Dear Theophilus, 

I am glad to hear that you feel that I have correctly represented your comments in the last letter. Now, perhaps, I can come to dealing with the points that you raised.

I know that what you want are some clear, unequivocal answers. Unfortunately, this is not possible and I will answer you as best as I can, but I am sure the questions will return, in another form.

Why doesn't God speak to us directly? Yo say that if He did, things would change and we would no longer be in doubt and be able to behave accordingly. There is an immediate problem here. I know that it is very tempting to say that all that is needed is for God to be more open with us, but, even if we were to receive a direct revelation, how would we know that we had received it? Questions would quickly crowd into our minds with the suggestion that we had imagined it all. We would not know, a price that we have to pay for our freedom. So, when it comes to the question of letting us know, the matter is not so simple and all that could be done, has been done by God through revelation, through Scriptures and through the Incarnation. If this cannot convince us, then nothing will.

A serious point that you raise, a most important one, is the matter of God and judgement and morality. Religion and ethics are something that arise with the fall and therefore are not as fundamental as we sometimes make them out to be. To understand this point better, it is important to understand what is meant by the fall.

The common picture of the fall is Adam being given some commandments. Then, Eve gets him to break one of these commandments and now we are all paying the price for it all. But the matter is not like that at all. Initially, the one human nature is whole and one in Adam. With the fall, this nature becomes fractured, it becomes split and individualism arises and this is the crux of the problem - this extreme individualism which separates man from God and man from man. And it is this fragmented nature that is passed on to us, with all the resulting problems. Now, instead of co-operation, competitiveness for the world's resources sets in. The one nature has become fragmented into millions of parts, consisting of many antagonistic wills vying for survival. Existence is now spent in the struggle for survival. The desire for self-subsistence in Adam become autonomous - we begin to believe the myth that we are authors of our own lives.

Life has nothing in common with legalism of any form, and sin and salvation cannot be seen in legalistic terms, which is what often happens. If legalism becomes dominant, guilt comes in and this is pride camouflaged, and adds to our woes. If sin is seen in the legalistic framework, and is seen as a transgression by an individual, then it is hard to see why Adam's sin is so damning or to see why sins in general have such a profound effect on our being. Sin is simply the refusal of man to become what he is intended to be - a personal being, in communion with all of humanity and God. Sin is not a personal transgression of some laws but this, unfortunately, is the way sin is often seen.

With the fall, comes the Law. The principle aim of the Law is to show the faithfulness of God, that He does not abandon us in spite of the fact that we have abandoned Him. But with the coming of the Law, man finds himself in a peculiar bind. The Law does not free man or give him what he needs and that is salvation, which represents what is sound, what is whole, what is free from death. There is a further danger in the Law. Keeping the laws puffs us up with pride, because we become 'aware' of how good we are and the result of this is to alienate us from our neighbors. And what this does is to aggravate matters further because our individualism is increased. This is further complicated because our civil codes are based, to a large extent, on the Law and we now begin to equate sinfulness with the breaking of the civil code and, since we are not in jail, we are not sinners like those who have committed crimes and are incarcerated. We fail to see, that we are all in the same boat, as far as God and salvation is concerned. Salvation is not an individual matter and has nothing to do with personal improvement; struggles to become better, just so that we can be better, are often self-defeating.

This is hard to accept and we start to worry about where it will lead. Surely, you will say, morality is necessary if we are to have a civilized existence with certain restraints on our behavior.

I understand what you say about morality, but what I am talking about is setting up morality as if it were some absolute that even God is subject to it. The fall, it has been said, is the only Christian doctrine which is empirically verifiable. The fall represents the gulf between what is and what should be and because of this gulf, morality arises. You see, there is nothing fundamental or necessary in morality - it is a temporary thing which has arisen because of the dilemma in which we as humanity have fallen into. What we want is something that is consistent and which works. Justice is just this: it is consistent and predictable. Mercy is unpredictable and inconsistent and that is why it is so hard for humans to accept it. The world can only be consistent if there is no God. His freedom is always threatening to the world and the world reacts in the only way it knows - label God a criminal and destroy Him. Mercy is inconsistent and therefore, comic. Someone once said that tragedy is the essence of time; comedy is the essence of eternity. Mercy liberates us from the tragic seriousness of our world. Mercy is totally incompatible with compulsion and obsession. It liberates from the deterministic structures which science, the child of magic, imposes on the world. Mercy cannot be purchased nor is it deserved. It throws all of our neat schemes into disarray and causes us confusion. This is so uncomfortable for us that we insist on seeing and understanding grace in terms of the Law. The New Testament clearly warns us that this is an impossible task that will end in failure. Grace is totally free (meaning it is undeserved) and meaning also, that the one giving it is free. Anything justified by a norm outside itself is legalistic and does not lead to life. Love is not, has never been, and will never be the work of states or institutions.

How much tragedy and pain has come from seeing God as a judge who comes to haunt us and to punish us. The pictures of a gory hell, of screaming, suffering humanity have done irrepairable damage to Christianity. This is a travesty of the teachings of Christianity. But, you will say, what about all the threats of punishment that are there in the New Testament? Surely, if you are going to be honest to the documents in the Gospels, you must take this into account.

Of course there is the possibility of damnation and the business of existence is very serious with profound possibilities. But what is at stake here is not so much what you do, but what you become. And here we see the bind in which we find ourselves and we see also why there has been such a grievous misunderstanding about man's judgement. You become what you do and here lies a great danger and a great opportunity and this is why it is important to pursue virtue. What you do is not inconsequential but it affects you in a way different from what is usually painted. In other words, judgement does not come externally from some avenging God; it comes internally by changing who you are.

This brings us to the language that is used in terms of what Christ has done for us. One of the most powerful images is that of atonement. Christ died so that we may be ransomed. This conjures up a picture of Christ dying on our behalf, of offering Himself as a sacrifice for us. The question naturally arises: to whom does He offer Himself? If it is to the Father, then what kind of picture does this suggest of God the Father? If it is to Satan, then what does this say about the power of Satan? We are in a quandary here, but only if we accept a certain view of 'atonement'. And this view of the atonement is totally legalistic in the sense of paying off a debt. As long as we cling to this view, we are going to be faced with insurmountable difficulties. The view of Christ's death as atonement has been more accepted in the Western Church as compared to the Eastern. It is in the West that the more legalistic interpretation of Christ's work has been more dominant and it is in the West that the atonement of Christ is stressed. But, we have seen from the above discussion, that legalism has little in common with life and it is with life that Christ's death has much in common and not in the paying off of some debt. I grant you that the ransom language is present in the New Testament, but this language has to be placed into perspective and the context of the whole of theology.

I think that this is a good place to stop and I will continue in the next letter. Meanwhile, my thoughts go with you.

Bar-Abbas

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