Redemption in Christ from individual and cosmic sin

There is a danger in seeing Christ's work of redemption as solely focused on one's individual sins. But at the same time the lived experience of Christians is precisely an experience of redemption from individual sins that block union with God and neighbor: "How can I ever be friends with Him, or with him, or with her, or with them, after I did that to Him, or to him, or to her, or to them?" In the context of one's individual repentance, a focus on the sin of the world and the deeply rooted social dimensions of sin, may be a distraction or even an excuse. "It's not my sin, but our sin." And it is not far from our sin to nobody's sin. Adam shifted the blame for his sin onto Eve, and Eve onto the serpent. It would have been no better if they shifted it onto the world.

None of this denies that there are structures of sin that are of cosmic importance, and that the means by which the individual sinner is redeemed is through-and-through ecclesial. But we must also not overestimate the importance of cosmic sin. For there is nothing worse in the world than mortal sins, and it is only individuals who commit those, and thereby separate themselves from God and one another. Moreover, to the true lover, the beloved is a cosmos. And God loves each of us.

Penalty and reward substitution

Christ bore the suffering due for our sins, in our place. One might worry whether this makes any moral sense. Assume a retributive view of punishment, on which wrongdoing provides a reason, not based on the protection of society or the reformation of the wrongdoer, to treat the wrongdoer harshly.

Now, the best argument I know for a retributive view of punishment is the parallel with reward. Doing more than one's duty is a reason to be rewarded, in proportion to how far above one's duty one has gone. By parallel, doing less than one's duty is a reason to be punished, in proportion to how far short of one's duty one has fallen.

But in reward situations, we fully accept reward substitution. Sally has earned a large cash prize as a reward for her life's work in getting the Elbonians and Olbenians to forget their past differences and live in harmony. She directs the bestower of the prize to give it to the Orphans of Mixed Elbonian-Olbenian Descent Protection Fund. Some consideration of justice would have been satisfied by giving the prize to Sally. But when the substitution is made, the very same consideration of justice is still satisfied.

If retributive punishment is the flip side of retributive reward, and if we are untroubled by reward substitution, we should be equally untroubled by penalty substitution. Fred's receipt of harsh treatment that was due Sally could satisfy the reason of justice to treat Sally harshly, just as the Orphan Fund's receipt of the money due Sally could satisfy the reason of justice to reward Sally.

There are, of course, some consent conditions on reward substitution. For y's receipt of a good that was to be x's reward to be a valid substitution, x has to consent. Moreover, it may be that y has to either consent or be presumed to consent to receiving the good qua substitution for x. If Hitler got the Nobel Peace Prize and directed the money to my research fund, saying that my research work promotes his ideals, I would have very good reason to refuse. And if I were given the money despite my refusal, it is not clear that it would be a valid substitution. Further, maybe the persons who were the primary benificees of x's supererogatory action--the ones by benefiting whom x gained the reward--need to consent or be presumed to consent to the substitution.

It would be very interesting if penalty substitution required the same consent conditions. Thus, if Sally is due harsh treatment, and Fred offers to suffer it for her (so, Fred's consent is built into the story), this is only a valid substitution if Sally consents to it. This would have the theological consequence that Christ's sacrifice cannot be validly applied in justice to those who never consent to its application. Likewise, if the primary benificees need to consent in reward substitution cases, the primary individual against whom the wrong was done need to consent in penalty substitution cases. If so, this means that Christ's sacrifice requires the view that the primary individual against whom the wrong was done is always God. "Against you, you alone, have I sinned," says the Psalmist, emphasizing this.

St. Anselm on the magnitude of sin

St. Anselm believes that the least of our sins puts us in an infinite debt to God and is infinitely bad. Anselm's own argument for this thesis is uses some implicit premises. Here is my best reconstruction:

1. (Premise) To sin is to oppose the will of God.
2. (Premise) If it is not permissible to do A in order to preserve a good G, then A is at least as bad as the loss of G.
3. (Premise) It is not permissible to oppose the will of God "even to preserve the whole of creation", even "if there were more worlds as full of beings as this", and even if "they increased to an infinite extent".
4. (Premise) The badness of the loss of the whole of creation if the whole of creation consisted of planets as full of beings as Earth and increased to an infinite extent would be infinite.
5. (Premise) If something is at least as bad as an infinite bad, then it's infinitely bad.
6. To oppose the will of God is at least as bad as something infinitely bad. (2, 3 and 4)
7. To oppose the will of God is infinitely bad. (5 and 6)
8. Every sin is infinitely bad. (1 and 7)
9. (Premise) To do something infinitely bad puts us in infinite debt.
10. Every sin sin is infinitely bad and puts us in infinite debt. (8 and 9)

Probably the most obvious thing to worry about is the conjunction of (2) and (3). Premise (2) appears to be a consequentialist claim. Premise (3), on the other hand, is a premise that the Christian tradition does indeed endorse, but the Christian tradition is not a consequentialist tradition (witness St Augustine on lying and St Paul's insistence that we do not do evil that good might come of it). Thus the argument brings together premises that originate in two competing moral theories, and it is unsurprising that when you do that, you can derive surprising things from their conjunction.

But this is too quick. For there is a lot of plausibility to the consequentialist intuition that Anselm invokes in (2). When one thinks about Augustine and Kant on lying, it "feels right" to say that they value honesty over life. On the side of Kant at least, this is mistaken. Kant's objection to lying isn't that honesty is a greater good than life, because Kant's ethics is not centered on the good (at least not in a way that would make this statement work). So perhaps it is right to affirm the consequentialist intuition in (2) as well as the deontological intuition in (3). And if one does that, then one gets the view that certain actions are infinitely bad.

However, this approach is mistaken. For one does not do justice to both consequentialist and deontological intuitions by supposing that wrong actions are infinitely bad. For consider this situation: If you don't kill an innocent person, a hundred other people will each kill one innocent person. (How can you set this up? One way is statistical. You know that if a certain temptation T is given to people, one percent of people will commit a murder. So you're told that if you don't kill one person, temptation T will be offered to 10,000 people.) Clearly the hundred murders are worse than one murder, and yet it's wrong, according to the deontologist, to kill one innocent person. Moreover, this case is directly a counterexample to (2).

One might try to get out of this counterexample by denying that infinities can be compared. But if one does that, then one can no longer say things that mortal sin is worse than venial sin, and the like. Besides, one does want to be able to compare infinities. If I had a choice between preventing one stranger from committing one murder of a stranger and a hundred strangers from committing one murder apiece, obviously I should prevent the latter.

A different kind of objection to the argument would be that in (2), "at least as bad" should be read as "not less bad" (I am worried about cases of incommensurability). But if one makes the same replacement in (5), it is far from clear whether (5) remains true. For it may be that something is infinitely bad in an aesthetic way (say, an infinitely long bad novel) and something else is finitely bad in an incommensurable way (say, a toothache of finite length); the latter is not less bad than the former, but it does not follow that the latter is infinite.

Nonetheless, even though St Anselm's argument for the infinite badness of sin fails, I think there are alternate ways to make the thesis plausible. But that's a subject for another post (hopefully over the next couple of days).

Commonality of nature and the Incarnation

St. Athanasius insists that it was crucial for Christ's redemption of us that Christ both share in the divine nature and in the human nature: in the divine nature to unite us with God, and in the human nature in order to unite us with God. The bond of a common nature with us made his redemptive work applicable to us.

The idea that the common human nature is a genuine bond is a fruitful one. (A lot of science-fiction from the middle of the last century takes this bond to be important. Yes, the aliens of the stories are persons, but there is a special bond that human persons share. However, a number of science-fiction writers confused this special bond with some kind of human superiority to the aliens they populated their stories with. But that is mistaken, a mistake which we will avoid if we remember C. S. Lewis's discussion of two kinds of patriotism--the bad kind where one likes one's country because one thinks one's country is better and the good kind where one simply has affection for one's country and its institutions and culture.)

It is, however, tempting after Kant to see what is significant about us as not our humanity which integrally includes both the personal and the animal aspects of our existence, but just the personal aspects. If we see what is significant about us as just personhood, then Athanasius' account of why the Incarnation was needed loses some of its force. For if what is significant about us is personhood, then the second person of the Trinity already had personhood prior to the Incarnation. Admittedly that personhood was not precisely like ours--if St. Thomas is right, we can term the Logos and ourselves "persons" only by analogy. But nonetheless there is an analogy there, and the fleshly nature of the Incarnation becomes less clearly needed.

It is theologically important to hold on to the idea that we are not just persons. We are also animals. We are human beings with all that this entails. That is one reason why accounts that attempt to reconcile evolution with the divine plan by insisting that God only cared about producing persons, and left it to a chance he did not control whether these persons should be mammals or reptiles, biped or quadrapeds, and so on, are theologically mistaken. A part of the significance of the Incarnation is that our concrete enfleshment matters. The kind of persons we are is defined in large part by our flesh, and the kind of flesh we have is defined in large part by its aptness towards personal activity. Ignoring the concrete enfleshment is apt to lead us to philosophical error, such as the error of those who think that there are two co-located beings in front of this computer, one a person and the other an animal, an error that leads to moral mistakes on issues like abortion and euthanasia.

What is this commonality of nature that all of humans have and which St. Athanasius thought so important? Platonists will say it is our common participation in a single thing, the Form of Humanity. Aristotelians will say that it is our possession of numerically distinct essences, which are, nonetheless, qualitatively the same. The Platonic story fits somewhat better with St. Athanasius' account, but both accounts provide an ontological basis for the commonality of nature.

Christ, having reconciled us human beings with God will also re-integrate our nature, bringing the animal and the personal together, when he transforms us in the resurrection, completing his new creation in us. Blessed be his name!

The Word became flesh. Let us bend the knees of our body and of our soul before him as we celebrate with joy this jarring truth.