Free to be

Everett Vandagriff wrote a long letter responding to my somewhat rude reaction to his earlier letter. This post is going to veer somewhat off the subject of the Atonement and into free will, an interesting subject in its own right. Minute Particulars also wrote on this subject, and like Everett includes a lot of C.S. Lewis. Which is too bad, because I don't much like Lewis. (Well, not on this subject -- I liked The Lion, the With and the Wardrobe.)

I think it may have been misleading for me to link to Julian Sanchez' post arguing against the existence of free will and in favor of materialism. I was not endorsing everything Julian said, but I thought he made some good points questioning how we think about free will. I am agnostic on the subject of materialism; and when it comes to the makeup of the human being, in fact, materialism does not necessarily run counter to Christianity. In fact, a while ago I posted part of a letter from Telford Work in which he says: "I myself tend towards holism: my 'soul' is linguistic shorthand for my 'self', which seems to be entirely material. When I die, I'm nowhere but in the casket until resurrection day."

So I'm going to skip that part of Everett's argument, and move on:

When we take a course of action, there are several things which tend to make us want to act one way or another. These are, ultimately, reason and emotion. Setting aside whether or not emotion is entirely chemical or not, I am going to proceed on the assumption that human reason is not merely controlled by chemical processes. When weighing our options, we look, ideally, at each one and determine which alternative is best based upon rational thought, emotional reaction and, occasionally, intuition. Now, in order to weigh the options, we need to determine which factors (within each of the areas of influence) take precedent and weigh them against each other. When this reflection has reached its conclusion we, hopefully, have decided which course of action is best. Once that determination has been made, we then have to decide whether or not to follow our better judgment. Sometimes we do, and sometimes we don't, be it for emotional reasons, indifference, what have you. There is something in us which determines whether or not we should follow that judgment, and it is not our reason or our emotion: it is our will. That will is bound by neither reason nor emotion, but sides with one or the other (in some cases both or neither) in determining our course of action. In order for it to be able to do this, it must be something different than both reason and emotion because otherwise, it would by its very nature be subject to one or the other. It must also be able to supersede the demands of reason, emotion and intuition so as to measure and reconcile them and react accordingly. Ultimately, it must choose, and the fact that it can choose on a purely rational basis, a purely emotional basis, purely intuitive basis, a purely habitual basis, or on several of them is an indication of a degree of independence from the various influences that lend weight to various options.

I disagree that the "will" must be some sort of free-floating entity within the mind. I think this description (which doesn't quote Lewis, but has Lewis' fingerprints all over it) overly compartmentalizes the self. Reason and emotion -- not to mention our many conflicting reasons and emotions -- are ultimately part of one organism. I think of my "will" as what I end up doing once all those factors play out within myself. The fact that "will" does not always side with one faction or the other, I think, simply means that the interplay comes out differently depending on the circumstances of the decision.

I also want to point out that there's another factor in decision-making that Everett doesn't mention: perception. Not all the variables in a decision are inside our heads. The first question is what we perceive our choices to be. And that's why I got so hot under the collar in the first post. Everett and other Christians say unbelievers "choose to reject God," as if everybody looked coolly over the situation -- Jesus, love and heaven or sin, death and hell -- and inexplicably chose the latter. I suppose, given the strangeness of humanity, some people may exist who feel they've done that. But the vast majority have not. In fact, most non-Christians believe they've accepted God -- but they don't think the Christian God is the real one.

Think of it this way. When you're choosing between two anythings -- cars, women, political candidates, you name it -- you start out believing that both of them exist, and you generally try to find out as much as you can about their various attributes. We do not take our knowledge that they exist, or the knowledge we might gain from learning about them, as interfering with our free choice. What drove me bats about Lewis was the way he acted like, when it comes to God, there's no free will without ignorance.

Everett, in his original letter, put it this way:

God wants a people who will follow Him out of free will, who will submit to them by their own choice. To simply declare the relationship restored is to place people in submission Him irrespective of whether or not they wish to be. This elimination of free will violates the basic dignity which God bestowed upon man.

This brings me to the second point. Any sort of divine decree or any other act of power that would restore the relationship between God and man would necessarily destroy man's free will. If God makes a decree, man has no say in the matter. If He moves in a worldwide act of power, He leaves no room for choice, for faced with the glory of God, man cannot but accept God as Lord.

I have been wondering, as I've pondered Everett's two letters, why God should care if people follow him out of free will. Why should he confer this "dignity" on us, since we are far inferior beings to him? It's true that we humans prefer that in our own relationships: a marriage freely entered into seems more meaningful than having a sex slave. But why?

I think because all that having a sex slave shows is that its owner is powerful. It does not show that the owner is lovable. And we humans want -- need -- to love and to be loved. So most of us hold back on the power that we could use over other people; we allow them some freedom so we know whether they really love us, and therefore whether we are really lovable. (This is, of course, leaving aside the moral problems with enslaving people. Since God is already the ultimate authority and the whole universe is his slave of sorts, I do not see how that is an issue.)

Apparently God also wants to be loved, and apparently he is also withholding his potential power. But I have a bit of trouble translating the human experience with this to Everett's formulation. For one thing, when you get down to it, this is less about free will than it is about emotion. You can make a slave sleep with you, but you can't make her love you. Nor do you have the fulfillment of emotional union with her, needless to say. A wife, on the other hand, does not choose to love you; it's just that when you give her the chance to walk away from you and she doesn't, she's showing you what is really in her heart.

God is supposedly our Creator. So even if we are not his slaves, he made us complete with our impulses and desires and capacities and what have you. While you cannot control what is in your slave's heart, God can control our hearts -- he made our hearts. Where does the love in your heart come from? Do you will it? Or does it just happen? What does freedom really mean here?

Another, less romantic possibility is that God wants us to recognize goodness even when it is not clothed in power. This seems to be behind Jesus' long series of "if you knew God, you would know me" answers to the questioning authorities in the Gospel of John. The trouble I have with this in the Christian context is that there are two parts to this: recognizing goodness, and recognizing that goodness = God. The first part of that comes from listening to the innate morality within ourselves. The second part involves a huge leap of faith.

After all, when we look around the world, right and might don't seem to be especially associated. For untold millenia down to the present day, pagans worshipped gods that were essentially amoral. I am reminded here of a quote from a Haitian, when asked how he could theoretically be Catholic while practicing voodoo on the side. "Jesus is good," he said, "but Eshu is powerful."

Where does the faith to overcome this sort of attitude come from? I don't know, but I don't think you can will it into being. I would like to believe that good is stronger than evil, and indeed that is the chief thing that drew me to Christianity in the first place. But wanting, alone, does not make it happen.

There's another complication to this, which I alluded to in the previous post. If you have recognized God, you may not be seeing him in all his glory, but the choice to follow him becomes something of a non-choice. Especially if you believe in hell. You would not say a man was giving a woman free choice if he said, "Marry me. Or I will cast you into a pit of unspeakable torture." She theoretically has a choice, but it ain't much of one. Part of the reason why a woman choosing to marry you is meaningful is that she could walk away without any negative consequences. She's with you entirely because she loves you.

And yet, in the current letter, Everett says he does have a choice:

Choosing to follow God, to enter into the relationship I was made to enter into is not something that is done once, nor do I have to do so simply because I believe Christ died so that I might be united to HIm. I can decide one day that I want to live a life united with Christ, and I can then decide the following day that I don't want to after all. Initial submission to God does not mean permanent submission to God, nor does it mean perfect submission to God. Because God created me with free will, I can walk away from Him at any time I choose (I should point out that when I say "walk away from Him," I am referring to what I at a given time intend to be a pemanent decision not to follow God, as opposed to simply instances of sin). What's more, because I have free will, even though I may have decided to unite myself to God, there are times when I am going to choose to do something contrary to His will. I will sin. It happens. I am not perfect, nor have I ever claimed to be (at least not seriously). Ultimately, submission to God is consistent with free will because we have to constantly choose to do so. God will not compel us to do anything, even if he sometimes gives a little encouragement (e.g. Jeremiah and Jonah).

I can't say, of course, what goes on in the mind of a Christian. But I wonder, again, how serious the option to walk away is. Many Christians -- if not all of them -- wrestle with belief in God, but I doubt many have believed firmly in God and chosen to walk away. Again, the question seems to be of faith rather than morality or even choice.

Also, getting briefly back to the subject of the Atonement, I quote Everett again:

I'd also like to briefly address the question of who goes to Heaven. It is correct to say that Christ died for all men. However, it is wrong to say in absolute that people do not go to Hell for their sins, and it is also wrong to say in absolute terms that people go to Hell for unbelief. We are judged ultimately by whether we accept or reject God, yes, but as you have noted, what about the ones who have not had the opportunity to make the choice? My general understanding of how it works is that we as human beings are wired to be in communion with God. Even if we are cut off from God, we sense that there is more to life than what we see before us, a transcendant element, if you will, and there is something in us that urges us to pursue that Truth (God). If we allow ourselves to be driven by that urge, to seek the Truth, but do not do so because we lacked sufficient knowledge or opportunity, or because of some other mitigating circumstance, then God will be merciful toward us. However, if we live our lives seeking simply our own self-gratification, ignoring any urge to seek the Truth, then God will have no recourse but to condemn us to Hell.

This is why Christian lines like "your sins are forgiven" can sound like doublespeak to me. They're forgiven unless you're really bad and you don't seek God, or something.

Finally, (yes, this post will eventually come to an end!), Everett writes:

I find it admirable that you are taking time to examine things, to try to gain a greater understanding of the Christian life. Would it were that more people pursued it with the same zeal as you. However, it is essential to recognize the limits of intellect. There is an element of mystery to religion that can't be explained away. There are things we can never fully understand on an intellectual level in this life. I encourage you, in addition to picking people's brains, to step out in faith. Much, if not all, of what is being said in this discussion will not satisfy you completely, nor can it. I know what I've said here does not satisfy me entirely, but is just a workable understanding. However, I believe because I have faith. I have stepped out off of the cliff and not fallen to the ground. So don't confine yourself to asking people who are by their very nature fallible. Ask God to help you come to grips with the questions you have, and continue to do so. Try to quiet your thoughts and listen for His reply. It may come directly from Him, or you may find yourself moved to read something, or someone may say something that clears things up for you. You never know, something might happen. Ultimately, be prepared to live with mystery. You don't have to know all of the answers, and that's a good thing.

I quote this partly because other readers have said similar things. And I should say that I have indeed been pursuing a sort of two-track policy on this. On the blog I've been having these brainy discussions about theology, since this seems like a good format for it. But I've also been attending a church, involving myself in its activities, and, in my own spotty way, praying. Telford, if he shows up here, can vouch for it. So yeah, I can sound like Supercritic on the blog, but I am also trying to get this more experientially/intuitively. And thanks for the kind words, Everett. I'm sorry I was so snappy with you before.

Dying for sins: righteous brothers

Disputations has completed part one and part two of his explanation of the Atonement. I feel like this is covering ground that we've been over before, but there are some interesting features to his discussion.

I was pretty confused by this part:

The Law was God's revelation to Moses and the Jews of how they were to live if they were to be righteous in His sight, yet as St. Paul points out "by works of the Law no one will be justified." If the Law could make someone righteous, then there would be no need for Christ to die.

I know the theory of the Atonement leans heavily on Romans, which I have read (I didn't come to this topic from a state of total ignorance, much though it may seem like it). Romans was pretty confusing to me too, especially on the topic of Jewish law. The gist seemed to be that God laid down the law but no one followed it perfectly, hence the need for Jesus to come and render forgiveness. What I can't tell is whether this was because giving the laws to Moses was a previous attempt at getting people to live right that failed, or whether the Law itself is somehow inherently inadequate to actually make people good enough to meet God. If the former, it makes God sound rather fallible, trying one tack with humanity and then another; if the latter, it makes the purpose of lawgiving rather mysterious.

Paul does offer one suggestion: that "through the law comes knowledge of sin." The implication apparently being that once people have laws and fail to obey them, they realize what sinners they are, and thus how much they need God's grace. Aside from seeming like a strange reason to hand down law, I am not sure how this applies to the many non-Jews who converted to Christianity. Evidently, they perceived their own sinfulness without knowing or caring that they were breaking Jewish law.

But anyway, this is a roundabout way of getting to the question that I asked earlier: what was the fate of those who lived before Jesus? Disputations offers hints:

Before Jesus' death, men were helpless, unable to please God by their lives. After His death, men were no longer helpless. By their faith in Jesus, they could live for Him rather than themselves, and living for Christ means living together with Him. Since Christ is living at the right hand of the Father, living with Christ means living in the presence of the Father, an unthinkable thought before Jesus, since no man sees God and still lives (Exodus 33:20).

So no man can see God and live, but what of the afterlife? If none were righteous, was everyone damned? Could Christ save the dead?

Disputations also says:

So Jesus' sacrifice, once for all, establishes a new covenant, a new agreement between God and all mankind, by which God promises to forgive our sins if we have faith in His Son. The one necessary sacrifice of this covenant -- the whole of mankind's side of the bargain -- was made before people even became aware the covenant was offered. Jesus died so that we would have a sacrifice through which our sins can be forgiven.

I must say I have the same objections which I spelled out here to the idea that your whole salvation rests on faith in one person. It's not a rational or theological argument, it just violates my inmost moral sense. But more on that in the next post.

I am also a bit doubtful that Catholics believe that mankind's whole side of the bargain was paid through the Crucifixion. Aside from the faith caveat -- an awfully big one -- people also evidently have to repent their sins. Maybe I'm taking Shakespearean theology too seriously, but I was under the impression that even a believer who died "in his sins," that is before repenting them, was destined for otherworldly punishment. Am I correct about that?

Holding pattern

Yes, I said I'd respond to some things today, but I got a late start and didn't have time for everything I wanted to do. So I will put it off again till tomorrow.

One thing that's taking longer than expected is reading Isaiah, which I told Telford Work I'd do because he thought it would help me understand the crucifixion business. I don't see the connection from what I've read, though it does show me the provenance of the guy who walked around San Francisco with a sandwich board saying "Fallen, fallen is Babylon..."

Now with more yack room!

I felt I was a little harsh with Everett Vandagriff, especially after I got a very courteous response from him that he apparently stayed up till four in the morning writing. I think I'm getting a bit emotional about this! So I'll take a breather and answer tomorrow, because it's a long and detailed matter.

In the meantime, after much computer mucking accompanied by a great deal of very un-Christian swearing, I have added comment capability to the site. I think I've attracted enough interest now that this might be fruitful. Of course, a three-day weekend is upon us so I don't expect everybody to be at home debating theology, but I thought I'd give it a shot.

And a couple more things...

I'm running out of steam, but Disputations has part one of his atonement explanation. I think I'll wait till it's completed before responding, but I will add that the comments to that post are worth reading.

Also Eve Tushnet has a response to the Julian Sanchez essay I mentioned earlier.

Dying for sins: love one another

Peter Nixon posted his long-promised essay on what the Atonement achieved for him. When he emailed me to tell me it was up -- no doubt reacting to how I've tended to rip to shreds everything else that's come my way -- he wrote, "Be gentle."

Well, I'm not going to rip it to shreds, and not just because I like Peter. You should read the whole thing, but here's what I think are the "nut grafs":

Like many people, I have a fear about forgiveness. I fear that it’s cheap. It’s easy to say “I’m sorry.” My kids say it all the time. Most the time they even mean it. Most of the time I mean it. But it’s still cheap.

Just what does it mean for a murderer to say “I’m sorry” to the victim’s family? For concentration camp guards to recant on their deathbeds? For President Clinton and Kofi Anon to apologize for their lack of response to the Rwandan genocide? For rapists to apologize to their victims? For the descendants of slave-owners to apologize to the descendants of slaves? Does it bring back the dead? Does it really heal suffering?

Is not forgiveness, in fact, morally monstrous? Does it not break faith with the dead and those who have suffered? There are many places in the world where people believe this. In the wake of September 11th, there are a large number of people in the United States who believe this. They believe that to forgive is to betray, to commit a terrible evil against those whom one loves. Forgiveness is not enough. There must be justice...

So what am I to do? How can I follow Jesus? How can I betray myself, my family, my clan, my race, my country? How can I forgive when there is no justice? If my life is to mean anything, then good must be rewarded and evil must be punished. There must be eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, blood for blood.

Jesus responds, “You want blood? Here, take mine.”

...On the cross, Jesus fulfills my demand for justice while seeking to lead me beyond it. After the cross, I have no more excuses. The Resurrection makes clear that Jesus was right and I am wrong, that His vision of human life is the authentic one, the one willed by God.

In other words, the issue is less about God forgiving us than us forgiving each other. God may not be bloodthirsty, but we are. The blood of Jesus, theoretically, slaked our desire for revenge and compels us to forgive.

This is quite different from any other account of the Crucifixion I've heard. And you know, it makes more sense, intellectually and morally, than just about anything else anyone has come up with. Thank you, Peter. It still doesn't resolve all the objections, but I'm going to chew on this for a good while.

Dying for sins: the well of souls

Josiah Neeley also wrote me again, and tried to answer my objections from this post:

I compared the atonement to being stuck at
the bottom of a well and being thrown a rope. You
asked, sensibly enough, what the rope is supposed to
represent. Not faith, I would say. Faith is more like
climbing the rope or, if we want to be really precise,
like trusting that, if you climb rope you will reach
the top alive. Grace, I think, is a better term for
what the rope represents. Through the atonement new
graces are opened to us, which allow for our
salvation.

True, people still sin, even saints. They are in this
way like someone who begins to climb up the rope, but
then let's go, or who can't bring himself to climb any
more and just hangs there (I suspect that we are
approaching the limits of this metaphor's usefulness).
It's only after death that a person makes it out of
the well, and thus it's only after death that a
person's salvation is complete. Even so, it's not true
that the rope makes no difference. A person can be
closer or further away from the top of the well, and
it's because of the rope that he can be able to climb
at all.

Does that mean that it's a mistake to say, as
believers often do, that they are already saved? Yes
and no. Personally, I prefer to say that I am being
saved, because this reminds me that sanctification is
a process, and not a one-time event. But there is a
sense in which it's perfectly sensible to say that
Christians are already saved. If you were stranded on
a desert island it would be perfectly natural to
exclaim "I'm saved" as soon as you've been sighted by
a rescue boat, even though your rescue won't be
completed for some time.

OK, that makes more sense. Sort of like being a "recovering" alcoholic. I'm still not quite sure how this relates to "your sins are forgiven," though. Every sin still harms your progress upward. Is the implication of forgiveness just that God doesn't yank up the rope the first time you slip?

Josiah also adds:

None of this means that the atonement couldn't result
in the salvation of those in the Old Testament. As you
point out, God isn't a linear fellow, and I see no
reason why He couldn't apply those graces gained
through the atonement to people living before the
birth of Christ.

Yes, I did say that, but this still strikes me as a bit of a dodge. It's not so much the question of time as of causation. Theoretically, only those who follow the Way that Jesus laid out can achieve salvation. How could they have known enough to follow it if they didn't know of Jesus?

Dying for sins: they call me free

I got a long email from an Everett Vandagriff explicating what is basically the standard version of the meaning of the Atonement. It was a bit frustrating to read because I feel like I've already described my objections to the standard theory, and I don't want to repeat myself. But there is one section I want to focus on:

Another reason for His death upon the Cross is that if He were to simply set all things to the way they were by divine decree, it would violate both justice and mercy. It would violate justice in that we need to make restitution for our sins. The death of Christ did not change that. It only lifted the ultimate price of spiritual death for those who accept His mercy, and it is in this acceptance of mercy that we find the source of the violation of mercy in a divine decree.

God wants a people who will follow Him out of free will, who will submit to them by their own choice. To simply declare the relationship restored is to place people in submission Him irrespective of whether or not they wish to be. This elimination of free will violates the basic dignity which God bestowed upon man.

This brings me to the second point. Any sort of divine decree or any other act of power that would restore the relationship between God and man would necessarily destroy man's free will. If God makes a decree, man has no say in the matter. If He moves in a worldwide act of power, He leaves no room for choice, for faced with the glory of God, man cannot but accept God as Lord. If He simply reveals His desire to restore the relationship to a few individuals, it both lacks credibility and fails to remove the old order.

I have heard this theory before, and words can hardly express how much it annoys me. I have deep and serious problems with the whole Christian conception of free will, which I will not go into now because it will sidetrack the discussion and because it gives me a migraine. Though by happy coincidence, Julian Sanchez has a post on the subject today that spells out some of the issues. (It does not quite go to the question raised here, but it does show how it's a lot more complicated than people who glibly invoke it seem to assume.)

But getting to the specific instance: why do all of you Christians out there believe in the Atonement? Because you believe it's God's will, no? So how is it that you have free will? By Everett's logic, once you believe that you have no choice but to submit. By the same token, it's not like the non-Christians out there saw the whole situation laid out before them and said, "Oh, I think I won't accept God's mercy, and burn in hell forever." It's because they did not perceive that they had that choice to make.

The thing is, you don't choose what you believe. And that's exactly what bothers me about this formulation: belief replaces morality as the criterion for how God treats you. If I understand this line of thinking correctly, Jesus' death atoned for our sins, but there's one last hurdle: you have to believe it. This seems to turn into the only thing that separates the saved from the damned.

Indeed, in an article Peter Nixon linked to the other day, one religious scholar says just that: "Jesus died for all. No man goes to hell for his sin -- people go to hell for unbelief ... they have not believed in Jesus Christ."

Rather than establishing a golden mean between justice and mercy, this seems to annihilate justice altogether, and not be very merciful either. In a recent email to me, Peter made a good point:

I sense that you have a great deal of intellectual integrity and that you feel it would be dishonest to say that you believe something unless you fully understand it. I think that's admirable, but I also think it can be a bit paralyzing. I'm not sure I can explain to you, in rational terms, why I love my wife and kids, or why I think racism is so wrong, or why torture is inhumane. You can make some arguments, but in the end, you have to make some baseline assumptions about right and wrong that may not, in the end, be rationally defensible.

Well, this appeals to me neither rationally nor morally. So I can only hope it's not God's way of doing things.

Yikes

Sounds like it was a good idea for me to blog under a pseudonym. I hope Iain finds a better employer soon!

Notes from all over

The new blog Not For Sheep mentions me as one of the "people of St. Blog's" whose sites she enjoys. Thank you. It's funny, though, how I've become one of the "people of St. Blog's" given that I'm a nonbeliever who attends a Pentecostal church. The Internet is all about breaking boundaries, I suppose...

And as if to prove the point, I also find myself on an Argentinian blog. My Spanish is rusty, but I think what he says is this:

Between Camassia (another nice Yankee blog) and Disputations is the beginning of an interesting exchange on "what it means concretely that Jesus died for us (for love of us/for our sins/for our salvation)". Nice because John of Disputations, as always, argues (Dominican to the end) with the calmness of a philosophy that only wants to elucidate the truth, and because Camassia questions and objects to absolutely everything, without looking for false agreements [consistencies?] in formulas that cannot be understood (in these things, to have understood the question is an almost sure sign that one is looking for certainties, not the truth).

Muchas gracias, Hernan. I must admit to being lost in the next sentence -- something about a Cardinal Ratzinger article about Jesus' suffering and death under Pontius Pilate, but I can't tell more.

The parenthetical note that follows is interesting. Apparently a reader complained about Hernan putting a picture of the Crucifixion on his site somewhere. If Jesus is to be depicted, the reader says, "depict him where he is: at the right hand of GOD the Father." Hernan says this is a typical Protestant objection to Catholic veneration of Crucifixion images. Curious, because I've never heard a Protestant up in this neck of the woods complain about that. But I suppose Protestants in a massively Catholic country like Argentina would be a different breed...

Dying for sins: who cares, let's eat

Ken Layne has his priorities:

When Jeebus died for whatever, he said: "At least you will have a Double-Double, fries and a drink for less than $5. So let it be written, so let it be done."

The spirit is willing, but...

The Great Atonement Debate will have to go on hold until I get over this stomach ailment I seem to have come down with. Everyone who's written to me, thank you, I'll get back to you soon.

The good, the bad and the gas-guzzling

Gregg Easterbrook has a truly depressing article about SUVs. But Jonathan Rauch offers hope for fuel-cell cars, while the Wall Street Journal says SUVs' popularity may have peaked.

I think the appeal of SUVs was probably best summed up on a billboard near my apartment: "Become a parent without becoming your parents." It became, I think, the emblem of baby boomers who are still hanging on to the belief that they're cooler than the previous generation even as their lives become essentially the same. But now that suburban parents are driving them, of course, whatever claim they had to cool has been lost.

Dying for sins: rolling on

Disputations responds to my last post directed his way. I think this time I'll take a cue from his opening sentence: "Camassia gamely continues to try to make sense of my attempts to set the stage to begin to sketch a way to try to begin to attempt to answer her perfectly sensible questions." Sounds like the man wants to move on to the first act, so I'll stop nitpicking and let him do it.

Dying for sins: Corpus Christi

Peter Nixon wrote a reflection on why everybody seems to be having such a hard time with the "dying for sins" issue. In an email, he remarked, "I suspect you will think (it) is an evasion."

I don't think it's an evasion, but it does make me feel like I'm going in circles. Peter writes eloquently about the limits of theological explanation, and the importance of community:

When a Christian is faced with someone who raises questions about the truths of our faith, the temptation is to explain, to use the faculty of reason, to argue and refute. I certainly do this myself (I’m doing it now!). But our more fundamental response should be to say “Come, live among us and see who we are and how we live. What we believe has made us who we are. While we can give reasons for what we believe, the only ‘proof’ we can offer is what these truths have made of our lives.”

Is this just intellectual evasion? A fancy way of avoiding the fact that our arguments do not seem intellectually compelling? Perhaps. But, speaking only for myself, I know that if my faith depended solely on my ability to articulate a convincing justification for each and every article of the Creed, I would be lost.

Well, I am hanging around Christians. I've been going to Christian Assembly since the middle of October, I've been blogging and emailing and talking to people. But as Peter himself admitted in his discussion with Dappled Things, there is more to it than simply attaching yourself to people you like. You don't believe everything the herd believes just because you like, even love, the herd.

This reminds me of a story my mother told me not long ago. She'd caught up with an old friend, a man now in his sixties, who had been going to the same church for decades. He liked the community, the activities, the services; his children had been married there. But he went up to the minister one day and admitted that he didn't really believe in God. He just liked the church. What was wrong with him?

After he talked about it for a while with the minister, he remarked with some amusement, "I think he felt the same way!"

They're not alone. It's perfectly possible, and indeed common, to feel deeply attached to a church community without embracing or even understanding its underlying creeds. If Christianity were all about works, this wouldn't matter. But it's also about faith, and more importantly, a narrative. If it were just a question of believing in the One God and that he wants you to behave a certain way, Christians would be Jewish. But Christianity is centered around a story, a series of events that supposedly saved humanity and for which we should all be eternally grateful, and if you don't "get" that, you're not really there.

Peter seems to acknowledge this toward the end:

I trust because I find something compelling in the life and death of Jesus. In Him and in those who bear His name I recognize and can give a name to something powerful within me, something that I both resist and want to surrender to. Jesus speaks to something in my heart and confronts me with an invitation, a moment of decision. I have no proof, no mathematical certainty. But I still leap, trusting that I will be caught.

It's that "something compelling" that I'm trying to figure out here. There is something powerful within Peter, and within Telford and Eve and other Christians I've known. Is it right to call it Jesus? I don't know. The Jesus I read about in the Bible is remote and largely incomprehensible to me. The story about dying for sins, obviously, does not especially move me. If I don't have this intuitive emotional grasp of it that Peter has, then what is left for me?

Dying for sins: oh hell

My faithful correspondent Josiah Neeley responded to my questions about his earlier letter (from the "In loco parentis" section of this post):

Your latest question was about
how Jesus could die for sins you had yet to commit. At
the risk of starting down the slippery slope to huge
posts of cut and paste quotations from the Church
Doctors, I offer this small passage from Aquinas who,
ironically enough, dealt with your objection hundreds
of years before you made it:

Objection 3. Further, one cannot be purged from a sin
not yet committed, but which shall be committed
hereafter. Since, then, many sins have been committed
since Christ's death, and are being committed daily,
it seems that we were not delivered from sin by
Christ's death.

Reply to Objection 3. Christ by His Passion delivered
us from our sins causally--that is, by setting up the
cause of our deliverance, from which cause all sins
whatsoever, past, present, or to come, could be
forgiven: just as if a doctor were to prepare a
medicine by which all sicknesses can be cured even in
future.

Summa Theologica, Part Three, Question 49, Article 1

That's interesting, but that isn't quite what I asked. I assume an omnipotent deity wouldn't worry about a trifling thing like linear time. The reason I said your analogic story only made sense as a one-off was if it was an exception to the judge's general behavior. If I were the son in question, I'd take that move as a kind of warning shot: you've gotten away with everything before, but now you are a man, my son, and your actions have consequences. What if the son knew the father was going to pay every single time he screwed up, ad infinitum?

Josiah also wrote:

Also, you asked what, if anything, has changed since
the atonement, since people still sin, there is still
death and hell, etc. It seems to me that this question
looks at the atonement from the wrong angle. Suppose
your stuck at the bottom of a well and I throw you a
rope. Now, after I've thrown you the rope, you're
still at the bottom of a well, it's still dark and
damp and cramped. Should we say, then, that throwing
you the rope didn't change anything? Hardly. The rope
has given you the opportunity to escape. You still
won't get out of the well without a lot of effort, and
there's still a chance you won't make it at all, and
it may well be that, while climbing out of the well
your condition might not seem any better than before.
But there is still a difference, and the difference is
fundamentally important.

All right, let's try to connect this metaphor to the real world. What's the rope? Josiah doesn't say, but I assume it's faith in Jesus and following the Way he prescribed. Does this mean before Jesus no one even had an opportunity to escape hell? If so, what was God up to in the Old Testament?

Also, I note that no one in the known history of Christianity has managed to follow the Way all the way out of sin and death during his/her lifetime. Does this mean that the actual difference is only in the afterlife?

Finally, I can't help feeling there's some doublespeak going on here. We are told "you are saved," "your sins are forgiven," "you are reconciled with God," as if it's all accomplished and done. Telford Work once startled me by saying that "the battle against sin is over," which sounded pretty preposterous given that sin is all around us and within us. Telford will have to speak for himself, if and when he enters this discussion (Peter Nixon and I have both been lobbying!), but there is this general tendency in Christians' language to act like the business is over and done. And yet there are these conditions printed in agate type: you are reconciled with God if you pass this one more series of tests, if you follow the Way and sin no more, which you stand a good chance of failing. This makes the salvation and mercy sound rather less overarching than the big banner lines would lead you to think. Like I said, finding favor with God by acting the way he wants you to was pretty much the deal in the Old Testament. What's different now?

Dying for sins: Disputing on and on

John, or Tom, or whatever he calls himself, from Disputations sent an email responding to what I said in the post before this one. Since this is coming to involve quotes within quotes, I'm just going to label every passage.

Me, in earlier post: And indeed, if it were simply a matter of preaching a message to humans, you'd think God doing it as Omnipotent God would be more effective than turning himself into an anonymous human and letting himself get killed.

Disputations: Yes, I would think that, and if God had asked me for advice I probably would have recommended skipping straight to the Second Coming.

Me, now: Look, I'm not saying God should have done things this way or that way. I'm just trying to deduce what he was up to from his methodology. He did not simply deliver the message from on high, like Allah to Muhammad (or Yahweh to Moses, for that matter), he incarnated himself, so one assumes this extra step had a purpose unto itself. That's all I was saying.

Me, in earlier post: But quotes like Peter's make it sound like this self-weakening to the point of death showed how much he loved us, which I don't get.

Disputations: Hm. Well, you become what you love. (Which is why it's important to love God; humans aren't intended to become money.)

Me, now: Well, I wouldn't take that quite so literally!

Disputations: Does that explain why God became man? Not fully, but maybe partly.

Let's pretend God is a Trinity, and that the Second Person of the Trinity became the man Jesus of Nazareth. How would Jesus of Nazareth show the love of the Second
Person of the Trinity for the First Person? The way a man shows his love for the First Person, of course.

But the way a man shows his love for God (can I get away without showing how to move from "First Person" to "God" here?) is by loving other humans. God both commands this and judges us by how well we loved others. (Protestants prefer to say He judges us by our faith in Him, but it amounts to the same thing, since our faith in Him includes the fact that He's told us He will judge us by how well we loved others.)

So anyway, Jesus shows His love for the Father by loving the people He meets. Now, there is no greater love than to lay down your life for your friend (again, returning
to what I wrote before, assuming the opportunity is there; you're not supposed to kill yourself at your wedding), so by dying for us -- and I realize I haven't explained the
"for" yet, which was your original question a few weeks back -- Jesus shows His (no-greater) love for us, which is a manifestation in this fallen world of the (really
seriously no-greater) love the Second Person of the Trinity has for the First Person.

Me: OK, but you seem to be affirming my original complaint when you say, "there is no greater love than to lay down your life for your friend." I mean, I understand why you say that, because dying for someone is a statement that you value the other person at least as much as you value yourself. But dying isn't the only way to say that, and the only reason dying for another even happens is that we humans are weak and mortal, and there arise situations where somebody has to die. How it was a loving thing for God to make himself weak and mortal, and therefore in a position to die, is what I'm not following.

Also, I have always wondered how God's sacrifice could be considered as great as a human dying for another human, given that he knew he was going to get up again. Depending on which version of the Gospel you read, Jesus seemed to have some anxiety about this, but I expect his father did not, and he and his father are theoretically the same being. Man, this trinity stuff makes my head spin...

Dying for sins: clarification

Disputations sent me an email taking issue with my complaint that some Christians equate love with pain:

I think you're putting the effect before the cause. Love doesn't equal pain; that would make God pain, and I don't think many Christians believe that. But love leads to pain. Why? Because people sin. When you take love and put it into this fallen world, a Christian might say, the result is suffering. It's like the distortion of an image cast upon a crumpled- up piece of photographic paper; the result may not look much like the original, but that's not due to the original. The Son loves the Father, and when the Son became man and manifested His love for the Father as a man, it so infuriated others that they killed Him.

Let me clarify: I don't have trouble with the concept that Jesus died because of human sin. That he got killed because he was telling people what they didn't want to hear, even if they needed to, is clear enough. What I was asking about is the idea that Jesus died for our sins: that his death was not merely an unfortunate side effect of his preaching, but had an active, premeditated role in some sort of atonement. And it seems like it had to, really: if it were simply a matter of getting a message accross, doing it as an Omnipotent Being would seem to be more effective than turning yourself into an anonymous human and letting yourself get killed. The comments that Peter was quoting seemed to say that this self-weakening to the point of death was itself an act of love, which I don't get.

Meanwhile, Peter quotes another reader who urges looking at Jesus holistically. Going back to the original comment, though, I came across a line that stopped me cold: "One can reasonably ask the question, in what I hope is a post-apocolyptic age, what would have happened to Jesus if he'd died in his bed at the age of 98. Methinks the same rising would have occurred, which is what is promised to us."

That makes it sound like his death really was incidental. Unless I'm totally misreading it, which is always possible.

The face I had before the world was made

The Gutless Pacifist has an interesting excerpt today from a new book about U2. I remember reading earlier that in the early days the band was effectively booted out of their Christian group because they chose to stay in the rock business, and the book suggests this was a good thing:

If U2 had been in fellowship (church) in the United States or even just sixty miles north of Dublin, in Northern Ireland, it would have been easy to get sucked into a Christian subculture. Many bands in similar situations are discouraged from playing in secular venues like bars or clubs because Christians shouldn't be in these places. The theory is that you shouldn't take Jesus into what are often called "dens of iniquity." The only acceptable reason for attending these places would be to evangelize the lost who go there.

I must say, from my admittedly sketchy knowledge of Christian rock, I have a hard time imagining U2 fitting into it. They're too theologically eccentric, too liberal and way too dark. They've done some celebratory pieces, but their real talent is for expressing religious frustration and doubt. One song that's been rattling around my head a lot in the past few months is Mofo, a ragged electronica experiment that's sort of the bastard stepchild of I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For. "White dopes on punk staring into the flash/Looking for baby Jesus under the trash." Don't know what the hell it means, but I like it.

Who goes there

Telford Work has been reading a book about Christianity in the modern age. I don't have squat useful to say about it, but I can't help being amused at the idea of a theologian named Rusty Reno. Is it just me, or does that sound more like the name of a porn star?

Sending a message

I've been regretting a bit the tone of my response to Peter Nixon's two recent postings on dying for sins. (See under the "Love hurts" section of the previous post.) I think I was being obtuse, and I was also responding not so much to the actual quotes as to a strain in pop Christianity I've seen elsewhere that fetishizes Christ's suffering to an unseemly degree. But I think what Peter is getting at is more complicated.

There seems to be an insinuation in both posts that the life and death of Jesus was some attempt by God to come down and speak to us in our language, and the Crucifixion was part of that communication. I take this from the Pope's line about God wanting to "justify himself to man," and the other writer's saying how the event "pointed out a way for us to follow." I guess most Christians feel they "get" the message somehow, even if they can't quite articulate it, and I don't. Like I said, I don't especially respond to a suffering God, or a God who weakens himself to walk among us. But obviously I respond to something, or I wouldn't even be bothering with this discussion.

Dying for sins: collected works

I've got a lot of interesting responses, both by blog and email, to my question about dying for sins. Because of their number, I'm going to try to address them thematically rather than individually, though I will refer to some individual people. So, here goes:

Mystery

Several writers have pointed out that Jesus' sacrifice is essentially a mystery, and we cannot comprehend all the details. Disputations alluded to this, leading me to a wail of despair: what's the point of talking about it then? I think I overreacted, and fortunately some Christians, including Peter Nixon and Eve Tushnet in emails, assured me that just because something's a mystery doesn't mean it isn't worth looking at. Eve wrote:

For my own part, I tentatively advance the theory that a mystery (in the Christian sense) is something where you can know _why_ it happens, but not _how_: the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, the Church as Body of Christ all come to mind. I think some of your questions are how-questions, which you're unlikely to get answered, but some are why-questions, which I'll try to address next week, and which, like I said, I think Anselm handles really well.

Minute Particulars expressed a similar idea: "And, as others have warned, slapping the 'mystery' label on doesn't mean 'give up!, we'll never know!' Rather it means quite the opposite: 'stay and stare, look again, contemplate over and over.'"

So I will stop asking everyone to "know the mind of God." But there are still some points to what I asked that I don't think require that.

In loco parentis

In response to my post questioning subtitutional atonement, Josiah Neeley sent an interesting email:

Here's an example told to me when I was a kid: suppose that a rebeleous kid is pulled over for speeding. When the cop gives him a ticket he laughs, saying that his father is a judge and loves him so much that he would never see him come to any harm. The kid goes to court where, as expected, the case comes before his father. His father, however, finds the son guilty and imposes the maximum fine. The kid is stunned. He has no money, and if he can't pay must spend the next 90 days in jail. The father, having passed sentence, steps down from his bench, takes off his judge's robe, gets out his checkbook, and pays the fine.

Good things about this analogy: It shows, first off, that it is possible to (quite literally) pay for another person's crimes. It also highlights a way in which taking on another person's punishments is different from not punishing them. We might reasonably suppose that the father's gesture of self-sacrifice would cause the son to mend his ways and go and sin no more. This would be particularly plausible to suppose if the judge was not rich and paying the fine required him to take on extra work, to do without, etc. in order to pay off the debt.

By contrast, if the father had just let the kid off, it's unlikely he would have mended his ways. If anything, he would be more likely to commit crimes, since he would conclude that he wouldn't be punished for them. The situation would also be lawless.

I think I see what he means here. This is not just about forgiveness, but imparting a moral lesson for the future. It makes forgiveness an exception to the rule.

The trouble I see, though, is that it only works for one act of forgiveness for one specific sin. If I understand it right, Jesus theoretically died for all our sins, down to the present day. After all, I am told that Jesus died for my sins, and I was born an awfully long time after the Crucifixion. But I think this is getting ahead to the last part of the post, so more anon.

Love hurts

Although Josiah was defending substitutional atonement, Peter Nixon, who originally described the theory, seem to be backing off it. He reprinted a reader's letter objecting to the idea that "God accepts as legitimate the death of an innocent," which was one objection I raised myself. The reader went on:

You are right in saying that it is difficult to explain. I like to think of it as follows: God is so merciful, that he himself became a mortal, and was put to death on account of our sins. What greater indication of the sinfulness of humanity than the brutal judicial murder of an innocent man? But through his resurrection, Jesus conquered sin and death and pointed out the way for us to follow. By accepting his infinite mercy and following him, by uniting ourselves with Christ, we are "saved". In the great words of St. Peter, God became man so that man could share in the divine nature. This is the wonderful truth of our faith, and it is so much richer and more beautiful than the vengeful deity theory of vicarious atonement, which is accepted by protestant fundamentalists today.

I'm kind of unclear on how the Incarnation and Crucifixion demonstrated God's mercy. Did he want to show he was capable of forgiving people for trying to kill him? This also raises again something I asked earlier: how Jesus' death, as opposed to his life, "pointed out the way for us to follow."

Later Peter quoted the Pope saying something similar:

God is always on the side of the suffering. His omnipotence is manifested precisely in the fact that He freely accepted suffering. He could have chosen not to do so. He could have chosen to demonstrate His omnipotence even at the moment of the Crucifixion. In fact, it was proposed to Him: "Let the Messiah, the King of Israel, come down from the cross so that we might see and believe." (Mk 15:32) But He did not accept that challenge. The fact that he stayed on the Cross until the end, the fact that on the Cross He could say, as do all who suffer: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mk 15:34), has remained the strongest argument. If the agony on the Cross had not happened, the truth that God is Love would have been unfounded.

I must admit, probably one reason I am not presently a Christian is that the whole idea of a suffering God doesn't really impress me. The general subtext I get from a lot of Christians talking about the Crucifixion is that love = pain; the way you really prove your love for someone is to suffer horribly. I don't like that as a conception of love. Certainly love sometimes calls upon you to suffer for another person, but unless that suffering is unavoidable, it's just gratuitous. I don't think you love someone less if you aren't called upon to suffer for them. That's why I asked the question that Disputations so disliked, whether the grisly business was necessary.

Though I may well be misreading, the implication I get from the above passages is that God descended and suffered so he could feel what we feel, which shows his great love. But I do not see a great point in simply suffering because someone else is suffering. If I cut my finger, I don't expect my mother to cut her finger to show that she loves me. I expect her to get me a bandage.

What really happened

But of course, most Christians would say God wasn't simply suffering along. Jesus' death achieved some sort of atonement, a reconciliation between God and humans. This brings me back to a question I raised in this post, which no one seems to have addressed yet: what did the atonement actually change? I think this seems so obvious to most Christians that it hardly bears explaining, but I don't understand it. In this post from Kairos, he describes "a moment ... when some other will bear our sins away from us, and free us from their terrible burden." This is supposedly what the Crucifixion was, and yet I have yet to meet a Christian who actually seems freed from his sins. For instance, in a more recent post, Kairos says: "I find that almost every urge and impulse to do or not do something is wrong... If I find myself really wanting to do something, wanting in a state of near lust or gluttony, it usually turns out to have been the very worst thing I could have done at that moment."

Not to pick on the KairosGuy: every Christian I know freely admits to sinning. They are, after all, still born into the fallen world. Many of them also fear ending up in hell, at least sometimes. So what exactly are they free from? How are they different from anyone in the Old Testament, those who likewise struggled to be good and often screwed up? How are they treated differently by God, who seems to sometimes punish and sometimes forgive, just like he did in the OT?

I apologize again if these questions seem boneheaded, but as I've read the responses I've been feeling more strongly we need to establish what The Great Atonement actually was before we can talk about how or why it happened. But thanks to all who responded, for being so thoughtful and courteous with this annoying heathen.

Dying for sins: necessary roughness

Sorry my posting has been so spotty lately. It's been a hectic week: my mother is staying with me, and I have work issues and car issues and a lot of little fires to put out. I got another interesting email from Josiah Neeley that I'm still pondering, and hope to respond to tomorrow. But in the meantime, I noticed John da Fiesole at Disputations also responded to my question about the meaning of Jesus' death. He says my confusion is understandable because the question is "the central mystery of our faith." However, he doesn't like another part of the question:

My first thought is to recommend against asking questions about necessity, mostly because that confuses me. Was Jesus’ death “necessary” in the sense that a square necessarily has four corners? That I had eggs for breakfast yesterday? That I must eat to live?

Instead of getting bogged down right away, I think we should grant that Jesus did sacrifice Himself on the Cross, and try to understand what it means, rather than why God ordained this means of salvation rather than another.

I suppose that such starting assumptions are really the crux of the matter. Christians take as a given that God is both good and omnipotent, and I assume neither. In fact, my doubts about both are partly underlying this line of questioning. When I have wondered about the goodness of God to Telford Work, his usual response is that God demonstrated his goodness through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. But I can't help but wonder why an infinitely good being would choose to counteract needless suffering and death with more needless suffering and death, and why an infinitely powerful being would choose a means of salvation that was so oddly small and limited and so painful to himself.

I must say, answers like John's make me wonder if this type of inquiry even has a point. If faith is a gift, maybe this is a gift people like him have and I do not have, and there is no way around it. That in itself makes me wonder even more if God can be good, if salvation is so arbitrary. In fact, John pondered this question a post earlier and answered, well, it's a mystery. This may be a satisfactory answer for him, but I hope he understands why, for some of us, this question is more personal than esoteric.

Get thee to a nunnery

So in my tracking software today one of the hits showed the referring URL -- i.e. the site where somebody clicked through to my site -- as www.nashvilledominican.org. I was completely baffled as to what a link to my site would be doing on a Tennessee convent's website, and indeed, briefly poking around I didn't see myself there. Anybody know what's going on?

Addendum

I wrote the last post in something of a rush, since I was at work, and on reflection I want to clarify part of it. Looking back at Peter's post I realized I was not making the proper distinction between punishment and consequences for sin. It's the latter that Peter was emphasizing; if our sins do not have consequences, it says we humans are not important.

But what bothers me about this is that even without Jesus, our sins do have consequences. The suffering we inflict on each other and ourselves, the distress that we cause God (if the Bible is anything to go by) certainly seem like consequences. They are not fair consequences, but then, neither was Jesus dying on the cross. So why does Jesus' death count as a "consequence" while the millions of other people who've been tortured and killed because of human sin don't? Contrary to what Neuhaus says, this seems far more trivializing of humanity than if God simply forgave us and left it at that.

Dying for sins: the book of Peter

Peter Nixon took a stab at answering my question about why Jesus had to die. Essentially, Peter seems to be making the classic substitutional-atonement case. Somebody had to pay for the sins of humanity, so Jesus nobly covered our debts for us. Thus, our sins are forgiven.

I've heard this basic argument before, and I have a couple issues with it. First, the "somebody had to pay" concept. Peter quotes Richard John Neuhaus to bolster the idea: "We could not bear to live in a world where wrong is taken lightly, where right and wrong finally make no difference. In such a world, we—what we do and what we are—would make no difference." So if the guilty don't pay, an innocent pays instead.

But what's the moral logic behind the idea that making an innocent pay for the guilty is better than making nobody pay at all? I do not think most of us would apply this rule in most of our lives. Indeed, since making others suffer needlessly is one of humanity's most common sins, it's hard to see how inducing yet another instance of it is going to help anything. It's as if God hung on to the mechanics of punishment while stripping it of its meaning.

This concept gets even weirder if you consider that the punisher and the punishee are theoretically the same being. I don't completely understand how the Trinity works, but Christianity is ultimately monotheistic, so I am considering them the same. This makes it a bit like a loan shark saying, "OK, the rule if you don't pay your debts is I break your kneecaps. But I'm going to forgive you, so I'll break my own kneecaps and we'll call it even. Because, you know, somebody's kneecaps have to get broken." I think most of us would be glad not to get our knees broken, but we'd think this was one demented loan shark.

Another problem is that God showed himself capable of forgiveness before Jesus ever came along. I haven't read the whole Old Testament, but just off the top of my head, there's the example of God sparing Ninevah in the Book of Jonah (much to Jonah's irritation) which Telford a while ago cited as an example of grace (don't have a link -- his archives have evaporated). This was before Jesus, and I don't think God demanded anybody get killed in the Ninevites' places.

In fact, it's hard for me to see exactly what changed from the OT situation. Two thousand years after Jesus, we are all still born into the fallen world, still marked with original sin, still in danger of hell (well, depending on what faction you adhere to). We are still expected to avoid sinning and to repent when we do sin, much as seemed to be true of the OT characters. I don't know what effect this had on the afterlife, since the afterlife is rather lacking in the OT, but it's hard to see why God would show mercy toward anybody, or even be very interested, if they were all eternally damned anyway.

I imagine some Christians must be thinking I'm titanically thick-headed, but honestly, I still don't get it. I appreciate the efforts people have made to explain this to me, but I still feel rather in the dark.

Dying for sins: the sci-fi version

Thanks to Eve Tushnet, a lot more people than usual have come around to ponder my question, "What does it mean that Jesus died for our sins?". One reader, Josiah Neeley, suggested an answer to one part of my question: why was the whole world responsible for Jesus' death?

Suppose that one night you are captured by space
aliens and taken up to their ship. It seems that they
have been monitoring events on earth and have decided
that, because of all the war, lies, cruelty, etc.
which human beings commit, they aren't worthy to live.
And so, for the good of the universe, they have
decided to destroy the planet. But, to make sure they
aren't being too hasty, they have devised a test. They
will randomly select one human being (you) and give
them the following choice. If you agree to let them
kill you, selflessly sacrafising your own life, then
they will conclude that the human race isn't beyond
all hope, and they will leave the planet, otherwise
they will destroy it. Suppose you agree to be killed.

Now, more 99.9% of the people on the planet don't even
know that you're alive. And yet, in a sense, they
would be responsible for your death, since it was
their bad behavior that made your sacrafice necessary
in the first place. So, in a sense, you can be said to
have died for their sins.

This anaology is far from perfect. For one thing, it
leaves human beings much as they were before, while
the real attonement (somehow) aids people in living a
holy life. And, of course, the real attonement didn't
involve space aliens. But hopefully it makes things a
little clearer.

It's an interesting idea, and in fact I seem to remember that plot has been used in a few sci-fi/fantasy stories (though for the life of me I can't name one.) But I have the following objections:

1) My question started with Telford Work's line, "We made Jesus walk our plank." That sounded a bit more like direct action than Josiah's description. But of course, Telford's pirate tale is another imperfect analogy, so he'll have to speak for himself.

2) I would only consider the whole world responsible for my death in that scenario if I felt the aliens were acting reasonably. Even if you accept that the world is so evil they'd be justified in blowing it up (a big if), the whole randomly-selected-human technique is just bizarre. Surely such an exercise is not necessary to prove humans are capable of self-sacrifice, if the aliens have been observing humans at all closely. And one human can hardly represent the whole race. I mean, I would accept death to save the world, of course, but I'd think those aliens were off their freaking rockers.

3) Aside from the problems with the analogy that Josiah mentioned, there's the fact that Jesus was no randomly selected human. Supposedly, he was an alien himself -- one who decided that incarnating himself as a human and getting himself killed was the way to save humanity. I realize Josiah was not trying to answer the whole question, but that is one of the main sources of my bewilderment. Given that he's an omnipotent being, why would God choose that way?

Meanwhile, other Christians have responded by recommending reading: Telford suggested Isaiah and Mysterium Paschale, while Eve Tushnet plumped for Cur Deus Homo by St. Anselm. I will see what I can fit in (not to mention what I can find), but I asked the question less to get a scholarly disquisition than to learn what this means to individual Christians. I mean, if I were asking about some obscure branch of theology like monophysitism I could understand being referred to books, but I assume every Christian must have a conception of dying for sins, since it's such a central idea in Christian theology. So I appreciate the feedback -- keep the emails coming, folks!

Degeneration

Quite a fight has broken out on Spleenville over the merits of Tolkien and whether reading fantasy is a good thing. I stayed out of this one largely because the main person keeping the argument going, one A.C. Douglas, reminds me of some of the most head-bangingly annoying people I used to encounter when I frequented message boards. The main error these people make is to think that if you are sufficiently cynical, you don't need to support your arguments. The evil of the world is self-evident, and if you question it, you're hopelessly blind and naive. Truth is always dark, so dark is always truth.

But in fact, a lot of popular cynical pronouncement are not supported by evidence. Teresa Nielsen Hayden points out an example in the comments section of her post on the subject:

Lamenting the decline of literacy is another gimme, a double-platinum cliche; and what's more, it's wrong. Good news: More people are reading more books about history, languages, and mythology (plus every other subject you can think of) than ever before. Next time you're in one of the better sort of airport bookstores -- you know, the ones with all the good trade paperbacks -- notice how many of them are about history. Or go to a Barnes & Noble, go check out the History section. Not only does it have its own turf, but that section is expanding.

Right. When was the Golden Age of Literacy, anyway? In fact, that was another anachronism I thought of after writing my own Tolkien post: everyone in his books seems to be able to read. Or at least, their illiteracy never comes up. This is the great irony of a bestselling book celebrating the world before the printing press.

The greater irony is that Tolkien's decriers are falling for the same myth that he was -- as I described in the earlier post, the paganish belief in an ideal past that has degenerated into the present. The article that set off the whole argument makes the bizarre assertion that fantasy lets us avoid the fact that "we have made no moral or intellectual progress for thousands of years and have grown most in our capacity to do ill. We flee to fantasy in recoil from truth." And yet, that was exactly the point that Tolkien was making.

The skinny, part 2

The New Republic today says being overweight isn't bad for you. The real problem is being sedentary. It also gives some rather alarming evidence that losing weight can increase your mortality rate, but that seems to be mainly from using drugs, eating too little and gaining and losing repeatedly, none of which applies to me.

Speaking of weight loss, John Ellis is incentivizing himself by printing his weight every time he blogs. That may be a little excessive; your weight tends to wobble around a bit by the day, so I've generally weighed myself once a week. But anyway, I wish him the best.

The skinny

Virginia Postrel links to a Reason article debunking a study that touting the low-carb Atkins diet. The study didn't count the 43% of participants who dropped out, and he adds:

Gary Foster of the University of Pennsylvania co-authored a study conducted in virtually the same manner as Westman's. Foster, whose work will soon appear in a major medical journal, provides a simple explanation for the Atkins weight loss. The regimen "gives people a framework to eat fewer calories, since most of the choices in this culture are carbohydrate driven," he says. "Over time people eat fewer calories."

Randy Seeley of the University of Cincinnati co-authored yet another "sister study" with similar results. His explanation is the same as Foster's. Ultimately, Atkins is nothing more than a low-calorie diet in disguise.

Now, I have a personal interest in weight loss, having shed 35 pounds recently myself. I didn't do it by the Atkins diet or anything like it. But I wonder if the article -- and the study -- is asking the right question. People keep asking if such-and-such a diet "works" as if there should be some eating plan out there that would cause everybody who uses it to lose weight. But I doubt such a thing exist, or will ever exist, because the question assumes everybody is the same.

From my own anecdotal evidence, I'd say people have radically different experiences of eating. For instance, my sister, who has always been thin, hits an abrupt shutoff point when she's eaten enough. It doesn't matter how much is left in front of her; if she's full, she loses interest. Me, I can go on for a while and not realize how full I am until later. A July 2001 New Yorker article by Atul Gawande provided medical support for this:

When food enters your stomach and duodenum (the upper portion of the small intestine), it triggers stretch receptors, protein receptors, and fat receptors that signal the hypothalmus to induce stiety. Nothing stimulates the reaction more quickly than fat. Even a small amount, once it reaches the duodenum, will cause a person to stop eating. Still we eat too much fat. How can this be? It turns out that foods can trigger receptors in the mouth which get the hypothalamus to accelerate our intake -- and, again, the most potent stimulant is fat. A little bit on the tongue, and the receptors push us to eat fast, before the gut signals shut us down...Apparently, how heavy one becomes is determined, in part, by how the hypothalamus and the brain stem adjuicate the conflicting signals from the mouth and the gut.

But that's just the beginning of the complications. People also vary in what kinds of foods they like, what time of day they're hungriest (you can divide the world into breakfast eaters and non-breakfast eaters), whether they prefer a few meals or a lot of little snacks, and so on. People also overeat for different reasons. I overate because I had a rather overactive appetite; I would eat a little too much at every meal, and over time it built up. But I also have a friend who claims to barely feel hunger at all, yet overeats because he just enjoys the tastes. Some people get heavier with age because they developed youthful eating habits and never changed. And then there are people who binge when they're under emotional stress, like alcoholics turn to drink.

That is why I never succeeded in losing weight until I essentially designed my own diet. I actually got started two years ago when I signed up for some personal training at my gym. The trainer weighed me, measured me, applied some pincers to various parts of my body, and entered it all into a computer to determine how many calories I needed to maintain my weight, and (by extension) how many I needed to lose weight. He mapped out this whole plan for me, and I took it home and almost immediately started fiddling with it. I pretty soon started ignoring the protein/fat/carbo ratios it called for (which I think was mainly to make sure I didn't malnourish myself, since I was eating less.) I found that I was too hungry with the original calorie count, so I adjusted it upward a bit so it was still below maintenance level. (Also, like a lot of women, I found my appetite varied over the course of the month, and adjusted to that too.) The result was that I lost weight slower. But that was a trade-off I was willing to make.

Basically, I treated the diet as a negotiation between my natural appetite and my desire to lose weight. With a bit of trial and error, I found a reasonable comprimise. But the trouble with the diet culture today is that hardly anyone treats it like that. There's this Manichean moralism about the whole thing. As a writer in put it in a women's magazine I read years ago, "When you hear women today talk about temptation and sin, guilt and shame, they're likely talking about food." People routinely say they're "being good" when they're sticking to a diet, and "being bad" when they slip.

Of course, most people who say this don't really think of dieting as a moral issue on plane with, say, war with Iraq. But I do think that the language means something real, and that makes eating and dieting so difficult for so many people. For one thing, it leads to the idea I mentioned earlier that there's One True Way to lose weight, instead of taking all the human differences into account. But what makes it even more Manichean, in the true sense of the 3rd-century cult of Mani, is that it regards the bodily appetite as the enemy. Rather than trying to work and negotiate with it as I did, many dieters make a wholesale attack on it. As a result, of course, appetite rebels, and it usually wins.

This exaggerated idea of dieting as self-denial, I think also leads to the dream of a diet with no self-denial. As Reason puts it, "Our increasingly obese population is desperate for some magical formula to avoid the physiological law that body fat is determined by calories in and calories out." If you consider a diet as a battle between thinness and pleasure, without the possibility of compromise, no wonder.

The Manicheanism also is applied to the food itself. People are forever trying to figure out what foods are "good" and which ones are "bad." Is milk good because it has protein, vitamins and minerals, or bad because it has animal fat? How about peanuts? I was thinking of this when I read a New York Times article that's been going around the blogosphere about the benefits of moderate drinking. Apparently, evidence of this was suppressed for a while because people didn't want to spread the idea that alcohol is "good." And in excess, of course, it's still extremely bad for you. With food and drink, as with so many other things, it's all about the dosage.

All this dualism has led, I think, to the rigid nature of so many diets. Of course, some people like rigid. I have an uncle who lost 70 pounds on a plan where he weighs all is food, is forbidden to eat flour, and has other weird rules. I couldn't do it, but he's been at it for more than 10 years, so more power to him. But again, one size does not fit all. I think for a lot of people dieting is like having a mental slavemaster in your ear, telling you you can't make a single mistake or you'll fall into the abyss. No wonder they can't stick to them.

Why the excessive moralism about eating? It might be a certain residual Puritanism in the culture -- the feeling that anything pleasurable, especially fleshly, must be morally suspect. It is as if, being abandoned elsewhere, our Puritanism attaches itself to food. But I also think people are confusing behavior with the motives. Dieting calls for self-control and putting the long term ahead of the short term. Both of these are, to a certain extent, necessary for virtue. But this ignores what the motive is. While it's true that some religious and moral systems see a positive good in taking care of the body (St. Paul would say it's a temple of God, and should not be abused), and gluttony as a sin, most overeating doesn't rise to the level either of gluttony or a health threat. We want to lose weight so we can look good. There's nothing moral about it. It's not immoral, but there's no special virtue to it.

Realizing all this made the whole thing a lot easier for me. But of course, the diet industry stands to lose a lot of money if everybody freelances it like I did.

Boy meets girl

Calpundit pays tribute to the strong female characters in the Oz books. He also makes a (presumably half-joking) case that Ozma was a proto-transsexual:

The lovely Ozma of Oz, pictured on the right, is the kind, efficient, and obviously female ruler of Oz who takes over after the wizard is exposed. But who is Ozma?

Answer: Ozma is Tip, a boy throughout the entire second book, The Land Of Oz, who is transformed into a girl by Glinda when all the men prove themselves to be hopelessly muddled rulers.

But wait, you say, Ozma is no transsexual. This is magic, not reality, and magic is an entirely different kettle of fish with no social implications. Not so. In fact, Baum was a theosophist who believed that magic and science were just two sides of the same coin.

Now, I grant it's been a looong time since I read the book, but as I remember it Ozma was born female but transformed into a boy to disguise her identity. Glinda was thus restoring her natural state. If I were an aspiring transsexual, I would not take heart from this.

Eve Tushnet also asks a good question: "...I wonder how his case for Baum's feminism can be squared with the disastrous (if I'm recalling the book correctly) results of Jinjur's army of women?" Again, long time since I read it, but the Jinjur story certainly seemed like an attack on feminism. The all-female army briefly takes over the Emerald City and forces all the husbands and wives to switch roles, making women have jobs and men care for the children. This makes everyone miserable until the coup is overthrown.

This story is a bit strange, because as Calpundit says, Oz is basically a matriarchy. But one fact he left out is that all those strong female characters are unmarried and childless. Baum could envision women ruling whole countries but evidently he couldn't envision them in any other family role but the traditional one.

On a roll

So for some time Minute Particulars (clearly a trailblazer) was the only soul to have me on his blogroll. Now in the past couple days I find myself on two more: Ideofact, the wonderful blog of historical and religious arcana that was already on my own blog roll, and a new blog called Chronica Majora. The blog's mission statement is unique:

I have in mind to reproduce the chonicles written by my namesake Matthew Paris between the years 1235 and 1272. In his Chronica Majora, Brother Matthew wrote of the doings of his nation and his king, as well as of the foreign affairs of the time, for this was the era of Crusades, Crusades against Saracens in the Orient and heretics in Europe. His narrative is a window into England of the 13th century. This Chronica Majora, in the Year of Our Lord 2002, will also be a window, a window onto America and the world in the 21st century.

I don't much like the implicit analogy of the current conflicts to the Crusades (I imagine Aziz Poonawalla and Mr. Paris could have quite a go at each other). But I've got to give the guy creativity points. Takes all kinds to make a blogosphere...

The land that time forgot

I mentioned earlier that I went to see The Two Towers on its opening night, but never got around to blogging about it. I enjoyed it. I actually didn't have to deal with the giant spider because they apparently pushed that to the beginning of the next movie (it was at the very end of the second book). It was more violent than I remember the book being; I don't think there was actually more violence in the movie, but there was less other stuff to ameliorate it. Some of the parts of the book that I remember best, and enjoyed most, actually weren't relevant to the plot but showed Tolkien's remarkable otherwordly imagination, such as the society of Ents, or Tom Bombadil and his wife the river-daughter. I understand why the movie trimmed it down just to what moved the plot along, but the dallying in magical realms was part of the books' appeal. But I'm amazed, as are some others, at how much the movie images looked like the pictures in my head while I was reading.

While I've been flaking off, other bloggers have been discussing the movie and the books. There have been some interesting discussions about how Tolkien's Catholicism is or isn't expressed in the novels. I think I agree most with Patrick Nielsen Hayden's take:

Of course it's a novel by a Christian, and Tolkien himself called it "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work." But for such a supposedly Christian work, the morality of The Lord of the Rings is as much infused with the stoical pessimism of the ancient world as with hope for redemption. Professor Shippey addresses this at length, observing that Tolkien spent his academic life on works like Beowulf and the Elder Edda, works of grim paganism passed down to us by later Christian writers. "The whole poem Beowulf," writes Shippey, "is a meditation between contrary opinions, with strong similarities to The Lord of the Rings." Mooney quotes Christian critics who extol the trilogy's images of "Christ-like sacrifice," but as Mooney points out, The Lord of the Rings is a story of universal loss. Evil is defeated for a while, but the world is diminished. As a medievalist quoted in Mooney's article observes, it's a "very Norse outlook: Even the winners lose."

In the Chris Mooney piece that Patrick links are some interesting quotes from Tolkien himself about his story's paganism: "In another letter, Tolkien outlined his aspiration to create a new mythology for England, describing the existing body of Arthurian legend as inadequate for the role because it 'explicitly contains the Christian religion.' (He added, 'That seems to me fatal.') References to real-world belief systems, Tolkien thought, would detract from the beguiling timelessness he hoped to convey."

This reminded me of Huston Smith's discussion of paganism in The World's Religions:

In constrast to the historical religions of the West, which are messianically forward looking, primal religions give the appearance of looking toward the past. That is not altogether wrong, and from the Western perspective, where time is linear, there is no other way to put the matter. But primal time is not linear, a straight line that moves from the past, through the present, into the future. It is not even cyclical as the Asian religions tend to regard it, turning in the way the world turns and seasons cycle. Primal time is atemporal, but the paradox can be relieved if we see that primal time focuses on causal rather than chronological sequence; for primal peoples, "past" means preeminently closer to the originating Source of things. That the Source precedes the present is of secondary importance.

The word Source is used here to refer to the gods who, where they did not actually create the world, ordered it and gave it its viable structure. The gods continue to exist, of course, but that does not shift interest to the present, for the past continues to be considered the Golden Age. When divine creation had suffered no ravages of time and mismanagement, the world was as it should be. That is no longer the case, for a certain enfeeblement has occurred; thus steps are needed to restore the world to its original condition.

That attitude runs strongly through Lord of the Rings; really, it's the whole plot. That concept relates to Christianity in the Garden of Eden story (one reason it always seems so pagan to me), but Christianity is primarily a faith of historical events. A man lived and died in Judea around 2000 years ago; the center of God's work is tied to a place and time, to names and dates. This did not fit with Tolkien's vision.

And yet, reading the novels reminded me of how hard it actually is to be "timeless." When we think we've done things a certain way forever they become timeless, even if we haven't. So Tolkien's hobbits smoke and drink tea, though those habits in Europe only go back around 400 years; they use the Julian calendar, thought that's barely older than Jesus. Probably to a lot of moderns those things seem eternal, but it depends on how much you know. I remember the calendar really jarred me when I read the books, because it seems so utterly Roman, with its months named for gods and emperors and its detachment from natural cycles. I'd think Middle-Earth would have a lunar or lunisolar calendar of some sort. Can't you imagine Frodo and crew setting out on "the first quarter of fall" rather than Sept. 23 or whatever it was?

But that's the sort of error that paganism makes. The planet is full of myths about how these people were always in this place, they grew out of the earth, when archaelogy shows they moved in just 500 or 1000 years earlier. I remember reading about a South American tribe in college who thought they had always grown plantains, though it's historical fact that Europeans brought plantains in from Asia some 400 years ago. And almost everyone, including Tolkien, ignores the fact that for much of human history there was no farming at all.

Another feature of paganism that Smith describes, and one can see in LOTR, is the holiness of places, especially natural places. Smith quotes a Native American author whose uncle tells him, "Do you see that bluff over there? Oren, you are that bluff. And that giant pine on the other shore? Oren, you are that pine. And this water that supports our boat? You are this water." Tolkien doesn't go that far, but he clearly loves his landscape, describing it in greater detail than many of the animate characters. The villains use and despoil the land (and in the form of the Ents, the land strike back).

This attachment to certain places and ways of doing things, in a world that keeps stubbornly changing, is what gives LOTR its gloomy feel. And it's what dooms paganism in today's world, I think. The great missionary religions of the world, that have succeeded outside their homelands -- Christianity, Islam and Buddhism -- all accept the transience of this earth and seek permanence elsewhere. It's what Tolkien did, apparently, but not without a longing, backward glance.

Kitsch lives on

I was surprised by the number of hits on this site while I was out. Turns out 90% of them were on search engines looking for that darned Huggy Jesus Doll. One of them was looking for "squeeze me jesus doll." I don't think I want to know...

Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine

Since I've been hanging around churches and talking to Christians lately, my mother has taken to asking me questions about the faith, which never made much sense to her. This is a futile endeavor, as she learned a few weeks ago when she asked me, "What does it mean to say that Jesus died for our sins?"

"I don't know," I said. "I'm still trying to figure that one out."

Recently on Sursum Corda, I learned I'm not the only one having trouble explaining this concept to a relative:

The other night, my 4-year old son pushes a chair against the wall, stands on it, holds out his arms and says “Look Daddy, I’m Jesus dying on the cross!”

I was a little unprepared for this conversation, which went something like this:

“Joseph, do you know why Jesus died on the cross?”

“No.”

“Uh…to take away our sins.”

“What are sins?”

“Well…uh…well there is a lot of meanness in the world and God wanted to take the meanness away, so he—"

“But I don’t want God to take the meanness away because I want to be a pirate.”

Peter asked readers for advice in explaining this to a four-year-old. His favorite answer, not surprisingly, came from Master Work, who took the pirate concept and ran with it:

"On Good Friday, the whole world played pirate, only for real. We made Jesus walk our plank. And though it hurt him terribly, he let us all be mean to him. Only Jesus hadn't done anything wrong. In fact, Jesus turned out to be the captain of God's ship! And after God saved him, Jesus had every right to fight back and make us walk his plank.

"That was a very scary time. It was then that playing pirate stopped being fun.

"Only Jesus wasn't mean back to us. He forgave us. Then he made us officers on his ship – imagine that! – and taught us a whole new game to play. It's called the Way. We're still on a ship, we still sail around and adventure, but now we help people instead of hurting them. God even helps us play! Some of the people who see us playing start wanting to play too, and we let them.

"To people who still think playing pirate is fun, the Way sounds boring and silly. But to us, it's the best game in the world. It's hard to go back to a ship of your own when you've served on God's ship. It's hard to enjoy being mean, or even just pretending to be mean, when you remember how people hurt Jesus and he wouldn't hurt them back. It's no fun once you know that hurting other people hurts Jesus most of all.

"And that's one of the many ways that Jesus saved us from our sins on the cross."

I don't know how I would have reacted to this at age four. I probably wouldn't have related, since I didn't aspire to be a pirate. (I think most girls don't like pirates until they're old enough to read romance novels.) But now I'm 31, I have a Stanford education, and I still don't get it.

For one thing, I don't get how the whole world was responsible for his death -- 99.99% of the world had no way to know he was alive, so they could hardly have anything to do with killing him. But more importantly, I still don't see how this story explains why he had to die that way, and how this saved us from our sins. So he taught us the Way. What does that have to do with getting killed? Why was that necessary? I mean, obviously preaching the Way got him into hot water, but clearly getting crucified wasn't supposed to just be a nasty side effect of his preaching -- it supposedly accomplished something in itself.

Acts 2, which Telford says his story loosely paraphrases, isn't much help. In fact, it never mentions dying for sins. It quotes St. Peter saying Jesus was killed wrongly but was raised because "death cannot hold him." Rising from the dead would suggest Jesus is divine, but that doesn't explain his manner of death -- he could just as well be raised from dying of pneumonia. Peter also goes on about how this fulfills Jewish prophecy, but that seems more about establishing his lordship over Israel than explaining his death.

So, what's the deal?