Damned Sinners, Part II: Can the Negative Value of Sin be Erased by Eternal Damnation?

This post picks up where the previous post left off. You may want to look at Damned Sinners, Part I, before turning to this follow-up.

In this post, I want to consider Steve Hays’ response to what I’m calling The Problem of Damned Sinners. The problem, in brief, is this: Some theologies (e.g. traditional  Calvinist ones) hold that God damns some sinners as a just punishment for sin, thereby repudiating sin clearly and forcefully. But by damning some persons as a punishment for sin, God is responding to the “affront” of sin by guaranteeing that this affront continue for eternity. But how is that supposed to repudiate sin? How can you repudiate something by guaranteeing that it never stop?

In a nutshell, Steve responds to this problem by denying that, on Calvinist theology, there is any meaningful sense in which sin as such is “intolerable” to God. What is intolerable is sin unrepudiated, sin for which just punishment has not been meted out. In other words, he takes it that the main challenge I’m raising in the Problem of Damned Sinners is this: By tolerating the never-ending sinfulness of the damned, the Calvinist God “tolerates the intolerable.” He then responds by saying that never-ending sinfulness as such isn’t intolerable, so long as it is fittingly punished.

But here, Steve is both misconstruing the main force of the Problem of Damned Sinners and, in responding to the misconstrued argument, relying on a premise I find highly implausible.

Before making these points, I should stress something that my co-author, John Kronen, wants emphasized. The argument I presented first on Randal’s blog and then in the previous post—which I’ve dubbed “The Problem of Damned Sinners”—is adapted from an argument in God’s Final Victory and brought to bear on certain Calvinist claims. But it is not identical to that argument. In our book, the argument John and I develop is not premised on God’s finding sin intolerable, but on the premise that God would never will sin. We argue that by permanently casting the damned away from the only thing that can save them from their own sinfulness, God does end up willing sin. In the book, we consider and respond to a host of objections to this argument--both to the claim that God would never will sin and to the claim that God would be doing exactly that were He to impose eternal alienation as a punishment.

In other words, as formulated in our book, the argument doesn’t even rely on the premise that Steve attacks. As such, Steve's rebuttal is irrelevant to the argument formulated in our book. That said, it may at least seem as if it is relevant to my formulation of the argument. In either formulation, however, the main focus of the argument is on whether imposing eternal damnation as a response to sin makes sense—whether this is a coherent “response” to sin, given what sin is to God (namely, something fundamentally opposed to God’s nature).

Even formulated in the terms I've used here and on Randal’s post, the argument isn’t reducible to the claim that, on Calvinist and similar theologies, God tolerates the intolerable. Rather, the focus is on the coherence of damnation as a response to sin. In terms of the tolerable and the intolerable, we might say that what the argument challenges is the idea that eternal damnation can make sin tolerable. In short, it doesn't quite capture my argument to say that sin is intolerable even if repudiated with just punishment. Rather, the argument is that you can’t properly repudiate sin with a response that guarantees its continuation.

Think of it this way. Even if Steve holds that punished sin is tolerable in a way that unpunished sin is not, to make sense of this position he has to hold that sin as such has a negative value that needs to be “erased” (if you will) through appropriate punishment. Thus, sin as such is bad, and what just punishment does is somehow “balance the scales” that have been set off kilter by sin. Steve himself uses this language of scale-balancing, which makes sense only on the assumption that sin in its own right throws things off balance.

In short, Steve and other Calvinists would be disingenuous if they claimed that, on Calvinist theology, sin weren’t deeply offensive in itself. Its profound negative value is what generates the demand for justice, the need to make things right.

Put another way, in order to hold that eternal damnation makes things right, you first have to hold that sin “makes things wrong.”

In short, Steve has to hold that sin has significant negative value. In fact, if sin is going to warrant endless punishment, that negative value would have to be very grave indeed. In fact, traditional Calvinists follow Anselm in explicitly embracing the view that sin is *infinitely* grave insofar as it affronts God’s infinite majesty. Sin—moral wickedness—is that in the created order which is most contrary to God, the gravest “turning away” of the creation from its creator.

One concise way to put all of this is as follows: sin is intolerable.

Now part of what Steve wants to say is that this way of putting things is misleading, since what might be intolerable all by itself needn’t be intolerable when combined with something else. Sin may be intolerable without a scale-balancing retributive response; but with such a response, justice has been done and the situation as a whole isn’t intolerable.

Even if Steve is right about this, I don’t think it solves the fundamental issue at stake in the Problem of Damned Sinners. But before making that point, I want to explain why I think Steve isn't right about this. Take the case of murder. We find murder to be such an “intolerable” crime that, as a society, we respond to it with the strongest punishments we consider intrinsically permissible (life imprisonment or capital punishment). Is it adequate to say that murder unpunished is intolerable, but murder justly punished is just fine since the scales of justice have been balanced?

Think of it this way: Suppose the murder rate in a country of 1 billion people is enormous: say one million murders every year. Does this become a tolerable situation if every murderer is caught and subjected to proportional punishment, but the murders continue unabated at the same rate? Is that state of affairs “just as good” as a society in which no murders happen? When confronted with a horrific offense, is it enough for the offense to be justly punished or does the horrific nature of the offense also entail that it should stop happening?

Intuitively, it seems we should go with the latter. Doesn’t it? Given that murders occur, we might agree that proportionately punished murder is better than murder going unpunished. But far better that no murders occur at all. And what would we think about a government that thinks the wrongness of murder is communicated most clearly in just punishment—and so, in order to demonstrate how bad murder is, enacts policies that magnify the murder rate so as to have more murders to justly punish? Do you really repudiate murder if you make sure more murders happen so as to have more murders to repudiate? Or is repudiation what you do in response to something that you think shouldn’t happen at all?

Put simply, if some behavior is so bad as to call for serious punishment, that’s a reason to want the behavior to be reduced or eliminated. As such, it seems you've got a distorted theory of retributive justice if you think there’s nothing wrong with the murder rate spiraling out of control so long as every murder is justly punished. In fact, I'd be so bold as to insist that any retributive theory that calls for the punitive repudiation of an act would also have to regard the act's non-occurrence as preferable to its occurrence. And if so, there’s something amiss in Steve’s claim that, for God, there’s nothing intolerable with sin as such, but only with unrepudiated sin.

But despite the deep intuitive difficulties with Steve's claim, let’s grant it for the sake of argument. Let’s suppose that appropriate punishment can somehow fully erase the negative value of sin, such that the sin taken together with the appropriate punishment does not have a negative value. Even if sin taken in isolation is intolerable, justly punished sin isn’t an intolerable situation at all. This is the point on which Steve Hays rests his rebuttal.

But how is appropriate punishment supposed to achieve this “erasing” of sin’s infinite badness? John and I actually develop a theory of this in our book—a theory of “vindicatory justice” that follows the lead of the Lutheran Scholastics. But explaining that theory here would take us too far afield. For now, it’s enough to note that what is needed in order to erase something of enormous negative value is something of comparable positive value. But even that’s not enough. If I owe a hundred thousand dollars in credit card bills, and my neighbor Joe has a hundred thousand dollars in his bank account, the existence of his money doesn’t erase my debt. In order for my debt to be erased, Joe's money actually needs to be applied to my account. To get to zero, the positive sum has to be “added” to the comparable negative sum. Only then can the negative value be “erased.” Only then is the intolerable situation turned into a tolerable one.

(In fact, as John and I argue, it is Christ’s Atonement that is thought to do this vindicating work in theological traditions following Anselm—and one section of the book is devoted to making the case that if you take that view seriously, you can no longer argue that the demands of justice require eternal damnation…but that's a different argument which I won’t pursue here.)

The point I was making in my comment on Randal’s blog was simply this: It doesn’t make much sense to suppose that you can erase the negative value sin by acting so as to guarantee that it never stops happening. How do you erase the enormous negative value of sin by propagating it? It seems that you would then be magnifying the negative values that need to be erased, as opposed to erasing them.

In short, suppose we grant Steve Hays’ claim that the continued existence of sin is a tolerable situation to God so long as sin’s negative value is erased by God’s justly punishing it through eternal damnation. Even if we grant this, we still have to ask whether eternal damnation really could erase the (infinite) negative value of sin.

Steve Hays supposes that eternal damnation can do this. In our book, we consider more than one reason to be highly skeptical of such a supposition. The focus in these posts is on one of them.

Here’s the thing about eternal damnation: Its central feature is eternal exclusion from the beatific vision. Whatever other positive evils might be thought to accompany damnation, the heart of hell is that the damned are decisively cast out of God’s presence and cut off from God’s grace. But Calvinists (along with other Christians) hold that the only cure for sin is divine grace. Without grace, ongoing sinfulness is inevitable. On this theology, eternally withholding divine grace amounts to eternally withholding the necessary condition for not sinning…and as such guaranteeing that sin continue unabated. The essential feature of the state of damnation—exclusion from the grace of God—can thus be characterized as the act of making sure that a person’s sinful state never be overcome.

And so the conservative Calvinist view can be summed up as follows: Some sinners have the negative value of their sin neutralized by being deprived of what is necessary to stop sinning. God punishes sinners by doing the one thing that guarantees their sin never ends. And somehow, THIS is supposed to neutralize the negative value of sin, making an otherwise intolerable situation tolerable?

Let’s put this in terms of a metaphor (however imperfect all such metaphors inevitably are): For the Calvinist, if sin is the disease, then divine grace is the only cure. Without grace, the “disease” of sin will continue unabated. And this disease is taken to be so bad that it must be repudiated—by forever withholding the cure and making sure that the disease continue unabated.

Huh?

Or to invoke an earlier metaphor, it sounds as if one is saying something like the following: If unpunished murder is intolerable, then of course we must erase its negative value with just punishment. So let’s punish murderers in such a way so as to guarantee that they continue to commit murder after murder eternally. Then the negative value of murder will be erased! Adding countless murders to the first one will eliminate the badness of the first one, bringing about a condition which is no longer bad!

What?

Or to invoke yet another metaphor: Suppose someone owes a debt. How do you get rid of it? Suppose someone answered, “Make sure the debtor keeps wracking up more debt forever! THAT is sure to make the debt go away!”

Umm…

Even if we don’t object to Steve’s claim that the negative value of sin, properly neutralized by divine punishment, ceases to be intolerable, the central concern at issue in the Problem of Damned Sinners remains. In some way, depriving sinners of the necessary condition for ceasing sin is supposed to do this work of neutralizing the negative value of their sins (even as it guarantees that the negative values requiring neutralization grow without bound).

Now maybe there is some way for the Calvinist to make sense of this. But it is a problem—a pretty big one. And I think the burden of proof lies on the shoulders of the Calvinist to resolve it. Otherwise, those of different theological persuasions have a right to be deeply skeptical. Simply asserting that, mysteriously, God depriving sinners of what they need in order to avoid sin somehow neutralizes sin’s negative value—well, that doesn’t cut it.

Some Remarks About Christian Love

Neither politics nor human character are simple things. It's rare to find politicians whose motivations are wholly unsavory, even if one disagrees strongly with their platform. In my last post I argued that, while cloaked in explicitly Christian language, Rick Santorum’s political rhetoric targeting gays and lesbians actually violates the spirit of Christian ethics.

But it's important to stress that when I say this, I'm not saying that Santorum's character and motivations should as a whole be judged in these terms. Reflecting on the last post, I think I didn't stress this point enough. In fact, there is reason to suppose that in many respects Santorum's political platform is driven by his allegiance to Christian love as he understands it, leading some to see him as the return of compassionate conservatism. Some conservatives even take him to task for this. Santorum is less inclined to let national borders define the boundaries of our concern, and so is more willing to speak out in support of a duty to provide foreign aid.

His homophobic obsession with villifying human beings who seek to overcome marginalization based on unchosen sexualtiy is, in an important respect, an anomoly. More significantly, perhaps, it is a kind of poison at the heart of his outlook, all the more eggregious because of what it is poisoning. But if I'm going to defend these claims--both the claim that his anti-gay rhetoric violates the spirit of Christian ethics, and the claim that much of his broader view expresses that spirit--I need to offer an account of what I take to lie at the heart of Christian ethics.

To offer a full account I’d need to do two things: explain what I take the heart of Christian ethics to be, and explain why I take this to be the heart of Christian ethics. Since I can’t adequately do both tasks in a short blog post, I focus here on the first—the task of explicating my understanding of Christian ethics.

On this issue I follow in the footsteps of theologians such as Anders Nygren and Paul Ramsey and Christian moral and social leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. The tradition of ethical thought they represent is deeply rooted in New Testament interpretation as well as in early Christian beliefs about what it meant to live as Jesus lived. It is a tradition that understands Christian ethical life as being fundamentally characterized in terms of the call to consistently practice agape—that is, a distinctive kind of love, one believed to be exemplified in Jesus’ life and described in Jesus’ twin calls to love our neighbors as ourselves and to love even (perhaps especially) our enemies.

How do we love ourselves? And how in the world can we love our enemies, those who wish us ill? These questions are actually interconnected. One feature of self-love is that it involves care for our own good simply because it is good for us, apart from questions of desert. Self-love is an immediate concern for personal welfare that doesn’t spring from such things as reciprocity (what would reciprocity even mean in relation to oneself?). Furthermore, rather than being conditioned on a judgment of our worth, self-love immediately motivates an interest in warranting a positive judgment of worth. Where we perceive ourselves as not warranting such a judgment, we are motivated by self-love to act and choose so as to warrant it.

Not that this motive is always going to win out against other motives. We might despair of any capacity to change for the better, in which case the very desire that would otherwise motivate us to change might lead us to reject the values that inspire a negative judgment of self-worth. We adopt, perhaps, an attitude of disdain for these values and concern ourselves exclusively with hedonistic ones. We make ourselves "good enough" by tailoring our standards of good enough to fit our failings.

Despair over our capacity to change for the better might also lead us into a state of conflicted self-loathing in which the part of us that is moved by self-love wishes for us to be good and happy, while another part of us, gripped by the widespread idea that love should be conditioned on desert, sabotages everything that might enrich our lives. Not all of us are ruled by self-love, and Jesus' injunction to love others as we love ourselves doesn't assume that we are. Rather, it assumes that we all have some instinctive self-love, even when it is overridden or stifled by other things. And that love is one which is directed towards our own good--both our happiness and our moral worth--in a manner that isn't conditioned on whether we deserve it or have earned it.

To love others as we love ourselves is thus to care for their good--including their character and self-development--in a similar way, a manner which is unconditioned by matters of merit or reciprocity.

And this is where the injunction to love our neighbors as ourselves dovetails with the injunction to love our enemies. The latter makes sense only if love is unconditioned by desert. A.J. Muste, at a Quaker meeting in 1940, put it this way: “If I can’t love Hitler, I can’t love at all.”

When you think of it, that’s a pretty staggering statement. In making it, Muste was making a definitional point about what’s involved in agapic love: To love in this way is to love in a way that does not attend to matters of reciprocity or desert. And the ultimate test of whether one is actually loving in this way is whether one’s love extends to one’s bitterest, most hostile, most villainous enemies. If it doesn’t, then one isn’t loving in this distinctive way.

In short, the idea of loving our neighbors as we love ourselves, and the idea of loving our enemies, converge on the same idea: We are to be concerned about the neighbor’s good—including the enemy-neighbor—for the neighbor’s own sake and without regard for whether the neighbor deserves such care.

Following Simone Weil and Martin Luther and others, I am convinced that such love is first and foremost a matter of attention. We attend to the neighbor as another subject like ourselves. Instead of seeing them through the filters of our own wants and needs and beliefs, we attend to them in the same way that we ordinarily attend to ourselves: experiencing as best we can the range of their wants and needs, hopes and fears, convictions and doubts--in short, empathizing.

But this is not to say that we abandon our best understanding of the truths of the human condition, adopting those of the individial with whom we empathize. It does not mean endorsing their choices and sharing their ends. After all, a Christian call to empathize with Hitler is not a call to adopt his lack of empathy for his victims. The empathy that is an essential piece of Christian love is not the limited, truncated empathy of someone like Hitler. It is, rather, the kind of empathy that involves rising above such limits. The empathy that is the starting point of Christian love is thus an attempt to expand our discernment of truth by wearing our neighbor's shoes (including those of our enemy-neighbor), not to truncate our discernment of truth by limiting ourselves to what is seen while standing in our neighbor's shoes.

The ultimate goal here is a kind of global empathy in which decisions are made as if each and every neighbor were as much a part of me as I am. What is being described here, of course, is a God's-eye view. We are called to love as God loves, to be vessels through which divine love operates. And this is something none of us can actually do. We cannot, in fact, adopt the God's-eye view, the universal empathy, that we aspire towards; nor can we in fact make decisions from such a standpoint. We will fail to love Hitler as if he were our own child, with all the concern for Hitler's good that we have for our own children (a concern, by the way, that wouldn't merely be for Hitler's happiness, but for his moral character; a concern that wouldn't pander to his actual desires, but seek what is in his best interest; and this, I believe, means wishing for him that he satisfy the desires he would have were he to actualize his potential and be the best person he could be, as opposed to being the moral monster he became).

In a sense, then, Christian love is merely aspirational. But in another sense it is not. Because the Christian love ethic is embedded in a broader theology which affirms the existence of a God who actualizes what we aspire for--a God who is love, and whose loving will operates in accord with the kind of universal benevolence and profligate empathy we cannot attain. Within this broader theological context, there is something we can do beyond merely aspiring: We can submit ourselves to that God who realizes what we can only hope to approximate. We can make of ourselves channels of divine benevolence.

And this is what it means to love God: It means giving ourselves over to a love that isn’t limited and constrained in the way that finite human love is limited and constrained. It involves saying “Your will, not mine, be done”—and so subordinating our will, not to an arbitrary tyrant, but to the being who is love.

None of us do this—except, perhaps, in rare flashes. Most of the time we cling to our own egos, our own finite perspectives, our own wills...defined as they are by a restricted scope of love. Or we want to be universally benevolent but we want to be responsible for it--a vestige of our allegiance to the notion that good will should be merited, and hence that to be loved as we long to be loved we need to achieve moral perfection on our own terms. And, of course, we fail. And we respond to that failure either by truncating the scope of the moral demand to fit better with our limits, or by beating ourselves up. Or we flicker from one response to another--at one moment justifying our behavior as good enough, at another smacking ourselves for not being good enough. The third alternative--so tritely but accurately captured in the saying so often repeated by evangelicals, "Let go and let God"--is a rare and difficult achievement even for those who believe in God.

But this third alternative is what Christianity calls for, what is at the core of the injunction to love God with all one's heart and soul and mind. And the Christian notion of divine grace at work in the world is the conviction that this third alternative is not merely a fiction, but that "letting go and letting God" actual makes a difference. To believe in grace is to believe that it is possible for us to realize levels of love we could not achieve on our own, by become channels for a love greater than our own. It also means the possibility of escape from the twin traps of rationalization and pathological guilt.

I see in my own life the failure to love as widely as I should--and the propensity to alternately justify it or beat myself up about it. I see it in something as minor as the uncharitable messages I almost post in the comments section of this blog. This is, I think, a real failure—a “sin,” to use the language of Christianity—even when I ultimately resist the temptation. The fact is that often enough I don’t resist it, and even when I do I typically find myself indulging my animus in private. That I don’t publicize it doesn’t eliminate it.

The truth is that there’s a ubiquitous human impulse to exclude some persons from the scope of our love. We want to push some people onto the other side of a divide. On this side there are those who have value and dignity, who deserve basic respect, whose needs matter, whose good is something to be sought. And then there are the people on the other side.

Sometimes this impulse manifests itself in genocidal wars. Sometimes it manifests in verbal slights against colleagues that cause them to fume even as we smirk. Sometimes it manifests in something as small and seemingly trivial as thinking that a particular commentator on my blog has finally crossed outside the line within which human decency is called for. We call it “taking the gloves off” or “no more Mr. Nice Guy.”

This is not, in my view, a trivial issue. And, unlike certain other human dispositions, it is universal in its scope. Everybody is prone not only to lashing out, verbally if not physically, against those who offend against us, but to convincing ourselves that the requirements of love do not apply to them--that lashing out is okay because they don't deserve any better, and hence that the lashing out needn't be constrained by questions such as "How would I react if someone said/did that to me? Would it motivate me to be a better person or would it be more likely to inspire retaliatory vindictiveness?"

Let’s be clear about a distinction, however. Loving someone isn’t the same as being nice. Sometimes it requires being honest in a way that’s painful to hear. Sometimes it may call for a refusal to enable self-destructive behaviors. Sometimes love means saying no.

But too often we call our behavior towards others “tough love” when it is neither tough nor love. We are following the easy path of lashing out in a way that’s purely spiteful, that’s nothing more than a desire to see the other person suffer. We feel the surge of testosterone, the fist-pumping delight in knocking down the enemy. This has nothing to do with love.

If the essence of the good is a love that knows no boundaries, then the essence of sin is any impulse that truncates the scope of love. And to affirm this is to be forced to acknowledge our own sinfulness. Far easier to focus on dispositions that other people have, and to call them sins. Far easier, for example, for the straight majority to obsess about homosexuality and to treat the disposition to be romantically attracted to the same sex as if it were a disposition to sin. Then sin is something that other people do, something in relation to which one can feel self-righteous.

Real sin isn’t like that. Real sin is found in the failure to live up to Jesus’ model of radically inclusive and sacrificial love. Expressing romantic feelings in the context of committed monogamy, and working hard to build a relationship of mutual trust and care, to overcome conflicts and build a life together—such a thing is the crucible from which virtues are built, from which admirable character traits can be cultivated. How exactly is such a thing rendered sinful, let alone perverse, simply because the person with whom one works to build such intimacy and partnership happens to be of the same sex?

To ask this question is, admittedly, to question the inerrancy of the apostle Paul. Paul clearly had no concept of committed homosexual monogamy. He seemed to think that all homosexual love sprang from an excess of lust, a lust so indiscriminate that one couldn’t limit oneself to those one was naturally attracted to, let alone to a single partner in the context of fidelity and life partnership. We know better now, at least those of us who listen to our gay and lesbian neighbors and who have witnessed the lives of fidelity that many have pursued despite the odds.

But there are those who have been steeped in a view of Scripture that makes no distinction between an example used by Paul (to exemplify a broader theoretical point) and the very word of God. And they sincerely wrestle with the tension between the implications of this view of Scripture and the seemingly admirable character of a same-sex relationship they've encountered. Their moral intuition is at odds with the moral authority to which they have been taught to defer, and so they struggle.

Many who struggle in this way are genuinely trying to live out a spirit of love. They wrestle with how to be authentically loving towards their gay and lesbian neighbors in the face of the biblical injunctions that, faithfully pursued, would seem to call for their social marginalization, their exclusion from bedrock social institutions such as marriage. They strive to figure out how to do this because they are convinced that the God who is love has, in fact, categorically condemned all homosexual acts. To my view, their struggle is rooted in a failure to see the difference between the word of God and a what their own theory about the Bible implies concerning the word of God. They confuse question the latter with questioning the former.

But there's a difference between struggling to reconcile what I take to be Paul's ignorance and prejudices with the ethic of Christian love, and treating Paul's comments about same-sex activity as an opportunity to indulge feelings that might otherwise be viewed with moral suspicion. There are those for whom "defending God's word"  opens the door, perhaps unwittingly, for guiltlessly letting loose those darker, meaner human impulses--indulging in the tribal impulse to divide and exclude while congratulating oneself for righteously defending God's will.

For many, the biblical passages that appear to condemn homosexuality do not merely provide an opportunity for such guiltless indulgence; they provide a way to distance oneself from sin. The serious sins, after all, are the things the perverts do. “I may have my failings, but I’m not a pervert.” Being a decent human being becomes easy. After all, it is astonishingly easy for a heterosexual to avoid having gay sex—about as easy as it is for a white person to avoid being black. Avoiding the worst sins becomes a matter of having the good fortune of being born into the right group.

This is an exercise in not taking sin seriously. And yes, paradoxical as it may sound, I am arguing that those who trumpet against the supposed sins of some group or other--some "them"--are thereby not taking sin seriously. They are making sin someone else's problem rather than a shared feature of the human predicament. We take sin seriously when we see its ubiquity…most especially when we see it in ourselves. We take sin seriously when we take the serious sins to be precisely those forces of alienation that abide in every human heart, including our own. We take sin seriously when we see it as the negation of love, and when we understand the essence of love that is captured in A.J. Muste’s words. We take sin seriously when we don't seek to truncate the demands of love to suit our limitations, but seek instead to transcend those limitations by opening ourselves up to being moved by a love that is not so limited.

This inspiration to reach for grace--to earnestly yearn to be more loving that our natures incline us to be--is what is most clearly poisoned by divisive ideology.

Christianity, Self-Compassion, and Wemmicks

In a recent post, I mentioned my knee-jerk urge to write a systematic rebuttal to a blog post by Sarah Hippolitus arguing that Christianity is damaging to psychological health.

Now I don't mean to go back on my decision not to offer such a rebuttal. But the other day I stumbled across the research of a UT Austin professor, Kristin Neff, on the psychological benefits of self-compassion--and thinking about her research immediately set me on a trajectory of reflection that brought me back to Hippolitus's claim that Christian teachings are damaging to psychological health--especially her claim that the doctrine of original sin is psychologically demoralizing insofar as it undermines healthy self-esteem.

Let me explain. Neff's research into self-compassion was motivated by her own religious practice as a Buddhist. Self-compassion is an important concept in Buddhism, and she became interested in studying the empirical effects of such compassion. Some of her central conclusions are neatly summarized in the following abstract for one of her professional articles:

This article focuses on the construct of self-compassion and how it differs from self-esteem. First, it discusses the fact that while self-esteem is related to psychological well-being, the pursuit of high self-esteem can be problematic. Next it presents another way to feel good about oneself: self-compassion. Self-compassion entails treating oneself with kindness, recognizing one’s shared humanity, and being mindful when considering negative aspects of oneself. Finally, this article suggests that self-compassion may offer similar mental health benefits as self-esteem, but with fewer downsides. Research is presented which shows that self-compassion provides greater emotional resilience and stability than self-esteem, but involves less self-evaluation, ego-defensiveness,and self-enhancement than self-esteem. Whereas self-esteem entails evaluating oneself positively and often involves the need to be special and above average, self-compassion does not entail self-evaluation or comparisons with others. Rather, it is a kind, connected, and clear-sighted way of relating to ourselves even in instances of failure, perceived inadequacy, and imperfection.

Neff defines compassion in terms of three elements: first, you notice or attend to a person's suffering; second, you feel FOR the suffering person in a manner characterized by "warmth, caring, and the desire to help"; and third, "when you feel compassion for another (rather than mere pity), it means that you realize that suffering, failure, and imperfection is part of the shared human experience. 'There but for fortune go I.'"


Now as I reflected on this account, what immediately came to mind for me was a book I sometimes read to my children: "You Are Special," by Max Lucado. For those unfamiliar with it, here's the summary of the story that I offered in a post from a couple of years back:
 

Punchinello, a wooden man, lives in a village of wooden people. These wooden people are called Wemmicks, and all of them were carved by the same craftsman, a man named Eli who lives in his workshop on a hill looking down on the village. The Wemmicks are all in the habit of putting stickers on each other: gold stars on those who impress them with their good looks or talents, dots on those who fall short, who are scratched or clumsy or awkward. Punchinello is one of the latter. He’ s covered in dots.


But one day he meets a Wemmick who has neither stars nor dots on her; and when he asks her why, she smiles and tell him that the stickers don’t stick on her because she visits Eli every day. And so Punchinello goes to see his maker. Eli is delighted by Punchinello’s visit, and offers him a warm welcome, as well as words of wisdom: What the other Wemmicks think of Punchinello doesn’t matter. What matters is that Eli loves Punchinello just the way he is, without conditions or qualifications. The stickers, Eli says, only stick if they matter to you. And once Punchinello is secure in Eli’s love, they won’t matter at all. Punchinello hears, and believes. And a dot falls to the ground.

The last time I talked about this story, it was to share the profound disconnect between the metaphorical way that Lucado shares the Christian gospel narrative in a children's book, and the way that too many Christians, too often, turn evangelism into an ugly bit of "come to Jesus or roast in hell" coercion. But what I want to stress now is that the elements of sin and grace that play such a central role in Christian theology can be pieced together in both of these ways--Lucado's way, and the ugly way that lends itself to the "come to Jesus or roast in hell" message.

It is, of course, the latter that Hippolitus picks up on. She takes the doctrine of original sin to be about "believing you are irredeemably defective without someone else," and she notes that this way of thinking has a crushing effect on self-esteem. She likens the Christian's relationship to God to the destructive dynamic that can arise in a relationship when one mate feels wholly inferior to the other and latches onto the merits of the other for the sake of being "saved" or rescued.

This is, clearly, one way of seeing the Christian doctrine of human sin and divine grace. And if you see the doctrine in this way, then the key message becomes this: Unless you get yourself rescued--that is, let God rescue you--you're doomed.

But what Lucado does in his story is offer us a different way of seeing this same doctrine. In the Wemmick's story, the key point is that all the Wemmicks share a common condition: All are flawed, all make mistakes, and what talents and strengths they have are largely out of their hands. Seeking approval through achievement, judging others for their successes and failures--these are tendencies that divide us and make us lose sight of our shared condition. Such comparative judgments need to give way to a higher perspective.

Years ago I remember reading a painstakingly stitched verse on a wall-hanging in the home of an elderly Christian woman I was visiting. It said this: "There is so much good in the worst of us/ And so much bad in the best of us/ That it doesn't do for any of us/ To talk about the rest of us." Perhaps it's cheesy, but I remember that it struck me at the time, and I shared it with my grandparents (my grandfather was a Baptist preacher). They nodded sagely. This, they said, was what Christianity taught in the doctrine of original sin.

But the doctrine is only a piece of a larger fabric. The higher perspective from which our shared finitude and imperfection are laid bare is also, at the same time, a perspective from which that finitude and imperfection cease to define us. We are not fundamentally defined by our finitude, but by the gaze of love--a love that knows no conditions, that does not wait on worth. And, like Punchinello, we are invited to see ourselves from this perspective--to see ourselves as God sees us, that is, as gracious love sees us. In other words, we are invited to look at our failings and finitude with the eyes of compassion. Looking at ourselves with those eyes, we can be honest about our failings rather than trying to hide them or rationalize them in the way we feel compelled to do when our worth hinges upon our achievements.

And hence, paradoxically, we are freed to achieve more. We want to help ourselves because we love ourselves--not because we aren't worthy of love until we're perfect. And because we can be honest with ourselves, our projects of self-improvement and growth are guided by a kind of clarity that just isn't possible when we define our worth by how many gold stars are stuck to us.

When I facilitated nonviolence workshops in prisons, I encountered many inmates who had undergone a transformation in self-perception of precisely this sort. The source of that transformation? Prison ministries, Christian ones that taught the doctrine of sin and grace. They came out of their encounter with that doctrine not with their self-esteem in the gutter, but with greater self-compassion.

It didn't always happen. But I think there is something about the character of those who choose to take the Christian message into prison, and something about the way they tell the Christian story, that conveys an understanding of it fundamentally similar to what emerges in Max Lucado's parable of the Wemmicks.

What we have here is one very traditional way of seeing and experiencing the Christian doctrine of sin and grace--a way of seeing and experiencing this doctrine that differs from Buddhist notions of self-compassion in its trappings, but a way of seeing that nevertheless fits the mold that Kristin Neff is studying. And yes, it is every bit as traditional as that other, uglier understanding. Both have been around a long time.

And I think that if we want to promote greater self-compassion in the world, we are better served by nurturing the former than by identifying Christianity with the latter and pretending that the former does not exist.

The Pragmatic Assessment of Religious Belief

A couple of months ago, John Shook expressed his frustration with the tactics used by religious believers to immunize their beliefs from rational criticism. One of his concerns had to do with the pragmatic assessment of religion, especially Christianity. The idea behind pragmatic assessment is, roughly, that one way to evaluate a belief system is to look at how it affects behavior. If these effects are positive, then that speaks in favor of the belief system. If the effects are negative, then that speaks against it.

Now there are a range of difficulties here that I could get into, having to do with how we arrive at the value system that we then make use of for the sake of doing pragmatic assessments of beliefs. But I will set that issue aside for now (perhaps taking it up in a future post), and assume that we at least have a general consensus on basic values that we can appeal to when assessing the pragmatic effects of beliefs and belief systems.

Shook clearly thinks that there is considerable bad behavior that can be directly linked to Christianity—such things, I suppose, as crusades and witch burnings and Inquisitions; although I would also add the heterosexist marginalization of gays and lesbians and the patriarchal subordination of women. Shook’s first complaint is that, when confronted with this sordid history, Christians will say that “it’s the bad Christians doing the bad things (or they really weren’t Christians at all).”

His second complaint focuses on the use of the Christian doctrine of original sin. “Very convenient,” Shook complains, “how Christianity ensures that we are already such bad sinners that no bad behavior at all need ever be attributed to a Christian belief.”

Now I think there is some merit to both of Shook’s complaints. And any reader of my book will know that I take pragmatic assessment of belief very seriously. In fact, it is one of the main aims of my book to distinguish between ways of being religious that are pragmatically pernicious, and ways of being religious that are pragmatically benign. In a recent post on this blog, I attacked the doctrine of hell on essentially pragmatic grounds, arguing that the doctrine tends to promote and perpetuate ideological in-group/out-group dichotomies.

Although I think Shook is right that some Christians throw up smoke screens to block pragmatic assessments of their beliefs, I think we need to make some distinctions so as not to cast blame where it isn’t deserved.

First, there’s a difference between, on the one hand, resisting pragmatic criticism of your faith by blaming all the bad things done in its name on “bad” Christians or pretenders to the faith, and, on the other hand, pointing out that there are different versions of Christianity, and that not every version has the same pragmatic effects. The former is an attempt to avoid pragmatic assessment. The latter is an insistence that such pragmatic assessment be conducted with care so as to avoid false generalizations. Furthermore, with any complex belief system, it is never adequate to simply blame the belief system as a whole for specific negative pragmatic consequences. The diagnostic challenge is to identify more specifically where the problem lies. If we don’t take this diagnostic challenge seriously, we risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

In my book, I make extensive appeal to Plutarch’s distinction between what he calls religion and what he calls superstition. The former is about living in the hope that the universe is fundamentally on the side of goodness. The latter is about trying to appease a supernatural tyrant in the sky. I maintain that these two phenomena could not be more different, especially on a pragmatic level. And I argue, furthermore, that both the divine command theory of ethics and scriptural fundamentalism, when embraced by Christians, tend to move them away from religion (in Plutarch’s sense) and into the dangerous domain of superstition. Also, in my book, I distinguish religion from what I call religionism, which is a kind of bifurcating ideology that designates in-groups and out-groups according to religious allegiances. Religionism, like racism and ethnocentrism, is a dangerous belief system that foments violence and oppression. But religious worldviews, experiences, and ways of life needn’t be paired with religionism in this sense.

My point, of course, is that there can be very good reasons why a Christian might want to say that Christianity in some broad sense should not be blamed for the evils that have historically been done in Christianity’s name. It may be that a careful investigation will reveal that the source of the negative behaviors can be traced to specific doctrines or patterns of thinking that are not essential to Christianity, even if they have often been embraced by Christians at various times and in various places. What the pragmatic criticism therefore warrants is not a blanket criticism of Christianity, but rather the rejection of those versions of Christianity that embrace these troublesome elements.

To me, however, the more interesting of Shook’s complaints is the one that implicitly gestures to the doctrine of original sin. His thinking seems to be this: Christianity has built into its worldview a picture of human depravity that essentially immunizes it from pragmatic criticism. Since any evils done by Christians can be chalked up to the effects of original sin, the proverbial chickens can be neatly kept from ever coming home to roost. It will never be Christianity’s fault that these evils are done. The blame will lie with our sinful human nature, a nature that prevents even the most sincere Christians from behaving in the praiseworthy ways that Christianity should inspire—and would inspire in the absence of sin’s corrupting influence.

I think that Shook is absolutely right on track here, in terms of how the doctrine of original sin is too often invoked. And what is so pernicious, in my judgment, about this use of the doctrine, is that it is fundamentally at odds with where a careful theological understanding of the doctrine should take us.

For Christianity, sin is the Problem (with a capital “P”). It names what’s wrong with the world and with our lives. At heart, sin refers to the state of alienation from God and from one another. Specific behaviors referred to as “sins” are merely by-products of this condition of alienation, which cuts us off from the source of all good and all value. It’s this state of alienation that is our “original” human predicament—our starting point, if you will. And until we move past this starting point, until our alienation from the divine is overcome, we will continue to be in bondage to affective states that render us too cowardly to stand up for what is right, too superficial to attend to what really matters, too fixated on earthly security or immediate appetites to care for our neighbors in need.

Christianity professes to offer a pathway out of this original predicament. It tells us that we can find salvation from the ravages of sin. Here, “salvation” is taken to mean something far more profound than getting into heaven when we die. Salvation isn’t something that needs to wait until death, nor is it about enjoying some paradise realm of endless pleasures. It is, instead, about overcoming the state of alienation that traps us in our narrow egos, that cuts us off from one another and from the source of all value. It is, in other words, about becoming connected to the whole of reality through bonds of love. And while the “beloved community” may require a level or reciprocity we are unlikely to enjoy in this life, we come closer to salvation even in this life when our love extends around us in such a way that we become catalysts for the promulgation of loving community. When Christianity speaks of salvation from sin, this is what is most profoundly meant.

But if this is right, if in some way Christianity offers the cure for sin, then shouldn’t Christianity be uniquely susceptible to pragmatic assessment?

I think, in fact, that it should. But let me be careful about something up front. If we are to speak precisely, it would be a mistake to say that Christianity claims to be the cure for sin. Rather, it claims to teach us about the cure.

Of course, there are complications galore, some of the most theologically difficult pertaining to the relationship between justification and sanctification (two important elements in the Christian understanding of salvation). But I want to sidestep these complications to make a general point, which is this: There are different ways of developing and interpreting Christian teachings, including teachings about sin and grace. And these alternatives need to be assessed on their own terms.

Some, for example, think that salvation comes from accepting the truth of certain doctrines about Jesus, or from accepting the inerrancy of the Bible. I’m suspicious of all such views for a number of reasons. Some of those reasons are pragmatic. If salvation comes from accepting the truth of particular religious teachings, then we should expect that those who strive diligently to believe the relevant teachings will lead lives that are discernibly better, in a moral sense, than are the lives of those who do not. But in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, this isn’t what I observe. Instead, it seems to me that there are people from a diversity of religions who exhibit what I would call “saintliness,” and that across religions there are doctrinal devotees who are as far from saintliness as one could imagine. And this constitutes a pragmatic reason to be skeptical of the idea that doctrinal commitment as such offers any kind of real salvation from the power of sin.

My own understanding of Christian theology is a roughly Lutheran one: salvation comes, not from anything that I do or believe, but from what a benevolent God does on the basis of unconditional love. In Luther’s language, our salvation comes from divine grace (mediated through Christ's work on the cross--but addressing that issue is something I will need to explore in a later post). On this view, our salvation is not something that is in our power. What is in our power is whether we block the influence of divine grace or open ourselves up to it. And one of the chief ways that we block its influence is by insisting on earning salvation for ourselves—or, stated in more secular terms, by clinging to the idea that our happiness can and should be earned by our own efforts. The idea here is that we have a right to be happy only if we’re good enough, and the responsibility for being “good enough” must rest with us.

According to Lutheran theology, this “works righteousness” is a recipe for beating ourselves up for our inevitable failures and shortcomings—or worse, for hiding from and denying our failures and shortcomings, since we can’t face them honestly without believing that we deserve only misery. In other words, works righteousness is a pathway either to false self-righteousness or to self-loathing. But more profoundly, it stands in the way of the only real pathway to salvation from the effects of sin: opening ourselves to the transforming power of a transcendent benevolence.

So, how do we pragmatically assess this version of Christian theology, which I will call the theology of grace? The difficulty here is that, while some Christians interpret their faith in this way and internalize it, others in the very same congregations are mouthing platitudes from the pews without giving them any real thought, while still others are so deeply habituated into works righteousness that they twist and distort the theology of grace even as they espouse it, turning it into another species of works righteousness.

So how do we make sure, when we try to pragmatically assess the value of a theology of grace, that we adequately distinguish those who really embrace such a theology from those who embrace something that resembles it only in the most superficial way?

Put simply, how do we make sure that our pragmatic assessment is focused on those who really are striving to put their trust in a benevolent higher power that can work through us and in us to help us overcome bad habits and impulses we just can’t seem to resist by ourselves?

My suggestion is this: we should look, not at the church down the road, but at our local meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous.

But for a detailed discussion of the religious significance of AA, I must hold off for a later post.