The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  To make certain that we understand that joy is not merely pleasure or aesthetics, or self-induced diversion or delusion, we must realize that the context of joy is not delight but deprivation. The experience of joy reminds us, by what we have momentarily gained, of what we did not have before we gained it. It is said that lovers cannot remember when they were not in love. I do not believe that this is true, for how would they know that they were in love if they did not know, that is, did not remember, what not being in love was all about? Joy is akin to holiness, not because of some sense of moral perfection or beauty but because both partake of the sense of the whole, of the complete. When we know joy, for a moment we see everything in its completeness, we have a whole view, and that is what the fullness of joy means. It is an instantaneous and complete glimpse, as it were, of that which ordinarily we see only in part. Remember where, in his most lyrical mood, Paul, speaking of love in I Corinthians 13, that most famous and beloved of all passages from scripture, says, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood.” (I Corinthians 13:12) Joy is both the moment and the response to the moment, when the partial becomes complete, the cloudy clear, and we see even as we are seen, and understand even as we are understood. Joy thus is not an out-of-body or out-of-mind experience contrary to knowledge, reason, and understanding. Just the opposite. Joy is when it all becomes clear, a Eureka! moment.

  What is the response when you suddenly come upon the clue to a complex problem, thereby solving it? Victory comes to mind, even satisfaction, and a sense of achievement as well, and pleasure is gained. The moment when it all falls together, either because of our efforts or despite our efforts, is that moment we call one of joy; the broken has been made whole. That is what Pentecostalists understand in the ecstasy of their worship. That is what colored folk know when they sing the songs of Zion and see the broken mended and in all its splendor; and when we sing at Christmas, “Joy to the world! The Lord is come….” that is not an invitation to mere merrymaking and mindless happiness, a distraction from earth’s gloomy night. Not at all. It means that because the Lord has come to fulfill the promises of God, all that was separated and disparate is now united and whole. Suffering is the context of joy even as darkness is the context for light and silence for hearing. Joy that is complete and full transcends, indeed overcomes, its context, and is not bound by the limitations of the context. Our eyes are opened, and having seen wholeness once we will want to see it again and again. Those who have had this experience are restless for another. This is what Augustine means, in his famous collect, when he prays, “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.”

  How Do We Make It Our Own?

  We don’t. Timothy Leary and the culture of drugs that he spawned tried to manufacture joy and put it into powders, potions, and pills, like the alchemists of old who tried to turn base things into something of beauty and worth. All they succeeded in doing was destroying all those who wanted shortcuts to joy. Joy is not a natural substance to be quarried, mined, or minted, and it doesn’t belong to us as we imagine that property or ideas belong to us. That slightly crazed seer-poet William Blake, he who gave us “Jerusalem” —the poem, not the city—reminds us of this:

  He who binds to himself a joy

  Does the wingèd life destroy;

  But he who kisses the joy as it flies

  Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

  (“Eternity,” 1793)

  We have known these moments, unbidden, surreptitious, elusive, in which by grace, perhaps in nature or in life, we have seen wholly and fully, if only for an instant, and we have been enraptured by an unexpected discovery, a vision, an incarnation, a manifestation. New fathers tell me that they have had such moments upon sharing the birth of their children with their wives. Women have told me of such moments coming to them as they have held the hand of a dying friend. A young Harvard undergraduate told me in tears of joy commingled with embarrassment that he had seen all heaven and earth in an instant of enlightenment while singing a hymn at the daily service of Morning Prayers in Appleton Chapel. Surely the Lord was in this place, and he knew it not.

  I do not have to sell these moments of joy, these exaltations, to anyone, for we have all had them. All I can say is that we ought to recognize and cherish them for what they are: glimpses of holiness at the thin places that remind us that we are neither our own nor on our own. If ever there was a biblical principle for making sense and meaning, this is it.

  Chapter 12

  The Bible and Evil

  A book about the Bible without a discussion of evil would be about the kind of Bible that most of us would like, but it would bear false witness to the Bible, for the Bible is much about evil. The effective point of communication in the Bible between the divine and the human is that the Bible takes evil seriously and recognizes the reality of evil in the human condition. In the Bible, evil is not an illusion, not a state of mind, not a mere moral inconvenience; evil is real. It must be real if the human lives in which it is found are to be real, and if the redemption from the ultimate domination of evil in that life and in this life is also to be real. There are those who argue that the trouble with religion, with the Bible, and with Christianity in particular is that all of these tend to emphasize the negative, that is, evil, and fail to give emphasis to the positive, which is the gospel of love. Pastoral sensitivities, we are told, should affirm that which is good and negate that which is not. Too much emphasis on sin and evil will drive people away, and besides, now that we know so much more than our primitive ancestors, we know that evil is really a synonym for ignorance. The corollary is that the more we know, the better off we will be because evil and ignorance will disappear or at least be contained, in much the way that modern medicine has conquered such once rampant diseases as tuberculosis and poliomyelitis.

  The Bible, however, never speaks of “curing” evil, and nowhere does it speak of “conquering” evil. If the Bible is about anything, it is about the subtle, ruthless, remorseless persistence of evil. The book of Genesis speaks of evil as trouble in paradise, and one cannot diminish the presence of evil in that account of Adam and Eve. It might even be argued that the star of the drama is the serpent, evil incarnate, and that Adam and Eve play significant but secondary supporting roles in a tale that is not really about them but is about the beginning of the siege of the hearts of men and of women. The last book of the Bible, the enigmatic book of Revelation—the interpretation of which engaged the last days and hours of David Koresh and his Branch Davidians, and about which the secular observers of that cataclysmic scene in Waco were so bewildered—that book is about a grand and final confrontation between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Evil, we might say, is the Bible’s leitmotif. If the Bible were set to music by a composer of Wagnerian dimensions, one can imagine the constant iteration in dozens of devious but recognizable ways of the evil motif throughout the full expanse of the production; we would recognize that it is always there, ready to burst forth, and even when it is defeated or when it withdraws, it does so only to reinsinuate itself into the very fabric of the composition.

  When theologians and religious philosophers talk about evil, the word is usually preceded by such a phrase as “the problem of…” for it is the problem of evil and not evil itself that tends to fascinate the learned. They are intrigued to know where it came from, how it got into the world, how a good and powerful God allows rampant evil and its attendant sufferings and sorrows into the creation. The problem of evil soon becomes the problem of God, and the conversation has become just one more theological tête-à-tête.

  When ordinary people speak of evil it is not so much “the problem of…” as it is “the problem with…” for ordinary people are not driven to speculation in the discussion of evil. The apocryphal farmer from Maine, when asked if he believed in original sin, replied, “Believe in it? Why, I seen
it.” So have we all. Our helping professions, I think, and those of us in the church have done people a grave disservice in underestimating their abilities to recognize and to deal with the reality of evil in the world and in their lives. I have often complained about the revisions of the General Confession of the Episcopal Church in the Book of Common Prayer of 1979, which excised as too penitential and Calvinistic the sharply worded phrase of Archbishop Cranmer that had people declare that as a result of the intolerable burden of their sins they were “miserable offenders,” and that there was “no health” in them. I have been told on countless occasions that the ritual repetition of these phrases on the part of the penitent diminished both themselves and the work that had been done for them in the atoning work of Jesus. Furthermore, this public sense of sin created “pastoral problems” in matters of spiritual self-esteem.

  I am all for matters of spiritual self-esteem. If we are to love our neighbors as ourselves, which is the second commandment in Jesus’ summary of the law, we must first and also love ourselves. We must remember and rejoice in the fact that we are created in the image of God and that we share in the full dignity of creation. I believe that. I affirm that. I also believe, however, that most of us are “miserable offenders.” We are made miserable by the offenses we commit and by their consequences. Sin and evil make us miserable. That does not deny the dignity of creation; that simply affirms the reality of sin, and that there is no health in us; which does not mean that we are unhealthy. It means that on our own, of our own, by ourselves, there is nothing within us to cure the malady of sin and of evil. The cure of sin is not simply a matter of mind over matter; it is not pure willing that leads to goodness. No orthodox Christian can possibly believe that. To say that there is no health in us means both that we are sick and that we cannot cure ourselves. We need help. We do not tell the physically ill that they can get better by denying that they are sick. The physician tells them what is wrong, most of them can take it, and then the physician prescribes what is best to cure the illness. We expect nothing less.

  Ordinary people know something of evil; they are not strangers to it, and they know that evil flourishes in the world, and, alas, even within themselves. When a terrible disaster occurs, such as the explosion of the airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland, some few years ago with the terrible loss of innocent life; or when the Federal Building in Oklahoma is bombed, again with hundreds of innocent people killed; or when Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin of Israel is assassinated in the name of God, we know that something terrible, and not only terrible but wrong, and not only wrong but evil, has occurred. We don’t have to be instructed or tutored in this; we know it to be so.

  We know as well when we see a schoolyard bully beating up a defenseless younger child that that is wrong, and that evil is at work. When parents abandon or do violence to their children, and when children murder their parents, when a deranged gunman opens fire aboard a crowded commuter train, and when, as happened in England a few years ago, two children under the age of ten kidnap a baby and maim and murder the young child as if for sport, we know that for the evil it is.

  These are in some sense easy cases, which by the sheer scale and audacity of their wickedness we can recognize on sight as manifestations of evil. There are, for instance, very few people in the world today, with the exception of some white supremacists and Holocaust deniers, who do not recognize Adolf Hitler as an evil man. It used to be one of the favorite moral lessons of literature and history, in the days when literature and history were thought to be able to teach moral lessons, that “man’s inhumanity to man” was the theme we could not escape. When Cain slew his brother Abel and asked the rhetorical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?,” we knew that we were seeing but the first act of the continuing human drama. Saint Augustine declared that the earthly city, as opposed to the city of God, was descended from the violence of Cain, that society was founded upon fratricide, envy, deceit, and violence, and that in such a society, under the patronage of the first murderer, Cain, there never would be real or lasting peace. Life under these circumstances was one endless Balkan civil war, with the dead in constant conflict with the living.

  Few centuries are better witnesses to this sad truth than our own, now mercifully drawing to a close. Two world wars, one cold war, and now numerous bitter skirmishes remind us that we have not learned very much, and that Augustine in this respect is still very much a contemporary social scientist. “All our progress,” Bertrand Russell once said, “is but improved means to unimproved ends.” Amid the shambles and shame of the Battle of Dunkirk in May 1940, Herbert Read wrote with more bitterness than sweetness this ode:

  Happy are those who can relieve

  suffering with prayer

  Happy are those who can rely on God

  to see them through.

  They can wait patiently for the end.

  But we who have put our faith

  in the goodness of man

  And now see man’s image debased

  lower than the wolf or the hog—

  Where can we turn for consolation? 1

  Dunkirk, we may be quick to note, was before America entered the Second World War, and hence was not really an “American experience.” We might call it a catastrophe, a bit of very bad luck and worse planning, but in 1940 this was hardly “our” problem, and the evil of Hitler had not yet fully dawned upon us. Evil in America tends to fall into two apparently mutually exclusive categories, under the common rubric of moral evil: social sins and societal sins or, if you prefer, sins of the flesh and sins of the system.

  Sins of the Flesh

  Once upon a time we were much more intimately acquainted with the seven deadly sins than we are today; that is simply to say that we knew their names and could list them as Pride, Lust, Gluttony, Anger, Sloth, Envy, and Greed. Literary critics and the historians of theology know the evolution of these “diseases of the soul,” as eighteenth-century mystic William Blake called them, but while the sins themselves can be found represented in various ways in the Bible, no list of the seven deadlies will be found in scripture. This doesn’t mean that because they are not in the Bible they are not biblical; the list is a convenient form of shorthand in which to discuss the moral human condition.

  For most of us the sins of the flesh have to do with pleasure and indulgence, giving rise to the old canard that everything we want to do is either immoral, illicit, or fattening. Pleasure and the flesh are condemned as a result of the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. The sins of the flesh are troublesome and therefore condemned because their pleasure diverts us from virtue and makes us want to satisfy ourselves rather than God or others. Such pleasures become ends in themselves, which easily leads to idolatry, which establishes an unacceptable rivalry between what is created and the Creator. It is wrong, but easily understood, to think of pleasure as in itself evil. It is not. Its consequences, however, are understood to be dangerous because they draw us away from our proper destiny, which is the service of God, and from the control of our reason, which would remind us of that duty and keep us faithful to it.

  It is to Augustine, and not to the Bible, that we must turn if we want to talk about the sins of the flesh for, unlike the Bible, Augustine was much concerned with the topic. For better or for worse, it is the convert from a self-indulgent worldly urbanity, Augustine, who is responsible for the Western moral teachings on sex. It is lust in the explicitly sexual sense that he writes about in The City of God:2 “The lust that excites the indecent parts of the body” is dangerous because it “assumes power not only over the whole body, and not only from the outside, but also internally; it disturbs the whole man, when the mental emotion combines and mingles with the physical craving,” resulting in so intense a sensation of pleasure “that when it reaches its climax there is an almost total extinction of mental alertness; the intellectual sentries, as it were, are overwhelmed.” Since such a lust is not subject to rational or physical control but is itself master of all, it is bot
h to be feared and controlled. “It is right, therefore,” he writes in the very next chapter, “to be ashamed of this lust,” and the organs that serve this lust should be called pudenda, or “parts of shame.” The trouble with arousal for Augustine is that it does not operate at the behest of the mind, but literally has a mind of its own. The corrective to lust is shame, and shame itself is not a virtue, like modesty, but a punishment for lust. Thus lust, of which sex is the manifestation, is to be punished by shame not because it is pleasurable but because it is irrational.

  Most Baptists and Methodists have not spent much time in consideration of the moral philosophy of Saint Augustine, but their anxieties about the sins of the flesh could not be better expressed than his. They threw off much of Roman Catholicism’s moral theology, but they retained the notion that somehow the sins of the flesh got between the sinner and God. Such sins, however, were not sinful because they offended reason but rather because they gave pleasure, which in the refracted Calvinism to which they were all heirs, was itself an unacceptable end. Thus sex was only for the begetting of children, shameful for the man, painful for the woman, both part of a divine plan; and sex for any other purpose simply confounded pain and shame, especially if any pleasure without penalty was involved. Women were thus vessels of shame who, like Eve, Jezebel, and Delilah, led their men to disastrous ends. Masturbation was forbidden because it wasted valuable and necessary seed for an endangered species, the holy community, and because it gave pleasure without a compensatory pain. Hence prices of masturbation had to be invented: hair on the palms, blindness, insanity, and impotence by reducing the finite supply of sperm.