SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1Versuchung (D/E) 1. Contemporary Sources: Contemporary theology, greatly concerned with human freedom, has tended to discuss temptation in terms of freedom. In addition to biblical and traditional sources, it has drawn on numerous philosophical and literary analyses. These include Dostoyevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov, portraying the temptation to choose for bread, power and security and against freedom, as well as Heidegger’s analyses of man’s resistance to accepting his existence as ordered to the destiny of his death, and Sartre’s distinction between “pour soi et en soi.” Most important, however, is Kierkegaard’s ground breaking work in The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death. Kierkegaard undertakes to discover how God’s prohibition against eating of the fruit awakens Adam’s concupiscence. It is anxiety which does this. Anxiety arises quite naturally for human beings because they are both body and spirit, a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, continually suspended between possibility and actuality. Freedom’s possibility, which is anxiety, can tempt Adam to sin, for he realizes through anxiety the possibility of “being able.” Thus he is tempted to resolve his freedom in self assertion instead of reliance on God. Anxiety does not explain the singular act of will by which humans actually do violate the prohibition. In fact, anxiety, once one realizes that he is not capable of mastering every situation or of actualizing the eternal, may be what teaches him to rely on God in faith. Unbelief creates its own enervation when tested, thinking that it will not pass God’s test; faith, on the contrary, assumes that God tests us so that we will meet the test (Prøven). But if anxiety does not necessitate sin or freedom, Kierkegaard does believe that it provides a psychological concept through which free will is tempted, and helps one move beyond abstract discussions of an indifferent liberum arbitrium. 2. Protestant Theology Protestant accounts of temptation, while usually beginning in the biblical witness, are often split between psychological and thoroughly theological accounts. Tillich’s treatment of temptation, an example of the former, closely follows Kierkegaard, beginning with a general account of human freedom. Human freedom is finite freedom, wherein human potentialities and aspirations are limited by human destiny. To be a free human being, one must accept self-transcendence within a given nature. Humans are aware of their finitude; this awareness is anxiety. As they seek to actualize their freedom and themselves, they discover the temptations of remaining in an undeveloped “dreaming innocence,” and losing innocence through knowledge, power, and guilt. They decide for the latter, an act of estrangement from the ground of their being. Tillich prefers to call this an act of unbelief and hubris rather than disobedience or denial. Christ, however, in facing these same temptations overcomes this estrangement. He accepts his finite freedom, refusing self-assertion, or any attempt to control events. Jesus desires his destiny, his limitations, as given by God, and thus realizes himself within the ground of his being, not alongside it. Thus Christ shows that temptation, which is inherent in human freedom, is even necessary for human fulfillment. Tillich’s account has offered rich opportunities for dealing with temptation in psychology and pastoral theology. However, stressing the possible positive outcomes of temptation may make this sort of approach too positive, and even account for the relative disappearance of temptation as a theological category, since the word inescapably carries connotations of danger, and the urge to fall away from what is good, as well as of an external tempter, or object of temptation, whose goodness is dubious. As the opportunity for positive growth is stressed, the danger of falling away tends to be de-emphasized. Moreover, this account may be too psychological and too universalized, ignoring the specific temptations of religious life peculiar to its various stages of moral and spiritual development. Neo-orthodox discussions of temptation, on the other hand, rather than beginning with the human existential situation have insisted that human religious temptation must be understood first through Christ’s temptations, which are temptations to assert oneself against God. For Barth, Christ is exposed to the same temptations as any human, i.e. the temptations to desert God and his Word. The greatest temptation in the desert that Christ faces is the temptation to throw himself from the pinnacle of the Temple, for it is a religious self-sacrifice that is in fact the most perfect kind of self-glorification in which God is pressed into the service of man. It is a temptation to desert the way that Christ took on himself. The desert temptations prefigure the temptations of the passion and Gethsemane, which are Jesus’ temptations to find an “easier way...than that which he had entered,” (Church Dogmatics IV/1 267) a temptation to change God’s will and his obedience to it. In overcoming these temptations, Christ represents the struggle between God, the whole world, and sinful man, and stands in for humanity which only overcomes temptation and death in him. Christ’s overcoming temptation does not deliver man from temptation or his daily cross; however, these are “secondary crosses,” not repetitions of Christ’s life giving sacrifice. Bonhoeffer similarly insists that human temptation can only be understood by first understanding Christ’s temptation, for all temptation is ultimately a contest between God and Satan. Temptation occurs when a person is abandoned by his powers, and they are turned on him. For example, Adam’s innocence, which should be his defense against evil, is turned on him when the tempter conceals his origin, and pretends to speak as knowledgeably as God. (It is in the nature of temptation that the truth be obscured for the one tempted.) Adam, whose lack of experience cannot help him understand such deceit, is left defenseless in the face of this lie, and thus “the sicut Deus looks like a new possibility within the imago dei.” (Creation and Fall, 71)His only defense is the Word of God, but Adam denies this help. He treats temptation as if it were a personal challenge. Satan in tempting him seeks to alienate him from God, and then to expose his guilt so that God must reject him. Christ, however, when faced with temptation and the added burden of human guilt, when hungry, powerless, and given the opportunity to deny God, looks for no defense but the saving, supporting Word of God. He is willing to be abandoned in accord with God’s will. Thus our temptation is overcome in Christ, for “we are not tempted, Jesus Christ is tempted in us.” (Temptation 22) Like Luther, who claimed that Satan does not need to tempt us to sin because he already owns us, but who does tempt us to deny Christ because only Christ can save us, Bonhoeffer sees temptation as Satan’s attempt to divide us from Christ, and as an attack on God’s saving Word. All our temptations thus must be spoken of by analogy to Christ’s temptations -- they are attempts to divide us from God, e.g. by making us doubt God’s goodness; or, spiritually, either by getting us to take God’s grace for granted or making us despair of its possibility. Deliverance from temptation is only possible by faithful submission to the hand of God. Taking seriously the danger inherent in temptation, Bonhoeffer still sees that temptation is within God’s grace. God allows temptation as punishment, but it is also a way of allowing Satan to destroy himself, and to bring believers to salvation since only “by knowledge of sin, suffering, and death, can the new man live.”(Temptation 30) Because within Protestant theology there has been a tendency to discuss temptation in terms of a choice when directly confronted with God’s Word, consideration of the sorts of specific temptations that Christians face in via has not received much attention, and much of the older devotional literature such as Pilgrim’s Progress, which did pay attention to them, has been forgotten. Temptations of one who is in via arise because he is committed to God, yet habits and desires of the “old man” persist, competing with a desire for God’s will, and, because of human self-deception, even masquerade as God’s will. There have been, however, notable discussions of ethical problems as problems of temptation, e.g. Thielicke’s treatment of technology. Furthermore, with an increasing recognition that theology and spirituality require deep integration, and because of an emphasis on the inter-connected narrative quality of the Gospel and Christian life, new attention has been paid to temptation as a significant part of Christian moral theology, e.g Diogenes Allen. Understanding and overcoming temptation should play an important role in an ongoing process of Christian sanctification, theological discernment, and moral growth in Christ; it is not simply a natural problem of human development. 3. Catholic Theology Catholic theology has tended to move in a somewhat opposite direction. Within moral and spiritual theology there has been an emphasis on the temptations of the believer in via. Temptations arise due to human concupiscence and self-centeredness, and are the occasion for spiritual combat, which is to be conducted by prayer, participation in the sacraments, and spiritual direction. The traditions of Ignatius, de Sales, and Vincent de Paul have remained strong and even dominant, at least until Vatican II. Increasingly, however, there has been an emphasis, as in Protestantism, on human freedom as finite freedom. Man is tempted to break the limits of creatureliness, either ignoring good and evil, or presuming to be its judge, and thus destroying essential relations with God and other creatures. However, human temptability may also be the occasion for growth, and thus is even a testing by God. In a Rahnernian interpretation, W. Molinski argues that the danger of any temptation is the danger of jeopardizing this growth by choosing one-sided and selfish options that destroy the human character. Thus many external temptations occur that are neither good nor evil in themselves, and are simply endemic to human creatureliness. Yielding to them in ignorance or without ability to discern their nature is not sin, which only comes into play when one freely yields to them, or yields to them as a result of a previous free choice. As in the older tradition, resisting temptation and the healing of damaged nature, because sin and temptation is a destruction of relations with God and other humans, is a matter of prayer and participation in the human community, the Church that God has established for human well-being. Herein lies a somewhat different emphasis than Protestantism’s. Balthasar has provided one of the most instructive discussions of the issue, attempting to do justice both to the important original Kierkegaardian insights, as well as to the demand that temptation be discussed thoroughly as an issue of Christian theology, as Barth and Bonhoeffer also insisted, and not as a matter of general psychology. Balthasar, too, sees human freedom as finite freedom, and agrees with Kierkegaard that man can only grasp his freedom through passing through a choice and temptation. Temptation does not arise, however, he argues, through a merely creaturely anxiety, but rather through the fact that God in creating Adam had left a space, ultimately meant to be filled by God, wherein God remained hidden. This space which invites man into it in faith, also allows him to move away. Anxiety arises in this space not because of the nothingness belonging to human finitude, but because of God’s hiddenness, which allows God to be thought not as present and One in whom man participates for his life, but as a distant abstraction. Thus man believing himself alone is tempted to arbitrate his relations and grasp power for himself from the position of one who can decide as if he were the judge and standard of goodness. Balthasar does not develop the thought at length, but it seems clear that the serpent, some sort of external evil, is necessary for this drama, insofar as the original lie which obscures and alters a true understanding of man’s relation to God must be told in order that man move from temptability to actual temptation. Deviation from the truth is an important part of any temptation; temptation is always under a description. Thus humans are tempted not by a desire for evil as such ( the vicious are not tempted ) but because of their culpable failure to recognize the good as it is and their relation to it; their fall is their responsible willingness to believe in an ersatz and self-centered good. Once the lie is believed, man develops the habit of self-deceit, increasing his temptations, particularly because of the real effects that this has on his relations with God and other humans. It is only by renewed participation in the life of God and the Church that he is healed. Literatur: Diogenes Allen, Temptation Cambridge, MA, 1986.- Ders., “The Rehabilitation of Pilgrim’s Progress” PRSt 27.1 99-112.- Hans Urs vonBalthasar, Der Christ und die Angst Einsiedeln, 1952.- Ders. Theodramatik III 125-186 Einsiedeln, 1980.- Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik IV/1 285-300 Zürich, 1953.- Dietrich. Bonhoeffer, Schöpfung und Fall, München, 1937.- Ders., Versuchung München, 1953.- Ladislaus Boros, In der Versuchung: Meditationen über den Weg zur Vollendung Olten/Freiburg, 1967.- R. Brouillard, Art. Tentation DTC 15, 116-127.- Andrè Derville, Art. Tentation: Du moyen âge au 20e siècle: D.S. 15, 236-243.- Bernard Häring, Free and Faithful in Christ 388-391 New York, 1978.- Søren Kierkegaard, Begrebet Angest, Copenhagen, 1844.- Ders., Engdommen til Doden, Copenhagen, 1849.- W. Molinski, Art. Temptation SM(E) 6, 210-213; Josef Pieper, Über den Begriff der Sünde, München, 1977.- Joseph Ratzinger, Im Anfang shuf Gott 47-59 München,1986.-Helmut Thielicke, Zwischen Gott und Satan, Hamburg, 1958.- Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, II 33-36, 126-129,Chicago, 1957. Eric O. Springsted