Another Cold Sunrise: A Song of Original Sin and Systemic Evil
When a baby is born, we can elevate the squalling, red flesh and declare with perfect confidence, "Here's another knucklehead." In the Christian vernacular, "Another sinner." He will not love the Lord his God with all his heart or love his neighbor as himself. And even setting aside all religious lingo, from time to time he'll do bad things. It's inevitable. I say he because the sentences need pronouns and sexism beats misogyny, if barely, but ego and addiction are gender-inclusive. Sin happens. This is an undeniable basis for the doctrine of original sin.
But the full-blown doctrine goes much farther. Augustine of Hippo, its principle author, taught that human nature was corrupted when Adam broke God's dietary code, creating hereditary guilt. We are all born knuckleheads as a direct consequence of one knucklehead act. This is like saying that, by running a prototype Model T into a tree, Henry Ford caused all future crashes of mass-produced American cars. If he had just hit the brakes, our highways might be accident free. Of course, supposing that this prototypal crash occurred, it might well be a cautionary tale but not a first cause. We may well say, "Henry crashed; likewise, we crash," but not, "Henry crashed; therefore, we crash." It's the difference between common sense and blazing nonsense.
Most Jewish and Christian thinkers prior to Augustine took the Eden story sensibility as a fable (whether historically true or not) illustrating how things are. Adam was a knucklehead, and so are we all, being made of the same stuff. If the story were true, Adam would be the first instance of a contrary streak in human nature that spoils Edenic perfection. This is obvious. But Augustine wove a dark thread into Christian theology, the idea of deserved hereditary guilt. Granted that, if we live, we all eventually sin (Christ the putative exception), but it's quite another thing to suppose that while still on a diet of mother's milk we are guilty of eating Adam's fruit. No sane person would defend torturing a child for his father's crime, much less for the crime of an antediluvian grandfather many "greats" removed, but somehow Augustine claimed to harmonize this with divine justice, creating a bloodthirsty God-persona that became even more savage with the Reformation.
In the Catholic tradition, human nature is too corrupt for us to merit salvation on our own. We can't earn heaven with good works performed by our own free will, but we can choose to perform good works, and, indeed, we are called to do so and to try to avoid grave sin in order to meet grace halfway. We still need regular infusions of divine grace associated with the sacraments--such as the rite of confession for forgiveness of sins--but it all stands and falls on our choosing correctly, even if only on our deathbeds.
The Protestant tradition of Martin Luther and John Calvin paints fallen humanity in darker colors: we are absolutely incapable of good works, a doctrine called total depravity. Every part of our character is so corrupted that even good deeds are mortal sins because our motives are impure. Even after Protestants are regenerated by faith in Christ, they still can't perform good works themselves (despite the fact that good works in their lives are necessary signs of regeneration) because anything genuinely good is done by Christ acting in them. They are sanctified puppets. The "natural man" is born under sentence of hellfire, condemned as a species unless Christ deigns to lovingly intercede, and there's a lot of disagreement about who qualifies for intercession. Universalists say that everybody, despite appearances, will eventually be saved; hypothetical universalists say that salvation is offered to all but can be rejected; and predestination Calvinists insist that only God decides.
I find repugnant the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination, which imagines that God at his pleasure chooses who will and won't be tortured forever. We can't choose correctly any more than thrown rock can choose not to fly. It's the story of a deity who creates souls just to torment them eternally. Imagine a man siring a huge family with a plan to torture his odd-numbered children regardless of their actions. Torture for a few days would be criminal, eternal torture infinitely worse. Even if such a father blesses the even-numbered offspring and they are grateful, that doesn't make it right.
Of course, the trouble here may be misplaced anthropomorphism. I may be reading analogical language too literally. In fact, we do live in a world a lot like this father-monster's family, where sufferings are scattered without any discernible pattern of justice, and it's nonsensical to morally object to the way things are. Rain falls on the just and the unjust. Floods may call for explanation but not justification. Still, any portrayal of God in the form of a story about a humanoid character ought to portray a halfway decent character, not a sadistic monster. So Calvin's double predestination seems to be, at best, a grossly inept analogy. Anybody who imagines it is true--who rejoices to believe that they are among the "elect"--is living in contempt of Christ's call to love their neighbors as themselves. If their souls were regenerate, actually unselfish, they'd be incapable of enjoying heaven while neighbors--as beloved as themselves--suffered in hell.
This consideration is the basis for Friedrich Scheiermacher's universalism in The Christian Faith (1830), his sprawling reformulation of Reformed theology. If God has given himself in love (his only knowable trait) for the salvation of mankind, he can't exclude anyone, nor can his loving intentions be thwarted. Schleiermacher refuses to speculate on the details and mechanisms of the afterlife--which are the business of the hidden God, not the revealed God of faith experience--but he supposes that eternal happiness must ultimately include all humanity by whatever means. Otherwise, infinite love would have failed. Along with this, he understands Original Sin as communal guilt, as social rather than personal.
Schleiermacher addresses three sources of suffering: natural evil, actual sin, and original sin. For him, all events in the natural world are acts of God. Physicists study a divine plan. We wouldn't want to live in a universe where gravity fluctuated unpredictability to redirect rain from an unjust farmer's cornfield to a just one's. A world without predictable order would be nightmarish. Natural "evils" are byproducts of consistent physical laws. The suffering is real, but it would be worse to live in a chaotic world. Besides, there's no such world, so we'll move on to human evil, called sin.
Personal or actual sin is obvious. It's knowing or believing an action is wrong but doing it anyway--maybe carelessly, but always in cases of conscious personal choice. We are conscious of actual sin, Schleiermacher says, because human judgement and will-power develop unevenly, but original sin is something else. Original sin is "inherited" in the sense that it is the customary or lawful destructive behavior of decent people we grow up with--evil that is today often called systemic and associated with racism. Schleiermacher's original sin is the cultural residue of past sins, unloving acts that have become collective habits and are socially approved, and our own actual sins create original sin for future generations.
Doctrinal statements about original sin, Schleiermacher writes, "are not to be regarded as utterances of the individual consciousness, which fall to be treated rather under the doctrine of actual sin, but are utterances of the corporate consciousness" (The Christian Faith, § 71). Original sin is an ongoing social process, not a one-off catastrophe, and a Christian's duty is to avoid adding more customary suffering to the inherited residue. Christians are called to learn to see communal sin (such as the denial of civil rights to German Jews, which he opposed in 1799), to develop moral perception through "God-consciousness" modeled on the example of Christ. This is today called "consciousness raising."
Finally, here's the song:
Another Cold Sunrise
Well, the rich get rich
And the poor the ditch.
It's a game of shame or dare
As the fragile weep
And the agile leap
And smoke floats on the air.
It's not the end of the world,
Just another cold sunrise.
The astute get paid
And the cute get laid
And the juiced keep getting juiced.
All the world's a peach
That's just out of reach
Where the hawks come home to roost.
It's not the end of the world,
Just another cold sunrise.
Well, the bold get old
And the weak get polled
As the thunder rolls the dice,
And across the field
Yellow cornstalks yield
To the soldiers or the mice.
It's not the end of the world,
Just another cold sunrise.
Here's the link to a music video:
A friend on Facebook (that elephant's graveyard, and donkey's too, where nuance goes to die) read this and wrote, "Under socialism everybody's equally poor." Of course, that's not true of democratic socialist nations (most of Europe), but I bit my tongue. I was blindsided by his assumption that recognition of suffering and inequity was a call for radical socialism, as if non-Marxists thought everything was hunky dory. Certainly, some of the inequities in the song do stem from ancient abuses of property ownership condemned repeatedly by Jesus--the rich hoarding more than they can conceivably use while the poor go hungry. Unlike my friend (a Tea Party organizer), I suppose that government, as an expression of the will of good people, has a role in counterbalancing such inequities. Still, the song is about problems, not solutions. The devil is always in the details, but if the song summons a devil and gives occasion to reflect on systemic equities, then my work as a songwriter is done here.
Reference
Schleiermacher, Friedrich. The Christian Faith (1830). Bloomsbury, 2016.
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