|
June,1997 |
Augustine's ideas were codified which became the third strike call for Truth -- you know, three strikes and you're out!. The other two strikes were when The Council of Nicea codified the denial of the divine origin of the soul in 325 A.D.(Nicene Creed), and when Justinian anathematized some of Origen's teachings in 553 A.D. at The Fifth General Council of
the Church. (Btw, Justinian was the emperor, not the pope. He had to arrest the pope and imprison him and convene the council without him in order to accomplish his goal of anathematizing some of the most profound and powerful truths of the Bible). In my opinion Jesus was a mystic who came to teach others how to achieve divine union with God. Systematically, throughout the first five centuries, the image of Jesus and the message of Christ was changed to suit the Roman emperors and the neurotic guilt-complexes of Augustine. Probably the worst thing that has ever happened to Truth and the possible salvation of Christian humanity was the adoption of Augustine's weird ideas on original sin. IMO, this has led to not only past abuses against humanity by the Church, but more importantly to the debasement of people's' own self-perception. What follows is an essay about Augustine's doctrine which is blindly accepted by most Christians. It is titled "Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?", and is in three parts. I believe there are rational, scripturally based alternatives to the Doctrine of Original Sin , but some of the early Church Fathers scrubbed those out of the Bible and out of orthodox doctrine for various reasons -- to our detriment, IMO. Part I Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People? Origen of Alexandria had explained it very well based upon the mysterious truth of scripture. After the truths of Origen's teachings were rejected, the Church had to come up with another explanation for why bad things happen to good people. The Church turned to a doctrine that has left deep scars on the soul of Western civilization: Original Sin. Augustine (A.D. 354-430) refined ideas others had toyed with earlier i.e., man's wretched state of affairs is somehow related to the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden. Bad things happen to good people because all people are bad by nature, he argued, and the only chance for them to overcome this natural wickedness is to access God's grace through the Church. As Augustine wrote, "No one will be good who was not first of all wicked." (City of God, 15:1) Although the Church has since rejected some of Augustine's arguments, the Catholic catechism still tells us: "We cannot tamper with the revelation of original sin without undermining the mystery of Christ." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 389, p. 98) Original sin is linked so closely with Christ, the Church argues, because it is Christ who liberates us from original sin. According to Augustine, in short, Adam and Eve lost the privilege of God's grace in the Fall, and Christ came to offer people a chance to be restored to the state of grace. He would act as mediator for the disobedient creation, and this would allow them to return to the state of physical immortality through the bodily resurrection. God's grace wouldn't stop bad things from happening to them on earth, but it would guarantee their immortality after death. The most important implication of original sin is that because we are descended from Adam, we bear his permanently flawed nature. "Man does not have it in his power to be good," writes Augustine { sidenote}. He believed we are no more capable of doing good than a monkey is of speaking. We can do good through grace alone. (Augustine's ideas, taken to their extreme, probably lead people to sin. "I can't help it" is a pretty good excuse.) Augustine arrived at the idea of original sin by a circuitous route. Read his Confessions for that story (his sexual neurosis is plain to see in that book!). He formulated his famous doctrine not long after Bishop Theophilus' Alexandrian Council condemned Origen's writings. I reacted to the idea of original sin with disbelief. How could the sins of someone who lived 5,000 or more years ago make me a sinner? Augustine found the chief scriptural support for his doctrine in Romans 5:12. In the modern New Revised Standard translation, the verse reads: "Sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned."But Augustine's version of this verse contained a mistranslation. Augustine did not read Greek, the original language of the NT, so he used a Latin translation now called the Vulgate. It renders the last half of the verse as "and so death spread to all men, through one man, in whom all men sinned." (emphasis added, quoted in Pelikan, The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition, p. 299) He concluded that "in whom" referred to Adam and that somehow all people had sinned when Adam had sinned He made Adam a kind of corporate personality who contained the nature of all future men, which he transmitted through his semen. Augustine wrote, "We all were in that one man...already the seminal nature was there from which we were to be propagated." (City of God, 13:14). Thus all of Adam's descendants are both corrupt and condemned because they were present inside of him (as semen) when he sinned. Augustine described sin as something "contracted" and passed through the human race like a venereal disease. [I can't help thinking about that crazy general in Dr. Strangelove who kept focusing on "precious bodily fluids"] Jesus was exempt from original sin since, according to the orthodox, he was conceived without semen. Augustine concluded that as a result of Adam's sin, the entire human race is a "train of evil" headed for the "destruction of the second death." (City of God, 13:14). Except, of course, those who manage to access God's grace through the Church. Part II Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?
Augustine convinced Christendom that all infants need to be baptized because all had been tainted by original sin. Since babies hadn't committed any sins on their own, he postulated only original sin is left to explain why they suffer. Although the Church has retreated from the doctrine of infant damnation, it still retains the basic framework of original sin Augustine established. But getting the Church to swallow the bitter pill of original sin was not an easy task. But Augustine devoted 20 years to it. Safely ensconced as the bishop of Hippo (modern Algeria) he battled bishops and influenced both popes and Church councils. He effectively combated the ideas of John Chrysostom, patriarch of Constantinople, who argued that we should not be blamed for Adam's sin -- when bad things happen to us, they are punishment not for Adam's sin but for our own (Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, pp. 108-109) Although Chrysostom's argument was logical, it did not explain the inequities in life -- including why babies suffer. Another chief opponent of Augustine was a British theologian named Pelagius (c.354-418), who thought original sin was absurd. He couldn't understand a belief that said men are wicked by nature and incapable of self - improvement. Pelagius, like Arius, believed that we have a higher destiny. He wrote: "There is no more pressing admonition than this, that we should be called sons of God." (emphasis added, quoted in Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 352) Augustine was able to convince the pope and Honorius, emporer of the western half of the empire, to excommunicate Pelagius. But a student of his, Julian, took up the battle, and he and Augustine hurled parchment missiles at each other across the Mediterranean from 418 to Augustine's death in 430. But Augustine eventually won this contest for two reasons: First, because Pelagius and Julian could not defend God's justice in allowing babies to suffer (this was really a continuation of the Origenist controversy -- the issues were the same i.e., defending God's justice and explaining human differences). Second, Augustine convinced the Church hierarchy his ideas were politically useful. In a letter to Pope Innocent I, he warned the Pelagian view of human nature must be condemned if Church authority were to prevail. Pelagius had argued that salvation is achieved by personal striving and not by simple adherence to Church rules. Augustine pointed out to the pope that if the Pelagian view prevailed, then people would no longer turn to the Church for the administration of grace or the guarantee of salvation. Even the prayers offered by the clergy would appear to be but "idle words," urging Pelagius' views on free will be anathematized. Put in those terms, the controversy became a matter of survival for the Church. If it wanted to retain its authority, the Church would have to accept Augustine's solution. (Brown, Augustine of Hippo, p. 358) Original sin was naturally attractive to secular rulers as well. Since man was supposedly naturally wicked, he was obviously incapable of self-government. Therefore he should obey his rulers even if they were wicked and unjust. "One [reason for the success of Augustinian Christianity] is certainly that it was an ideology uniquely suited to serve the needs of the dominant classes in Roman society It provided a cosmic justification for the existing hierarchical order rooted in human sinfulness and divine justice, and it encouraged every person to accept his or her place in that order." ( Scott, Augustine, p. 57)Those arguing with Augustine about his doctrine of original sin and God's justice could not prove that infants had done anything deserving the "punishments" they suffered without harkening back to Origen of Alexandria's ideas. The controversy over original sin was settled in A.D. 529 when the Council of Orange accepted Augustine's doctrine of original sin. The council decreed that Adam's sin corrupted the body and soul of the whole human race and that sin and death are a result of Adam's disobedience. But, not only does it contradict the best teachings of Jesus, it undermines our ability to achieve atonement (at-one-ment). Augustine's ideas are what one scholar describes as " utterly incoherent." In the next part of this essay (part III and the last), I'll attempt to show how it is incoherent in the final analysis. Part III Why Do Bad Things Happen To Good People? Like Origen, Augustine took up the question of why God treated the twins Jacob and Esau differently (see Gen. 25: 21-28/ Mal. 1:2/ Rom. 9:13). The question helped lead Origen to prexistence. It led Augustine to predestination, the illogical but necessary underpinning of his thought and the one on which it founders today. Although the Catholic Church no longer accepts Augustine's ideas about predestination, it has yet to find a sensible replacement for them. The fundemental tenet of Augustine's thought is that God is both all-powerful and perfectly good. Since he is all-powerful, he must know and determine every event before it happens. This reasoning led Augustine to the idea that God decides before souls are born which will go to heaven and which to hell and that salvation results from the unmerited grace of God. Thus, Augustine explains the divergent fates of Jacob and Esau by telling us that God is free to save or damn whomever he pleases. (Notice that we now have an unrighteous, arbitrary and capricious God). Augustine further illustrates his principle of predestination with a ghastly story. Imagine, he tells us, that there are two men. One is good and kind but is born in a place where he cannot hear the Gospel. Another is a criminal and is "addicted to lust," yet he hears the messaage of salvation and becomes a believing Christian. At the final judgement, the good and kind man is sentenced to the second death because he is not a Christian. The criminal is saved. (Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, 1st serm.,5: 26-27) Augustine cannot sustain the image of God as both all-powerful and perfectly good. When discussing Jacob and Esau, he tries to preserve God's goodness by telling us that God's seemingly arbitrary actions toward the two boys are justified by some "hidden equity that cannot be searched out by any human standard of measurement." (Scott, Augustine, p.212) But when forced to pick between the two attributes, he chooses to preserve God's power rather than his goodness. Augustine tells us that the entire "clay of sin" (everyone) is damned from the moment of creation and incapable of loving God unless God chooses to impart the ability to love him. As scholar T. Kermit Scot points out, this leads to the conclusion that God damns people for failing to love him when he hasn't given them the power to do so in the first place. (Scott, Augustine, p. 214) "That is certainly unjust," Scott concludes. With a Christian God as Augustine describes him, no wonder some people hate him! Augustine never admitted what Scottt calls the "ultimate incoherence in his thought". His portrait of God is blurred by his inability to conceive of an all-powerful and just God who would give his creation the free will to act lifetime after lifetime. Modern Christian positions on original sin differ widely. Today Protestants and liberal Catholics do not ask us to believe that sin is transmitted sexually or that everyone sinned in Adam. Nevertheless, they say, since people still suffer, it is clear that original sin still exists. And when you ask for details, a cogent, coherent explanation of original sin, all explanations fail to account for children who suffer before they sinned or have been conditioned to sin. However mildly they put it, they are still saying that every baby born is already mired in original sin, unable to move without divine grace and cursed by a twisted nature to suffer at the capricious hand of fate {more on modern perspectives}. The Church has not gotten out of the tangled knot of original sin because there is nowhere to go but back to Origen's ideas. And if it were to admit that, it would have to deny fifteen hundred years of doctrine. But Origen had already cut the knot before it was tied. Back to Nazarene Nirvana
|