Whither Sin? Whither Grace? (2009)

 Originally published as a Facebook Note May 17, 2009.

I have been blissfully complacent about the extent to which I have a theology, and the extent to which said theology can be challenged by Darwin. I've found that, the less I try to reduce religion to a series of true-false statements, the better I get along with God, so I thought I had come to an 'anti-theology' theology, which was about as minimalist and accommodating as you could possibly be while still taking religion seriously (see one of my previous notes). I have also managed to get along with Charles Darwin throughout my life. It is interesting to speculate how I would have dealt with Darwin 150 years ago. If I had been born 150 years earlier than I already was, I would have been about my present age when The Origin of Species was published. Could I have accommodated Darwin into my worldview? But I was born into liberal theology, and have not had to struggle with that.

Then along came two books, both about ethical philosophy, which my Contemporary Political Theory class wrestled with this spring; they knocked the pins from under my theological comfort zone.

The first was After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, published in 1981. MacIntyre said that western ethical thought became unmoored during the Enlightenment, and what we have now is a variety of strongly-held beliefs at the individual level but no firm basis for people to discuss their beliefs with each other. (Case in point: what passes for debate these days about abortion, gay rights, or anything on a radio talk show.) The problem, MacIntyre says, is there used to be a purpose for ethical behavior, and now there isn't. The purpose, he says, is to transform humans from what they are to what they could be. For the ancient Greeks, like Aristotle, this was our "teleology," our becoming people capable of living in community with others. For traditional Christians, following the law of God transformed us into godly people.

MacIntyre says that the Enlightenment era (roughly 1500-1750) brought the individualist worldview, which tends to promote the idea of 'rights' but denigrate the idea of community, as well as bringing (gulp) Protestantism, which does not see human nature as transformable.

Well, knock me and my theology over with a feather. I've always understood humans to be inherently "sinful," as argued by Paul in the 3rd chapter of Romans (armed with a slew of Hebrew Bible proof-texts). This is reflected in our dominant urges towards material gain, the love/attention/ praise of others, and physical security... listed by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) but cribbed more or less straight from the temptations of Jesus in the gospels. We emerge from this condition of sin, not by following God's law, but by accepting God's grace. Our attempts to follow the law always fall short, but we should probably keep attempting to follow God's law, if only out of gratitude for the grace and stuff. This is pretty boilerplate Protestant thought, and I took it for granted so much that I had blithely included it in my minimalist universalism.

However, apparently, there is an entire body, maybe more than one, of Christian thought, that doesn't buy this. Interestingly, none of the Catholics I have consulted buy this at all.

I think I'm still with sin and grace, and would say the purpose of ethical teaching is to enable us to live in community with others, which does not seem to me to come naturally. But ha ho, along comes the next book, Darwinian Natural Right, by Larry Arnhart, a political science professor at Northern Illinois. Arnhart argues that Hobbes's division of innate selfish behavior vs. learned moral behavior has been blown away by Darwinian research into animal behavior. Moreover, the idea that humans learn while animals are guided by instinct is also blown away. All this amounts to evidence, presented painstakingly over 10 chapters, that moral behavior is evolutionarily successful, and that we are driven in large part to behave morally.

Arnhart's 10th chapter, which we did not read for class, restates his theory with God in it. (There is no God in the first nine chapters. He says his theory works with or without God.)