The Blahs

{Part 15 of Original Sin: The Neverending Story}

“We do not know how to imagine, comprehend, measure or conceptualize the divine reaction to sin until we know the divine remedy to sin…the measure of sin must be read backwards from the cross.”  --Bernard Ramm, OFFENSE TO REASON

“We wouldn’t have invented a disease if we didn’t have something you could take for it.”                               --Alka-Seltzer commercial, circa 1968

In all seriousness and with all due respect, Original Sin seems to be the theological equivalent of Alka-Seltzer’s famous “the blahs”: in this case, a metaphysical ailment invented (some would say “discovered”) solely because Christianity found itself in possession of the cure—Christ Jesus, that is, the new (and improved) Adam, with the unique activating ingredient agape, and available everywhere absolutely free of charge, by faith through grace.  Christianity, like any product, had to meet (or create) some need, real or perceived; in that sense, Paul was clearly the merchandising genius of the early Church.  We have seen how pessimism permeated the religious and philosophical atmosphere of Palestine both before and after the lifetime of Jesus; Paul’s inspired innovation was to affirm (even to exaggerate) that pessimism while simultaneously offering a solution to it.  While Christianity’s primary competitors—Judaism, Gnosticism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism—might rival its bleak estimate of the human condition, none of them could hold a candle to the Pauline combination of hopelessness (the old Adam) and hope (the risen Christ).

From the Christian perspective—from Paul’s perspective—the evident if mysterious presence and power of Jesus, after his death on Calvary, empowered and transformed the lives of those who somehow still experienced him. This presence and this power not only led Jesus’s followers into a new present and directed them towards a new future, but it also in important ways created for them a new past.  The light of salvation brought about a reassessment and a better understanding of humanity’s pre-Christian predicament, enabling believers to see how woefully inadequate they had been, how far they had Fallen from God’s created image, and how helpless they had been (before Jesus) to alter their condition. 

No one grasped this dynamic more quickly or more completely than Saul of Tarsus, a zealous Pharisee first glimpsed in the Book of Acts as a consenting spectator to the stoning of Stephen, Christianity’s first martyr.  Shortly thereafter, Saul comes to the fore as “a great persecution arose against the church in Jerusalem…Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.”  Then, “still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, [Saul] went back to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way [Christianity], he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.”

Authorized, Saul embarked for Damascus; at which point, somewhere along the way, exit Saul of Tarsus (the old Adam) from history and enter Paul (the “second founder of Christianity”).  "As he neared Damascus on his journey, sudddenly a light from heaven flashed around him.  He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?'  'Who are you, Lord?' Saul asked.  'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.  Now arise and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.'" ¹

A less auspicious candidate for conversion could not have been imagined, much less found; and it was precisely the unlikeliness of his transformation that would shape Paul’s understanding of, and gratitude for, what God had done for him.  Without reducing Paul’s later theology to mere personal psychology, it is clear that his abrupt and dramatic conversion must have changed how Paul viewed his previous existence: he had been delivered (it seemed) from darkness into light, from falsehood into truth, from slavery into freedom, from death into life.  It was a simple step for Paul to project this transformation out onto the world, generalizing and universalizing his insights: what Jesus had done for Paul, Jesus could and would do for anyone, because what Paul had been, so too was humanity at large. 

The old Adam, like the old Saul, had been (Paul retroactively realized) hopelessly lost, enmeshed in an insidious dynamic of sin and death, fettered by a Mosaic Law he could never observe perfectly and the perfect observance of which would have brought him no merit in any case (keeping the Law being a duty for all Jews).²  Righteousness before God, Paul came to see, could not be reckoned upon the scrupulous performance of obligatory works—what then?  Only faith could set one free.  Saul had been a slave both to Law and sin, to duty and to death; the reborn Paul was free in Christ, released from Law into gracious Love.  Saul, like Adam, had been bound for judgment and death; Paul was forgiven and revived in the hope (already manifest in Jesus) of resurrection.  Saul was foredoomed seed and son of the old Adam; we all were. Paul was predestined instrument and adopted child of God in Christ Jesus, as could we all become.  Humanity could escape judgment; in fact, we would even someday (said Paul) judge angels.

“The dimensions of sin correspond to the dimensions of salvation”: we don’t truly know how lost we are until we’ve been found.  Found by God, Paul was stunned to realize just how lost he’d been, and how lost all men would continue to be without Christ.  That realization led him to a series of rhetorical dichotomies: praising God’s unwarranted mercy, Paul heightened his descriptions of man’s need for that mercy, man’s helplessness, woefulness, and wickedness.  As God in Christ was exalted, man was correspondingly diminished; the more Christ was ascendant, the more mankind was depicted as Fallen. Paul’s guilt at having persecuted the followers of Jesus gave way to self-abasement (“What a wretched man I am!”) and then to debasement of the entire wretched race of which he was a part.

To be clear: psychological speculation does not necessarily explain Paul’s conversion, nor does it discredit his theology or his anthropology; it merely provides context.  The early Christian church was, of necessity, composed entirely of converts, among whom Paul’s references to Adam, sin, death and rebirth would surely have resonated (centuries later, Augustine too would be a convert).  Beyond psychology, though, there was a simple and compelling logic at work: if God had felt it necessary to resort to the unprecedented and humanly inconceivable device of the Incarnation; if, in fact, Christ Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross”; if all this were true, then the preceding human condition must have been unspeakably dire--one doesn't resort to radical chemotherapy for a hangnail or a pimple.

The fact that mankind, by and large, had not been aware of its plight or of its need for a Savior was but one more indication of the extent of its Fall: human beings were completely ignorant, having “literally no idea what we needed to overcome the gulf of alienation in our nature.”  Worse, we didn’t even know there was a gulf of alienation to overcome; mostly, we thought we were pretty much intact.  We were drowning men who thought we were competent swimmers, until the lifeline was thrown to us and grasped; we were blind men who thought we could see, until our eyes were actually opened.  We’d Fallen so far and for so long we’d forgotten what it was like to stand; we’d been down so long it looked like up to us--until the Light of the World arrived and showed us our true condition.

And to make matters unspeakably, unbearably worse: mankind, Jews and Gentiles alike, had rejected and murdered its God-sent Redeemer, the man Jesus, himself later revealed to be God.  In the words of poet Myra Sklarew,

“We have also killed a man / set him into a cross of wood, / a dense wood whose petals / are notched and stained. / They say we have brought down / a long night upon ourselves.”

If Christianity was to be believed, Jesus’s crucifixion was humanity’s nadir: our darkness, at that moment, was total.  And as Paul, no longer Saul, emphasized: for those who could not or would not open their eyes to the light of the risen Christ, the night would be long indeed.

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¹ That account of Saul's conversion is found in Acts 9.  Acts continues to refer to the reborn apostle as "Saul" until midway through Chapter 13, when it adopts the Greek name "Paul" for him and never looks back.  

2 The second part of Paul's genius was his ability to make his insights applicable to Gentiles as well as to Jews. This genius may have been born of necessity; many Jews were no doubt inhospitable to Paul's Good News and to his claim that the Mosaic Law was actually designed to bring about condemnation and death. In any case, Paul primarily managed to persuade Gentiles, in part (one suspects) because he wasn't asking that much of them: no circumcision and no burdensome Laws to keep, just "love and do what you will". As Paul's various admonitory letters make clear, some of his converts took him quite literally.

Comments

[Jack Shifflett]

Terry: "Here's to another 15 parts"? Be careful what you wish for, my friend.

Seriously, though, thanks for the comment and the encouragement. It's always gratifying to know that someone is actually reading this stuff; it's even more gratifying to discover that someone actually likes it.

[NorthernNites]

I have enjoyed your commentary on Original Sin Jack. I was raised in a faith community that did not put much if any emphasis on Original Sin so they have been most insightful. The Alka-Seltzer analogy was particularly inspired I thought. At this point in my life I look to a deeper understanding of who this Jesus person was and filter out what others have added over the millennium. Always find your posts thoughtful and enlightening. Here's to another 15 parts.