Yesterday I mentioned Augustine’s discussions of the possibility of other rational corporeal creatures in the universe. (As a Christian, he already accepted the idea of incorporeal rational creatures called “angels” and “devils”.) To recap, Augustine wisely took the position that God, under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, can do whatever he pleases, so if creating other rational, corporal animals was what he wanted to do, who were we to tell him he can’t.
At the same time, Augustine also wisely thought, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, and we may never come to it.”
Smart guy, Augustine.
Anyway, that whole passage is from the chapter addressing the fundamental Christian proclamation that says says of God the Son:
For us men and for our salvation he came down from heaven.
And in the course of that piece, I remarked that there are two assumptions that tend to underlie objections to the idea of the Incarnation. One, as we noted, was the false idea that the Incarnation somehow would be made impossible by the existence of other forms of corporeal rational animals (assuming they exist).
Today I want to tie things up in a bow by talking about the other popular false assumption: that the Incarnation was some kind of reward for our awesomeness. It was not.
For Our Salvation
I sometimes imagine the moment at which the unfallen, sinless aliens from Regulus V touch down on the White House lawn in their mother ship. The delegation of United Nations representatives is hastily assembled, the alien translator devices are distributed, the worldwide televised event begins, and the Regulan ambassador says, “People of Earth! This day is one of profound wonder for us! Ever since our planetary archangels told us that the supernova of MK149797 two thousand of your earth years ago heralded the moment when God chose to take human form on your world, we have longed to meet you and discover what you could possibly have done to merit this unthinkable honor! Now that our long interstellar voyage is over, we wish only to know: What did your species do to welcome him?“
Pity the poor schlub tasked with telling Perfect Innocence that story.
Bottom line: God did not become man because we are so wonderful, but for our salvation. It is our wretchedness that drew the attention of divine compassion. He came, not to say, “Way to go!” but to rescue us from the disastrous pit of sin into which our race fell at the dawn of our history.
The Incarnation was undertaken by God, not as a prize for our perfection, but as the desperate remedy for our fatal illness called sin. Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; Jesus did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance (cf. Mark 2:17). That is what Christmas is all about. It is the equivalent of D-Day in salvation history. It is the moment when God stormed the beaches of time and space to invade Occupied Earth and destroy an empire that dwarfs the Third Reich: the devil’s empire of sin and death encompassing the whole world.
Sinners in Adam
To say the above is to say something very unpopular: that we require saving–that there is something wrong with us–something so desperately wrong, in fact, that we cannot save ourselves and only God can save us. Curiously, the same people who deny the existence of God due to the monstrous evils human beings commit (the Holocaust is an archetypal example) also often deny the reality of sin. As Chesterton observed:
Modern masters of science are much impressed with the need of beginning all inquiry with a fact. The ancient masters of religion were quite equally impressed with that necessity. They began with the fact of sin—a fact as practical as potatoes. Whether or no man could be washed in miraculous waters, there was no doubt at any rate that he wanted washing.… If it be true (as it certainly is) that a man can feel exquisite happiness in skinning a cat, then the religious philosopher can only draw one of two deductions. He must either deny the existence of God, as all atheists do; or he must deny the present union between God and man, as all Christians do.[1]
The Creed, as is typical, does not propose a debate on this point and assumes that if you are going to accept the Christian faith, you are willing to accept the reality of sin as a fact about the human race and, most importantly, about yourself. As St. Paul summarized our predicament: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
How we became sinners is tackled through a doctrine presumed, but not articulated or defined, by the Creed. It is the biblical idea that “sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all men sinned” (Romans 5:12).
About a century after the Creed was formulated at Nicaea, another controversy (involving a man named Pelagius) would drive the Western Church to work out in greater detail this mysterious idea, while still leaving it a mystery.
The question that wracked the 5th Century Western Church was this: Are we, as Pelagius said, sinners because we sin or do we, as St. Augustine countered, sin because we are sinners? Such questions seldom trouble people today. Indeed, an awful lot of people think the easy, obvious, and liberating answer is “We are sinners because we sin!” So with some pluck and elbow grease we can just try real hard and improve ourselves without God’s help.
Now there’s nothing wrong with self-improvement and we can get better at some things. But the universal experience of the human race throughout all of time, space, and eternity (with two notable exceptions) is that sooner or later (usually within a few days and sometimes within a few minutes) that project breaks down. Usually it breaks down in small ways, sometimes in big ones, but always in some way or other. And when you try really hard–eat right, stay fit, get plenty of exercise and do your very, very best–you start to discover deep, tectonic plates in the soul where there are giant, broken, and misaligned things grinding and smashing parts of your heart and soul in painful ways.
Making this clear was the agonizing work of discovery that fell to the people of the Old Testament. Israel is given the law through Moses (himself a deeply flawed man) and responds, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient” (Exodus 24:7). Within eight chapters of this confident declaration, the nation is prostrating itself to a Golden Calf and having orgies. And that pattern will play out again and again throughout Israelite (and human) history. Over and over, Israel will promise that, this time for sure, they will obey God and remain true to their covenant with him and, over and over, they betray him, not only at the national level, but in each human heart. Prophets come and go, calling them back to fidelity and, for their pains, are martyred in gruesome ways, culminating in the murder of the Son of God himself. And he will, in no small measure, be killed because he will make plain the paradoxical purpose of the law: that it exists in order to show that we are incapable of keeping it without his help:
Do not think that I shall accuse you to the Father; it is Moses who accuses you, on whom you set your hope. If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words? (John 5:45-47)
So Jesus’ servant Paul will likewise discover that the purpose of the law, like a Buddhist koan, is to confront us with the fact that we cannot obey it. As he says:
We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! (Romans 7:14-25)
In other words, the law of Moses was a diagnostic tool, like an x-ray machine. It was essential to the healing process, but it could heal nothing. It could tell you what was wrong with you but having done so could do nothing more. For healing, we must apply to the Physician. So Paul sums things up this way:
No human being will be justified in his sight by works of the law, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.
But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. (Romans 3:20-22)
In short, the core lesson the law teaches is that we do broken things because we are broken people: we sin because we are sinners. There is something wrong with us. “Original sin” is the theological term for that interior brokenness. It’s a bit like blindness. It’s not a thing, it’s a lack of something. But that does not make it unreal.
That is what the story of the Fall is about in Genesis 3. When our first parents rejected the life of God, they lost it not just for themselves, but for all of us. God constituted us as social and interrelated creatures, like it or not. Our choices effect the rest of the human race and the choice of our first parents to throw away the life of God has damaged human nature and howled in pain down the ages ever since. So we suffer from a kind of spiritual birth defect where something—the life of God in the soul—should be and is not. And that vacuum warps and distorts us in various ways, leading us to live out our warped and distorted lives in various ways.
Original sin does not mean, “If your father was a horse thief, then you are a horse thief.” As Ezekiel pointed out long ago:
The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father, nor the father suffer for the iniquity of the son; the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself” (Ezekiel 18:20).
We are each responsible for our own choices. But our very ability to choose is damaged by original sin. We are born with a weakened will, a darkened intellect, and disordered appetites and all of that gets expressed as soon as we start to manifest the power to express it.
This is why the Church distinguishes between original sin and actual sin. Original sin refers to the interior brokenness that comes of our condition of being “in Adam”: i.e. coming of a race that has lost the life of grace that we should have had. Actual sin refers to the bad acts we choose to commit as a result of our brokenness. So Scripture tells us:
Blessed is the man who endures trial, for when he has stood the test he will receive the crown of life which God has promised to those who love him. Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am tempted by God”; for God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one; but each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin; and sin when it is full-grown brings forth death. (James 1:12-15)
The Tradition makes an important distinction here. We are born afflicted with original sin, but God did not desire that, nor does he desire us to sin since he cannot contradict himself. As John reminds us:
God is light and in him is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5)
The damage we bear from the Fall comes not from God but from our first parents misusing their freedom and from the accumulation of generations of sin warping succeeding generations. So Wisdom tells us:
God did not make death, and
he does not delight in the death of the living…
But ungodly men by their words and deeds summoned death. (Wisdom 1:13,16)
God does not create us to be sinners, nor tempt us to sin. His whole will is ordered toward our salvation, not toward some absurd game of cosmic cat and mouse in which he forbids sin, then tries to get us to commit it, then blames us for doing so. He is not a demented sociopath. Rather, because of our solidarity with our first parents and theirs with us, the effects of their sin are experienced in our lives and we are born as broken creatures. As Jesus notes in the Sermon on the Mount, sin begins in our hearts. That is why he says that if you hate or lust after somebody, you have already committed murder or adultery in your heart (cf. Matthew 5:21-30).
That said, original sin also does not mean that we are “totally depraved”, as though all goodness has been extinguished in us. We remain creatures in the image and likeness of God. But the image and likeness are distorted; the mirror has been shattered. We still reflect God’s likeness, but the reflection is more like a warped mirror in some nightmarish circus. We have brilliant intellects, but we use them, not only to discover E=MC2 but to build bombs for burning cities to death. We have hearts that create great symphonies–and devise mind-shattering cacophonies for North Korean torture and CIA brainwashing experiments. We give our hands to become healing surgeons, and to breaking bones in back alley muggings. We can choose life or death—but sooner or later we all choose death. We all sin. We all need salvation.
And so, the early Church thought searchingly about this in light of Jesus’ own words about his mission. He himself told us the reason he had become man: “to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45). And he crowned his earthly ministry with this act:
Now as they were eating, Jesus took bread, and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.” And he took a chalice, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, saying, “Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. (Matthew 26:26-28)
This was how he both explained and made us participants in the entire saving drama of his Passion, Crucifixion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension that immediately followed the Last Supper. None of it would make sense if there were no sins to forgive. And, indeed, as we shall discuss more fully later, the murder of Jesus is itself the proof of our fallenness.
And so, the Church concluded that Paul was simply speaking common sense and universal human experience when he said we are, apart from Jesus’ saving help, “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). It did so, not to be a buzzkill, but because Catholic theology is descriptive, not prescriptive. It is forged in the crucible of experience and tells us what is so, not what we wish was so.
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One Response
Regarding extraterrestrial life, we just don’t know. Given the size of the universe, it is certainly possible that there is life out there somewhere. What are they like? Are they benevolent? Who knows?