a fashion accessory, no matter how many of them Madonna and Eminem wear. Looking upon it should still take our breath away, not only because it shows us how far Jesus was prepared to go in establishing his reign of justice and love in this world, but also because it spells out the cost for all of us who follow his Way, speak his Truth, and live his Life. This should be as radical and threatening now as it was in the first century. For those of us who put on a cross, and for everyone who carries one, we want to answer Christ’s question, “How far will you go out of love in following me?” with the same answer he gave the Father, and us, “I will go to the end. I will see it through, no matter the cost.”

I like creative and stirring arrangements of “How Great Thou Art.” I am very happy to sing strongly about how we can wander through the woods and glades and praise “all the worlds Thy Hands have made.” And in the final verse, I sing more loudly than anyone about “When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation and take me home what joy shall fill my soul.” It is just verse three. Because I take popular theology seriously, I cannot and will not sing it because I hope the verse, and the bloodthirsty God behind it, just isn’t true. In fact, what makes God great is that he wants nothing to do with death.

Here is an Elvis version of How Great Thou Art. It leaves that third verse out...

Holding the Scorpions on the Street Accountable

Or, the Vampire Squids, as Matt Taibbi calls them



I know that the following quotes will seem a bit out of character for the nature of this blog, but muckraking journalist Matt Taibbi makes a blunt and important point in his Rolling Stone article Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? Right off the bat he quotes congressional officials on how useless it has been for the SEC to try to police Wall Street, even in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown:

"Everything's f____ed up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."

I put down my notebook. "Just that?"

"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's f____ed up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there..."

"You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."

In her book Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies, Judith Stein describes the shift that began in the late 1970s when America started shedding its manufacturing jobs and shifted to an economy based on finance and consumption. It was deemed at the time to be more important to fight inflation than unemployment, but in her view it was a failed strategy that has increased income inequality, weakened the nation, and left us in a more precarious position than before.

As the controversy in Wisconsin drags on, much of the anti-union sentiment coming from the right reminds me of what I was hearing back in the 1970s. In the comments posted on the American Thinker article Why I Changed My Mind About Unions I found a litany of the kind of stories I was well familiar with hearing in those days. In fact, I'd venture to guess that most of the union horror stories in those comments were from the 1970s. They'd almost have to be, considering that less than 7% of the private sector workforce is unionized today.

I have to admit, I saw some of this myself. When I was in college during the 1970s, I worked a landscaping job on campus during the summers. The guys on the full-time landscaping crew could be interesting characters, to say the least. One guy, almost perpetually high, used to tell me about his union days working in the shipbuilding yards down South. The union-management relationship he described to me sounded contentious, if not outright vicious. What struck me was that he saw no apparent irony or contradiction between his stories about finding a secret place to sleep off hangovers on the ships they were building, and his stories about the petty-minded bosses "who wanted to take food out of the mouths of my kids." I wasn't shocked that the shipbuilding industry collpased in the USA as a result, and I told him so.

At any rate, 30-35 years ago? That's a long time. Did American union workers get fat and lazy by the time the 1970s came along? I suppose some did, but that is a far cry from saying that the unions, that people bled and died to form, by the way, were unnecessary then and are unnecessary now. Anyone who agrees that:

- Greed is associated with our fallen human nature and can affect any of us, whatever our state in life happens to be, and...
- Any human endeavor is best served by a healthy system of checks and balances ...

...should be able to see this. In any case, it's a mystery to me how so many people can be resentful over the size of a unionized teacher's pension, but are non-plussed over what gets raked in by a Lloyd Blankfein, or the rest of that den of thieves on Wall Street. I'm reminded of a quote by the late columnist Molly Ivins

The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it's not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point.

Not only does it miss the point, it's increasingly absurd. Through the paucity of their numbers combined with the pressures of globalization, unions have long ago been rendered largely powerless and toothless. Nevertheless, the right still uses them as their favorite whipping boys. They will tell you that the GM bailout was done at the behest of unions. They will even tell you that the SEIU was the main beneficiary of the Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision.

Rick Santelli and the guys on the trading floor at the Chicago Board of Trade want to talk about moral hazard... Sure. We can put some blame on people who got into houses over their heads and didn't read the fine print on their mortgage agreements. Shame on them. But let's put bigger blame on people who should have known better, people with MBAs who knew that these loans were crap but gave them AAA ratings and collateralized them and sold them as bogus assets anyway.

As far as union money goes, they can blame the people who work cleaning the bathrooms at night in our office buildings for all of this if they want to. After all, the Tea Party is a revolt of the "haves" against the "have nots." They can try to make the case that the unions have the same kind of lobbying clout as the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce in our political process, but I don't think rational people will think it's very convincing.

Then again, what does rationality have to do with it? Clearly, not much. It's hard to let go of some of our most cherished myths about America and the Horatio Alger stories we adore.

If we feel a need to assign blame, we can see that it has been next to impossible to assign blame where it properly belongs. Matt Taibbi, author of the recent book Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, tries gamely to rectify this as he describes in Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? the chummy, revolving door relationship between the Wall Street investment banks and the agencies that are supposed to be overseeing them.

The system is skewed by the irrepressible pull of riches and power. If talent rises in the SEC or the Justice Department, it sooner or later jumps ship for those fat NBA contracts. Or, conversely, graduates of the big corporate firms take sabbaticals from their rich lifestyles to slum it in government service for a year or two. Many of those appointments are inevitably hand-picked by lifelong stooges for Wall Street like Chuck Schumer, who has accepted $14.6 million in campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other major players in the finance industry, along with their corporate lawyers.

As for President Obama, what is there to be said? Goldman Sachs was his number-one private campaign contributor. He put a Citigroup executive in charge of his economic transition team, and he just named an executive of JP Morgan Chase, the proud owner of $7.7 million in Chase stock, his new chief of staff. "The betrayal that this represents by Obama to everybody is just — we're not ready to believe it," says Budde, a classmate of the president from their Columbia days. "He's really f____ing us over like that? Really? That's really a JP Morgan guy, really?"

Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement. On the contrary: In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers — of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would "demean the seriousness" of the offenses.

So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait — let's not even make them say they're sorry. That's too mean; let's just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don't make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don't ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What's next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?

The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don't feel real; you don't see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They're crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let's steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy. They're attacking the very definition of property — which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone's claims of ownership equally. When that definition becomes tenuous or conditional — when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice — this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality.