I’ve had some further discussion with people in church about the original sin thing. One problem that John pointed out is that Mennonites, in contrast to the well-developed Roman Catholic distinctions of dogma, doctrine and theology, don’t have a very strict idea of what beliefs make up the core truths of the faith. “For Mennonites,” he said, “the real dogma is behavior.”

I’ve been thinking about this at some length, since this is a distinction I keep running up against throughout American Christendom. On the one hand, following a version of sola fide, there are people (usually conservative) who state that the primary element of Christian faith is right belief, and that the main question humanity needs to answer is which god to worship. On the other hand, there are the (usually liberal) advocates of centering faith around good behavior, to the point where what you believe about God, or even whether you believe in God, becomes irrelevant. That was essentially the bone of contention in the debate over the follow-up post, as well as what Graham is talking about here.

Now, the first thing that crosses my mind about all this is that the old distinction between faith and works, or the more modern contrast between belief and action, is to some extent artificial. Behavior requires constant improvisation, as we always have to deal with novel situations; and so behavior cannot be as unchanging as, say, the Nicene Creed. (This may be one reason the Mennonites produced the Amish: if your religion is based on behavior, it’s safer to keep the environment exactly the same.) So what people really mean when they talk about “behavior” in this context is certain principles governing behavior, such as pacifism, loving your neighbor, helping the poor and so on. But once we’ve gotten into the question of principles, aren’t we already in the realm of ideas?

From the other side of it, believing in and worshipping God still constitutes doing things. Even totally mental actions are still actions. I remember once at my Lutheran church, the pastor was giving a recent convert the good old Lutheran assurance that she didn’t have to earn God’s love with works, she just had to believe in and accept Jesus. She responded, “But isn’t that a sort of ‘work’?”

So I think the distinction lies elsewhere, and I was getting an inkling of it in that discussion over original sin. It’s not a question of beliefs vs. actions, it’s a question of actions that serve God vs. actions that serve people. In other words, actions like worship, prayer, sacraments and so on please God but have no direct apparent impact on your neighbor, while things like feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and so on quite obviously affect those people without any apparent supernatural element. That’s why evangelism tends to be the domain of conservatives, although it’s certainly “behavior”; it’s aimed toward the proper worship of God, rather than serving your neighbor’s earthly needs.

The Anabaptists were (and still are, at least at my church) reacting against a Christianity that emphasized the former over the latter, which is why the movement was allied with the humanism of Erasmus et al. But I think it’s another matter that requires a proper balance, because going too far the other way also has problems. It can turn into another way of displacing God — making humanity the real center of things, with God just benevolent wallpaper.

Thinking about this has collided in my mind with something else that’s been rattling around in my brain for a while. A while ago a blog called Mystic Bourgeoisie discussed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I hadn’t thought about Maslow since we briefly went over him in one of my college psych courses, but apparently I would have heard a lot more about him if I’d gone into marketing. Brian Millar’s discussion of it in the second half of the post (under the subhead “Crossing the Line: the Curse of the Pyramid”) is nice and concise, so rather than repeat it here I urge you to read it yourself.

Now, Maslow is not as influential in society as a whole as he is in marketing. But looking at his pyramid again, I saw that like many philosophers he managed to spell out a lot of assumptions of the society at large. They are, essentially, materialist assumptions: that the most important needs for a person are the needs of his body, followed by the less-physical-but-still-earthly social needs, followed by the totally metaphysical spiritual needs.

As Millar aptly points out, this highly logical scheme really doesn’t track with actual human behavior. It would come as a shock to anyone from an honor/shame culture — which is most of the planet — that “esteem” ranks so far up the pyramid, when they were weaned on phrases like “death before dishonor.” In fact, quite a lot of people in world history have preferred suffering and death to social humiliation. More to the point of the subject at hand, if spiritual needs were really at the apex than rich people would be a lot more spiritual than poor ones, since their more basic needs have already been taken care of. But if anything, the reverse is true.

Now, I don’t think most Mennonites adhere to the hierarchy of needs quite that rigidly. But I do get the feeling that a lot of the “behavioral dogma” believers assume that God holds a hierarchy of priorities something like that. That is, the most important thing Christians can do for others is to serve their physical needs, and secondarily their social needs; and only after that is taken care of are they free to worry about whether their neighbors are having the proper relationship with God.

But the Bible, in fact, frequently inverts this assumption. God is concerned about how people treat each other, but he’s also interested in people’s relationship with himself — not as the endpoint, but as the starting point. “Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation,” says Habbakuk. But my point is not to assert that the physical needs of one’s neighbor are irrelevant; after all, we still have Matthew 25:31-46 to deal with. It’s not that I would turn the pyramid upside down; it’s that I don’t think you can so neatly stack human needs in that way. Our physical, social and spiritual needs are all tangled together.

I think another problem here is that, in our modern empirical way of thinking, we tend to see service to our neighbor only where we can trace a direct path from our action to our neighbor’s benefit. So giving a hungry person food obviously serves him, whereas munching on a communion wafer doesn’t have such an obvious effect. Yet there are plenty of intangibles that go with common beliefs and worship; special communal cohesion, meaning, direction and so on. The fact that it is difficult to observe and quantify the exact pathways of such intangibles doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

So anyway, getting back to the question of dogma, I think that God’s expressed desire in the Bible is not just that people obey him, but that they know him. And while stuff like Trinitarian theology can get pretty arcane (quick recite the Athanasian Creed!) I think that at its best, dogma declares things about God’s character that make his commands make sense. It seems strange to me to set out commandments while throwing a sort of veil over their source. The point of the Incarnation, as I see it, is that God was thus unveiled, and it seems to be denying quite a basic human need to refuse the gift.

(Mystic Bourgeoisie link via AKMA.)

Lee responded to my post about original sin with a quote from an essay on the subject by Orthodox Bishop Kallistos Ware. He summarizes:

Orthodoxy has sometimes been accused by Western theologians of having a quasi-Pelagian view of sin, while the Western tradition has been criticized for embracing a morally objectionable notion of inherited guilt. Whatever the accuracy of those criticisms, both traditions agree that we need God’s grace to move from sin to blessedness, and deny that we are capable of living morally acceptable lives independently of God.

I think this is true, and it occurred to me after reading this that one problem with original-sin discussions is that they tend to confuse the peripherals with the main point. What Lee said is the essence; the business about whether it started with Adam or Satan, or whether it gets transmitted through sexual intercourse (!) is just so much human theorizing. Although Paul, like everyone else in the New Testament, never uses the term “original sin”, you can see how he used the idea of universal fallenness and God’s grace in a pastoral way before all the theorizing developed.

First of all, he uses it to make sense of the apostles’ extraordinary experience of Jesus. He points out that if people’s imperfect attempts at virtue were really enough, God would never have had a reason to come to earth, die horribly and rise again. After all, giving moral advice from on high was old hat for God, so surely he didn’t go through all that just to dispense still more moral advice. Secondly, he employs the idea to get people to stop feeling superior to each other. All have fallen short, he insists, so even if you follow God 80% of the time you don’t have a right to look down on somebody who follows him 20% of the time.

Underlying Paul’s advice was the early church’s conflict between gentiles and Jews; and one thing it achieved pastorally was that it tackled the “virtuous pagan” problem. It could explain why Jews and Greeks both needed grace, much though both their cultures produced fine works of piety and truth. (One interesting feature of this book was that Wilken credited Origen, who usually gets a pretty bad rap, with being one of the first to acknowledge the goodness of Greek philosophy while explaining that the philosophers still need Jesus.)

I was thinking about this after reading Telford’s post about seeing Desmond Tutu. Telford found Tutu inspiring in many ways, but was very upset to hear him say that “God is not a Christian,” because “who can look at the Dalai Lama and say his prayer and his holiness is something God will reject?” Telford gives a rock-ribbed Protestant response:

Thanks be to God for Desmond Tutu and the mighty works done through him in South Africa. My life will never remotely compare to his. But if he thinks the godliness of a Dalai Lama or a Desmond Tutu or (God forbid) a Telford Work will justify any of us, if he thinks the prayers or spirituality or deep thoughts of even the holiest of us will be acceptable to God on their own, if he thinks that Jesus’ good news doesn’t need to be taught because all these other good things are already all around us – then the Archbishop Emeritus is teaching another gospel. He is a prophet of justification by works.

The connection to original sin becomes more apparent in the interview Telford links to:

I mean, you don’t have to believe in God to know that loving is better than hating. We are trying to remind them that all of us are fundamentally good. The aberration is the bad person. God is not upset that Gandhi was not a Christian, because God is not a Christian!

The phrase “all of us are fundamentally good”, like “children are born innocent”, is one of those lines whose Christian validity depends on how far you take it. To the extent that everyone is a child of God, it’s true. But what to make of those “aberrant” bad people? Where does their evil come from? To what extent do “good” people share a responsibility for it? In this interview at least, it’s not clear to me what Tutu believes about that.

It seems to me that one reason this subject is so difficult is that it involves a rather delicate balancing act. On the one hand, overemphasizing the goodness of people can fail to deal effectively with their badness. On the other hand, overemphasizing people’s depravity can make loving your neighbor nearly impossible. Justification by faith alone can turn salvation into an arbitrary business, detached from moral behavior; justification by works alone sets people with the unbearable task of saving themselves.

I think that the “good, but fallen” definition of humanity is an attempt to carve out the middle space, however people push it this way or that. I noticed that on the point about justification, Ware also took a middle path:

Even in a fallen world man still retains some knowledge of God and can enter by grace into communion with him. There are many saints in the pages of the Old Testament, men and women such as Abraham and Sarah, Joseph and Moses, Elijah and Jeremiah; and outside the Chosen People of Israel there are figures such as Socrates who not only taught the truth but lived it. Yet it remains true that human sin — the original sin of Adam, compounded by the personal sins of each succeeding generation — has set a gulf between God and man such that man by his own efforts could not bridge.

In a way, I don’t think this denigrates Desmond Tutu or the Dalai Lama so much as it further elevates God. After all, if being as good as those guys are still falls short of God’s glory, that’s a pretty impressive glory.

There was a fascinating — and very disturbing — confession in the L.A. Times recently by a man who, as a child, had lied to investigators in a huge child-abuse scandal that happened here in SoCal back in the ’80s. It actually dovetailed in a rather interesting way with the sermon at my church, last Sunday, and what bothered me about it. The sermon was about original sin, and among other things he claimed that Anabaptists don’t baptize infants because they were “born innocent.” Sin is apparently transmitted socially rather than genetically, or at least I think that was what he was trying to say. (It wasn’t the clearest preaching I’ve ever heard.)

Now, I’m not overly fond of infant baptism myself, and I’m also not overly enamored of the odd Western “inherited disease” model of original sin, particularly as it claims that guilt is somehow passed along, so that babies just born are somehow already hellworthy. But to define fallenness and sin according to legal culpability is, I think, making it too narrow.

The law, for convenience’s sake, defines a certain legal age you have to pass before you are considered fully responsible for your actions. But in real life there is no abrupt change when you turn 18 or 21 or whatever, and I think the article bears this out. Kyle knew, as a ten-year-old, that what he was doing was wrong, and in fact tried (unsuccessfully) to confess and repent to his mother. Yet it’s also obvious how helpless he was. All the adults in his life, upon whom he was emotionally and physically dependent, were unwittingly pushing him to lie.

Kyle’s attitude towards himself seems to go both ways. He engages in a bit of psychologizing by commenting on how much he wanted his stepfather’s approval, and how his parents’ belief that he was molested weirdly served their needs. Yet he also feels guilty about it and wants to apologize to the McMartins for what he did to them. I think most of us know, to a lesser degree, how he feels, in that we remember doing things as children that we feel guilty about. Even if we can look back and say, “I was just a kid,” that doesn’t really take away from its status as sin.

The fact that all the falsely accused persons turned away his apology strikes me as odd. I mean, I can’t really imagine what it’s like to be in their shoes, but it doesn’t make sense to me. The author says they “say they don’t need apologies from former students, who were children and couldn’t help themselves. Peggy Ann has said that they would rather hear from the police, social workers, therapists, prosecutors, doctors and parents who fueled the case.”

I guess this is itself a refusal to see children as anything but innocent, based again on the belief that they don’t really have any moral agency. But I can’t help wondering if under that, they really do blame him. After all, if the guy wants to unburden himself, what’s the harm in letting him come apologize? It seems almost cruel. Or is it just too threatening to however they think of what happened to them, to think that the children were also, to some small extent, to blame?

It’s been noted before that the whole satanic-sex-abuse scare of that era was fueled partly by a belief in childhood innocence, and the disbelief that children could lie on that scale or imagine such gruesome things. But what’s interesting about Kyle’s explanation of his own motives — and I see little reason to doubt him — is that he didn’t lie so much out of motiveless malice toward the McMartins as out of the desire to please certain other adults, and the implicit pressure from the fact that other kids there were telling similar stories.

In my study of this issue, one little over-facile formula I’ve come up with is that conservative Christians trace all sins to disobedience, while liberal Christians trace them all to abuse of power. This, I think, helps explain their sometimes radically different attitudes toward children: kids are often disobedient, after all, but they among the most powerless people in society. One thing I liked about Yoder’s Politics of Jesus was the way he connected the two ideas: abuses of power occur because the powers are disobedient, and seek to usurp godlike power to themselves.

But the power issue is complicated. As a child Kyle had a power he probably didn’t even realize he had: the power of adults’ fears for him, their desire to protect him, and therefore the power to put the McMartins through hell. The fact that he didn’t coldly and willfully abuse his power doesn’t mean he didn’t abuse it. And he was likewise in the dark about whom, and what, to obey. I’m sure he was taught not to lie, but suddenly that was what his ruling authorities wanted him to do. It’s not hard to see why it was hard for him to obey the laws of God when so many more immediate and physical powers were pushing him the other way.

I think then, that there is one consequence of fallenness that children are born with: ignorance of God. They have to rely on adults to tell them about God, and of course adults often screw it up. That’s a long way from the Garden of Eden, where, even allowing for the poetic license in the storytelling, God has a much more open and clear relationship with humanity than he does now. Over the course of the Old Testament, God seems to withdraw more and more, communicating more indirectly and through more marginal, unlikely people. And so babies born today, even if they are not guilty of any particular sin, are already in a place where they have to rely on themselves and other people, and only learn (perhaps) to rely on God.

Sometime soon, I’m going to go talk to the pastor about what he meant. If he’s lurching towards Pelagianism, we have a problem. But that’s a matter for another day.