When God Demands All

One of the persistent aspects of scriptural analysis is the recurrent phenomenon of layered implications of a passage obscuring each other.  One might easily say of some scripture--even though it be thought generally to be simple and foundational--that "I don't know where to begin."  In this post I am concerned particularly with the ostensible proof of (or at least evidence of) God's existence in Romans (1:18-20).

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them.  For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse . . . 

This passage has been rejected persistently by humanists on the rather solid ground that an inherent illogic is present in extrapolating from the limited to the unlimited.  The existence of Creation, even if it be held to be "created"--which is a gratuitous concession from the humanist stance--does not necessitate the existence of a perfect creator.  Indeed, Paul's argument in Romans wavers in itself between notions of "God-attributes," on the one hand, and the notion of the existence himself of God on the other.  If we set aside--for a moment later--the notion of particular discernable attributes of God, there is something to be said about Paul's (or anyone's) contention that Creation reveals the existence of God.

If it be said, as Paul says of God, that "the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen," then it must be noted that there is a fundamental concern to be extracted from Paul's admonition in Romans to worship the creator rather than the created thing.  A created thing is understood to have properties (else it is indistinguishable from an amorphous and undiscernible mass of existence).  To look at Creation and to find in it properties thought reflective of God, and ostensibly to be attributed to God, is not to find evidence of God, but rather to assemble a collection--perhaps on balance to be found ultimately an admirable collection--of parts with which to create a mosaic of "God."

This mosaic of "God" is not God.  This mosaic of "God" is nothing but a hyper-"created thing."  A pious person can look at the majesty of the mountains and lament--with perhaps indifferent sincerity--the spiritual blindness that allows others to un-see the hand of God beyond the majesty.  However, there is no parallel "indifference" to the negative quality of a pious person pointing to the mountains and claiming that the ineffable God deserving of the pinnacle of worship is revealed by some conceit of how his mighty hand molded the rocky heights.  The God of humanity's yearning is beyond compare or comprehension.  The "God" known ostensibly to have molded the rocky heights is a hypothetical, trans-dimensional clod-slinger.

And, as might be expected, Paul's "argument from Creation" rides along as it does on the rather worldly assumption that not merely the reader or listener, but the entirety of humanity, is comprehended in its implications.  Some people are born without, or deprived of, certain sensory capacities.  If humanity writ large is responsible to God because of Creation, then at bottom the mere experience of existing ought to comprise all such necessary "evidence"--for all we know, human beings have been born with no sensory capabilities at all, and it is still less of a conjecture to imagine that persons have been born whose "lives" as we understand them have been as little informed by sensory experiences as are infants in the moments before birth.

The "evidence" we have of God's existence is the self-same evidence we have of our own existence.  At least, either the one proves the other, or it doesn't.  Hand-waving at the heights or at the horizon is worse than meaningless--it is impious.  Jesus would have us look to God as our father and would have us spring to that embrace through our own experience of parenthood, but the bottom line of such contemplations is the contention that God is all-in-all, not a collection of discernable parts.  The flow of our analysis comes from God outwards, and starts therefore with our recognition that we are at base lost and befuddled---it is to be hoped that we are groping to some understandings as we make our way through life.  Instead (and unfortunately) we are tempted to imagine our existence as well-founded, and from there we construct conceits about God that we offer simultaneously as worship and as excuses for reaching up with the self-same minds that we have trusted to frame what we are reaching for.

And so, in truth, the most basic conceivable relationship we can have with God is as non-sensory (or pre-sensory) consciousnesses that--unbidden and unaccountably--seek union with God.  In this realm there are no dimensions and no points of reference, only the binary consummation or non-consummation of that union.  It is with this understanding that we can understand without impious presumption Jesus' declaration that "I am the way, the truth, and the life."  Let Jesus say "I am" elsewhere in the Gospels, and the commentators will leap to their pronouncements that Jesus is emphasizing his identity with God, but such vigor will not be found in their treatment of this passage.  Whole ministries (and, sadly, whole campaigns of parochial intolerance) have been founded on the notion that Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," and that he is to be understood foremost to be denouncing false "paths" to salvation.

The divine pronouncement "I am" subsumes all else to that pronouncement.  "I am" is not a parceling-out of God to any "way," "truth," or "life" understood to be ratified by his imprimatur.  "Ways, truths, and lives" are to be understood by us only imperfectly, and if there be any value in any way traveled, any truth discovered, any life lived, then it is to be found in the very fact of those things dissolving in our apprehensions in the prospect of union with God.  Our relationship to God is found in our saying "Yes" to the great "Yes or No" question that resides in the essence of existence.

It is in the reduction to this binary that gives us the "best"--take that word as we will to be for good or ill--understanding of what we presume to call the attributes of God.  An ever-present God is proximity itself, a true God admits of no multiplicity of false conceits, a God who gives life is not by contrast a fellow-inhabitant of humanity on some pre-existing matrix.  A God who involves each of us in an essential and fundamental forsaking-all-else binary yes-or-no union is a God whose relationship with us IS "way," IS "truth," IS "life."  Our (as we like to think it) understandable attachment to our existences in which we each embark upon a way, find truth, and live our life is not an attachment which serves simply as a framing of our "faith journeys," or whatever.  This attachment is sinful, though fundamental. It is so fundamental, this attachment, that typically we think nothing of devoting our lives to the Savior who does not ask for the devoting of our lives.  Jesus demands the surrendering of our lives, and the distinction is crucial.

Jesus demands that, at each moment, we say "yes" to God.  Jesus demands that, in each thought, we say "yes" to God.  Jesus demands that, every step, we say "yes" to God.  What Jesus really demands, however, is that we surrender ourselves--on every path, in every contention, and at every instant of our lives--such that every moment and circumstance of our existence were as the One Great Moment of our individual conceits in which we are either saved or put on the "path" to salvation.  How, might we ask, are we to live, when each moment is to be as that all-consuming, dimensionless convergence of all-that-we-might-never-begin-to-understand that we try to freeze in time and space as our salvation?

Is it not really the case that Jesus is REALLY demanding that we give up our lives, surrendering to a flow of time and space that is in each particular all that exists--all time in all and all space in all?  Of course Jesus is "the way, the truth, and the life," not because he serves a function, but because nothing else exists for us but Jesus as the divine, if he is to be really Jesus and really one with the divine.

Testing the Theme of Shame Part One

We need to test the premise of shame as the fulcrum of humanity's relationship to God.  One test will be whether or not shame is revealed to be an abiding element of Gospel stories, when theological accretions and convenient conceits have been stripped away.

I am reminded of the exasperating experience of hearing a radio preacher holding forth on the scriptural evidence for hell as a real place and a real experience--an exasperating experience not because of any failing on his part to produce and present applicable scriptures to prove the point, but rather because of his revealing proclivity to hold to Scripture here and to ignore it there.  I will explain.

The preacher's contention about the actuality of hell was well-founded in the biblical passages he presented, but as it turned out a revealing twist accompanied his last reference--the story of The Rich Man and Lazarus.  The implication of hell as a real torment is undeniable in this story, though admittedly the mention of the Bosom of Abraham seems destined to admit of only a symbolic interpretation.  The preacher's invocation of the story of Lazarus and the rich man, however (though it was well-accompanied by evidences for hell, especially eternal hell, in the preacher's thesis) lurched in a most awkward moment at the very finish.  The preacher lamented that the rich man was consigned to eternal damnation because he did not know Jesus (neither, I will surmise, as an explicit knowledge nor as that knowledge-by-extension available to Jews through the "Moses and the prophets" deposit described in the story as accessible to the living.)

The preacher, obviously, held to the common radio-religion emphasis on Christian "faith alone" salvation--the fact that the rich man enjoyed good things while Lazarus had only bad things (though this fact is recounted pointedly by Abraham) is not to be understood in this emphasis to legitimize any "works-based" salvation.  However, the plain truth in this unraveling of the preacher's method is held properly to be the impropriety of holding to direct meanings in Scripture here and forsaking direct meanings in Scripture there.  The Story of the Rich Man and Lazarus has only the self-indulgence of the rich man and the deprivations of Lazarus (set off by the strong implication that the rich man stepped over Lazarus with regularity) as its earthly action.  Nothing done by or attributed to the rich man or Lazarus says anything about their beliefs or lack thereof.

Moreover, the story is preceded in the text of Luke by Jesus' declaration that not one letter is to drop out of the law and that divorce is the equivalent of adultery, and the story is followed in Luke by Jesus describing horrid punishment for those who lead "little ones" astray.  The plain meaning of the lesson of The Story of the Rich Man and Lazarus is that doing bad things in life will lead to bad things in the afterlife.

It may be seen that there are three conceivable arcs of thought that overshadow the mere text of this story on the page.  There is, at bottom, the story as related simply in its very words.  In addition, if an interpreter is to postulate some generalized theme of Jesus' teachings, then there may be thought to be at the very top an overarching interpretation (which, like the "shame" interpretation I have proffered, must be put to the test.)  And then (as is most typically the thought-process supplied by the preachers) there is the supra-textual though incompletely-warranted sort of interpretation that begs at every juncture to have the benefit of every available doubt, and that squirms and dodges away from any definitive test.

This last sort of interpretation--this type of interpretation that I have called incompletely-warranted--occupies a space (or might properly be seen to arrogate to itself a space) between the simple text of a scripture and the properly top-most (and properly sought-after) general theme of Jesus' teaching.  Nothing better typifies the incompletely-warranted interpretation than the notion of "faith alone," which flies in the face of the self-same "simple" renderings of Scriptural thought that the "faith alone" preachers claim to espouse.  In the story of The Rich Man and Lazarus, as I stated above, there is not a hint of a notion that faith is an operative element in the progression of the two men's lives.  It might always be said that people who do good things do so out of "faith" in something, but it need scarcely be said that this is casting a conceptual net too wide to serve any of the preachers' purposes.  Indeed, the story itself casts the net of possible interpretations even wider, stating only that the rich man got good things and Lazarus bad things--leaving it to the hearers (the rich man and us) to attach the earthly events to any motivation of the men at all.

What really happens in the post-death part of the story is the shaming of the rich man.  The rich man's plea for the slightest of comfort to be had from Lazarus is hurled back at him with the simple rejoinder from Abraham that Lazarus in life had only bad while the rich man had only good.  The existence of the impassible chasm is stated matter-of-factly, but only after the rich man is hit with a gratuitous explanation of why Lazarus' ministrations would be withheld from him at any rate.  The punishment of the rich man will be accompanied by shame--this is undeniable from the very text of the story.

And then the rich man asks for Lazarus to be sent to the rich man's surviving brothers.  Either the rich man is still shamefully limiting his concern for what he thinks of as his own (for he might as well ask for the rising-from-death testimony of Lazarus to be beheld by all humanity), or the rich man has been beset by the shame of having failed in his fraternal duties.  In either event the result is the same.

The theme of The Story of the Rich Man and Lazarus is shame.

The Shame of Humanity

Adam and Eve were not ashamed to be naked before they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Afterwards they were afraid to be naked--but naked before whom?  Before each other, as husband and wife?  Before God, as creations of the all-knowing and all-seeing?  Adam, equipped with his new facility for "knowing good and evil," did not know authoritatively what he was talking about when he answered God to explain why he and his wife hid themselves--at least, that is what appears to be the case based on the text, and based on common understandings of the nature of God and of humanity.

Of course, the stark question of the accuracy of humanity's estimations based on the "knowledge of good and evil" is not addressed explicitly in the text, but it would be fatuous in any event to imagine that "knowledge of good and evil" is not apt to be faulty knowledge in the minds of humans.  What is even more foolish, however, is to imagine that the moral lives of humans are punctuated by instances and episodes that are self-contained--and in no aspect is this un-containable quality reflected more than in the matter of shame.  Genesis says that Adam and Eve were not at first "ashamed" to be naked, and then they become "afraid" about it.  Their fear about the repercussions of their disobedience was of course well-founded, but it was to be allayed by God relenting in the immediacy from his threat of death.  (And given that the prospect of eternal life in paradise awaited after "death," not even the end of earthly life was enough to actuate the initially-proclaimed death sentence for disobedience.)

Fear about having committed transgressions--even mistakenly-conceived transgressions--can be allayed (as in the initial experience of Adam and Eve after the Tree Moment) and it can be counter-balanced or even outweighed (as in the heaven-prospect offered by eternal life), but shame admits of no similar antidote.  Shame attachable to some transgression is intrinsic to the committing of that transgression.  Attempted remedies or counter-balances to transgressive acts can weigh in the whole of a person's experience-life as anticipation of savoring memories of good deeds to dilute the sting of remembered misdeeds, for example, but in such playings-out it is fear of future remembrances of remorse balanced by the reassurance of a store of good reminiscences, or it is the pain of recalling one's transgressions balanced by the pleasure of recalling one's more-laudable acts.  Fear and pain can perhaps be cancelled out (and healing or recompense provided to the injured), but shame rebounds forever (at least on this plane.)  The shame that Adam and Eve DO NOT feel initially (and this emphasis seems justified, given the fact that its mention has no intrinsic connection to the flow of events, and is not therefore necessary to the narrative) is a potential shame that is not mentioned even after it is visited presumably on Adam and Eve.  Neither in Eden nor elsewhere on Earth is there a curative for shame.

Neither is there to be, in this life, a curative for our misapprehensions about Good and Evil.  We will always wonder what sins we might have committed.  We will always be liable, therefore, to generalized shame.  Shame is an intrinsic quality of a morally-aware person, and the true test of moral awareness is found in the twin implications of having done innumerable things wrong, compounded by having made innumerable mistakes about what is right and wrong.  Such is the state of humanity.  Such is the state of human beings.  To feel shame is as intrinsic to human nature as it is to feel temptation.  One might imagine a human being who had never either transgressed nor felt he or she had transgressed, or a human being whose moral state had remained securely in the too-short-to-be-measured span of an infant's innocence, but this would be the same as to imagine a human being in the same moral condition as the Adam and Eve of the puerile preachers' conventional conceit--Adam and Eve absolutely without sin while reaching for the fruit, and then damnably sinful at the instant they swallowed.

Adam and Eve sinned, of course, before ever they ate of the fruit, and but for the preachers' pap so beloved by Paul, one would not think of either of the First Couple as being free in any textually-described moment from both sin and shame, however incrementally.  If, then, we are to think of Jesus as having experienced true human life, then it is ridiculous to contend that this experience consisted of being faced with temptation (which, in the argument here, we will consider he met perfectly), while at the same time NOT being faced with the tribulations inherent in confronting the generalized shame that perfuses all competent (that is, morally accountable) human beings.

We must consider then, that Jesus experienced the shame, not of being reviled, being arrested, being mocked, being tortured, or being crucified, but rather the shame of being a human being.  It is a hideous conceit of some Christian commentators, to harp on the notion of Jesus being "shamed" by his mistreatment at the hands of others.  No one is shamed in the proper sense by another's misdeeds, and while for us feeble mortals it is indeed usually horrible--and a horrible sin attributable to the inflictors--to be "put to shame" by others, it is silly to think that Jesus fell victim to the temptation of internalizing shame he did not deserve.  (Moreover, the recurrent Christian fixation on Jesus having suffered shame discounts often the Jewish Scripture's paradoxical and crucial regard for the servant reviled and disfigured in the service of God.  The Suffering Servant is treated shamefully--he is "shamed" only in the conceit of his tormentors.)

It would do violence to any conception of God's justice, to contend that any age of humankind was bereft of the opportunity for salvation.  Similarly, the accessibility of God through prayer has existed always, even when the thread of any Scriptural narrative (or, to think of it, any non-Scriptural conceit) has held that God has closed his ears to the importuning of humanity.  On this latter point the teachings of Jesus are quite pertinent.  Greater even than the workings of Jesus on earth, might be our accomplishments, if only we pursued them in prayer, prayer accompanied by even the most miniscule of faith.  Adam, or even Cain, could have made the earth spring forth with abundance, if only they had asked in faith.  According to Jesus, all things are possible when requested in prayer--while yet at the same time nothing (or at least next-to-nothing, in the greater estimation) is possible through our prayer, since our faith is either nothing or next-to-nothing, as any fleeting moment of conceptualization warrants.  This is our shame, and we will always be required to confront the shame of our simple existences, shame both unbounded and unquantifiable.

Even if Cain had asked in such faith as to be granted health and prosperity for a thousand-year lifetime, and even if Cain had asked in such faith as to be granted the ability to intercede successfully in a thousand potentially-deadly conflicts among siblings, still he would never have lived free of the shame of his murder of Abel--nor even would he have been free of the shame that attended him (and us) always, murder or no murder.  Indeed, even the most perfect imaginable of us mere mortals--for the sake of argument--who prayed successfully for a blessed millennium-lifetime would still be a mere mortal burdened by the shame common to humanity.  It would be as logical a contention as any to say (again, for the sake of argument) that this paragon would at last lie down to die out of mere shame.

This places us, finally, in the arena of wonderings-beyond-wonderings--the place we are driven to when we try to think about Jesus.  The stories in the Gospels are given to us for reasons, but we must always wonder if the reasons are to be as beyond our compassings as are the stories themselves.  Jesus deserved no shame, he did nothing that would bring shame, he thought nothing that would bring shame, but did he--in taking on the nature of the human--partake of the self-experience of shame common to humanity, a generalized shame unbounded by particular misdeeds and yet inherent in any workings of a mind burdened by identification with us?

We are presented with a story of a Jesus who humbled himself before God in the garden, either asking for what he knew he could not have, or asking for something about which his knowledge was incomplete.  In our own lives we have similarly-describable experiences, and we experience them perfused with shame.  We can try out of piety to imagine a Jesus without shame, but we cannot conceptualize simultaneously a Jesus overcoming that which is common to humanity without reckoning that shame is common to humanity.

This also is the Jesus who declares that he will be ashamed of those who are ashamed of him.  And this also is the Jesus who, though he does not (simply stated) just lie down and die, but rather cries out in the most piteous of manners and embraces the death to which he will not in the end succumb in the failings of his breath.  If this cry is not one of shame inherent in the human nature taken on by Jesus (as opposed to shame attachable to Jesus proper), then one can only wonder what it was.

Fear and Shame as Gifts

We have a tendency to think of fear and shame in the context of our relationship to God as pertaining to discrete offenses.  We are supposed to fear the consequences of doing things that are wrong, and we are supposed to be ashamed of ourselves when we have done something wrong--at least, such is the commonplace application of the concepts of fear and shame.  Fear and shame are understood in the context of discrete, identifiable acts of morality or immorality.

That this understanding is essentially problematic is revealed in the existence of the ever-encroaching consideration that no act of morality can ever be regarded as "good enough" for God.  The moral-versus-immoral balancing is really inconceivable, and in any circumspect consideration is shown to be skewed perpetually in favor of immorality weighing down the status of any human being.  It is no wonder that the theologians speak continually of "total depravity" and "miserable sinners."

What is incumbent upon the theologians, then, is the responsibility to consider fear and shame most crucially in terms of the non-discrete and the confusing.  Genesis does not describe Eve as simply taking hold of the forbidden fruit and eating it.  Eve is describe as joining in a scurrilous conversation with a creature that she knew--at the very least--was not God.  Even the act of merely touching the fruit--which act is not prohibited specifically by God in the text, though we have Eve describing it so--is a questionable act, the more so as we might think of Eve (sinfully) concocting a prohibition and therefore (sinfully) violating it, this latter sin being what can come from the simmering irresolution that has characterized humanity from the start.  Certainly such irresolution is evident in Eve entertaining in the slightest the snake's appeal to confusion, "Did God really say . . . ?"

Saint Paul or no Saint Paul, there is no warrant to understand the plight of humanity as springing from a simple, discrete sin (eating the fruit, though the theologians would be lying were they to contend that they knew with authority what would have happened had Adam refused to partake--such is the confusion of humanity's primordial sin-nature.)  The plight of humanity is not understood in its rawest sense as innocence-versus-guilt or as right-versus-wrong, but as the perpetual not-even-as-simple-as-opposition relationship of fear and shame.

Eve did not know what to fear (which can be fearful in itself) and Adam did not know of what he was to be ashamed (which can be shameful in itself--consider Jesus' stark admonition, "Why cannot you judge yourselves what is right and wrong?")  When we ourselves learn fear and shame, we learn them in the context of confusing, real-life scenarios--just like Adam and Eve (if we consider Adam and Eve as being "real" like "real people," not as the puppets cherished most ironically by those theologians most eager to argue for their historicity.)  We not only fear things, we fear that we do not know what to fear.  We not only feel shame, we feel shame as a generalization.  This latter generalization is latent in the experienced mis-match (assignable both to our faulty conceits and to the imprecise description of our misdeeds by authority figures) that imposes itself upon us as we grow to understand that we can commit trespasses, and have committed trespasses.

Conceivably, perfect parents and other authority figures could relieve children of all fear and shame, by making it reassuringly unmistakable what are trespasses and what are not, and by levying perfect correctives such that all causes for shame were discharged perfectly.  This is not going to happen, any more than succeeding generations of parents might practice eugenics or gene-alteration such that all proclivity for misdeeds might be extinguished.

Adam and Eve knew fear and shame, in the context of a story in which "knowledge of Good and Evil" was merely an element, rather than a presupposition.  It is often said that God in the garden paradise was a perfect parent, but it is no more an impiety to contend that this simple platitude is swallowed up in the receding mysteries of Creation, as it is to contend that there is something amiss in a perfect Creator making a creation that is merely "very good."

Jesus knew the workings-out of all this.  It is good to be kind to an animal, and it is bad to be neglectful to an animal, but that does not mean that it is "good" or "evil" to be seized by the urge to life a sheep from a pit on the Sabbath.  It is good to provide for one's children, and it is bad to be neglectful to one's children, but that does not mean that it is "good" or "evil" to reach out on the Sabbath to collect a sheep that might be crucial to the family's welfare.

All real-life situations involve fear and shame.  All real-life situations involve good and evil as well, but the very fact that they are "real-life" means that the good and evil elements in all situations are matters of discovery, not understood as merely "situational," but rather as developing--developing as each situation itself develops, a "situation" being a non-discrete and confusing happenstance that only with its unfolding crashes against the edifice of that which is abiding and irrefutable.  This is nothing more or less than the giving (if we choose to regard it so) of the gift to Eve and Adam (and all imperfect of us) of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

It is irrefutable that the woman with the alabaster jar had cause (or what we might call "right," if in terms of our having anything to say about it) to approach Jesus in fear and shame.  That Jesus deigned to extract from her actions that which must be seen as laudable is an expression of God's sovereignty.  We are required still to decide in endless progression what to sacrifice, what to save, what to donate, what to labor for, and so on indefinitely.  We are attended through all this by fear and shame, and we are guided through all this by fear and shame, and for us to try to subsume fear and shame to our conceits of Good and Evil is for us to cast back in our Creator's face gifts original to us in the very moment of Creation.