[part two of Original Sin]
Should you have had the misfortune of attending worship in Northampton, Massachusetts in the summer of 1741, the sermon by Rev. Jonathan Edwards would have hit you like a ton of bricks. The title alone would have scared the holy hell out of any hearer: “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”.
You might be dismissive of such a far fetched idea, thinking it from so far back in olden times that it lacks gravitas today. But if you look and listen, that same God seems to be alive and well and easily angered by our slightest inclination toward evil. Cathedrals are full of art works depicting the final judgement with the saved heading to heaven and the damned doomed to the inferno. Fear is the force at work in the sermon, the works of art, and the whole notion of original sin.
If this primary doctrine is to lead us to believe that we came into this world as pond scum or a lowly worm, that means we start off with a negative factor and spend our lives trying to get out of this infernal debt before we end up in hell. Such a doctrine needs to have subsequent doctrine that will lead Jesus to pay the price for my atonement. Believe it or not, the Church just happened to have a atonement dogma or two that brought in new members by the droves. Isaac Watts’ hymn sings it like this: Alas, and did my Savior bleed?/ And did my Sovereign die?/ Would He devote that sacred head/ For such a worm as I? [That term “worm”, always made me wonder that if God’s eye is on the sparrow, who’s watching the early bird?]
This personal Savior version of Jesus is the only gospel some people hear and believe in order save their own hides, to get the hell out of here and the devil take the hindmost. And even if Jesus paid it all, “love so amazing, so divine, demands my life, my soul, my all.” In other words, I’m up to my neck in debt and in the red all over again.
Franciscan monk, Richard Rohr, puts it this way: For some reason, most Christian theology seems to start with Genesis 3—which features Adam and Eve—what Augustine would centuries later call “original sin.” When you start with the negative or with a problem, it’s not surprising that you end with Armageddon and Apocalypse. When you start with a punitive, critical, exclusionary God, it’s not surprising that you see the crucifixion as “substitutionary atonement” where Jesus takes the punishment that this angry God intended for us.
That seems sufficient to many folk who just want to be saved, and let the rest of the world just go hang. If, however, you open up to rabbi Jesus as our teacher who urges us away from self-centered attempts to save ourselves and shows us how give ourselves away for the common good of all. Then, this sordid notion of personal salvation evaporates when he urges us to see the good in others…to see God in the faces of all our neighbors even as we do in ourselves. To take up the cross and follow him to heaven knows where. To consider the lily. To open the pearl of great price. To find treasure in a field. To love our enemies. To live lavishly like the daughters and sons of the prodigal father who loves all of us dearly.
Paul Scherer, one of the great preachers at the beginning of the last century, summarizes such a gospel like this: “Love is a spendthrift, leaves arithmetic at home, is always ‘in the red!’ And God is love!”