No Hell and No Explanation

In my last post I wrote:

In its most childish renditions (renditions that are, incidentally, forced all too often on children), Genesis is treated as a collection of "Just So" stories.  The predominant puerile constructions of God's intent in Genesis would be bad enough in themselves, but they are most pernicious in that they seem merely to be lacking in form, when really they are lacking in veracity.  The Creation Story does not answer questions about "Why?", yet its verses are treated by conventional Christianity so that its instances of descriptions are as miniscule bricks swamped in a seeping mortar of injected moral pontifications.

Near the end of the Genesis narrative that I covered (the "First Story" of Creation), I offered the notion that the plant world was created initially as a free-standing described entity, and only later given to humanity (and the rest of the "animal" world) for sustenance.  The animal kingdom fell upon the plant kingdom, and any notion of this happenstance as being in accord with God's sovereign will is admittedly sound, but so also is it a sound observation that the template has been set for domination and exploitation--the opportunity and the propensity for unwholesome or disproportionate behavior being established, though this potential had not (to any degree appreciable to us) been displayed.

And then the "Second Story" of Creation is set in motion with a man created from the dust, rendered into a "living soul," and placed in a newly-planted garden (which arrived, apparently, with all the rest of Earth's vegetation.)  Adam is directed "to dress it and to keep it."  Adam is so disposed so as to prompt God to say, "It is not good that the man should be alone"--while yet Adam is spared any travail such as we might lament (or even, it must be imagined, such as we might notice), and Adam is in such proximity to his Creator as to be unsurprised that God would walk abroad in the garden "in the cool of the day."

In short, this preface to the episode in which the man is presented with a procession of potential "help-meets" is not a description (or even a prelude to a description) of "why" humanity's moral state is such as it is.  Rather, this initial "dress and keep and be revealed as deficient for being 'alone'" episode is manifestly a quintessential rendering of sinful proclivity arising from an imperceptible beginning to a state of full-blown alienation from God.  The "why" of this moral decline is not explained, but the very fact that humans insist on being supplied with a thumping "why" has led to centuries of commentators looking straight at the evidence I have just presented, and arriving at the notion that Adam in his imperious posturings can be reckoned free of the inklings of shame, free of the stirrings of sin.

I referred in the previous post to the Genesis story as lacking in references to "why's" of Creation attributable merely to God's sovereign will.  "Why's" arrive indeed in Genesis, but they are not representations or explanations of God's reasoning behind his creation of imperfect humanity--or of imperfect (remember, only "very good") Creation itself.  If Adam's flawed relationship with Eve is taken, in whole or in part, as the occasion for the pivotal, "apple"-eating sin of Adam, it must be remembered that the outfitting of Adam with a wife was not original to the Creation, but was undeniably a corrective to the man's deficiencies.  God's sovereign will was displayed in his provision of Eve to Adam, but Adam's needy proclivities (arising as imperceptibly yet as definitively as a narrative might relate) are beyond any human finding-out.  Most importantly--centuries of commentators' cant notwithstanding--this mystery of humanity's moral imperfection is withheld from any of humanity's beseechings, and this mystery frustrates all of the theologians' postulations.

Our moral state--lamentable such as it is--is such as it is because it is such as it is.  Our moral state is such as Genesis describes it--and the text will stand for no other probings.  Adam is ashamed of his nakedness because he is ashamed of his nakedness.  The notion that Adam has never felt shame before (because he had been hitherto "sinless") is a conceit of the preachers--Adam who (in the preachers' idyllic imaginings) had known only peace and contentment (such as would befit the "sinless") was apparently keenly aware of the notion of fear.  It is a convenient conceit to contend that he had never known shame before.

Only a face-value reception of the text can guide us through what it is intended to teach us, and the "why's" of any of God's sovereign acts are the last and least likely things to be imparted to us.  The cynics have asked for millennia "why" Adam was not killed along with Eve upon eating of the Tree.  God asks where the cowering Adam is.  The cowering Adam responds.  God does not have to drag Adam out of the bushes.  There!  There is reason enough for God, if he wills, to show mercy to Adam--is there any "Bible" notion, or indeed any cause upon Earth or in the Heaven we imagine, that can gainsay such a straightforward conclusion?

Such would be a most reasonable explanation of why God would show mercy to one of his errant children, and all of his mortal children would be expected to be to some degree errant.  The only reason why the skeptics' rejoinder, "Why didn't Adam and Eve die that very day?" (asked with the gleeful subtext of a truthful Satan and a lying God) is a rejoinder difficult for the theologians is because the theologians have pre-loaded the "Fall" story with the weight of explaining humanity's moral arrears before God.  As if being not God was not enough to render any entity deficient--explanations are none of our business.

And so now, at last, having confronted the "Fall" story, are we to be confronted with the "why's" (or the "because's") of humanity's moral state?  The "serpent" was hit with a "Because thou hast done this," but the serpent is scarcely to have been thought "sinless" before (though the only Genesis record we have of his depravity is his mutual sin-party with Eve, defaming God.)  Eve, "the woman," was hit with painful childbirth and, apparently, a heightened and potentially-contentious relationship with the presumptuous fellow she had been presumptuously hitched with--but Eve heard from God no "because."  Adam heard a "because," but not a "because you ate" charge in itself--rather, Adam had to stand there in shame and be told "because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife," the wife that he required in his earthly attachments and the wife for which he now blamed God.

All in all, the Tree Episode is a sad story, but it scarcely explains anything.  Adam had no reasonable expectation of immortality at any rate--and if the punishment for being "sinful" (absent any manner of redemption) was what the theologians call the mortality of the soul--eternal damnation--there is no hint of such a threatened end in the Eden story.  The churches look to Eden to explain why people go to hell--and Eden has no hell and no explanation.

No Answers About Why

I am wondering what sort of response I might get to asking some statistically-significant sampling of humanity whether or not the story of "the Beginning" to "the Flood" in Genesis explains why we are in the moral condition that characterizes us.  I might expect that many people would simply discount Genesis, and that many others would treat it lightly, but I would expect as well that--among "believers"--the thrust of an affirmative estimation of Genesis would include the notion that "of course" the first chapters of the Bible explain "why" we are in such moral condition as we are.

Of course, I am going to say that Genesis does not explain the "why's" of our moral condition.

Genesis does not say why we were created--or, really, why anything was created (if the matter of God's sovereign will alone is what concerns us.)  Genesis does not say why Creation in general was started--it was simply started.  We can say that God created the light that was "good" so that he might ascertain whether or not it was good, but it can scarcely be posited that we are told as much because the matter was ever in doubt--or that we are being invited to bestow our affirmation on God for doing what God set out to do.

We can say that we are being told "why" God made the firmament ("to divide the waters from the waters"), but we are not being told why God made the water-firmament-water assemblage in the first place.  We are told that God made "lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night . . . . and to divide the light from the darkness."  This seems at last to be a description of an instance of "why" some things were created, including the function of the "lights"--"the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night"--though their described function "to divide the light from the darkness" would seem to be rather redundant, since God himself had "divided the light from the darkness" three days earlier.

Clearly, the descriptions of Creation's progress are meant to be evocative rather than explanatory.  The notion that Genesis "explains" humanity's moral state folds in upon itself as we examine the text.  For example, the moral framework of a purported "why" of our species' role in Creation ("have dominion . . . over all the earth") would seem to describe a "purpose" for humanity, but this dominion-role would not be necessary if Adam and Eve had behaved aright.  We were created--if our conscientious application of human logic has anything to say about it--not to rule over Creation, but to preserve a state in which Creation did not need to be ruled.

And--in a manner which defies clean explanation (as often we will see)--God does not even tell the humans and the animals that the plants were made for their sustenance.  Rather, the creeping and walking and flying creatures are told that the plants and their fruit are being given to them.  Already, a less-than-exalted (if not outright shameful) looming of creature's appetites over the rest of Creation is being illustrated.

And then, as if to cap off the whole matter in the (first) story of Creation, we are told that God rested after the first six days of activity.  Let it not be said, of course, that God rested "because" he had done work--work that is really not done for any humanly-appreciable "why's."  In its most childish renditions (renditions that are, incidentally, forced all too often on children), Genesis is treated as a collection of "Just So" stories.  The predominant puerile constructions of God's intent in Genesis would be bad enough in themselves, but they are most pernicious in that they seem merely to be lacking in form, when really they are lacking in veracity.  The Creation Story does not answer questions about "Why?", yet its verses are treated by conventional Christianity so that its instances of descriptions are as miniscule bricks swamped in a seeping mortar of injected moral pontifications.

The Evil of Problems

I am fascinated (perhaps unduly so) by a certain sardonic take on the First Cause Argument.  The religionist accords for a moment with the materialist by considering as a given the ostensibly materialist contention that everything in observable existence has a what the materialist would call a cause (and one or more effects, but I will dwell on that later.)  If the religionist can disarm the materialist by joining in the conceit that everything in observable existence has a material cause, then the religionist has set the stage for the contention that there must have been a First Cause for everything--that First Cause being, of course, God.

Unfortunately for the religionist's "cause," there is latent within the above argument a cavity of erosion effective against any recognizable religion being the province of said God.  The "God" "proven" by the First Cause Argument--a God who is always somehow beyond question that of the religionist's choosing--is of fantastic irrelevance both to human existence and to the argument itself, since the argument by its very logic has excluded anything but material cause for any observable (and, most importantly, any expectedly observable) phenomena.  Let any God so "proven" to exist ever perform a miracle, and the whole argument breaks down.

Plainly then (as would ever be expected of the mental lives of real people) the "everything has a cause" notion is neither logical nor scientific--it is experiential.  People see something happen, and they look for a cause.  People look for things to begin, and they look for things to end--which is only awkwardly connected to the preceding sentence, which would seem to disallow any neat notion of where one phenomenon leaves off, and another takes over.  And all of this can be tangled up into notions of existence "taking over" from an ostensible pre-existence of contemplation in the mind of a Maker, and of an existence "leaving off" at some conjectured point of dissolution or stillness.

It is at this juncture that I feel the need to introduce the idea of our fitful race viewing our universe as a tapestry of interwoven images of cause and effect stretched over an infinity of time.  And the "playing out" of the whole thing is crucial, for--no matter the recurring conceits of ancients and moderns about the earth as always existing--our everyday life is replete with examples of the stored energy of our lively surroundings being depleted into disorder and only partially useful heat.  That is what we know as human beings--causes and effects winding down (albeit with plateaus and intermittent resurgences) toward a palpable end.

I must inquire, then, how the First Cause Argument fares when the opposite end--the winding down of the effects of causes--asserts itself after all.  Here, of course, our real-life understandings are either dwarfed by a universe of wonderings, or are shouldered aside by a jostling company of unprovable physicists' theories.  An argument about the existence of a divinity, or perhaps more properly about the existence of physical states ostensibly comporting with the existence of a divinity, can scarcely prevail when physical states might be postulated (and might be as likely as anything else) that defy our recourse to the comforting touchstones of our everyday experience.  Here, at the opposite-end, "winding-down" aspect of a conjectured universe, we are confronted by the frustrating possibility that existence might both "end" and "never end."

The universe might cool and cool, and slow and slow--forever.  The universe might wind down and wind down--and never stop.  Never stop, that is, slowing down so that each passing moment involves motion so much less--while yet it traverses a lesser-still fragment of the possible remainder--so as to never end.  The analogy here is to the school-days idea of the asymptote--the intellectually-conjured limit of some perpetual equation that will only approach, and never reach, that limit.  Why ought not the universe--if overseen by some deity who would so please--persist that way forever?

Why ought not the story of the universe--the story of burgeoning scope of progressively unconcentrated energy--be analogous to the school-days representation of the positive graph-quarter of y equals one divided by x, the curve that falls, as the value of x increases, from the un-chartable heights of the left-hand near where x is zero, and that seems to flatten out to become a y-value of zero as x increases until it falls off the edge of the page?  Of course, just as the flattening-out of the curve toward the right never reaches zero (our analogy of the universe petering out), so also is there never a conceivable limit of height on the left of the graph (where we might imagine--or pretend we can imagine--an infinity of energy density in some primordial, dimensionless concentration.)

Who can say that the motion of a winding-down universe would ever stop, and--most importantly for the First Cause notion--who can say that the conjectured infinity of energy in any point-source (traveling, as our imagination allows us, backwards) has not involved a more-and-more near-infinity across time fragments that grow progressively smaller as against any given degree of energy concentration?  As any of the math teachers of our school days might tell us, the familiar visual curve of the preceding illustration can be preserved with any value of x, even if x (which, near zero, would constitute our idea of time near zero) so long as we stretch or compress the y-axis as we please.

In short, we can think of our universe as having existed forever, or as having started some-when.  We can think of our universe as going on forever, or as being fated to stop.  What is most important, and as I have tried awkwardly to illustrate, is the fact that the malleability of proportion--the drawing of any curve, the charting of any graph--is the one province of our Creator that he can never be denied, even as we tell ourselves that our undeniably merciful God will in turn not deny us the opportunity to assess our surroundings and so to attempt to navigate ourselves aright.  These things we can do, whether our attempts--rightly understood by us as "designs"--are for good or ill, or whether they are attempts to guide kingdoms in a world of usually-needless suffering, or attempts to guide tendrils in a garden of relative delight.

If God is as God is, the chasm of every moment, and of every stride's-length, between Adam and his Creator in the Garden was an abyss of detachment that--for all we can imagine--was but a hair's-breadth of difference from our separation from God.  We can say that the Garden was more good than ill, and that our lives on the outside are the opposite, but--as if we did not have trouble enough--we ought to choke on those very words.  Compared to communion with God, Adam's lot was a veritable hell on earth--or at least it would have been so, if Adam had not so shameless--and therefore all the more shamed--as to direct his attentions elsewhere than to his Creator.  Any of us, if possessed of the wish, can arrogate to themselves the claimed ability to inhabit the Garden forever without reaching for the tree, but I would not advise piling so unnecessary a sin upon any of our shame-ridden shoulders.

I have written elsewhere that our experiential lives are--or perhaps I should say, should be--characterized by futility and exhaustion.  That is really too optimistic.  Our lives are forays into failure that we will not recognize and retreats into repose that we do not deserve.   It is usually not as bad an experience as it sounds, but that is the rub.  Our reaching for the divine is always just beyond the immediacy of any experience we face, and the infinity of distance from us to the God who is always present for us is essentially the same whether we are in the throes of some great struggle, or we are in the mild amusement of trying to seek out--that is to say, to fit a design to--some delight of a momentary existence that beguiles us with notions of wholesomeness and positivity.

All that we make the subject of our capacity for design--whether quiet musings or great struggles--is what stands between us and God.  All of it must, in the course of a life, be worked around as we might, for this is but the first building-block of that impossible creation--the life-that-is-not-life that Jesus demands that we live.  This not-life is constructed without proportion, and it involves delights beyond proportion, and sufferings beyond proportion, and to experience any of it is a torment compared to the proffered experience of God.  In this we can see the ridiculousness of theodicy, that inane set of postulations about why God would create evil, when all that is not God is evil and drowns in evil.

The business of figuring things out is the worst of all, the very snake-spoken ponderings of Eden--the attempts to solve problems and address evils when all that is describable as lamentable is as nothing compared to alienation from God.  Evils like prating about the problem of evil when what bedevils us is the evil of problems, of figurings-out, of postulations about good and evil when all that surrounds us, when all that has ever surrounded humanity, is evil. 

The only possibility of describing something that is not God as being other than evil is when that thing is tumbling unmoored through the ravages of a looming existence.  We might envy the stones that are lashed by the elements, and we might hope and strain for the experience of the pilgrim--as each of us might be in rare seasons--struggling for the sake of struggling in search of God.  In such a state we know not what to puzzle out, and we might ask for the designs of God to be imposed on us, and for all of our attempts to understand to be frustrated--else we grasp at our own designs.

Thread of the Eden Story

Every story begins somewhere, at some time.  The primal “story” of the Bible--that of the original Creation--begins somewhere, at some time.  It is a perennial curiosity, that the “In the Beginning” story does not really begin at the “beginning” (before anything was created), but begins rather in a pre-existing chaos of indisputably existing elements.

It is of some salience to metaphysicians, to say that God equals existence, but even that stab at timelessness and indefinable location is of limited application to a story of “Creation” as a verb.  If something is to be described to us limited beings as “coming into existence,” then that something itself must be seen as intruding into some pre-existing though perhaps indescribable context.  There is no humanly-conceivable connection between “God as existence” and “this or that finite thing ‘came into’ existence.”

A chief element of my blog-writing hangs on the notion that the starting-point of a wholesome interpretation of the Bible is found in locating the proper starting-point of the moral tension between humans and God.  The chief element of humanity’s moral quandary, as reflected in this blog’s title “Shame Appears,” is shame.  Shame, not sin.  I maintain—if we are to reckon in prudence that the Creation story presumes a context, and must arise therefore in some collection of described elements (whether those elements be the void and the roiling waters, or the pre-Fall jostling of Adam’s will against that of his Creator)—that the story of humanity before The Great Sin of the Forbidden Fruit is really the collecting of the primordial elements from which can emerge the redemption narrative culminating in the Christ.  The great humanly-neglected element of the creation of our species is the effectual yet theologically-ignored starting-point notion of humanity as shameful creatures.

As I wrote in my previous post,

It is from the seed-beds of shame that we obtain the true values of faith.  The seed-beds are sown with our presumptions thrust at God, and what we reap is a bounty so great that we are--in lesser turn--knocked back with amazement at our undeserved fortune, and--in greater turn--liable to ignore the blessings of God, or to not even realize that we have received them.  This is the story of humanity, and the story is shown to us in the Scriptures in terms of the staggering arrogance with which we make great demands of God, and also in terms of the unaccountable gentleness and accommodation with which God responds.

And so it is incumbent upon me to perform the less-than-noble task of describing our first ancestor’s relationship with God as being tinged from the very (humanly-conceivable) start with strife between Adam and his Creator.  We cannot look upon the story with the eyes of God, and so we are left with two options.  Either we can contemplate the Eden story as incorporating some humanly-relatable described events involving Adam and then Adam-and-Eve, or we can reckon that the chaos of the void is no more daunting to interpretation than the chaos of a garden unlike any we can ever know in this life (or do we, who dare not presume upon the perfections of God, ascribe to ourselves the ability to understand anything perfect?)

This latter reckoning—that of a “Boom! Here it is!” appreciation of the “Fall” moment as being as logically-defensible as a “Boom! Here it is!” appreciation of Creation “starting” from a convulsing void—would permit the notion that Adam and Eve and all of us were “created” as the cowering, shamed wretches of the culturally-ensconced Expulsion from the Garden.  Perhaps we ought to consider that our prudent self-conception as shameful and sinful is as far back as we should go regarding interpretation, and this tack might serve at least to deflate our culture’s shameful thoroughly-un-Jesus-like fixation on the particulars of sin.

There is, however, probably more utility in considering the former reckoning above—the reckoning that there are humanly-relatable described events involving Adam and then Adam-and-Eve.  This involves the less-than-noble task I referred to above—the task of describing Adam’s relationship with God pre-Fall as being tinged with strife.  And, of course, “strife” between God and humanity must be understood in its most unyielding sense, with the very slightest of ungodly acts, thoughts, or motivations understood as nothing but grave.

For me, this is best illuminated by my unexpected realization that there is actually a question I would like to ask C. S. Lewis—though it would serve me right if Lewis had addressed this before.  Given the emphasis among Lewis and his crowd on friendship and gentlemanly behavior, I would if I could ask Lewis if he thought he would like Adam pre-Fall.

I, for my part, would have to consider the moral quality of Adam pre-Fall as an open question.  This is of no small concern to me, as I contend that (as I maintained above) the seed-beds of our shame are that into which we thrust our ungodly presumptions.  To be “ungodly,” such presumptions can be the most minute, yet surely they exist.  Did not Adam presume to disdain the other amazing creatures as being unsuitable as “help-meets” to him, and did not Adam presume to pronounce upon some particular (“bone of my bones” rather than bones-of-her-unique-own) as a source of his satisfaction with Eve—with Adam’s complete satisfaction being an arguable question?

The preachers never tire of proclaiming that the individual, mortal soul of Eve is as valuable and unique to God as that of Adam, and so we hear endlessly how she is more than Adam’s “help,” but rather how they are to be “helps” to each other.  Do we understand Adam to have practiced or offered any “help” to any creature in those perhaps-momentary trial periods?  We labor through life understanding that life requires (on pain of divine disapproval) positive contributions to all around us.  Yet do we have even a glimmer of a notion that Adam gave of himself in any way?  Is not the story of the Garden pre-Fall straightforwardly a story of God giving to Adam more, more, more, while Adam produces nothing in return.  It would be fatuous to imagine that the Garden really needed “dressing,” and it is apparent that the “design” aspect of Adam imposing himself thus upon Creation was merely the start of Adam attempting to work his existence into a burgeoning design of his own conceit.

Most importantly, if Eden pre-Fall is really a story of the origin of humanity, rather than a just a collection of elements that support a story that starts with the launching at the Fall of a bewildered, freshly-minted couple equipped from the start with sinfulness and shamefulness, then Adam and Eve were real people throughout.  It is of no value to describe Adam and Eve as “sinless,” when they were perfectly capable of telling themselves they could have scurrilous dalliances with the devil (for the “eating” did not have to happen necessarily, unless they were non-human humans.)  Or perhaps it would be more valuable—as I contend—to maintain that the concept merely of discrete “sin” was embedded in the fruit, while yet the first couple had known from their first and initially imperfect thoughts the shamefulness of all humanity.

Notions aside of Adam and Eve eventually transgressing some boundary of “sin,” it is plain that, from the start and throughout, our first ancestors shared with us our (as I said above) “staggering arrogance with which we make great demands of God”—and of course the least of such demands would be shameful.  It would seem impossible to arrive at a wholesome appreciation of the state of humanity without understanding shame as being the background of all of our earthly existence.  The path to obtaining that appreciation, however, must make its way through a wilderness of distractions strewn about us by our cultural fascination with the Fall.

An illustrative example would be found in a post from “Philosophical Journal” by Gary Lovan.  Among some very thoughtful observations, Lovan deals with the Eden story under rather standard presumptions about the Fall.  He refers to Benedict XVI in Einführung in das Christentum, by describing Benedict’s thesis so:

He argues that sin is not merely an individual act but a condition into which we are born. We enter a world already marked by what he sometimes calls a "network" or "web" of distorted relationships. Thus nobody begins from a morally neutral position. We are beneficiaries and victims of injustices we did not create and participants in systems we did not design.

One wonders, however, whether the initial reference to “sin” (and the implicit Fall) is necessarily connected intrinsically with the substance of the passage.  The Adam who was, by God’s observation, in a state of debilitation by being “alone,” was a creature in potential communion with his Creator.  Should not God have been enough?  Was not Adam in a state of moral alienation from his God when first we understand anything about Adam as a person?  Considering the moral burden upon Adam (and all of us) to translate the inestimable blessings of God into blessings we shed abroad, what can we conclude other than that the needy Adam was from the first in a state of “disordered relationships,” disordered in regard to God, to the world, to fellow creatures, to the mate whose value he reckoned according to his human and fallible sense of design?

Lovan offers also the notion that,

The Fall is not really about breaking a rule, I think. It is about a rupture in the relation between humanity, God, nature, other persons, and oneself. After the Fall, every good becomes mixed with domination, anxiety, exploitation, pride, and necessity.

Assuming that such admixture is less than godly even in its least extent, the ruptures in question need not wait until after “the Fall.”  Adam’s designs and pronouncements bespeak domination, his needy character and his apparent familiarity with fear indicate anxiety, his attitude to other creatures is tinged with exploitation, his looming assumptions about the role of Eve indicate pride, and he is from the very start a creature whose relationship with his Creator is characterized by the arising of necessity.  None of that needs a tree or a snake or a fall.

The writers to whom I referred have much of value to say about how our culture must deal with the quandaries in our lives illustrated by, among other things, the Eden story in Christianity.  This conventional story is about sin.  I maintain that the chief thing we need to deal with is the matter of shame, and I maintain that this is the first and most prevalent thread of the Eden story in Genesis.

Ashamed as We Ought

Abram married his half-sister.  Abram whored his half-sister out more than once.  Abram defended himself against the accusation of lying--fantastically, considering the circumstances--by maintaining that the wife he had pimped out as his sister was not merely his wife but also his "sister."

Jacob, a grandson of Abram (become Abraham), set himself off to the East, seeking refuge from his brother's wrath among the extended family of Abraham.  Jacob, on his way, declared his intention to accept the Lord of the Universe as his God if this God would look with favor on Jacob's journey.

It is a wonder that Jacob, in his transactional impiety, was not vaporized with a thunderbolt.  It is a wonder that his grandfather was not vaporized with a thunderbolt.  In the larger view, however, there was an episode --revolving around Isaac, who was Abraham's son and Jacob's father--that would seem to be more thunderbolt-worthy still.

This horrific episode curdles and bubbles in the very marrow of the "Judeo-Christian" consciousness--although the episode of which I speak has come down through the ages dressed up in a veritable wedding-gown of preacherly approbation.  In between Abraham's emergence from the East with his wife-sister in tow, and Jacob's twenty-year sojourn in that realm, was a visit by Abraham's most eminent servant to that eastern land of Aram in search of a wife for Isaac.

The logic of that wife-search--instigated by Abraham with seemingly no warrant from God--was for that venerable servant (usually held to be Eliezer of Damascus) to go to Abraham's kin in pursuit of a mate for Isaac.  As though there had not been in-breeding enough.

What is most striking is the fact that, though Abraham cannot bear the thought of Isaac marrying among the Canaanites, there is no warrant to assume that the only alternative source of a bride would be the family-clan in the East.  Abraham (at least when it mattered most, in warfare) was truly a king of kings.  Surely Abraham could have sent far and wide for a suitable wife for Isaac--even as Joseph years later was given a perfectly serviceable wife from among Egypt's priestly caste.

No, instead Abraham insisted on marrying a proto-Hebrew yet again with a close relative--a blood relative.  Abraham's household--in effect, his larger family--consisted presumably of numerous retainers, both capable and trustworthy (and able to sire daughters to Isaac's satisfaction), and the "sires" among Abraham's echelons were all circumcised.  Unavoidably, the insistence of the proto-Hebrew Abraham on a blood-match for Isaac carries the taint of proto-racism.

And so Abraham draws into his Holy Land orbit a daughter of the pagan family of Laban, this daughter (Rebecca) sharing presumably the idol-toting proclivities of her clan--a clan shot through with deviousness, polygamy, strife, and a fixation on worldly gain.  In the course of time, it becomes difficult to say which vaunted patriarch (Abraham or Isaac) is most disgraced by Rebecca's horrid maneuverings in the service of her favored son, Jacob.  In this context the urge-driven, unfavored Esau, with his straightforward though unelevated motivations, seems almost heroic--and we are not deprived later of seeing Esau greet in manly fashion his itinerant, cringing brother Jacob.

These are the sort of scriptural episodes that I will marshal to the notion that shame is the great unplumbed cavern at the center of Christian thought.  It would be difficult to say that definite, definable sin is at the root of any of this (and more difficult to say that we sinful types are in any position to so pronounce), and neither would it make sense to speak of "remorse."  How are we to be remorseful for events three or four thousand years ago?  Yet, as for "shame"--is not the element of shame as lively as ever, regardless of who commits acts, or when, if we are connected at all with larger humanity?  Or if we will connect ourselves to belief systems that insist on dragging themselves endlessly (and with undiminished immediacy) through circumstances that will bring shame to any enlivened conscience?

The "Judeo-Christian" heritage finds such true life as it does in shame.  Shame is what pulls the treasures of faith traditions out of the inevitable dross that coats any humanly-appreciated notions of belief.  Indeed, the very application of any "Judeo-Christian" sensibility entails of necessity the shame of unwarranted assumptions and unmet obligations.  The notion of an unbroken, uncomplicated heritage of belief since Eden?  It would be correctly called "Hebrew-Christian," confining as it does the Jewish contribution to the Old Testament and the ostensible prophecies of the coming Christ.

The notions of the triumphs of God's people, and the preoccupation with the End Times?  Herein it would be proper to speak of "Israeli-Christian."  But as to "Judeo-Christian," understood as the undeniably disjointed corpus of unsparing thought and time-battered considerations confronted by people of conscience?  Such can only be thought through with shame, and lived through with shame.

It is from the seed-beds of shame that we obtain the true values of faith.  The seed-beds are sown with our presumptions thrust at God, and what we reap is a bounty so great that we are--in lesser turn--knocked back with amazement at our undeserved fortune, and--in greater turn--liable to ignore the blessings of God, or to not even realize that we have received them.  This is the story of humanity, and the story is shown to us in the Scriptures in terms of the staggering arrogance with which we make great demands of God, and also in terms of the unaccountable gentleness and accommodation with which God responds.  We can try to be as thankful as we should, but first we must try to be as ashamed as we ought.

Gifts to All Else

I need to find some sort of relevance--if indeed such relevance exists--in my "Shame Appears" approach to the teachings of Jesus.  Just about everything I have written finds it foundation in the original or near-original experiences of humanity, whether the "humanity" in question is the entire species personified in the first man Adam, or whether that "humanity" is the universalized experience-capacity that we all possess--at least in the newborn state, and then (hopefully) later on.

"Roused, Readied, Reaped" is the shell of our experience-lives, lived as they are through countless, overlapping arcs of our callings-forth to the challenges of our existences.  "Aware, Away, Awry" is the marrow of our experience-lives, each pulsing within us as graspings of our circumstances and--inevitably--twistings by us of what we ought to do into what we deem proper to do.

By the phrase "deem proper to do" I mean to draw as closely as I can to what I think is the true lesson about humanity's woeful behaviors, behaviors which--if examined at all--result in a state in which "Shame Appears," and moreover result in the conclusion that shame is the foundation-stone of our perceived alienation from God.  Shame, as I have written, is the precursor to sinfulness, and shame is also the result of sinfulness.

That shame would seem to be properly always the result of sin, rather than ever the precursor to sin, is a misconception (or perhaps I might say, "disorientation") that comes in the Western World in a twin denial, firstly, of the indisputable fact that the infant learns first of having done something wrong (as a prerequisite of learning right from wrong) and experiences therefore shame before guilt, and, secondly, that the priority of shame is implicit in the Eden story, with its description of "knowing good and evil" as a result of shameful behavior preceding sinful behavior--though then as ever it would behoove us limited creatures to conceive of a spectrum of shame leading into sinfulness.

That sinfulness leads to still more shame (or, more ominously, to a state of acquired shamelessness) is a rolling convolution of snowballing burdens upon each person's soul.  This is the moral outworking of each person's tumbling experience-life--as would be expected without surprise for us imperfect creatures.  What is all the more lamentable (and which we see all around us in humanity's jostling and inflexible contentions about "right and wrong") is the fact that our refusal to understand shame as the foundation of our experience-lives is a concomitant refusal to scrape away in simple prudence our conceits about what I foreshadowed above, that is, our conceits about what we can "deem proper to do."

Adam had the God of the universe at hand, and Adam chose instead to put his hand to imposing--in hideous imitation of God--design upon the universe.  This was Adam from the start, and this is us from the start.  The "tree" episode came later, and it occurs over and over for us, as we squirm ever away from falling Eden-like--or Gethsemane-like--in the dust of our creation, and we seek instead to shake off the shame of our original inadequacy and substitute for it our conceits of morality, our conceits for which we will sin ever more vigorously, and ever more shamelessly.

We choose not to understand sin, just as we choose to ignore the genesis of sin in shame.  Adam was given a world to which he might give himself--a world to which he might lay claim thereby in gentleness and self-abnegation.  Jesus taught us the same thing, telling us that more fields and houses and communities and relationships than we could count would fall into our possession merely at the giving-over of our lives.  We need only embrace the shame of our inadequacy before the Creator God.

The sin that exacerbates our alienation from God is the sin of withholding ourselves from the panorama of the God-is-behind-the-miracle-of existence miracle.  Instead the preachers want to tell us that our sin is originally one of pride, or that our sin is rooted most basically in our yielding to the temptations of world, flesh, and devil.  If we remember our shame--the simple and undeniable shame of being less than God--then we can understand sin correctly.  Sin at base is not pride, nor is it weakness before temptation.  Sin at base is us presuming upon the design of Creation, and reckoning therefore that we can hold out our hands to the plumping, seemingly proffered benefits that align with our conceits, while simultaneously we can ignore or swat aside those elements of Creation that we reckon of less concern.  Perhaps needless to say, this "ignoring or swatting aside" is exacerbated by our ample opportunities to say our means are limited, and our attentions are overburdened.

Adam did not rejoice in that he was bone of Eve's bone, or flesh of Eve's flesh.  Adam did not rejoice in what he could give Eve (nor in what companionship--instead of just names--he could give his fellow creatures), Adam just rejoiced in the benevolence at hand, and disregarded shamelessly what benevolence he himself might bestow.  Adam did not rejoice in the fact that all of humanity would be of one flesh.  The first description of human relationships--relationships occasioned by the fact that Adam would be satisfied neither with his God nor with his God's Creation--is presented as the sundering of some bonds in favor of others.  The preachers, in their insipid cant about The Institution of the Covenant of Marriage, act like it was some good thing--while yet there was neither occasion nor need for humans to think of copulations or incest or aging generations--that some persons would be preferentially related to some few others.  One would think that the anti-family agitator from Nazareth had never arrived.

This is the great shame of sin, the great shame that precedes and spawns sin.  We do not stand shaking our defiant fists at God, and we do not cast ourselves lustfully at the temptations of the world--at least, these descriptions are fit only for the extremes of depravation, and they are branded by the world as being all the more "shameful" precisely because the world has no use for shame as the tool and explanation that properly it is.  What we do most usually when we sin, and what we do almost without exception in our first formative years, is put out our hands to receive from a world of more or less great generosity.  We might become jaded, and we might reckon the world to be the less generous as our growing, adult-approaching existence is thrust upon us (quite often too soon), but we would never be able to grow to adult responsibility without having known the provisions of God's Creation.

And so the defiant fist thrust at God, or the rapacious hand grasping at ill-gotten goods or pleasures, are metaphors that--no matter how convenient they are for the preachers--do not explain the moral difficulties that entwine us characteristically in our lives.  For much, too much, of our lives, we know of an existence that is passably generous to us, and for which we are passably thankful.  Only when our experiences of such at worst indifferent satisfaction are threatened do we become defiant or rapacious.  Deprived, however, of a healthy understanding of shame--shame as the state of the created being, shame as the indispensable, whispering caution against our seemingly sober and pious gratitude for designs that we, without warrant, attribute to God--we waste great lifetimes that otherwise we might devote to the teachings of Jesus in their true substance.

I have tried to probe these ideas in my blogs, faint and embarrassing though they are.  Roused, Readied, Reaped--to be cast into persistent, overlapping cycles and arcs of experience and effort that serve as much by collapsing into futility and exhaustion as anything else.  Aware, Away, Awry--to become cognizant of issues, to try to do something about them, and in the process to construct those issues incorrectly, and to address them more incorrectly still.  And then Shame Appears--shame that, if it be not the first gift of God, is undeniably--upon reflection--an absolute necessity in that it reminds us that the gifting we received first from God is expressible by us in presenting ourselves as gifts to all else.

Our Smoky and Devouring Flame

I have written about how concepts in themselves are shameful things.  For all that "concepts" can encapsulate what little we can know about reality, and for all that the creation and promulgation of concepts can represent the best we can do about thinking and speaking truth--still "concepts" are but pieces of reality.  A pure and comprehensive representation of reality is the only pure and comprehensive representation of reality, and is therefore the only truth.  God only knows the truth.

Additionally, we can never address concepts without tainting them with our impure predispositions.  We do not really know the truth, we cannot really express the truth, and we cannot do either without behaving, thinking, feeling, or reacting other than how we should.  This is what it is to be not God, and to be not God is a shameful thing.  We might call such a judgment unfair, and yet the actualized "we" who would be thus in operation would be an imperfect "we."  We might as well accept the fact that, while "sin" might be too strong a word to describe our original inadequacy (especially as "sin" is described usually in terms of some discrete offense), nonetheless shame--even if infinitesimal beyond our grasp of "smallness"--is ever present in us.

When we entertain concepts we behave shamefully, even if this source of shame is the frustration we feel in finding ourselves less than perfect in thus addressing the subjects of thought--and even if this frustration is what we can find in some way laudable insofar as it goads us to further explorations.  Similar to this is the frustration (and perhaps innumerable other less-than-perfect mental states) involved in meditating upon things we think we know, or upon puzzles we think we can crack.

Such shameful imperfection trails behind us in everything we have done and experienced in life.  Concepts (and meditations thereon), and impressions, and inklings, and feelings, and responses, and urges--all of the elements of our experience-lives burrowing back into the unremembered depths of our existences from the first--are in some manner shameful.  Only the inestimable and unrecoverable mystery of our origin might claim to be free of shame, and the very collecting-together of a consciousness by which to claim innocence would extinguish by its imperfect assembly any vestige of that claim.

The teaching from Jesus, to become like the little child, is instructive rather than directive.  We cannot become like the little child, in some comforting sacerdotal or declarative sense, any more than we can possess faith in that immeasurably small way that by Jesus' definition would be immeasurably powerful.  We can only reckon, when considering the "little child" directive, that we must consider ourselves as unmoored from our lost birthright as innocent children as we are unmoored from our contentions that we understand reality or our place in reality.  Jesus, when he directed Nicodemus to be "born again," did not provide him with a new parentage--Jesus told Nicodemus that he did not even understand the earthly things of which Jesus spoke, to say nothing of heavenly things.  We, as Nicodemus, are not properly-oriented children of the earth, and we are not properly-oriented children of heaven--we are shameful creatures given as our true patrimony continual life-chances to cry out in our shame.

Of course, to live a life and to "cry out in our shame" is really to live out that cry in innumerable fashions and in every possible instance.  We will always make something shameful of every fashion and instance--for such it is to be human, and the living with and processing of shame is what we must do beyond everything else.  From the ground up, from first infantile urges to the most rarified of meditations, we must live with shame, for that is the only way to live.  When told, "Go and learn what this means, I require mercy and not sacrifice," we are set upon a course of assimilation of that idea that is a course dragged inevitably through the dross of our shameful natures.  When the young man responds correctly to the notion that God values mercy over sacrifice, the young man can be no closer than not far from the kingdom of heaven--for shame will always (as we might understand the matter) stand in our way.

And, as I have written, shame and not sin is what bedeviled our first ancestor from the start--shame arising from the insensible, rather than sin describable as this or that act.  This is the story of Genesis, and this is the story that finds its resolution in the Passion of Christ.  The redemptive history of humanity did not begin with The Fall and the ejection from the Garden, any more than our possibility of redemption was consummated in the shadows of Gethsemane.  This is an important point, for nothing shows better how off-kilter is the course of conventional Christianity than the commentators' fascination with the two Gardens.

Adam did not arise in a Garden, and Jesus did not die in a Garden.  Adam arose from among soil and rock, as Jesus died on a patch of earth that was not permitted to bring forth life.  Adam was given a garden to tend--a garden given by a God who saw Adam as a creature of need--and Jesus was torn from the garden of his petitions to God.  Adam was set to bending the boughs of Eden to his fancies of design, and Jesus was hung on a twisted tree designed for the essence of torment.  Adam was given other human beings to keep him company, and Jesus saw the company of his followers disperse in shame and despair.

Adam, before ever he could speak it or conceptualize it, had his incomplete, needy, and shameful nature seen by God and addressed.  Jesus, after all else he had done to reach out across the chasm between God and the shameful Creatures Who Are Not God, cried out more acutely than ever we might, in the pain of our pain and the shame of our shame--and in our absolute inability to understand alienation from our Creator as different from abandonment by our Creator.

We were shameful from the first, and we will be shameful to the last.  This is really no more dismal than the theologians' assertions that we of the post-"Fall" race are originally sinful, and that we of the post-"Fall" race will carry sinfulness to our graves.  Shame, however, must be lived with, while sin--as the innumerable "salvation economies" make implicit--can be bought, or sold, or wiped clean from this or that conceptualized slate.  The "sin" conceptuality makes a shadow-play of Scripture's descriptions of humanity's ill-adjustment to existence from the start, and substitutes between Redemption's incomprehensible beginning and Redemption's incomprehensible end a devised drama of sin as committed and conquered.  Spread out the full scope of Jesus' story concerning us, however, and it becomes plain that our alienation from God began before ever humanity was aware of it, and the end of our alienation from God awaits a moment when our smoky and devouring flame of life is extinguished.