A THEOLOGY OF… ALL THIS
A Hong Kong street after suppression of pro-democracy demonstrations. Wikimedia Commons.
One of my favorite underappreciated memes is Gestures Broadly at Everything. As Slate reports, this meme first originated in the summer of 2016 as a way of summing up the user’s despair at the ever-increasing series of catastrophes that defined that summer: the Pulse nightclub shootings, Brexit, the Zika virus, and an increasingly chaotic US presidential election. Instead of enumerating the ills one by one, the meme simply gestures broadly at everything, as if to say, “Just look around! There’s hardly anywhere you can look where you can’t see the chaos, fear, and disaster that I’m talking about.” A variant of this meme achieves the same end by referencing the whole panoply of chaos as simply “all this.”
After lying dormant for several years, this meme is making a comeback in 2020. And why wouldn’t it? Instead of naming the reasons for one’s despair – a global pandemic, the rise of authoritarianism around the world, massive ecological disasters in Australia and the American Southwest, a US presidential election marked by staggering dishonesty and unabashed authoritarian threats whose delayed ending is poised to leave no one fully satisfied, increased police brutality in response to cries for racial justice, and the brutal backlash against pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong (to name but a few), isn’t it so much easier to simply gesture broadly at everything? Why not rely on the listener, who has assuredly suffered through these terrors just as we have, to understand? Do we really need to rehearse the litany of ills that plague our world time after wearying time?
Theology cannot explain away the madness of 2020, or of any year. But it can render its chaos more intelligible and offer new hope. If we want to understand the times we live in, we can do no better than to reflect upon one of the oldest and most besmirched of Christian doctrines: original sin.
The doctrine of original sin is often misunderstood as the sole creation of Augustine, who taught that all human beings share in the guilt of our first ancestors’ sin, and hence are worthy of damnation from the hour of our birth until the waters of baptism cleanse us from Adam’s fall as well as our individual sins. Augustine’s view on the matter is extreme – so extreme that even the Roman Catholic Church demurs, especially when his doctrine is applied to the fate of the unevangelized, or of stillborn infants.
If we look beyond Augustine to the other figures of the early church, we find a more moderate understanding of original sin (not always called by that name) that wins wide acceptance. On this view, all human beings inherit a human nature damaged by ancestral sin, but are not culpable for that damage. Babies are not born damned. Yet the tragedy of our situation is that our fallenness guarantees that we will sin ourselves. As Gregory of Nyssa hauntingly put it, “Evil was mixed with our nature from the beginning…Thus sin takes its rise in us as we are born; it grows with us and keeps us company till lives [end].” (1) John Chrysostom describes death gaining power over the whole human race as a result of Adam’s sin (2) - once the first parents are enslaved to the oppressive powers of sin and death, their children are forever born in bondage.
But we don’t need to rely on church authorities or biblical prooftexts to see that this moderate version of original sin is true; we can simply look around us. Others often mistreat us in ways that lead us to believe that we need to hoard wealth, attention, or power in order to be loved – which leads straightaway into the sins of greed, vainglory, and pride. Study after study shows that abuse has a horrific power to trap victims in its cycle for generations. Most profoundly of all, no one in the whole human race seems to be able to manage to get through the changes and chances of life without missing the mark of moral perfection. We feel rage, and in our rage we speak words we later wish we could take back. We feel terror, and in our terror we enact a cruelty we later regret. We cannot help but hurt others. Often, we cannot help but hurt the ones we love the most.
We may not be responsible for the situations we find ourselves in. And yet, in our situation it is impossible not to commit evil acts for which we are responsible. This is the paradox that, as G. K. Chesterton so famously said, “is the only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” (3)
Why should this dreary doctrine render, well, all this more intelligible? Because it makes it less surprising. If we are inescapably trapped in a matrix of sin not of our own making, drawn inexorably toward the moral abyss like some sort of metaphysical black hole, then we need not be shocked when people make the wrong choices. And the predicaments in which we find ourselves are the result of human choices. Leaders have chosen to ignore scientific data and public health wisdom for the sake of political expediency. People find themselves under the thumb of tyrants because others have chosen conquest, realpolitik, or subtle subversion of a democratic establishment. Sometimes people even prefer the easy answers an oppressive government offers to the hard work of just leadership and sharing power (1 Samuel 8). Even the natural disasters that have wreaked havoc on our world are exacerbated by human choices that prioritize short-term profit and comfort over the planet’s long-term stability.
The doctrine of original sin does not state that we are so irredeemably corrupt as to always choose the wrong thing. It does tell us, however, that the condition of our souls, apart from God’s grace, is such that even our best efforts will usually go awry – and that many times, we will not even be able to do good at all, let alone our best. So we need not spend time wondering why God’s world is in such shambles, or why people so often disappoint us. It is the result of our natural condition. To understand sin is to understand the world around us; a theology of sin is to the Christian what anatomy and pathology are to the doctor.
Theology can do more than help us understand the world we face, however. It can also give us hope in the face of inevitable setbacks, frustrations, and outright disasters. Theology, after all, reminds us that the all this to which we so plaintively gesture is not all there is. The cosmos hangs on the reality of Jesus Christ, perfect God and perfect human, crucified in the flesh, risen in the flesh, and coming again to reign in the flesh – not upon the reality of original sin. Because theology speaks of a God beyond all human imagining, it can promise us a hope that comes from outside the realm of merely-human actions, feelings, and institutions. Because God’s help is above the power of original sin, it can break the power that original sin holds over the world.
Theology gives us hope because it allows us to hope in God’s direct action in the world, not merely our own. It is only through divine supernatural action that we can hope for a future escape from sin’s event horizon. To take but one example, if the resurrection is not God’s physical undoing of the effects of death on the body of Jesus of Nazareth, but merely the disciples’ visionary experiences of a risen Christ coupled with a persistent memory of his life, then it is no different in kind from all other mystical visions and wisdom traditions that have come down to us over the years. It is more of the same: ordinary people trying, always imperfectly and often with no success, to hold on to the insights of their most profound experiences. Similarly, if Christ’s second coming simply means that human beings will eventually manage to make a world that looks like heaven, then it must be said that the evidence for its truth is hardly convincing. But if it is true that God acted, quite apart from our perceptions or feelings about it, in the life of Jesus, then we can have faith that God will act again, even in the midst of every evil we so painfully gesture towards.
I don’t intend for any of this to be taken as a call to political quietism or ethical inaction, of course. Quite the contrary; the very God whose actions will complete what is lacking in our faltering attempts commands us to make those attempts anyway. By God’s grace, real change is possible even in the here and now. Systemic racism can be undone, patriarchal chains can be broken, and the wounds of a hurting planet can be closed. Even now, Satan falls like lightning from heaven whenever God wills it.
Still, it would be a mistake to read too much into the chances and changes of human history, while good and evil still battle inconclusively for supremacy. Far better to give ourselves to the struggle while trusting in the final, decisive action of God – to gesture broadly towards every evil we see, no longer with fear or despair, but with hope and quiet confidence. Far better to look that evil squarely in the eye and say, “I have heard of a day to come when God wipes away the tears from every eye, when heaven and earth rejoice that they are finally free of you, when death itself is reversed. I have heard of a day to come when uncountable multitudes of people will inherit eternal life and behold the ecstatic vision of the Son of Man crucified and risen, and you will have no power anymore.”
For we have it on God’s very word that all that awaits us. And in the end, it turns out that all that is more than enough to sustain us through, well, all this.
Quoted in Kelly, J. N. D. Early Christian Doctrines, New York: HarperCollins, 1978, p. 351.
Chrysostom, John. Homily 10 on Romans, v. 19.
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. Orthodoxy, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995, p. 13.
