There is a certain jibe against conventional Christianity that--one would hope--is in most applications quite unfair. This is the objection to Christian morality to the effect that the name "morality" is scarcely deserved by a system of rules that serves merely as an exchange of behaviors against future rewards (or punishments--though it is the "reward" aspect that receives the most scorn.)
How is it truly "moral," one might say, to forego pleasures in this finite life in order to gain (presumably greater) pleasures in a future, infinite life? Of course, two millennia of Christian moral thought has been anything but neglectful on this point. It is the transformation of the person, the realignment of the person so as to do the will of God for its own sake, that is held to be the core of Christian moral striving.
Yet no one will doubt that the purported transactional nature of Christian morality is seen in frequent cases to float to the surface of many of the morasses of human thought and behavior that seep throughout our experience-realms, religion included. Often we do what we are "supposed" to do, yet it cannot be denied that nearly as often it is obvious that we are not feeling particularly attached to the possible elevated inspirations of our actions. And then again, do we not possibly place ourselves in "daily grinds" of ethical frameworks that obviously we find taxing, while yet it might be imagined that original selfless motivations have led us to undertaken such larger enterprises?
And so, of course, such questions can wend on and on. There are, to us humans, no really clean scenarios of moral behavior. Largely, it is left to us to try to clean up any of these messy situations to the extent we are able--and the attempted removal of the most unnecessary accretions to moral behavior would be at the top of the list. In terms of Christianity's aspiration to foster the realignment of persons so as to desire the will of God, it would be best that followers of Jesus renounce two of conventional Christianity's oft-cherished conceits--that true religion involves conceptualization of an anticipated afterlife, and that true religion brings relief from shame.
The first score is easiest to address. The notion of a conceptualizable afterlife is ridiculous. The broken nature of humanity--a concept rehearsed ceaselessly by Christianity--must be understood first (as I have written almost ceaselessly) as a breaking of communion between Creator and created from the conceptualizable first. There is no "going back to Eden" or the like--the bliss of Adam and Eve blissing on each other and sharing late afternoon chats with their Maker is not a true conceit of our existence's broken linkage being fixed. The anticipated place of "going back" to "how it ought to be" is properly an anticipation of communion with the divine that we cannot imagine.
It is for this reason, apparently, that Jesus dismisses out of hand conjectures about who will be married to whom in the afterlife. Jesus does not declare simply that God by his sovereign will can assign properly marriages in disputed cases (taking humanity back to the realm of "help-meets), nor does Jesus say that humans will be understandably human though no longer having any use for marriage. No, Jesus throws in even the essentially unassimilable notion that people (or the saved among people, at least) will be "like the angels," whatever that means. Of all the things that make us human, we cannot even know what--if anything--will persist in the afterlife of our social affinities.
We will die, and we will be confronted with many things that we did not understand, and we will be confronted presumably with many things that we did not understand for no other reason that it did not please us to consider them. We do not know ourselves, and in our (fascinating, really) predisposition to imagine ourselves willing to be surprised about ourselves after death, we prance through our daily lives with nary a thought for the (undeniable, really) fact that this postulating about our undiscovered selves emanates from our "selves" as we package them for our personal possession each. It is intrinsically perverse for us to imagine that we will learn merely many things about the consciousnesses that frame our moment-by-moment self-conceptions--while yet we have no warrant to deny that our essential selves might be constellations of memories and forgettings and impulses and whatnot though which our mutable momentary conceits of "I am" are mere wanderers.
We can imagine ourselves saying to Jesus on that dreadful day, "When did we give you drink (or not), comfort (or not)?", but we cannot imagine the divine perception that will scour possible levels and extents of our persons--and rarely (we should presume) to our credit. To say that we might understand the process of Final Judgment would be as ridiculous as for us to maintain that we can parse out the Story of the Sheep and the Goats. Would a collection of bereft souls wailing to be spared punishment really call out to the King, "When did 'we' not give you something to eat?" And would it really be profitable to assign anything more than a diffuse, multi-faceted, generalized warning to a story that--if taken literally--will dissolve itself, since Jesus has made sure the surprised "sheep" and "goats" know the punchline already?
A "diffuse, multi-faceted, generalized warning" would be appropriate for us pitiful humans, especially as we are understood properly to be deserving of that to which I alluded above--shame. A religion that purports to take away shame, or that--worse still--contends that a proper earthly orientation to the Savior can take away shame, is a religion that accords to itself an understanding of human beings that only God can know. What we do not know about ourselves ought ever to make us invite the propensity--rare enough as a commodity--for shame. It is shame that can pervade us, can pervade even the selves that we do not know or only fitfully know, while that manipulatable and socially-bargainable notion of "guilt" can be assuaged by infinite means, even as "guilt" presents itself to us as something bounded and finite--even as we maintain that guilt can be seen in its defined qualities to spread to those defined boundaries of our self-conceptions.
Shame, when lived with, can serve to supplant (even if flaccidly) those self-conceptions we would rather live with. And in this supplanting of the self is to be found the only joy that Jesus says we can have. We give up our lives for the joy of giving up our lives for Jesus. This is the moral equation of salvation--not doing things or forgoing things merely to gain the desired opposite in a bargained afterlife, but rather enjoying faint and partial subsuming of self in the present, in exchange for enjoying inestimable and unimaginable subsuming of self in eternity.
