Absolute Dependence: Jonathan Edward's Spider and Kris Kristofferson's "Why Me?"

After writing last week about Kris Kristofferson's inexplicable spiritual experience, the one that inspired his song "Why Me?" I was reminded of Jonathan Edwards 1741 sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," a classic of American Literature. 

           Kristofferson asks, "What have I ever done to deserve even one of the pleasures I've known?" The implied answer is, of course, "Nothing." At least, nothing sufficient. In an absolute sense, as a cosmic universal, this seems undeniably true and only incidentally religious. No religious doctrine is necessary to realize that our very existence depends on something (if not God, something else) that preceded all of our past and future. All existence is gratuitous, given to me by something Not-Me. This jibes with Edward's trope of a spider dangled over a fiery pit, but without the image of an angry man:

The God that holds you over the Pit of Hell, much as one holds a Spider, or some loathsome Insect, over the Fire; . . . ‘tis nothing but his Hand that holds you from falling into the Fire every Moment: 'Tis to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to Hell the last Night; that you was suffer’d to awake again in this World, after you closed your Eyes to sleep: and there is no other Reason to be given why you have not dropped into Hell since you arose in the Morning, but that God’s Hand has held you up (p. 15).

Our existence and character are products of forces outside of ourselves. A motivational speaker on television likes to repeat that we can do anything we really want, but he exaggerates. As a skinny man, I never had the option of becoming a professional fullback or ballerina. Even our most general powers are limited. We may attempt suicide with high likelihood of success, but none of our choices can give us comparable assurance of life into the indefinite future. A few years ago a friend my age, who seemed healthy, is said to have "blanked out" in the process of a conversation. A fatal brain aneurism. It can happen to any of us at any moment. Other possibilities--car crashes, tornados, heart attacks, stray bullets, and more--threaten us with, if not a fiery pit, termination of earthly existence. Edwards evokes this existential uncertainty in another image: "Men walk over the Pit of Hell on a rotten Covering, and there are innumerable Places in this Covering so weak that they won’t bear their Weight, and these Places are not seen" (p. 9).  

Set down inexplicably in the world and pushed by a storm of causes and effects thereafter, we can do little to earn whatever good things happen to us--or, less fashionably, to deserve whatever bad ones happen. Outside of our fragile bubble of control is a stormy cosmos or God-realm of absolute dependence. We may kneel before it, stand defiantly, or carry on in denial of it, but but we cannot  escape it. It grounds existence. This is emphasized by Reformed theology, the school of John Calvin to which Jonathan Edwards belonged. The general sense of helplessness before the God-realm is solidified in the doctrines of Predestination and Total Depravity, according to which, only by an infusion of Christ's grace into the believer (much like possession by Pod People) can anybody do anything that merits any benefits. This is the purest form of the sense of helpless submission expressed in Kristofferson's "Why Me?"

Calvin's doctrines build the myth of Adam's fall and the dubious belief that one man's mistake corrupted all of this descendants. Unless we accept that guilt is inherited, that a judge could justly punish me for my grandmother's crime, Calvin's story of human sinfulness is nonsense. And predestination at any level, limitation on free will, logically implies that bad deeds don't merit hell any more than good deeds merit heaven. Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), writing within Calvin's Reformed theology, demythologized Calvin in the light of German philosophy and the Romantic movement. "The father of modern theology," Schleiermacher based his entire system of Christian doctrine on a "feeling of absolute dependence on God," the sense of personal insufficiency expressed by Edward's image of walking on a "rotten covering" and Kristofferson's "What have I ever done?"

Any honest and reflective person, I suggest, understands this. Life is a walk across an ice-covered lake with unpredictable thin spots. It's a voyage on a small, leaky sailboat. This is not to deny that much of a voyage--maybe all of it prior to the inevitable sinking--may steer over calm, sunny seas with a consistent tailwind. Except for a few manageable squalls, that image comes close to describing my lucky, ordinary life, but for this I can only thank the Lord, or whatever shaped the weather of Being around me. I missed the Civil War by ninety years, WWII by six thousand miles, and, whether I admit it or not, my phenomenological soul has always been in His metaphorical hands (to paraphrase Kristofferson's lyrics). Clearly, that "soul" is not a physical thing, if a thing of any kind, not of a size to be held in anthropomorphic hands, but the trope is transparent enough, and anybody who tries to assert autonomy to the extent of contradicting it undertakes a desperate and doomed mission, a denial of elementary self-knowledge.

Some people do abuse substances, make money, and pursue fame and power in desperate denial of their "absolute dependence." They rage against the dying of their personal light. Maybe, puffed up by desperate will, they are happy, but it sounds like hell-on-earth to me. Certainly, they don't enjoy peace of mind, which can only be achieved by accepting dependence. I have wandered back to a viewpoint I wrote about two years ago in "Four Ways to Live Over the Void."  I won't repeat that analysis (https://www.wrestlingwithreligion.net/2020/10/how-to-live-over-hungry-void.html .

Once we have seen the fact of absolute dependence on a vast unknown outside of ourselves--perhaps melting into ourselves--we cannot and should not unsee it. Unless we somehow make our peace with it, we are terrorized by a deadly and alien universe. The world is an enemy to be fought. Life is a war, which is hell, as General Sherman observed. It is a horror movie, the depressing kind in which even the loved heroine dies.

Christianity sees the vast irresistible outside of ourselves in the image of a loving first-century rabbi, the one holding Kristofferson's soul in his hand. This humanizes the absolute, facilitating acceptance, but isn't the only way. At another extreme are Zen Buddhism and Vedanta, which deliver pure acceptance without an anthropomorphic intermediary. It is impossible to know another person's spiritual state with certainty, but I suppose that others achieve this outside of any institutional framework. "Spiritual but not religious" has always seemed self-contradictory to me, as if a personal religion weren't a "religion," but I understand its drift. Yellow robes are not any more necessary than crucifixion to accept the dependence of being.

Reference

Edwards, Jonathan. Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: A Sermon Preached at Enfield, July 8th 1741. Kneeland and Green, 1741 https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1053&context=etas