Searching for God #8

 In his insightful and incisive work, Religion and Alienation, Gregory Baum, writes:

This…reflection on sin as personal-and-social corresponds to the dialectical relationship between consciousness and society,…The privatizing trend, overlooking the reciprocal relationship between personal transgression and social contradiction, has therefore a hidden political meaning. It makes people think that the dreadful things that happen in the world are due to the evil deed of single individuals and that there is no need to examine the social institutions to which they belong. The privatizing trend in the Christian religion supported by the dominant culture, lets society off the hook-…and hence protects institutional power and privilege. In other words, the privatizing of the gospel is ideological….For if Christian teachers present sin as those acts and attitudes that undermine the values and the authority of the dominant groups, they make the support of the present social order a duty of religion. If they prefer obedience to disobedience, conformity to criticism, modesty to public controversy, patience to impatient longing for justice, then they make the gospel a symbolic language for the defense of the dominant forces in society. Another kind of Christian preaching indicts as sin conformity and compliance with the world. Sin here is the uncritical surrender to the norms of society and the authority of the inherited institutions. This trend is strongly represented in the New Testament….The preaching of Jesus, in a trend amplified by his followers, accused the ‘world’—that is the dominant structures and the received norms—as the principle of evil….

In the Catholic Church the privatizing of sin eventually led to the denial that the church as church could be sinful. Since all sin was private it was unnecessary to engage in critical reflection on the church’s corporate life. Bishops and popes admitted, of course, that they were personally sinners and in need of divine mercy, but they did not acknowledge that their collective life embodied in ecclesiastical organizations, was marked by sin and hence in need of an ongoing critique. Systematic criticism of the institution was regarded as disloyal. When people, individual or in groups, left the church, fault was found with them: they were unfaithful, they had betrayed their heritage. What remained unexamined was to what extent the contradictions in the ecclesiastical institution had contributed to this exodus……(A) church’s unwillingness to subject its corporate life to a systematic and principled critique is the great barrier that prevents it from proclaiming the gospel with power….Unless we move in the direction of deprivatizing the notion of sin, we are in danger of making the Christian faith a protection against injustices in church and world and thus transforming the religion of Jesus into an ideology. (Baum, p.206-207-208)

First, let it be stated clearly and unequivocally, that, from the perspective of this scribe, it is certainly not only the Roman Catholic church that warrants and wears those Baum critical insights, especially about the privatizing of sin, and the impunity and immunity from self-critical, principled evaluations of the institutions. Indeed, the public and lay adherents will often claim ‘hypocrisy’ as the cardinal ‘sin’ of the church.

In a corporate, capitalist culture, dominant as it is in North America, and has been for the better part of the last century, the individual is considered the cornerstone of the culture. We stress individual accomplishment and failure in the home, in the school, and in the workplace as well as in the multiple organizations, both governmental and social, based on several cultural templates that have lingered as tradition, heritage, convention and normalcy. Clearly, the privatizing of sin endorses, sustains and isolates the public, conventional society, even if such enmeshment is never mentioned publicly.

Laws, including criminal laws, are written to depict individual acts for which specific charges, convictions and punishments, are detailed. Patients, in the medical offices and hospitals, too, are considered through the perceptual lens of the ‘body’ and the ‘mind’ and the ‘spirit’ or ‘psyche’ of the individual. Contextually, medical case histories will ask about whether family members have exhibited similar symptoms or illnesses, as a way to ascertain whether or not there might be a genetic relationship. Businesses, including entrepreneurships, are operated by hierarchies of power and authority, within which, the performance of each individual is scored, ranked, rewarded and/or sanctioned, as determined by corporate policy and practice. In the U.S. a law has been passed that defines the corporation, for legal purposes, as equivalent to an individual person.

Congruent with this organizational structure, (and theological/moral/ethical model) of sustaining social order, only individuals are culpable, and even if the organization is proven corrupt, the legal process operates under the premise that it too is an individual person. The operating template on which practically all interactions, engagements, contracts, and transactions are judged is a function of the interaction of individuals and fault, expressed as sin and immorality, is considered obsessively and compulsively as the magnetic focus.

Even a political policy that is resisted by a group of citizens is invariably identified with the name of the individual who proposed it. The idea may have been the shared opinion of a group of cabinet members, or a corporate board, in the case of the corporation, and yet, the ‘individual’ on whose name the policy ‘hangs’ is about to be judged, favourably or not, depending on what is perceived to be the relative ‘success’ of the policy.

Sociology and social psychology are interested in the anatomy and the physiology of groups, and conduct studies in order to better inform decision makers in both government and corporations as to whether a planned proposal might be well received or not. As consumers, we monitor the story and timeline of a government, for example, as part of our calculations when considering whether or not to vote for them next time.

Nevertheless, fundamental questions of church dogmatic teaching, for example, on birth control, or abortion, or celibate clergy, or female ordinations, or divorce and remarriage, or LGBTQ+ clergy, or even membership and access to the eucharist, while the subject of ecclesial debate, remain fixed in traditional church teachings, on the arguably tenuous strength of literal biblical injunctions and exegesis. Each Christian church denomination has struggled with many of these public and social issues, some of them to their ultimate division and demise.

Privatizing sin, however, does not really acknowledge the larger problem of the problem of evil, as depicted in the apparent incompatibility of a belief in a loving, forgiving God and the existence of so much obvious and unending and imponderable evil everywhere. Flawed human beings, especially, as former President Biden frequently opinion, ‘compared with the Almighty’ (“Compare me with my opponent not with the Almighty!”), includes each of us. And the Judeo-Christian embedded archetype of the original sin, and the Fall of Adam and Eve, hang over everyone since. (We have already noted the role of Augustine in how this archetype has been seeded and flourished in the last two millenia.)

With ‘free will’ as posited by much Christian theology, the separation of God from nature including human nature is assumed.

And yet, whether or not we all , not only Christians or Buddhists, or Muslims, or Jews, or ostensibly of no specific faith community, acknowledge it, there is a kind of universal ‘consciousness’ of what some call our ‘better angels’ and, conversely, an intimate knowledge of what some call our ‘darker angels’…..and most of us acknowledge a divided self, detailed in Romans 15: What I want to do I do not, but what I hate I do.

The theologians are far better equipped than this scribe to wrestle with the ‘problem of a perceived incongruity between a loving and forgiving God and the depth and range of evil in the world.

Here, our focus is on what and how an individual is conceptualizing, internalizing and integrating the authority of God, in his or her personal life, and whether, the cultural ‘thumb on the scale’ in favour of ‘privatized sin’ is not, paradoxically, and tragically, a contributing factor in the prevalence of evil acts. On a literal level, the notion of free will, central to the Christian perception of a relation to God, seems to be the faith community’s way of separating God from the evil that men (all humans) commingt. On an unconscious level, on the other hand, even if we believe that we are free, autonomous and self-regulating individuals, ‘in charge of our lives and the choices we make,’ nevertheless, however we might wish to orient ourselves to it, the truth is that Paul’s words, Romans 15: What I want to do I do not, but what I hate I do, have universal application.

 Each of us rides on the edge of a cliff, between want to do, and hate to do, and find that they often merge into situations for which explanations we seek in vain. Any striving for exclusive and unequivocal and final separation between the two, is a recipe for disaster, although the church experiences to which I have been subjected, have never ventured into that field fraught with underbrush, thorns, paradoxes, ironies and incompatibilities. Indeed, preaching and teaching the ‘either-or’ of ‘free will dedicated to God’s will, or narcissistically deferring to self-indulgence, and failing to openly embrace doubt, paradox, uncertainty, is, by definition, a reductionistic portrayal of any human existence, whether one searches for God or not.

For centuries, humans have searched for, articulated some conceptually, and deferred from, any attempt to link God and man, as inherently related, occupying the same psychic, spiritual, intellectual and emotional terrain. The notion of a creator as ‘watchmaker’ who/which/that created the watch, human existence, and then left it to run on its own course, has had salience in some circles. Not so here.

The notion of trying to imagine the ‘mind of God’ has occupied generations of men and women, of all faiths, and, in this aspect, the Jews have adopted what seems to be a highly worthy, humble, and tolerable approach (not only ethically and morally) but also cosmically, and metaphysically, that humans can never ‘know’ the mind of God….

Here are the words of a Jewish Rabbi, Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, from ReformJudaism.org:

Often I am asked, Rabbi, how do I connect with God?” And I have long struggled with my answer. The obvious place to begin is with personal or communal prayer, but I have come to realize that, for many seekers, prayer is too alien even to contemplate.

And so, I suggest: Begin with a new openness to the world around you. Reawaken your capacity for wonderment. Makw room for the sense of awe you felt as a child when you first beheld the beauty and the mystery of the natural world. These are Divine sparks. Allow yourself to experience them….Turn next to the sacred texts of our tradition. In carefully studying how others navigated this course, you can find reassurance, inspiration and guidance. Remember too that God is not only a noun but a verb-not only a presence but a process. We may not know precisely what God is, but our tradition clearly tells us what God does: heals the sick, clothes the naked, houses the homeless, and pursues peace…..Finally I encourage you to experiment with religious rituals, including those you may have discarded. Rituals help us cultivate a sense of the sacred within ourselves and in our midst. Rituals are also instrument of sacred reenactment, a means for us to relive momentous encounters with God—the Exodus, the revelation at Sinai—that shaped our people’s religious lives.

From mkgandhi.org, we read the great man’s words:

In a piece entitled Truth is God:

There is an indefinable mysterious presence that pervades everything. I feel it, though I do not see it. It is the unseen Power which makes itself felt and yet defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive through my senses. It transcends the senses. But it is possible to reason out the existence of God to a limited extent. I do dimly perceive that whilst everything around me is ever changing, ever-dying, there is underlying all that change a Living Power that is changeless, that holds all together, that creates, dissolves, and recreates. That informing Power or Spirit is God. And since nothing else I see merely through the senses can or will persist, He alone is. And is this Power benevolent or malevolent? I see it as purely benevolent. For I can see, that in the midst of death life persists, in the midst of untruth truth persists, in the midst of darkness, light persists. Hence I gather that God is Life, Truth, Light. He is Love. He is the Supreme Good. I confess …that I have no argument to convince…. Through… reason, Faith transcends reason. All I can advise…is not to attempt the impossible. I cannot account for the existence of evil by any rational method. To want to do so is to be co-equal with God. I am, therefore, to recognize evil as such, and I call God long0suffering and patient precisely because He permits evil in the world. I know that He has no evil in Him and yet, if there is evil, He is the author of it and yet untouched by it.

To be continued……