The Sins of Scripture (17 page)

THE SADOMASOCHISM IN THE HEART OF CHRISTIANITY

C
an you imagine that something so destructive and life-denying as sadomasochism has become overtly a part of the Christian story? Impossible, you say! Christianity is about life and love, not about pain and punishment. Well, before you dismiss this thesis, you might want to listen to the words from a hymn found in the Episcopal hymnal:

Before thy throne, O God, we kneel;

Give us a conscience quick to feel,

A ready mind to understand

The meaning of thy chastening hand;

Whate’er the pain and shame may be,

Bring us, O Father, nearer thee.

Search out our hearts and make us true,

Wishful to give to all their due;

From love of pleasure, lust of gold,

From sins which make the heart grow cold,

Wean us and train us with thy rod;

Teach us to know our faults, O God.
¹⁷

Can you visualize the scene being depicted in this hymn? Is there no sadomasochism present here? Listen next to the self-deprecating words that punctuate the Christian liturgies: We were “born in sin”! We are “miserable offenders.” There is “no health in us.” We can do nothing good without you. “We are not worthy to gather up the crumbs” under the divine table. “Have mercy, O Lord, have mercy!”

Are these words not the picture of a quivering child before a punishing parent? Over and over again in the forms of our worship, we seem obsessed with guilt and penitence. Is this not an expression of the human need for punishment being drilled into believers by the church in multiple doses almost daily? Are these liturgical phrases not admissions that deep down we believe we deserve the wrath for which we are almost asking? These elements are deeply and intrinsically part of our faith story. During the season of Lent, church bulletins frequently feature the standard implements of torture—whips, nails and a crown of thorns. The Bible, again and again, portrays a wrathful God’s intention to punish the chosen people. When the faithfulness of the Jews falters in the biblical story, God raises up enemies to defeat and punish them. When they are evil, God sends a pestilence or a plague. The Bible describes human beings as sheep gone astray; then it describes God as the heavenly parent whose divine righteousness must be vindicated. We tremble before the throne of this deity, knowing that if God gives us what we deserve, we are doomed to suffer forever. “If you, Lord, were to note what is done amiss, O Lord, who could stand?” (Ps. 130:2 BCP, 1979). Worshipers in church, hearing the above words, are pictured like schoolchildren waiting in quiet, anxious dependency for the moment to arrive when the price of their sinfulness will be exacted. Protestant churchgoers reveal their inner masochism when they say of the preacher, “He really laid it on us this morning.” Catholics reveal it when they meditate on the wounds of Jesus as they have been taught.

On this diagnosis of the nature of our humanity, the entire Christian story tends to be based. Punishment is our due; we have earned it. We cover these neurotic aspects of our worship with layers of piety or with the smoke of incense, but they are always there just below the surface. If one were to take these words from our liturgies out of their sacred environments and read them in a secular setting—in Greenwich Village, New York, for example—those hearing them for the first time would tell us exactly what the words really say: “I am a bad boy. I deserve to be punished. Either God will give punishment to me directly, or God will give Jesus the punishment I deserve. That is how I am saved.” Is that healthy? Does it enhance life? Does guilt enable growth to occur? Is watching Jesus die on the cross anything more than an act of sadomasochistic voyeurism? Is it not time that we raise these issues to consciousness?

If this focus on punishment, which seems to fit our theology, is not yet visible to all Christian people, it is because we do not yet want to see it. We will be forced, however, by this newly emerging awareness to look again and again. Perhaps the beating scenes or the sadism evidenced in the blood from the crown of thorns streaming down the face of Jesus in Mel Gibson’s controversial motion picture
The Passion of the Christ
will finally be enough to make us see the violence that Christianity has fostered based upon the perceived human need to suffer.

The primary way in which the Jesus story has been traditionally and historically told portrays the holy God involved in a cruel act of divine child abuse that was said to have occurred on a hill called Calvary. We are told that there, instead of punishing
us
for our sins, God required the suffering and death of the divine Son. God’s righteousness was restored when the Son of God was punished as a substitute for us. Does that not sound strange? The Christian church has invited the faithful to meditate on Jesus’ pain, to revel in the blood that he shed. In the evangelical hymns of Protestantism it is said both that his blood is precious and that it has the power to wash us clean. With so much sin to be washed away, Jesus must suffer and bleed excessively. In Catholic devotion it is the blood of Jesus that the church invites us to drink in the sacrament of the Eucharist. That blood is said to have the power to cleanse us from within. Either way, the blood of Jesus becomes a fetish, a grotesque image that rivets our attention on the trauma of the cross. We are taught that the suffering of Jesus was our fault, our responsibility. One of the Passiontide hymns states this quite overtly:

Who was the guilty?

Who brought this upon thee?

Alas, my treason, Jesus, hath undone thee.

’Twas I, Lord Jesus,

I it was denied thee:

I crucified thee.
¹⁸

Since Jesus is punished for our sins, we are left with a sense of heavy guilt that is all but unendurable. It is a timeless process, because our sins kill him anew each day. In that extension of the divine life that Jesus, understood as the second person of the Trinity, was said to represent, God is portrayed as eternally absorbing the punishment that was our due. God rescued us from sin by paying the price of our sin through Jesus.

That is the story scraped clean of its piety so that its horror can be viewed with full awareness. It is grotesque. It is barbaric. It creates a distorted, even a sick, humanity. It paints the portrait of a sadistic God served by masochistic children. How can that be good news? How can that lead to human wholeness? It is bad theology because it is bad psychology.

Perhaps that is why religious people have become more and more unloving, more and more judgmental and more and more eager to force others to stand where they stand. Misery loves company. Unrelieved guilt leads to the willingness to endure incredible pain—pain that is deemed to be necessary to satisfy our need to suffer.

That is the traditional way in which Christianity has prescribed the cure for human sin. It is obviously a nonstarter! Yet that picture still lies at the heart of our liturgy, our hymns and our theology. It validates violence because it attributes to God’s punishment of Jesus salvific themes; and not surprisingly, it validates our own violence, since when we abuse others we are only acting after the example that God has set for us. The punishing God is thus replicated in the punishing parent, the punishing authority figure and the punishing nation. Violence is redemptive. War is justified. Bloodshed is the way of salvation. It all fits together so tightly, so neatly, and it justifies the most destructive and demeaning of human emotions. It is, however, neither true nor vaild.

Let me state this boldly and succinctly: Jesus did not die for your sins or my sins. That proclamation is theological nonsense. It only breeds more violence as we seek to justify the negativity that religious people dump on others because we can no longer carry its load. We must rid ourselves of it. One can hardly refrain from exhorting parents not to spare the rod lest they spoil their child if the portrait of God at the heart of the Christian story is that of an angry parent who punishes the divine Son because he can take it and we cannot.

This interpretation of Jesus as the sacrificed victim is a human creation, not a divine revelation. It was shaped in a first-century world by the disciples of Jesus, who drew on their Jewish liturgical symbols as a way the crucifixion of Jesus might be understood. They borrowed this understanding directly from the Jewish Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, in which an innocent lamb was slaughtered to pay the price for the sins of the people. The sinful people then had the cleansing blood of that sacrificial lamb sprinkled on them so that they could experience what it meant to be cleansed—or as we say, “washed in the blood of the Lamb.” In the second act of the Yom Kippur liturgy an innocent goat had the sins of the people ceremonially heaped upon its head. As the bearer of the people’s sins, that goat became so evil that people were invited to curse it and to call for its death. But the goat, now the sin-bearer, was not killed; it was rather run out into the wilderness, carrying the sins of the people with it and thus leaving the people cleansed. This creature came to be known as the “scapegoat” and became, liturgically, “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Yom Kippur was a worship-filled drama designed by the Jews to relieve at least symbolically their sense of human separation from God, a separation they understood to be the source of human guilt. Jesus was interpreted by his earlier disciples inside these Jewish liturgical images. They are all based, however, on an understanding of human life that is quite simply wrong.

We are not fallen, sinful people who deserve to be punished. We are frightened, insecure people who have achieved the enormous breakthrough into self-consciousness that marks no other creature that has yet emerged from the evolutionary cycle. We must not denigrate the human being who ate of the tree of knowledge in the Genesis story. We must learn rather to celebrate the creative leap into a higher humanity. Our sense of separation and aloneness is not a mark of our sin. It is a symbol of our glory. Our struggle to survive, which manifests itself in radical self-centeredness, is not the result of original sin. It is a sign of emerging consciousness. It should not be a source of guilt. It is a source of blessing. We do not need to be punished. We need to be called and empowered to be more deeply and fully human and to develop the godlike gift of being able to give ourselves away freely in the quest for an even deeper sense of what it means to live. Jesus did not die for our sins. Jesus demonstrated in an ultimate way that it is by giving that we receive and by loving that we enhance life.

Guilt, judgment, righteousness, orthodoxy, creedal purity: these are the products of a religion of control in which we hide in fear. They are attempts to build security. None of these boundary marks is life-giving. All are methods of seeking righteousness when that for which we yearn is love.

The angry deity who judges human life from some heavenly throne might make us feel safe, but this deity always shrinks life, for that is what guilt, fear and righteousness do. That is a god-image that must be broken; but when it is, the traditional way we have told the Jesus story will surely die with it. I believe it
must
. When it does, I think it will be good riddance, for with the death of that understanding of Christianity this faith may yet have a chance to be born again. To the possibility of that resurrection we turn next.

O
nce we step beyond the religious formulas of yesterday, questions flood our minds. If God is not a punishing and rescuing deity, then who or what is God? If the biblical explanation of the source of evil is no longer operative, as I have now suggested, then from where does evil come? What is its origin? How is it to be explained? Can the way evil is viewed be changed, transformed or transcended? Can we human beings escape our need to view ourselves negatively, which is the interior situation that makes the punishing God necessary? If the task of the Christian faith is not about rescuing and restoring the fallen sinner to wholeness, a task that was said to justify the church’s use of guilt, threat, fear and violence as tactics of control and discipline, then what is the task of this religious system? Does it have one? To this probing series of questions about God I believe Christians must turn new attention. Not to face these issues is not to engage the most pressing agenda before the religious establishment. That would be like casting a vote in favor of total irrelevance.

That God probe, however, is still only the tip of the iceberg. If behavior control is not the church’s primary social agenda, and surely it is not, then we are forced to conclude that so much of the way we portray the content of the Christian faith simply falls away. To focus this discussion quite specifically on traditional Christian doctrine, we need to raise the question as to whether Christianity as we know it can survive without its doctrines of atonement and incarnation, both of which hang on the sin and rescue themes we have discussed. Is there any way to see the divine presence of God in the life of Jesus other than to view Jesus as the incarnate sinless one who came from the realm of heaven to enter the arena of the fall to pay the price God required for our sins and thus to rescue us from that fall? What happens to this faith story if God can no longer be viewed as either the heavenly parent or the punishing judge? Does our understanding of the righteousness of God depend on this definition of the sinfulness of human life? Can we dismiss once and for all the ancient Christian symbol of Jesus as a blood offering, a human sacrifice required by God?

To all of these Christ inquiries I would answer not only that we
can,
but also that we
must
. The Christology of the past has rested on a false definition of human life and has helped us thereby to develop a false understanding of who God is. A true reformation must be radical indeed. It must rid the Christian tradition of both the current concept of human evil and the idea of a punishing God. At the same time this reformation will, I submit, cut the ground out from under the manner in which violence has been justified on the basis of this religious system. It is thus a reformation eagerly to be sought.

The deconstruction begins with the dismissal of the story with which the Bible opens. It has already moved from being thought of as literal history to being viewed as an interpretive myth. The next step is to dismiss it as not even an accurate interpreter of life. It is a bad myth, a false myth, a misleading myth. There never was a time, either literally or metaphorically, when there was a perfect and finished creation. That biblical idea is simply wrong. It is not even symbolically valid. It is an inaccurate idea that has helped to set the stage for the development of a guilt-producing, dependency-seeking neurotic religion. Nothing more!

Whatever else we know about creation, we are now certain that it is an ongoing, evolving and still-incomplete process. A further insight follows quickly from this: we can no longer properly conceive of God as resting from the divine labors of creation and pronouncing good all that God has made.

Since there was no perfect beginning, no Garden of Eden and no first man and woman who walked with God in perfect communion, there can also be no fall into sin and thus no act of disobedience that destroyed the perfection of God’s world. These details cannot be true even as symbols. They constitute, rather, an inaccurate perception of human origins. We were created neither in the original goodness that Matthew Fox has proclaimed,
²⁰
nor in the original sin that has been established as the primary understanding of human life inside which the Christians have traditionally told their story, at least from Augustine on. Since these understandings are basic to the whole superstructure of Christian creeds, doctrine, dogma and theology, this realization means that they will all eventually come crashing down.

Creation must now be seen as an unfinished process. God cannot accurately be portrayed as resting from divine labors which are unending. There was no original perfection from which human life could fall into sin. Life has always been evolving. The Psalmist was wrong: we were not created “a little lower than the angels” (Ps. 8:5, KJV). Rather, we have evolved into a status that we judge to be only a little higher than the ape’s.

That is a very different perspective. There is a vast contrast between the definition of being fallen creatures and that of being incomplete creatures. Our humanity is not flawed by some real or mythical act of disobedience that resulted in our expulsion from some fanciful Garden of Eden. It is rather distorted by the unfinished nature of our humanity. The fact is we do not yet know what it means to be human, since that is a status we have not yet fully achieved. What human life needs, therefore, is to be called and empowered to enter a new being. We do not need some divine rescue accomplished by an invasive deity to lift us from a fall that never happened and to restore us to a status we have never possessed. The idea that Jesus had to pay the price of our sinfulness is an idea that is bankrupt. When that idea collapses, so do all of those violent, controlling and guilt-producing tactics that are so deeply part of traditional Christianity.

It is like an unstoppable waterfall. Baptism, understood as the sacramental act designed to wash from the newborn baby the stain of that original fall into sin, becomes inoperative. The Eucharist, developed as a liturgical attempt to reenact the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross that paid the price of our sinfulness, becomes empty of meaning. Various disciplinary tactics, from not sparing the rod with our children to the use of shame, guilt and fear to control the behavior of childlike adults, become violations of life based on an inadequate knowledge of the nature of our humanity. They are the application of the wrong therapy designed to overcome a faulty diagnosis. Even the afterlife symbols of heaven and hell, designed to motivate behavior by promising either eternal reward or eternal punishment, now lose their credibility. A system of rewards and punishments, either in this life or beyond it, does not produce wholeness, nor does it issue in loving acts of a self-giving person. It produces rather a self-centered attempt at survival. It leads to behavior designed not to do good for good’s sake, but to do good in order to win favor or to avoid punishment. When the plug is pulled on the definition of human life as something infected by the sin of the fall, then the mighty fortress of systematic beliefs that people think constitutes the Christian faith collapses like a house of cards. That is when reality erupts in our consciousness and forces upon us the inevitable conclusion that Christianity as we have known it cannot endure. It has two choices only: change or die!

If change is the tactic to be adopted, the change cannot be simply cosmetic, an adjustment around the edges of our faith story. It has to be so total and so radical that many will think such a change is either impossible or will result in the death of the patient. It would be easier, some say, to start over by building an entirely new religious system than it would be to seek to reform this one so totally that continuity might be strained to the breaking point. They may be right, but I am not yet convinced of that. The Christianity of the catacombs in the first century of the church’s life could never in its wildest imagination have envisioned a future that was capable of producing the concept of Christendom, with its dominating cathedrals. Yet the Christianity of the thirteenth century could look back and see its ancestor in the church of the catacombs. Our task is thus not to build tomorrow’s church. That is something into which we have to live one day at a time. Our task is rather to face the need for radical change and take the first, probably tiny, step necessary to erect a totally new foundation. That step is found, I believe, in acknowledging our evolutionary origins and dispensing with any suggestion that sin, inadequacy and guilt are the definitions into which we are born. This also means that we rid ourselves of the idea that the world was created for the benefit of human beings, or even that the planet earth is somehow different or special in the universe.

Anthropocentrism is a product of a pre-evolutionary mind-set. This planet is part of the whole universe and we human beings are simply the self-conscious form of life that has emerged out of the evolutionary soup. We are kin to both the plants and the animals. Homo sapiens were not made to dominate the world, but to enrich it by living out our role in a radically interdependent world. We might be a dead end in the evolutionary process, a creature like the dinosaur, destined for extinction. We might instead be the bridge to a brilliant future that none of us can yet imagine. Our task is first simply to be what we are, then to adapt and finally to be a link to that emerging new being. That is quite different from the role generally assigned to human beings in the ongoing story of our religious teachings.

From where does evil come? We cannot deny its presence. We see it every day. It is certainly not derived from a fall from perfection, as we were taught. It rises rather from the incompleteness of the evolutionary process. We are not fallen sinners who need to be rescued; we are incomplete creatures who need to be empowered to step into the new possibilities of an expanding life. It is not appropriate to wallow in our inadequacy or to accept as our due being denigrated by religion or having our behavior controlled or our guilt expanded. We do not need to be punished either in this life or in the life to come, nor do we need to have some mythical god figure take our punishment for us. What we need is the power to take the next step into a new and more complete humanity, to transcend our limits, to step across the self-erected boundaries of our insecure humanity. We need to face—no, even more proactively, to
embrace—
the trauma of self-consciousness, the self-centeredness of that hysterical struggle for survival that only self-conscious creatures can understand, which leads to the erection of security systems that finally destroy our emerging humanity. We need to see that the evil things we do to one another are the result of this incomplete humanity for which punishment is inappropriate. Evil cannot be controlled by threats or by discipline, parental or divine. Security can never finally be built on violence. To be “saved” does not mean to be rescued. It means to be empowered to be something we have not yet been able to be.

Is there any role for Jesus in this new vision of reality? Can the Christian story clamber out of this pit? I think so, but developing this idea fully is a task for a later day.
²¹
Suffice it for now to say that Jesus emerges as a symbol for a humanity that is not defined as fallen or sinful. It is a humanity that is portrayed as so whole and so complete that it is experienced as God-infused. Jesus cannot be a divine visitor from the heavenly realm. He cannot be, as John A. T. Robinson said of him some fifty years ago, “a cuckoo inserted into the nest of humanity.”
²²
Jesus can only be a product of humanity, created out of its gene pool. If our ideas of divinity cannot be found in this pathway, then what most people regard as the essential tenets of traditional Christianity will have to be abandoned. Christianity may well not survive so radical a dismissal of its core doctrines. But if we can understand, as I believe that we are beginning to do, that divinity is a human concept that can be found only in humanity, then the link into a Christian future will be established. So I do not despair that the traditional understanding of the faith that has guided me for a lifetime is about to die. I see in Jesus one so radically human and free, so whole and complete, that the power of life, the force of the universe—that which I call God—becomes visible and operative in him and through him. It is a new way to travel theologically. It operates from a new angle of vision that has been built on a new premise about the origins of life itself, through which I now engage a primary Christian assertion. That assertion is that somehow, in some way, through some means, God was in this Christ and that this God presence can still be met in the depths of our humanity.

The doctrines of the incarnation, the atonement and the Trinity were necessitated in traditional Christianity by the premise of the fall. God alone could overcome the fall, and since Jesus was perceived as the rescuer, then Jesus had to be a divine visitor accomplishing this divine task. When the fall is dismissed, traditional Christology cannot help but go with it and a new Christology must emerge, as a phoenix rising from the ashes of the past. It will be a Christology based not on fall and rescue, sin and salvation or even guilt and forgiveness, but on the call to wholeness, the power of love and the enhancement of being. More work must be done here, for this is the doorway through which Christianity must walk if it is to live in tomorrow’s world.

For now I am content only to take the first step, which is to expose the negativity in the terrible texts that have for so long fed the neurotic human need to justify both suffering and violence as our due, as something earned by the fall into sin over which we had no control.

There is surely a better way than this to love God with one’s heart, soul, mind and strength and to love our neighbors as ourselves. There is also surely a better way to speak of Christ as the “human face of God,”
²³
in whom we meet the source of life, the source of love and the ground of being. That is the Christ I seek and that is the Christ to whom I am still powerfully drawn.