The Good Book

by Peter J. Gomes

  From these anxieties come many of the other social inhibitions of the flesh. Drinking, for instance, like sex, contributes to the “almost total extinction of mental alertness; the intellectual sentries, as it were, are overwhelmed.” Dancing was also forbidden for its similitude to the sexual act. The old Southern Baptist joke has the young man say to the young woman with whom he is about to have illicit sex, “We’d better do it on the sofa so they won’t think we’re dancing.”

  Although it is fair to say that biblical morality encompassed a much wider spectrum of virtues, including those of the Commandments, and those to be aspired to in the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount, when most Christians think of morality they think first of the sins of the flesh, and then most explicitly of sex. Thus, one whole strand of Christian ethics contributed to the dangerous reductio ad absurdum that sin is simply sex and thus sex is evil. There is more to sex than sin, and more to sin than sex. Augustine has much to teach us, but even he cannot possibly teach us all that we now need to know.

  Sins of the System

  Until Jimmy Swaggart’s highly publicized infidelities and the increasing public consciousness of the AIDS epidemic renewed their newsworthiness, sins of the flesh were for most citizens of modernity rather old-fashioned and left behind in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. In fact, Carl Menninger would write a briefly popular book in 1973, with the catchy title Whatever Happened to Sin? It seems that nobody knew. What was clear was that very few people were any longer responsible for anything at all. The comic Anna Russell put the sentiment of the age in her “Psychiatric Folksong”:

  At three I had a feeling of

  Ambivalence toward my brothers,

  And so it follows naturally

  I poison all my lovers,

  But I am happy now I’ve learned

  The lesson this has taught:

  That everything I do that’s wrong

  Is someone else’s fault!*

  One of the great acts of transference in modern times is the transference of the responsibility for evil and sin from individuals to institutions and to society at large. It is not altogether clear when this began. In the period of American revivalism and reform in the first half of the nineteenth century, preachers and the reformed condemned the sins of drink and the drunkard, both. When the slave trade was condemned, so too were those who participated in it. The revival of society, it was understood, began with the revival of the individual, the redemption of society with the redemption of the individual. “Lord, send a revival,” was the old cry, “and let it begin with me.” John and Charles Wesley preached for the revival of the world through the sanctification of the individuals in it. They understood, as did Saint Paul and the patristic doctors of the early church, that as through a human being, the man Adam, sin entered into the world, only through the renovation of human beings, a work accomplished in the atonement of Jesus Christ in his human form, would the price of sin be paid and the fallen society redeemed from sin through the redemption of its members. “As in Adam all die,” says Paul, “even so in Christ shall all be made alive.” Soul winning, as the process of conversion and evangelization was once called, was also world saving, producing even within the fallen city of man, as Augustine put it, the City of God.

  Social sin, or what I am calling sins of the system, is understood to be the sinful, fallen nature of the institutions and social systems that are created, managed, and manipulated by sinful men and women. When Reinhold Niebuhr spoke of Moral Man and Immoral Society, the title of one of his most penetrating and influential books, he addressed the conundrum of how “good people” could participate in and perpetuate sinful, wicked, and destructive systems. Part of this had to do with a rather sophisticated analysis of how people who were good, but not good enough, could not in aggregate avoid social sin, which tended to negate whatever individual and private virtues the individual might possess. Theologians describe this as the consequence of a corrupt or wounded will. When Saint Paul says that the good he would do he cannot do, and the evil he would not and wills not to do he does, that is an illustration, personal and powerful, of the inadequacy of the unaided will on its own to be, to do, or to know good.

  The manifestation of this dilemma is not simply the personal discomfort that individuals feel between their intentions and their deeds. That itself is quite significant, but the sins of the system, or social sin, has to do with the active participation of good people in deeds and systems that are themselves not good. The classic examples are clear and terrifying. Most of the evils in the world have been performed and perpetuated by individuals who, convinced that they are doing good, even doing God’s will, participate corporately in wickedness. We can call upon ancient historical examples to make our point. Surely, those Spanish Christians who fueled the fires of the Spanish Inquisition with their unspeakable tortures and maimings did what they did, and felt that they could do no other, because they believed ever so firmly that they were doing good and doing God’s will. The Puritans of Salem, Massachusetts, in the summer and autumn of 1692 were convinced that they were doing God’s will by hanging those whom they believed to be witches. In moral retrospect we like to think that such people themselves were deranged or lacking in virtue or in cultural sophistication.

  When we look at Nazi Germany, however, we are dealing with the heirs of one of the world’s most sophisticated and gifted peoples, the land of Bach and of Beethoven, of Kant and of Hegel, of Luther and of Brahms. These were not barbarians but men and women learned in the arts and sciences, with an appetite for the beautiful and for the life of the mind. When they raped, robbed, and pillaged Europe, they saw to it that the finest art treasures of the lands they conquered were preserved for their own pleasure. Nazi Germany was by no means all thugs and Brownshirts and Bavarian drunkards, and the great moral problem was how so great a civilization could perpetrate and tolerate such immense evil.

  For many of us that moral dilemma had its more immediate demonstration in the United States in the very same period. When I taught at Tuskegee Institute, I discovered that the institute’s archives held the world’s largest single collection of documents having to do with lynching. I remember an exhibition on lynching in America in the period between the First and Second World Wars, in which were displayed photograph after photograph of lynch scenes taken, in many cases, by participants. What was so horrifying in these pictures was not the obscene display of the lynched and often otherwise mutilated Negroes, but the faces of the white mob, faces not frenzied in anger but filled with pleasure as at a sporting event. Women and children featured prominently in these photographs, together with the men, and one knew that these mobs were composed almost exclusively of Christian men and women, Baptists and Methodists, who knew and read their Bibles, who said their prayers, who took sins of the flesh very seriously, and who saw themselves as God-loving and God-fearing. One could imagine these people lynching on Saturday and worshiping on Sunday, with no hint of the slightest moral discontinuity. These were not merely the hooded white knights of the Ku Klux Klan. These people had no shame to cover up in the bedsheets; their unconcealed faces revealed an almost grotesque pride in the perverse pleasures of their violence. They would condemn dancing, drinking, and sex; they opposed legislation opposed to lynching. Lynching was sport masquerading as justice. At the last judgment these Christians in particular will have much to answer for.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, movements for social justice would speak out against the sins of those systems that perpetuated violence and injustice in the world. Thus racism was not only the collective acts of violence on the part of racists but the system that encouraged and supported a culture of violence and discrimination. Individuals might repent and change their ways, but no real change would happen until the systems themselves were changed. Racism was such a system. So too were naked capitalism, militarism, and sexism, and the institutional structures that gave them aid and cover; and one of the great ironies of the developing consciousness
of institutional sin is that it developed in a culture when it was becoming increasingly fashionable to denigrate the notion of personal responsibility for sin and evil. Thus many of those who in the 1960s and 1970s were leading the crusades against structural and institutional sin were themselves increasingly indifferent to the notion of personal sin. Thus there developed a great divide between those whose priority was the reform and repentance of the individual for whom sin for so long had been defined almost exclusively in terms of sins of the flesh, and those who, having abandoned the personal piety that took sin and repentance seriously, embraced the wholesale reform of society and its system.

  Sins of the system, while real, have a way of becoming so abstract, so structural and analytic, that it becomes very difficult to clothe them in the moral authority they require to convince and convict those who participate in them of the need for change. The antiwar movement of the 1960s and early 1970s tried to do this, and if war cannot be addressed in moral terms, few other phenomena can. The antiwar movement was frustrated by a countervailing morality that combined patriotism and pride with profoundly secular cultural values wrapped in the odor of sanctity. A paradox not often commented upon is that the rhetoric of the antiwar movement often was far more religious, indeed, moral, and was waged with a higher sense of the consciousness of sin than the one that favored the war. That rhetoric tended to indulge in the unexamined shibboleths of national pride, mindless anticommunism, and a profound distrust of any change in what was in essence a secular status quo. The war ended, as we know, not because of the moral weight of the arguments against it but because of the unbearable social costs of proceeding. We have only to read the memoirs of Robert McNamara to confirm this anxious-making analysis.

  Social justice issues, at the hands of their most articulate advocates, suffered in the communication of their values because those values seemed so abstracted from any sense of sin and concerned themselves almost exclusively in the realm of rights, policy, and strategies. This secularization of virtue has long inhibited the movements in favor of women, homosexuals, and the environment. Having yielded up the notion of sin to those who claim it in opposition to all threatening change, those who are advocates for rights are seen simply as well-orchestrated lobbyists for selfish interests and special considerations, and thus are deprived of the moral high ground. They see themselves as the heirs of the civil rights movement, and wonder in frustration why they do not reap the moral capital of that movement’s success. What so many fail to understand in these comparisons with the civil rights movement is that at its origins and heart that movement was not merely political or social, but fundamentally religious and moral, and in particular animated by a Christian perception of the biblical notions of sin and redemption. From this conviction, drawing upon the great moral substratum of American piety, came the energy of the marches, the confrontations with conscience and guilt, and even the legal and strategic maneuvers.

  To be deprived of these resources is to disadvantage any significant movement for moral and social change, and that is why all marches in Washington, D.C., since Dr. King’s famous address at the Lincoln Memorial tend to be pale imitations, lacking not simply the vital spark of so compelling an orator as Dr. King but the moral urgency and sense of sin and rehabilitation that turned that 1963 gathering from a protest into a sacrament. Mere displays of numbers on the Mall, as women and homosexuals have discovered, do not guarantee that the moral imagination of the nation will be engaged. The surprising, and, to some, disturbing, success of the 1995 Million Man March, despite the controversial and distasteful views of its leader, Louis Farrakhan, was achieved because it embraced the discourse of sin, atonement, and redemption.

  In what I hope is not too esoteric a theological footnote, I would argue that the Million Man March gave public display to the theological principle conveyed in the Latin phrase Ex opere operato, “Through the performance of the work,” which in the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church means that the efficacy of a sacramental action depends upon Christ’s promise and not upon the character or merits of the person performing the work. Thus, a “whiskey priest” does not make invalid by his questionable character the validity of a proper work properly done. Louis Farrakhan was to many a whiskey priest, whose character invalidated an otherwise good idea. The good idea and its merits could be said to have prevailed despite the character of its chief proponent, and it did so, I think, because it appealed to conscience.

  Good People and Bad Things

  Any of us who has ever wanted to write a book hopes to enjoy the phenomenal success of Rabbi Harold Kushner, whose book When Bad Things Happen to Good People has become a legendary success story in the literature of American popular piety. It ranks with Russell Conwell’s Acres of Diamonds, Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows, Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps, and Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, not to mention that second-only-to-the-Bible perennial best-seller, The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, as an example of the right book at the right time. Every pastor has dealt with those of the flock upon whom some disaster or tragedy has been visited, who, in a combination of anger and anguish together with an acute moral curiosity, ask, “What have I done to deserve this?” Rabbi Kushner, as good an expositor as he is a pastor, has done us all a tremendous service in his straightforward and useful book, and he and it deserve every success.

  Perhaps it is the people with whom I have ministered over the years, but I have often given thought to another book that would deal with an equally profound and pervasive pastoral problem. I would call this book, with due apologies but with no royalties to Rabbi Kushner, Why Good People Do Bad Things. That is what we have been talking about all along, and it is no small subject of the Bible as well. The people I see want to know why it is that they cannot restrain themselves from hateful, hurtful attitudes and actions; they are not in a moral quandary; that is to say, they are not ignorant of what the good is, or of the consequences of the wrong. They are not morally obtuse or ethically challenged. They have not inverted wrong into right; they have not deluded themselves into thinking that what they are and what they do is virtuous. These people have a ruthless honesty about themselves. “I have behaved badly toward my wife, my husband, my lover, my children; I have been a terrible colleague, a less than responsible employer. I have not been a good neighbor.” They recognize themselves in those memorable phrases of self-indictment from the General Confession of Archbishop Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.”

  Whether, as the old TV comic Flip Wilson used to say, “The devil made me do it,” or whether one sees oneself as a victim of circumstances that compel one to choose between the lesser of two well-known evils, the sinner recognizes a no-win situation and is thus miserable, indeed a miserable offender. Would that we could take comfort in the lines attributed to Mae West, who said, “Between the two evils I always choose the one I haven’t tried before,” but even such hedonism after a while becomes boring. Ignorance is not an excuse for sin, but it is a bliss. The misery of the sinner is the knowledge both of the wrong and of its inevitability.

  It is often suggested that we do not know what the good is, and as Pontius Pilate asked half sincerely, half sardonically of Jesus, “What is truth?,” we ask “What is good?” Those who do wrong in the Bible more often than not know perfectly well what they are doing; they do not act out of ignorance. They act out of what is called in theology a corrupted will, what we might call a twisted, partial, imperfect vision of what goodness is. The Bible is filled with vivid images of people caught between the knowledge of what is good and what is evil, and the inability to avoid the easy wrong and to affirm the difficult right.

  Such knowledge is both good and bad. In the creation story Eve is seduced by the serpent into eating of the forbidden fruit of the tree that contains the knowledge of good and evil, and when she and her husband do so, the first
knowledge they gain is of their own nakedness. Not only do they see that they are naked, which is nothing new, but they realize that they shouldn’t be, and experience shame, and thus hasten to cover themselves with fig leaves, or “aprons,” as one of the earliest English translations puts it. Augustine, and those who take their moral philosophy from him, think that this all has to do with sex and their awareness of their genitals, what he calls the “parts of shame.” He assumed that nakedness was ipso facto a cause of shame because it provided the occasion for lust, and we know his views on lust. It is hard, however, to take seriously the implication that the story of that first disobedience is simply a tale of prudery and a genealogy of shame. The story is not about sex or lust or “parts of shame,” no matter how titillated Augustine was by the conviction that it was. It is about limitations, indeed, about the ambiguity of knowledge. The fact that they knew that they were naked means that they saw themselves for the first time as they were, and that knowledge, contrary to the modern notion that “knowledge is power,” made them realize with their first infusion of knowledge just how weak and vulnerable they now were and had been. It was not knowledge that had protected them from the blandishments of the serpent, but ignorance that had preserved their innocence. Now they knew all, but their knowledge was not a blessing, it was a curse; and hence, as John Habgood says, “All knowledge is ambiguous.”