The Embodiment of Alienation

In my last post I wrote:

Typically for our species, we try both to discern designs and to implement designs.  From this source of impetus--so reflective of our Creator as a designer, and so deleterious to us ourselves as beings who rationalize transgressions--we create everything from worldviews to excuses for the least of ungodly behaviors.  Nothing, tragically, so characterizes us humans as our twin tendencies to squirm away from the shame that ought ever to center us upon God, while also we turn away from what we ought most fundamentally to think and to do, placing ourselves in the service of the endless designs created by us--and which become our counterfeit "creators" in whose service we can commit the most heinous of acts.

This is the story of humanity.  When "shame" rather than "guilt"--the universal "shame" aspect of our existences rather than the particularized "guilt" aspects of our actualizations--is the recognized point of emphasis, then Genesis makes sense.  We--and everything else that is not God--are burdened with shame as surely as we are burdened with existence.  This must be so.

God designed us to enter existence as we do.  To say that God designed us to be created beings less than God is essentially a tautology--we cannot be the "created uncreated," and we cannot understand why God would create anything, but we can reckon that it is not ours to question the matter.  We can reckon, however, that a God who created us with the capacity for shame has created us with the uncoerced opportunity to assimilate and make use of such an appreciation of our deficits.

Contrary to this is the theologians' mistaken consensus that "sin" is the source both of humanity's woes and humanity's shame.  Rather than being designed as lesser beings in every regard (and granted therefore the chance at least to feel shame in concert with, and in proportion to, our limitations), the humanity of the theologians' conceits is the created-in-God's-image-as-moral-agents species whose original innocence abutted in perfect reflection the moral quality of God--a hideous blasphemy.

A creature that was always lesser than God in every way has at least the opportunity to feel ashamed against the perfection of God, but a creature that was comprehensibly "sinless" from the start was a godling, and a creature that ever imagines itself to be fallen from a perfection of God is indistinguishable from a demon.  That we--all of our imperfections thrown into the bargain--were created to be lesser beings than God makes sense (so long as we are willing to believe that we have a Creator), while the notion that we were created as co-possessors of a divine and at-one-time pristine "image" of God as a moral agent is fantastic self-delusion.

Inherent in this "fantastic self-delusion" is a design on our part of a latter twin of our original creation (and of our original Creator.)  There is at first the imagined God who creates humanity as sinless, followed by a seen-only-after-the-fact God who is pained to see Adam fall into the trap that this inserted-into-the-story God knew from the start would ensnare the man.  This latter "God" is a creation of humanity's design, and this former version of God (the true and original Creator) has been wrought by humanity's conceits into a background figure.  We begin, with our delusion of original sinlessness followed by delusion-upon-delusion about sin as we define it, to layer over our receding appreciation of an ineffable Creator first one, and then another, and then another design of God as we choose to see him.  As I quoted myself above,

Nothing, tragically, so characterizes us humans as our twin tendencies to squirm away from the shame that ought ever to center us upon God, while also we turn away from what we ought most fundamentally to think and to do, placing ourselves in the service of the endless designs created by us--and which become our counterfeit "creators" in whose service we can commit the most heinous of acts.

The tragedy of Genesis is not foremost a tragedy of sin, but a tragedy of design practiced by humanity.  Or call it a tragedy of conceit.  Or call it--if the language serves best--a tragedy of the sin (for the man is never understood in Genesis to be sinless) actualized in humanity attempting to recapitulate the creation process--the conjuring from the recesses of humanity's murky selves satisfying designs of the world we conceptualize around us.

In reality, the shame of limitation spawns the shameful creation on our part of inherently limited conceptions of reality--or what we like to think of as reality.  Indeed, the very act of conceptualizing something--gathering the available parts of what we have decided is "something" into an analyzable and communicable conceit--is inherently limiting.  That is what we do, and that is what Adam did, and I am not forgetting that I presented the promise that the inchoate "shame" precincts of the Genesis story would make more sense when examined than would the silly sin-story we have made of the Forbidden Fruit--a story that is imagined ridiculously by the theologians to mark the alienation of the created from the Creator, when inescapably the created-Creator term is the embodiment of alienation itself.

Our Counterfeit Creators

I think I need to provide a sketch of where I think this blog's emphasis on "shame" is going.  One of the chief elements of shame as an underpinning of our understanding is my contention that shame is both dimensionless and unconnected to describable prior events in a person's experience.  "Sin," on the other hand, consists of either some violation of a describable tenet of proper existence, or must be constructed in that groundless and more-or-less-vaguely-blasphemous idea of "original sin."

Humans made "in the image of God" and liable also to sin are--by a rather inescapable definition--creatures in their sin-tendency most definitely not "in the image of God."  It is usually the maneuver of theologians to contend that the "image of God" idea--since of course it cannot be said that we "look" like God, or indeed that we share any "perfect" quality of God (assuming, as a matter of simple prudence, that God has no "imperfect" qualities)--is an idea of a unique "image of God" quality through being of the shared character of moral agency.  Unfortunately, exuberant paragraphs could be spent on the storehouse of Scriptural evidence to the effect that both the invisible hosts and the beasts of the field are creatures of moral agency.

None of this can allow us to wish away the conclusion--as intrinsic to our thought-lives as any other postulate--that there is something "unfair" about being created liable to sin and therefore liable to judgment.  This realization about a limitation in ourselves ought to be enough to convince us that we are not so much as shadows--let alone "images"--of God's moral character.  God is beyond understanding.  The least we can do in regard to this reality is to sweep away any humanly-introduced barriers between ourselves and the God whom we do not understand, and the most insidious of these barriers is the conceit that we are in our most basic of understandings convicted (or, to our eternal peril, not convicted) of our sinful state.  We are not fundamentally convicted--we are fundamentally (and in our first impressions of life) shamed.

The infant--who of course is taken by Jesus to be the proper representation of proper existence--experiences shame, rather than guilt, as an initial experience.  It is the adult, or perhaps the adolescent, who can process the notion of being blameless of an innocent transgression of some norm (and even then the temptation to exclude possibilities of willful or negligent ignorance is ever-present.)  To the "little child" a reprimand--or, more primally, a rebuff--is a source of shame coterminous with his or her first understanding of a surrounding world populated by others.  Guilt, on the other hand, must be processed upon the beginnings of an understanding of the particular transgression.  Shame is primal.  Guilt is not.

So now we can return to the idea of humanity "in the image of God."  Of course the matter of the meaning (or possible meanings) of the Hebrew is a subject for scholars, but enough uncertainty has remained for it to be an open question whether the original Hebrew indicates "image" as a pattern of the creation of humanity, or "image" as a sustained conception (an "imaging" synonymous with God's support of existence itself) such as it be the case that humanity exists as a function of being in the mind of God.  Perhaps more acutely, there is Rabbi Akiva's conjecture that man is blessed in being created according to an image (or design) of God.  In this latter conceit, there exists the possibility that creation other than humanity is a subordinate skein of designs supportive of human beings as the "crown of creation."  Certainly, man and woman (described in both sexes and present at first in the awkward chronology of the Creation Story) seem from the very beginning to be the point of the whole process.

This humanity is made upon a template--for no believer can deny it--of limitation, no matter how much the "image of God" imagery is invoked.  This limitation exists from the very start, and this limitation is not describable in any particular.  Humanity is not God.  The infant experience of humanity--as a species as well as individuals--is the shame of limitation rather than the guilt of transgression.  And this shame is in its basic qualities dimensionless and global to the person.  Shame exists before we can make sense of our existence, and shame exists even as we try to make sense of our existence.

And "trying to make sense of our existence" is what we do as humans (more so, at least, than other earthly creatures.)  Typically for our species, we try both to discern designs and to implement designs.  From this source of impetus--so reflective of our Creator as a designer, and so deleterious to us ourselves as beings who rationalize transgressions--we create everything from worldviews to excuses for the least of ungodly behaviors.  Nothing, tragically, so characterizes us humans as our twin tendencies to squirm away from the shame that ought ever to center us upon God, while also we turn away from what we ought most fundamentally to think and to do, placing ourselves in the service of the endless designs created by us--and which become our counterfeit "creators" in whose service we can commit the most heinous of acts.