Banished from EdenOriginal Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the Drama of Salvation
By Raymund Schwager, SJ
Chapter 4
Human Self-Reflection and Universal Responsibility
The doctrine of original sin must be based essentially on the Bible and church tradition. However, the reception and understanding of a Christian doctrine in a given period depends to a considerable degree on how it is related to the world view that is dominant during that period. Is the doctrine’s deeper structure compatible with that world view? Does it function as a constructive challenge, or does it merely appear as a vestige of an earlier, outmoded world view? In view of these problems we have attempted in the preceding chapters to engage in a thorough exploration of a new understanding of imitation (mimesis), of evolutionary theory and of questions associated with procreation. Already in the introduction, however, we saw that the essential difficulties with the doctrine of original sin, which began with the Enlightenment long before Darwin, originate in the ‘dogma’ of modernity (Latour) that holds that nature and freedom (history, social order) must be separated. Since this separation has again become problematic in light of the most recent research, we deliberately left the question open as to whether and how far we could follow that theory or ‘dogma’ of modernity. In the preceding chapters a clear answer has emerged, which I want to summarize and then proceed to make it more precise through an explicit series of reflections on the connection between evolutionary theory and the ‘dogma’ of modernity.
The Organism as Memory
The theory of evolution initially made accepting the idea of a first human couple being responsible for the whole history of human sin seem implausible for many. However, the same theory also indirectly had another and quite different effect, namely that the Enlightenment separation of the eternal truths of reason and the contingent truths of history was rendered problematic and out of date. According to evolutionary theory, accidental events may permanently imprint an organism and enter in to its structure or into its ‘essence’. Evolutionary theorists speak therefore of 'frozen accidents’. Out of this background every organism can be understood as a living memory, which preserves countless accidents, bifurcations or ‘decisions’ in the course of cosmic and biological evolution and passes them on. Accidents presuppose, of course, a common structure for which the contingent event is either meaningful or meaningless or harmful. Conversely, however, the accident can also change common structures and make a determinative imprint on them for the future. The universal or the structure on the one hand and the particular or the accidental on the other hand are therefore not separate realities, but both are bound together by a ‘tangled hierarchy’ (Dupuy).
Not only the body and its functions should be seen as a living memory but also the spontaneous reactions and forms of behavior of animals. Even normal dispositions of our conscious human behavior turn out to be ‘remembrances’ that were imprinted by earlier stages or accidental occurrences in the evolution of the organism. Of course, these traces of earlier occurrences are not stored up and transmitted in a conscious way, but in the gene pool. They show how particular events can enter into the nature of an individual.
If the organism is understood in light of the evolutionary theory as living memory, there are few objections against the Christian doctrine of original sin from this point of view. If it is part and parcel of evolution that individual events are preserved and transmitted, it is not implausible any more that negative decisions from the beginning of human life are being passed on until today. Certainly there is an essential difference between those many ‘decisions’ within evolution which directly affected the gene pool and moral decisions at the beginning of humanity. For this reason we have attempted to show, on the one hand, that moral decisions could have had at least a long-term effect on the gene pool; on the other hand, we have explicitly dealt with the question of freedom and the supernatural calling of all humans in connection with the theory of evolution. Thus the doctrine of original sin, in spite of its obvious peculiarity, enters into a positive resonance with the evolutionary world view, for it posits that events long past continue to have effects as an enduring heritage in us. Whether we are dealing with more than a resonance depends of course on whether the hereditary transmission that affects the gene pool can be brought into an inner connection with the imitation that influences behavior.
Propagation and Imitation
The Council of Trent says of original sin that it is transmitted through propagation (procreation) and not through imitation. The continued effect of negative behavior through imitation is easily accessible to modern thinking. Yet the inheritance of a moral quality is scarcely accepted. Due to the modern separation of freedom (sin) and nature (propagation), this idea could only be seen as a mythological amalgamation of categories that have nothing to do with one another. But this suspicion of mythology at work was gradually rendered questionable in the course of our investigations. According to Girard, deeper imitation precedes reflective knowledge and it absorbs the influence of models in 'quasi-osmotic immediacy'. This biological metaphor for the description of imitation or mimesis indicates that the latter is deeply rooted in nature and should not be seen in opposition to it. Tomatis shows further that imitation begins already in the mother’s womb. The influences the fetus absorbs from its mother affect its further growth and especially the development of its brain. This influence begins already at conception. Finally, genetics shows that conception is only possible because the male and female gametic cells create copies or imitations of themselves, which can then fuse, and also growth ensues through a continuous copying or imitation of information in the fertilized ovum.
From conception, through growth under absorption of sensuous impressions, to imitation of moral acts, there is thus a continuous process. Imitation is completely grounded in natural processes and nature proves to be a communicative development from the very beginning, a development which gradually opens up to freedom. Procreation and imitation should therefore no longer be played off against one another. Yet, the question of freedom requires further clarification.
Freedom and Preset Nature
Christian tradition has always understood man as a creature of freedom, even if the Augustinian doctrine of predestination made the Western understanding of freedom problematic in part. But the concrete possibilities of action were very limited because freedom was perceived in the context of an order which was preset by an unalterable human and extra-human nature, which was in its turn grounded in the free creative will of God. In accord with this view, one usually also regarded social institutions as previously given by nature and thus as directly or indirectly given by God.
Within western history the struggle between Caesar and pope in part brought the preset order into question. The long-standing crisis between Church and political authority made the Reformation possible, which caused a deep rift in western society. This opened new ways in which the natural sciences and Enlightenment thinking could originate and gradually develop. The theoretical separation between body and soul (Descartes), and somewhat later between nature and freedom, untied thought on freedom from the bonds of nature for the first time, and at the same time turned nature into an object that could be manipulated at will. This development initially had consequences primarily in the social realm. In place of trust in the political authorities established by God, the idea of self-determination by the peoples (democracy) appeared, and in the toil of work one saw no longer a punishment decreed by God for original sin (see Genesis 3:17-19), but the possibility for the self-realization of one’s own life and for the improvement of mankind’s future (Marx). Progress in science and technology finally led to the gradual substitution of machines for many forms of human labor and to new forms of worldwide communication. In this way expanded windows of opportunity and previously unknown possibilities of creative action were developed.
However, the devices humans produced (machines) exerted feedback effects on them in complex ways. People imitated these as new models in their thinking and began to conceive of the human body according to the model of machines. So humans were no longer simply conducting research but they became the object of investigation and manipulation. The effects of research on humans appear most clearly in the increasing possibilities for changing one’s nature through genetic manipulation. There is now a direct connection between theoretical insights into evolution and the practical possibility of altering one’s genetic inheritance.
What humans earlier thought most definitely to be preset, the environment and their own bodies, turns out to be a product of a construction process in which they themselves can intervene, at least subsequently, and they can do this ever more strenuously. The preset is thus no longer untouchable, but becomes something provisional that can be formed and changed. To be sure, this possibility does not hold for every individual person, for whom most things remain simply given, now and in future. Yet it certainly holds for human society as a whole, which created these modern possibilities and pushes them continually further. In earlier times there used to be a dialectic between individual and society, but in the meantime a third reality has appeared, technology, in which many already see the decisive subject of history. Through technology nature is more and more integrated into the realm of human action, while men are molded according to the demands of the technological world. Already in our day there is talk of a ‘third Copernican revolution’, whose aim is not to make nature serve man but rather to adapt the human organism to a changed environment and social order. ‘The human person who has turned into a subject and who, as subject, developed the natural sciences for the mastery of the world has now become the changeable object of technology.’ The separation of nature and freedom was thus from the very start only a theoretical separation, which in reality led to a previously unknown interpenetration and fusing of nature and history and set in motion a process whose outcome we cannot yet perceive. We are thus within a ‘tangled hierarchy’ that is becoming ever more universal: on the one hand, humans form society and create technologies so as to master the processes of nature, while on the other these processes and technologies form and master their human ‘masters’ more and more. What used to be nature, increasingly becomes the objectification and materialization of free decisions, which in their turn are subject to the increasing coercion of processes imposing their own more powerful order.
The philosophical tradition of the western world has always seen human freedom in connection with the human ability to return to oneself (reditio in seipsum). This capacity remained, however, very formal because of the limits preset by nature. Karl Rahner, referring to modern thought and Christian experience, has expressly emphasized that freedom is not simply an external human capacity by which man can choose between different possibilities. To the contrary, freedom concerns his entire existence and is a ‘total and finalizing self-mastery of the subject’. It is ‘first of all “freedom of being”. It is not merely the quality of an act and capacity exercised at some time, but a transcendental mark of human existence itself.’ ‘By the fact that man in his transcendence exists as open and in-determined, he is at the same time responsible for himself. He is left to himself and placed in his own hands not only in his knowledge, but also in his actions. It is in being consigned to himself that he experiences himself as responsible and free.’ Rahner holds that this transcendental freedom has to execute itself through concrete objectifications throughout the full length and width of the space-time of historical existence. This occurs above all through humans taking an evaluative stance toward their own history of freedom by interpreting it and thereby endowing it with its final meaning. ‘Freedom always concerns the person as such and as a whole. The object of freedom in its original sense is the subject himself, and all decisions about objects in his experience of the world around him are objects of freedom only insofar as they mediate this finite subject in time and space to himself.’
Rahner developed his doctrine of freedom chiefly in light of Christ’s total surrender of his life and in regard to the Christian task of deciding about one’s own salvation or damnation. However, he also referred to the modern possibilities of self-manipulation: ‘What is new in this issue is therefore not that man is faber sui ipsius [maker of himself], but that this fundamental constitution of man is manifested historically today in a totally new way. Today for the first time man’s possibility of transcendental self-manipulation irreversibly takes on a clear and historically categorical form.’
The word self-manipulation could suggest that these modern possibilities should on principle be judged negatively. But if freedom is the total and finalizing self-mastery of the subject, then this can hardly be true. In fact, the modern possibilities of self-manipulation provide the anthropology of total self-determination with an empirical meaning. As long as the environment, other people, and one’s own body were understood as fixed and preset by nature, a strange distance remained between transcendent freedom in its openness to the absolute and the self’s concrete acts of execution by means of very limited objectifications. Only when much of the preset material could be understood as objectifications of prior history and prior instances of freedom, did self-mediation become more comprehensive; a complete self-mediation could then become conceivable when humans become able to take a stand toward their entire earlier history. Biological research is at present occupied with fully decoding the human genome, and in a few years it will have attained this goal. When this occurs, human nature will not only become more transparent, but it will become possible for humans to engage in a new way with their entire past. Everything that has been built up in the process of life over hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years is opened up to their access. With the possibility of changing our inheritance from the past, new dimensions for the future also open up. Thus an immanent possibility of total self-determination emerges. Even if immense dangers are bound up with this potential self-determination, nonetheless the new possibilities and tasks are commensurate with the Christian understanding of freedom as total and finalizing self-mastery.
The newly accessible ranges of freedom were obviously not available to humans before, yet they were already addressed in a historical-symbolic fashion in the Jewish-Christian history of revelation. This occurred not only in the narration of original sin, but also through the eschatological-apocalyptic oracles of judgment and through Jesus’ unique surrender of himself for all of us in an apocalyptic context. The intention of the history of the fall in paradise was to make clear that phenomena such as oppression, the hardship of labor, and death, which earlier must have seemed naturally or mythically determined, must be judged differently from a biblical point of view: the apparently natural is to be interpreted as the consequence of prior human failure. Likewise the eschatological-apocalyptic oracles of judgment intended to establish a connection between human sins and the entire course of history, which to most men and peoples appeared to be determined by nature of fate. In the context of its own time the Bible could of course speak to this question only in a form of historical-symbolic metaphor and only for faith could it be understandable in some fashion.
However, the transformation processes that were meanwhile awakened in the world by the Christian message led gradually and through complex stages to the point where today the issue in question has become a concrete object of knowledge. We can now establish empirically that freedom and the human potential of transformation extends into areas previously thought to be predetermined. From this standpoint the doctrine of original sin is thus anything but an outdated concept. In fact it proves to be a fundamental, though largely symbolic emergence of a problem which only now has taken on an immediate empirical dimension. The preset, human and extra-human nature, is the product of an earlier history and earlier bifurcations, and present decisions will become what is preset for coming generations.
At the same time this insight makes it evident that freedom cannot be completely understood either from the standpoint of the isolated subject nor from that of the I-Thou relation, but must be seen in the context of human society and history in their entirety. This way all objectifications of freedom become preconditions for other free acts, which in turn are the preconditions for future decisions. The long and complex process of the self-construction of human nature and human society, which hitherto has proceeded unconsciously for the most part, has now become self-reflective. Individual self-reflection, accessible to earlier human individuals within certain limits, has developed into a comprehensive process of self-reflection, which can only be fulfilled by humanity as a whole and in view of its final destination.
Since the end indicates something about the beginning, one may infer from the contemporary and imminently foreseeable possibility of free intervention in our genetic inheritance that already, in the self-construction of this inheritance, there were potentials for bifurcations (accidents), and that these potentials became, on the first level of self-reflection, authentic freedom. A retroactive freedom, which is possible from a standpoint anticipating the end of history, consequently suggests openness in all evolution and an analogous freedom in the beginning of humanity. In this regard it makes sense that freedom in its radical form as total self-determination cannot be a matter pertaining just to the individual or any group, but is a task of all mankind. All individual attempts toward self-reflection and freedom must complement one another toward an all-embracing self-reflection in which humanity intervenes in its own nature and determines itself with regard to its future and final destination. Viewed in this way, the doctrine of original sin no longer comes across as an odd curiosity in today’s world. Together with the eschatological-apocalyptic oracles of judgment and the doctrine of the universal redemptive death of Christ it proves in fact to be the first and decisive articulation of that universal process of self-reflection and self-determination moving toward finality which now has become an empirical challenge and task. But if freedom is a universal process, it also becomes clear that each individual subject is more determined by the free acts of others than by his or her own self-determination. Freedom turns out also to be an affliction, something that the traditional doctrine of original sin has always known.
We are clearly not in a position to evaluate more precisely how far the already foreseeable possibilities of transformation or manipulation will actually extend into the future and how they will be used. The historical-symbolic narratives of the Bible certainly intimate significant possibilities, which should at least arouse us in these days to thought experiments in order to prepare ourselves for developments that could occur. In the book of Revelation the time up to the end is seen predominantly negatively and is described as an anti-Christian reign by means of two beasts. The first beast embodies political power, while the description of the second is that it has the appearance of a lamb but speaks like a dragon. It thus resembles the Church, the creature of the lamb, but it represents something quite different. The second animal serves the first one, erects an image for it, and possesses quite extraordinary powers: ‘It was then permitted to breathe life into the beast’s image, so that the beast’s image could speak and could have anyone who did not worship it put to death’ (Revelation 13:15). In this prophecy it is striking that the second beast not only pretends to possess miraculous power and so leads men astray, but it is actually able to breathe the breath of life into the dead image. It therefore has at its disposal quite extraordinary powers and imitates precisely what God did in the creation of the first humans (Genesis 2:7). How the biblical writer could come to the point of ascribing such powers to an idolatrous force may remain open for now. In the modern context, however, his prophetic utterance at least gives rise to the question of whether the sciences, with their instinctive quest to imitate the Creator, could in fact succeed in becoming the ‘creator’ in his stead. Looking from the standpoint of the Revelation of John we cannot, in any case, exclude this possibility from the outset. In this prophetic thought experiment the sciences should by no means be associated unilaterally with an anti-Christian regime. In an earlier chapter I considered as a hypothesis and thought experiment the quite different possibility that modern genetics might succeed in removing negative elements that had entered the genome through sin in the course of human evolution. The sciences appear to be an extremely two-edged sword that can lead to utterly new forms of both good and evil.
According to Revelation the anti-Christian character of the second beast consisted particularly in the fact that it would lead all inhabitants of the earth to worship the image of the first beast, and it kills all who don’t comply. If the sciences should one day succeed in creating life, evil would lie in the pressure humans felt to worship the work of their hands. They would hardly be able to see any longer that the power of the second beast finally comes from God.
What the sciences will be able to achieve in the near or distant future, we do not know precisely or at all. But from a biblical standpoint we cannot exclude the possibility that humans, by means of their self-transformation, will become able to intervene and penetrate more deeply into nature, as we can realistically foresee at the present time. Even the idea that humanity might one day encompass even what was formerly simply given, nature and the cosmos, and at least change its direction, may no longer be rejected a priori. The ‘dogma’ of the modernity, which would separate nature and human history and which so deeply influenced modern theology, thus loses any profound basis.
‘Evil’ in Evolution
The question of how one should judge evil in an evolutionary view of world greatly occupied Teilhard de Chardin, and he became convinced that the doctrine of original sin should be construed out of the background of the laws of evolution. Since evolution, in this view, strives gropingly from multiplicity in pursuit of unity, there are tendencies toward backslides that inevitably occur. ‘In such a system, which advances by tentative gropings, the laws of large numbers make it absolutely inevitable that every step towards order is paid for by failures, by disintegrations, by discordances: the proportion of these depends upon certain cosmic constants which it is impossible to determine, but to which it would certainly be useless to claim to fix a priori an upper limit beyond which one could say that the world was corrupted or evil.’
Modern knowledge of genetics has led still a step beyond what was available to Teilhard in his time. It shows that relapses and disintegration are not simply unavoidable. Errors in the reproduction of the genetic programme now prove even to be necessary for progress to occur: ‘The most perfect capability of replication is, however, its “only-almost-perfection”. Without imprecision, i.e., without accidental errors, any development would be impossible. Errors of replication and subsequent selection of “fitting” changes are the motor of the growth of organic patterns.’ Besides errors in genetic replication great catastrophes, such as those that killed off about half of all living beings 250 million years ago or that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, prove also to be important steps on the way toward human beings. It was every unfortunate for those immediately affected, but it had a positive effect in evolution.
This view is compatible with the Christian doctrine of creation and has great resonance with the doctrine of redemption. That is to say, if a free creature (human being) is to become possible, the world must fulfill a double condition. There must be great regularity in it so that the free creature can find its way and orient itself through the recurrence of similar or like experiences. The laws of the world must, however, have simultaneously a certain openness and indeterminacy. Though this may lead easily into accidents and catastrophes, it in turn makes possible real, free decisions on the part of the creature without a suspension of the laws of nature.
Modern insights which can be summarized by the catchword symbiogenesis furthermore show that not only accident was a motor of progress. Evolution also required a process of ‘unification’. Precursors of cells completely coalesced and so enabled genuine leaps in evolution, even if many unsolved problems still remain for us with regard to macro-evolution. Also, sexuality was quite significant, since through it distinctive genetic material was repeatedly fused and combined anew. Alongside accident, which tended in a destructive direction, there were consequently strong forces of unification at work in evolution. This does not simply refer to physical and chemical forces. Animals that mated, struggled for food or defended their territories always did this without thinking of their genes or the corresponding chemical reactions. They reacted in this way because they were governed by corresponding drives. Drives were thus a decisive force in evolution. If animals were only physical-chemical machines, it would have been all the same to them whether they were dismembered (became extinct) or not. An evolution of life can only exist where there is also a drive to live, as seen in the behavior of animals that fight for their existence and survival. Where, however, self-assertive drives are at work, interaction necessarily comes about: cooperation, competition, and fighting. Life in the animal realm offers precisely this picture: besides forms of complex cooperation there is a continual struggle for survival. This is especially clear among those animals that are closest to us humans. So it is that among certain species of apes sexuality serves not merely for reproduction, but also for lessening of conflict, indeed for ‘reconciliation’. In the same vein we find here precursors of human battle which means that fighting not only a matter of momentary self-defense but of long-term ‘planned’ destructive action against enemy groups.
For our immediate sensitivity, the natural struggle for life can seem brutal and totally ‘evil’. But against this negative impression one has to consider first of all, that the struggle for life itself has a goal and serves the function of self-control. Moreover, besides the struggle there are likewise forms of cooperation which are even more numerous. Above all, however, the problem appears in a completely different light if we look again at nature from the standpoint of human freedom. Freedom – understood as possibility of choice – presupposes, as we have already seen a dimension of openness and accident in pre-human nature, and thus also the possibility of negative developments. Self-determination (freedom of being) belongs also to freedom in a deeper sense, and in nature this corresponds to (evolutionary) self-development. The concrete expression of this self-development is the life-drive with its manifold forms of cooperation and struggle. If the image of the watchmaker does not dominate our understanding of creation, but rather the image of a true creator who through continuous influence confers on the creature the ability to own his own being and engage in his own actions and self-development, then the deeper meaning of the life-drive becomes clear. It turns out then to be the necessary precondition and the root out of which freedom may develop.
We have already mentioned that Teilhard wanted to understand original sin in light of an evolution that proceeded groping and struggling. In dependence on ecclesial tradition he designated relapses within evolution as ‘the tinder of sin’ (fomes peccati) or as the provocation to sin, and in this connection he interpreted original sin as the actualization of the sparking of this tinder: ‘The specifically human Fall is no more than the (broadly speaking, collective and eternal) actualizing of this ‘fomes peccati’ which was infused, long before us, into the whole of the universe, from the lowest zones of matter to the angelic spheres.’
Now if the actual sparking of this tinder of sin had been ‘absolutely inevitable’ in the human realm, as a quotation of Teilhard we referred to earlier could suggest, speaking of true freedom, and thus also of sin, would be invalid. Yet since it is this very freedom that endows the life-struggle in nature with a deeper meaning, such a conclusion would destroy any explanation for the hardship within evolution. If, on the contrary, the destructive tendencies within evolution are understood only as a stimulus of sin, and if original sin is interpreted in this frame of reference, then both the specific character of sin is preserved and its rootage in pre-human evolution is clearly seen. From this point of view we also realize that the concept of original sin is anything but an exotic idea. It, in fact, enables us to conjoin antithetical aspects of our contemporary world view and experience. On the one hand it maintains the concern for freedom and just in that way lends deeper meaning to the evolutionary world view. On the other hand it explains why forms of behavior we feel are evil in the animal realm can reappear among us humans in sharpened form: in the animal realm they are actually natural, but in the human realm they are evil precisely because they have their origin in freedom as well. They may not be minimized or excused because of our animal past.
Universal Responsibility and Redemption
The concept of solidarity is a central element in modern humanistic and ethical thought. This concern already took a particularly radical and universal turn in The Brothers Karamazov by F.M. Dostoevsky. In this work the seventeen-year-old, severely ill Markel, brother of the Elder Zosima, finds life to be like paradise in spite of a burning fever. He says to his mother, ‘Mother darling … there must be servants and masters, but if so I will be the servant of my servants, the same as they are to me. And another thing, mother, every one of us is guilty toward all men, and I more than any.’ His mother asks how he could have sinned against all men. Markel answers, ‘Mother, little heart of mine … my joy, believe me, every one is responsible to all men for all men and for everything. I don’t know how to explain it to you, but I feel it is so, painfully even. And how is it we went on living, getting angry and not knowing?’ E. Levinas has often cited the sentence, ‘Every one is guilty toward all men, and I more than any’, and he sees in it a central element of his own ethical philosophy. Starting from a radical personalist thinking, Levinas advocates an ‘ethics of heteronomy that is not a servitude, but the service of God through responsibility for the neighbor, in which I am irreplaceable’. The true I is ‘the one who, before all decision, is elected to bear all the responsibility for the world’.
This view is relevant to our reflections on original sin and redemption insofar as it poses the question of freedom. Here we are not dealing with an isolated and so-called ‘autonomous’ subject, but one understood in the framework of all humanity and thus in the context of universal responsibility. However, a perspective such as this is not at all self-evident today, and the concept of a universal partaking in guilt and responsibility must face up to a massive challenge. The largely dominant thought about system thinking and the naturalistic positions that wish to interpret life solely as a matter of physical and chemical processes scarcely allow a place for true solidarity. Moreover the multifaceted experiences of the autonomous workings of the modern world give rise to the impression tat human society has become transformed into a huge machine. It is no longer free decisions that seem to determine the world, but constraints of the system.
Against this tendency of thought and feeling, it may be objected of course that it is precisely a new development within the ‘world-machine’ which again raises the question of responsibility. Modern society has – in multiple ways – created the possibility of self-destruction and thus has placed the most urgently vital alternative before mankind. In view of this overwhelming fact that is evident to everybody who wants to be well informed, human beings can scarcely assert with conviction that they have no responsibility. Rather the question must be raised in the opposite way: is the responsibility facing them not too great, so that it demands too much of them? Levinas’ ethical philosophy brings up exactly the same question. How can the human being actually bear responsibility for the whole world without breaking down under an unbearable burden?
H. M. Enzensberger grants a central place to this question in his study Aussichten auf den Burgerkrieg (Views on Civil War). He describes how modern mass media confront us daily with so much misery, injustice, and violence in the world that we are no longer able to truly expose ourselves to all these impressions but must protect ourselves inwardly. He therefore draws the conclusion that there is no longer any infinity universal claim upon us. The idea of a universal responsibility would only make sense if conjoined with the idea of being all-powerful like God. But this would be pathological arrogance. For him it is therefore time ‘to take leave of moralistic fantasies of omnipotence’ and to familiarize ourselves with the concept of limited responsibility.
Enzensberger’s enquiry should be taken seriously, for the narrative of the fall in paradise shows that the attempt to be like God actually belongs to the core of the story of sin. Since this attempt, as we saw in the previous chapter, does not have to appear directly at the forefront, it can easily be concealed behind a pious or high ethical demand. Isn’t the idea of universal responsibility just such a deception? Isn’t this the appearance of a high ethic that covertly claims the status of being like God?
Before we proceed further into this question, we must briefly consider whether the same temptation occurs today in other ways. Nietzsche posed this question in his usually brilliant and simultaneously naive manner with brutal frankness. In Thus Spole Zarathustra he has his hero speak to his friends: ‘But to reveal my heart entirely to you, my friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods.’ It would be unbearable not to be the highest or greatest. There must be nothing beyond man. Instead, the latter becomes the new creator, and so he must have the heart to create the ‘Overman’: ‘Once you said “God” when you gazed upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say Overman. / God is a supposition; but I want your supposing to reach no further than your creating will. / Could you create a god?- So be silent about all gods! But you could surely create the Overman. / Perhaps not you yourselves, my brothers! But you could transform yourselves into forefathers and ancestors of the Overman: and let this be your finest creating.’
The departure of God led in Nietzsche’s poetic fantasy to the human being who is creative creator. Doesn’t an actual feature of our social order today correspond to this dream from the nineteenth century? Though the social order will hardly attempt to create the Overman in a straightforward fashion, it certainly intends more and more to improve man, as he has been so far, through conscious interventions. We have already seen that modern society is self-reflective. It more and more stamps and forms its own members and not merely on the cultural place, for it even interferes in their very organisms. Admittedly people today – to use again Nietzsche’s language – are certainly only the ‘parents and forebears’ of man to come. If, however, science should succeed in creating artificial life, which on the basis of the Bible cannot be excluded a priori – as we have seen – wouldn’t men understand themselves as the true alternative to the creative divine will? Would the creative will of the humankind that had become the Overman not take the place of the former Creator God?
The most profound problem is that we don’t stand before coarse alternatives, but before distinct possibilities which – on the surface – are very close to one another, yet in actuality lie worlds apart and thus call for a very subtle and spiritual gift of discernment. In the light of evolution, especially in the light of the radical mandate of freedom contained in the Christian message, one cannot reject out of hand the tendency of humans to re-make themselves and to assume a new attitude toward evolution and cannot judge it as sheer mimicry of the creative work of God and as satanic. But at the same time we cannot overlook the fact that the self-reflective process of modern society imitates man in particular, insofar as he is a physical-chemical organism. So this tendency inclines more and more toward substituting the living person, this feeling, suffering, rejoicing, and therefore incalculable creature, for another that is more controllable and thus more predictable. This being would perhaps blend in even better with the (ant colony) state, but this means it would have largely lost its spiritual dimension. So today we face not only the possibility that humanity is brutally annihilating itself, but we also see a tendency emerging that humans would do away with themselves in a much more subtle and ‘peaceful’ manner: by transforming themselves and worshipping this process as a divine creation.
Since we now recognize such tendencies, they summon us to a correspondingly great responsibility. With that we have, however, arrived where our reflections already were. The problem has only got worse through the new sphere of questions. Humans are, on one hand, challenged to a universal responsibility for themselves and the future, while on the other hand they seem completely overwhelmed by this responsibility. We face a dilemma, though not a hopeless one. The new dilemma corresponds precisely to the one that Anselm of Canterbury already pointed out nearly a thousand years ago in his doctrine of redemption (Cur dues homo). Starting from cultural and religious concepts of his time, he advanced through different stages of deepening thought to a radical concept of freedom in which he emphasized human dignity and defined freedom as the mandate ‘to act out of oneself’. This resulted in the conclusion that humans themselves must rectify the evil that they perpetrated through sin, but at the same time they are unable to do so. However, Anselm did not stop at the dilemma, but he drove his conclusions relentlessly further. Regarding this impossible obligation human beings must either despair or there must be a God-Man who as human does what humans must do and also, as God, is able to do it. We are compelled to an analogous conclusion today. If we do not intend to despair and become inwardly resigned because of the magnitude of the problem, we have to hope for deliverance.
Already in the preceding chapter theological arguments led us to the conclusion that the problem of sin can only be adequately comprehended by looking back on it from the salvation in Chris, the overcoming of sin. Now the secular problem of modern society has led us to a similar result. As long as we approach the problem of evil solely from our human perspective we get lost in a world of contradictions. Problems and challenges appear before our eyes, and we immediately see that we will never be equal to them. The orientation and trust in the meaningfulness of our lives can be sustained only if we are allowed to place our hope in redemption.
But how is redemption to be understood with respect to the problem as sketched? Since modern society has become self-reflective to a radical extent and since the most pressing problems appear in this context, redemption too must be understood as self-reflective in some manner or the other. Only in this way will it have healing effect in the ‘wounds’ of modern society. A dramatic soteriology would probably do justice to this challenge. It would highlight first of all that the biblical history of salvation began with an orientation toward those fruits of salvation that were likewise important in an analogous fashion in the animal realm. Just as territory and progeny largely determine behavior there, so the covenant of God with Abraham begins with the promise of land and descendants. From this point of departure a dramatic history proceeds gradually through ever new experiences and disappointments to a radical transformation of the original idea of God and so also to a new understanding of the original promise. From a later standpoint the beginning takes on a completely new meaning. Within this process of transformation and self-reference Jesus himself initiated a self-reflective process with his proclamation of the nearness of God’s reign. What he initiated through his message was soon out of his hands. It developed effects on its own power and soon its reverse effects hit him with their full weight. But this reaction did not throw Jesus off his course. He used this very massive and violent backlash to live out the ultimate consequences of his own message. He gave himself nonviolently for those he sought to win, though they collectively expelled him. The only means still at his disposal was that in dying he entrusted his case to the heavenly Father and Judge in whom he had placed his hope from the beginning. The Father did not, in spite of Jesus’ experience of abandonment, leave him to his fate, but awakened him to new life and elevated him to his right hand. Together they sent that Spirit who continued to the work begun on earth and who at the same time retroactively clarified that Jesus’ entire work of salvation, indeed the whole creation, had begun in the power of this Spirit.
Faith in a redemption understood in this way liberates us first of all from desperate attempts, bound up with fantasies of omnipotence, to find a simple recipe enabling us to get a better grip on the enormous problem of modern society. Living out of this faith, it suffices to build our trust – in the discipleship of Jesus – on the nearness of the true God, to keep track of the world process with spiritual discernment, and in doing so to trust that faith itself will initiate its own process affecting the world. It may well be that something important might get out of control, have a contagious effect, backfire on us, and once more destroy positive beginnings. But if the beginning is actually the result of faith in the God who is near, we may hope that this God will awaken new life out of the collapse of our efforts and through his Spirit establish once again beginnings that we cannot foresee. So on the one hand, much of the world process can be integrated anew into the community of faith thanks to the profound guidance of the divine Spirit, and the negative autonomy of the world can at least be broken up piecemeal. If anti-Christian tendencies nevertheless dominate the world and the apocalyptic beasts still largely prevail, which is quite possible, then there is still the hope that godless regimes will destroy themselves in the long run. Above all, however, we know in faith that true and complete salvation is promised to us only through death, as Jesus’ way shows us, as eternal life with God. Salvation in a Christian sense can only be expected in passing through mortal conflicts.
The ‘we’ of which I have just spoken is the community of believers in Christ, the Church (and the churches). It is called to understand itself as an alternative community, and as such it must not be conformed to the autonomy of this world. The community of Christ only remains true to its vocation and meaning as long as it publicly presents a clear alternative, and at the same time avoids false conflicts. Since the self-reflective process of modern society, which reaches deeply into nature and the human organism, may not be judged negatively by the Christian doctrines of creation and redemption, we can no longer deduce ultimate norms for those trusting in the God who is near from a Nature which is preset and ostensibly eternally the same.
Natural justice has not become questionable simply due to social changes. Nature itself has been drawn into the comprehensive process of creative self-construction, as God intended regarding his free creatures, and so it is subjected to change. The norms of the alternative community can consequently be only those given us in the biblical revelation. The directives of the Sermon on the Mount seem to be crucial, for they sketch the new life in the imminent reign of God and thus in the alternative community. This goal, however, is always by far, indeed decisively, ahead of the way of life that the concrete ecclesial community is able to live out. The Sermon on the Mount is both goal and critique of what is actually lived and can be lived out in a Christian way of life. Therefore it spurs on the church community, not to fall back on past experiences so as to set itself against the forward-pushing, self-reflective process of human society, but to lay hold of the forward-looking possibilities of the kingdom of God so as to engage in critical discussion with ever new experiences in world society.
In the reciprocal process by which the community of believers builds itself up we have t discover the basic tenets of the Sermon on the Mount ever anew, understand them more precisely, and experience them as enhancing our life. Only out of such experience can we evaluate in each case what is reasonable for the faithful in a given situation and what exceeds their powers. The experience of powerlessness is and remains essential to Christian life. It alone preserves the community of believers from pride and enables them to know existentially that they are dependent of God’s guidance in all things. It gives them clear knowledge that they themselves, as long as they live on the earth, continue to need redemption.
