The Real Questions are Theological

The Real Questions are Theological Elaine Graham Bound to Sin: Abuse, Holocaust and the Christian Doctrine of Sin, Alastair McFadyen, Cambridge University Press 2000 (Hb 0-521-43286-3/ Pb 0-521-43868-3), pp.xiii + 255, Hb £40, Pb £14.95 This is a rich, difficult, thought-provoking and helpful book. Its value rests in its capacity to be read on several levels, with a number of different objectives in mind. Firstly, it serves as a useful intervention in the debate about the relevance and integrity of explicitly theological contributions to contemporary moral, philosophical and cultural values. It argues for the necessity of the theological as an indispensable orientation, without which no claims about the nature of human experience, about goodness, truth and value, can be authentically advanced. Secondly, it claims to unite the practical and systematic arms of academic theology, as McFadyen undertakes to integrate contemporary reflections on child abuse and the Holocaust with the classical doctrine of original sin. It is thus, potentially, also an experiment into whether the Western theological tradition might have anything to say to the very extremities of the human condition – and, indeed, how some of the worst degradations of genocide and sexual exploitation may both challenge and, possibly, reinvigorate, Christian God-talk. It is thus an experiment in theological method, a testing of the process of ‘conversation’ by which Christian tradition has always been formulated and developed. Overarching these subsidiary issues – but nevertheless, vital ones – is the book’s central commission: to restore the doctrine of original sin to the centre of the Western theological lexicon. For McFadyen’s claim is that by surrendering the language of original sin, Christian theology – and, we must assume, Christian practice itself – has been diminished. It has been robbed of its ability to speak meaningfully, distinctively, of the triune God who is the source of all things. The effacement of sin, then, leads inevitably to the impoverishment of the theological imagination itself, for theology has lost its ability to locate the essential dynamic of relationality between God and the world upon which it rests its truth-claims. What results is a functional, even if not intentional, atheism: a performative ‘bracketing-out’ (p. 12) of the divine. McFadyen is thus describing a very insidious, but no less corrosive, © Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001. Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Review articles 257 death of God by default; and with that, goes an attenuation of our moral and political vision, as the vital connection between the way we live and what we worship is dissolved. ‘We live in our world as if there were no God – or at least a God who makes some actual difference to the way in which the world is to be interpreted, spoken about, acted in and upon’ (p. 9). An ambitious project, then, but one embarked upon with passion, fluency and conviction. McFadyen’s thesis is that a recovery of the language of sin is not only necessary, but serves to illuminate many contemporary social and moral ‘pathologies’. We cannot accuse him of opting for cheap grace, either, in choosing the areas as serious as Holocaust and child abuse as his chief empirical sources. Yet these are, for McFadyen, indicative of the very problematic nature of doctrines and concepts of sin. Whilst the experiences of those who have lived through such horrors would not fashionably be analysed in terms of active participation of sin (indeed, the language of ‘survivor’ as it has displaced that of ‘victim’ reflects a conceptual recognition that such people are not merely the passive objects of others’ actions), there is still a sense in which all human beings are both agents and objects of a divorce from their authentic natures that is primal, predispositional and endemic. Sin must be reclaimed from a framework which regards it as an act of human willing derived from voluntaristic actions. In evoking alternative understandings of sin, complicity and agency via his analysis of the Holocaust and child abuse, McFadyen exposes the inadequacy of such thinking. The root of the problem lies in models of the will that assume the atomistic agent for whom acts of commission amount to deliberate disobedience of God’s laws. Agency and will do operate, but in a distorted, ‘disorientated’ manner (p. 147). Such sinfulness is best interpreted as akin to sloth, in which acquiescence and collusion insinuate themselves into one’s selfunderstanding. ‘As life-trajectories become disoriented in this way, we live out and repeatedly confirm a comprehensive confusion about reality … which internalises distorted self-understandings and exports them to others through systematically distorted relationships’ (p. 146). Feminist theologians glimpse some of this, argues McFadyen, by diagnosing the pathologies of patriarchy as prohibiting the exercise of free agency untainted by its own refracted images of selfhood. Similarly, children who have been the objects of abusive attentions from adults are stripped of the rights of self-definition, imprisoned in patterns of relationship that inhibit autonomy and right relation. Here, McFadyen reprises earlier claims to do with the loss of understandings of sin as ontological and generic to the human condition, by arguing that such a presumption of the non-necessity of the divine for our world-view is itself an implicit denial of God. For such an © Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001. 258 Review articles effacement of the theological is, inversely, a claim about the selfsufficiency of the human condition, indeed, a kind of idolatry, as the immediate and the contingent are elevated to the status of the absolute. This is at the heart of McFadyen’s analysis of the Holocaust, as he argues that it was people’s inability to see beyond expediency and selfinterest, rather than any ideological attachment to Nazism, that – again, by default – rendered them incapable of resistance. To refuse the transcendent is to disavow the possibility that the world embraces more than finite humanity can realize. McFadyen’s articulation of the motifs of ‘joy’ and ‘worship’ as manifestations of human particpation in divine activity, and thus prefigurations of a non-alienated state, rest on an assumption of divine ‘transcendence’ as defying closure, expediency and objectification. In such talk about God, therefore, we find not only an affirmation of that dimension to existence but an anticipation of human freedom undistorted by sin. So McFadyen achieves a reiteration of Augustinian original sin, in which his diagnosis of contemporary problems illuminates and rearticulates classical formulations. And here I return to the question of theological method, to which I hinted at the start. We may well wish to support McFadyen’s intentions of avoiding abstraction on the one hand or the abandonment of privileging of the theological in adapting to the secular and clinical, and to seek ways of speaking in ways that reflect the theological wisdom of the past whilst firmly rooted in the contemporary and immediate; but this inevitably does lead us back to questions of method, of theological hermeneutics and formulation, all encapsulated in the question of how people of faith are enabled to negotiate the process that leads, as Don Browning would put it, from the practical to the theological and back again (Fundamental Practical Theology, Fortress 1991). So what is the methodology here? The abstract for the book claims that it is ‘more systematic and more theological than most practical, pastoral or applied theology and more practical and concrete than most systematic or constructive theology. It is a genuinely concrete, systematic theology’ (p. i). By this, I assume that the book is claiming to engage in a more sustained fashion than most pastoral care literature, and is claiming to be more rooted in contemporary experience than much systematic theology. Certainly, in the early stages of the book McFadyen frames his project as one of ‘theology in concrete conversation’ (p. 43), albeit in the context of a disappointingly short chapter on method which could have benefited from a more explicit engagement with the broader literature on theological method. Nevertheless, he appears at this stage to be locating his own discussion within a broadly critical correlationist tradition, as exemplified by North American theologians such as Paul Tillich, Seward Hiltner, David Tracy and Don Browning. © Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001. Review articles 259 McFadyen insists that he is not seeking simply to reinstate old orthodoxies without some degree of respectful dialogue with the secular and experiential. Not only does theology answer the questions posed by contemporary culture, as Paul Tillich would have it, but responds and adapts to the challenges of the secular. Tradition is not static, or monolithic, but evolves and flows; and this is only to be counted as departure from, or disloyalty to, tradition, if we imagine the nature of tradition to be ‘the passive receipt of an already co-ordinated doctrinal deposit … The point is rather that tradition is something we take responsibility for in the making’ (p. 50). This implies that for McFadyen doctrine is capable of absorbing new insights, and moving into new registers of God-talk in response to practical need and changing contexts. Yet at the same time as insisting that his own project is also seeking a dialogue between the doctrinal and the empirical, McFadyen attempts to mount a critique of the legacy of liberal theology – out of which critical and revised critical correlation emerged – which, for him, has capitulated before the scientific rationalism of modern science and abandoned Biblical myths of the Fall along with theological anthropologies of original sin. It is this perspective that prevails eventually, for once he moves beyond an engagement with Augustine, he delivers a fairly unreconstructed recapitulation of (Augustinian) orthodoxy, losing sight of the method alluded to at an earlier stage, of a renewed formulation arising from mutual correlation between the historical and contemporary, the systematic and the practical. Of course, it is a matter of debate as to whether liberal theologies really were as uncritical in their reception of secular disciplines. My own reading is that such traditions, especially in practical theology, were always aware that the traffic between historical tradition and contemporary experience needed to flow in both directions, and that doctrine can respond to novelty without collapsing altogether. I am reminded of Judith Plaskow’s comments on the need to retain an explicitly theological horizon when engaging with the pressing moral, political and intellectual issues of the day. As she says, ‘The Right Question is Theological’ – the legacy of faith is nothing if not practised, but it must always be informed by theological discourse, and rooted in collective and historically-rooted understandings of the nature of God (see On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader, edited by Susannah Heschel, Schocken Books, 1983). However, I found McFadyen’s conclusions insufficiently prepared to carry out the task of integrating new insights, or of evolving beyond received wisdom into a new synthesis. For example, whilst McFadyen’s prime focus is on the doctrine of original sin, it might be reasonable to have expected such a correlation between doctrine and human experience that was rooted in such manifestations of extreme © Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001. 260 Review articles evil to have touched on questions of theodicy. In this respect, McFadyen’s is not the first to address serious theological issues through the prism of Holocaust or abuse. I think of the powerful ‘theology of protest’ contained within the juxtaposition of psychological analysis and midrash in David Blumenthal’s Facing the Abusing God (Westminster/John Knox Press 1993) or James Poling’s practical theological expositions on the nature of evil (The Abuse of Power, Abingdon 1991) or the indictment of structural and socio-economically embedded sexual abuse in Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite and Rita Nagashima Brock’s Casting Stones (Fortress 1997). Each one of these analyses, whilst being deeply theological in focus, calls into profound question many of the established and ‘traditional’ models of naming and relating to God. I was disappointed at McFadyen’s lack of engagement with such themes as the impossibility of speaking of God after Auschwitz, or the considerable pastoral and theological issues generated by survivors of abuse searching for images of God that heal, rather than sanction, their betrayals. This cannot help but reshape the theological landscape. Blumenthal’s work, especially, is a particularly powerful example of such work, exemplifying a tradition of God-talk as not simply the affirmation of divine goodness and justice, but taking as its startingpoint the very refutation of divine benevolence, as rooted in the cry of pain and rejection towards a God who (seemingly) fails to respond to human suffering. Can theological discourse continue to affirm a good, loving God without acknowledging those whose experience suggests the extinction of goodness and the utter effacement of moral purpose? Whilst Blumenthal, as a Jew, roots his protestations within a Psalmist’s tradition, such an emphasis on theology emerging from the depths of human abandonment links powerfully into a dynamic of crucifixion and resurrection, themes which also, significantly, do not figure prominently in McFadyen’s scheme. There are other more radical ‘conversations’ between the theological and the practical which are absent from McFadyen’s reconstruction of original sin. He is mindful of the difficulties raised for theology by feminist (and other) exposures of the implicit politics of talk about God (p. 165). Yet to speak of ‘transcendence’, ‘power’ – even ‘Fatherhood’ – is to adopt particular models and ideals that may enshrine abusive or ideological relationships; but by his conclusions, McFadyen is continuing to speak of the goodness of God, and to refer unproblematically to the notion of transcendence. When McFadyen claims that ‘grace acts on the human condition from without’ (p. 173) we are presented with a model of divine activity that fails to resolve precisely all the preceding questions of agency, human autonomy, fundamental and ontogenetic sin. Is his model of ‘transcendence’ merely another way of expressing the incompleteness of human experience without what Luce Irigaray terms the divine ‘horizon’; or, by saying things like ‘we © Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001. Review articles 261 cannot save ourselves’ (p. 173), is he merely reinstating a theology of divine authority and human powerlessness that has (as the testimonies of survivors themselves attest) often been used to support ideologies of abuse and totalitarianism? Similarly, I am troubled by McFadyen’s return to Augustinian models of the self which merely submerge earlier hints at a more sophisticated, problematic understanding of human identity. In his analysis of empirical resources, McFadyen suggests a notion of subjectivity as contradictory, embedded in systemic, ideological webs of facilitation and constraint, a world in which intention, will – even language – are far from transparent or self-authenticating. I found myself speculating on the ways in which a Foucauldian perspective could have made some extremely apposite contributions to a renewed framework for thinking about what it means to be a person, what freedom and agency might mean, that would take us into new dimensions far beyond modernist notions of self-actualized, autonomous subjects, and which, in turn, would speak powerfully of the very kinds of models of loss of selfhood of which McFadyen speaks. However, we find that at the heart of the discussion of Augustinian original sin there still endures the notion that sin is equated with loss of will, a surrender of self-control, capitulation to concupiscence and desire. Terminology of ‘impotence’ and ‘potence’ is recurrent at this stage of the argument (pp. 175–192). Again, given feminist and others’ insistence on the embodied, situated self, on postmodernity’s stress on the fragmentation of the psyche and the complexity of desire, such a retention of traditional concepts seems somewhat inconsistent with earlier statements of intent. Is there a privileging here of the superiority and primacy of tradition as handed down which implicitly contradicts other previous premises to do with the fluidity of that same tradition? Ultimately, I found myself asking, does McFadyen really need his discussion of the Holocaust and abuse to effect his reconstruction of Augustine and original sin? The answer is, both yes and no: his exposition of Augustine is serious and constructive, and succeeds in advancing a valuable and sophisticated reconstitution of original sin. On the other hand, the radical significance of much of the empirical material has not fully been realized, however sensitive and considered McFadyen’s discussion of it. I remain unconvinced that to retain the terminology of original sin has not resulted in the expecation that experience must fit theology, in ways that stifle awkward but necessary questions about evil, the nature of human identity, the absence of God and the possibilities for redemption. One possible compromise might have been to follow the example of someone like Edward Farley, who synthesizes doctrinal and empirical reflections on sin into an analysis of the condition of flawed and alienated humanity as essentially tragic (Good and Evil, Fortress 1990). And yet, despite my reservations, © Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001. 262 Review articles I do concur with McFadyen’s insistence that the theological tradition cannot be dismissed, but must rather be reclaimed and given new currency. The value of this impressive, arresting, book is that it confronts us not only with the enormity of the human tragedy, but also charges us with the challenge of renewing our talk about God in the shadow of suffering and evil. Elaine Graham is the Samuel Ferguson Professor of Social and Pastoral Theology, University of Manchester. © Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2001.