Yet let me not forget what I have gained
     From their own mouths: all is not theirs, it seems;
     One fatal tree there stands, of knowledge called,
     Forbidden them to taste: knowledge forbidden?
     Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord
     Envy them that? Can it be sin to know?
     Can it be death? And do they only stand
     By ignorance? Is that their happy state,
     The proof of their obedience and their faith?
     Oh fair foundation laid whereon to build
     Their ruin! Hence will I excite their minds
     With more desire to know, and to reject
     Envious commands, invented with design
     To keep them low whom knowledge might exalt
     Equal with gods: aspiring to be such
     They taste and die: what likelier can ensue? [iv: 512-527]

Later, speaking to Eve, he says:

    Why then was this forbid? Why, but to awe?
     Why, but to keep you low and ignorant,
     His worshippers? He knows that in the day
     Ye eat thereof, your eyes, that seem so clear
     Yet are but dim, shall perfectly be then
     Opened and cleared, and ye shall be as gods,
     Knowing both good and evil as they know. [ix: 703-709]

Some readers have made the serpent's point of view their own, interpreting the story so as to make God the villain and the serpent the hero. God (they say) wished to keep Adam and Eve ignorant. He therefore told them that if they ate of the fruit of the tree, they would die that very day, which was false. The serpent promised them that if they ate of it, their eyes would be opened, and they would be like gods, knowing good and evil. Moreover, the serpent was telling the truth. After the Fall, we read:

Then the LORD God said, "Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil...." (Gen 3:22)

So we see that the serpent was a benefactor, a true philanthropist, looking out for the best interests of the human couple. The Fall (they conclude) was actually an Ascent. Thus one author:

Curiously, this view has also been advanced by some professed Christians. Marcion, a second-century Christian at Rome, advanced the theory that there were two gods, one good and one evil. The good god was the Christian god, described in the New Testament, the Father of Jesus Christ. The evil god was the Jewish god, described in the Old Testament, and more correctly called the Devil. (Proof text: John 8:44, where Jesus says to the Jewish theologians, "You are of your father the devil...for he is a liar and the father of lies.") The Devil had Adam and Eve in the Garden and was trying to keep them ignorant, but the serpent made his way into the Garden to rescue them. The serpent was really Jesus Christ in disguise. (Proof text: John 3:14-15 "And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life."

It is a bit cheeky of Marcion to be using proof texts from the Gospel of John, since he excluded this gospel from his version of the New Testament, along with Matthew and Mark. Of the four gospels, he retained only Luke, and that in a highly expurgated version. He also rejected most of the epistles of Paul, keeping only those in which Paul argues that Christians are not bound to keep the Law of Moses, and throwing away everything else. The plain fact of the matter is that you cannot cut Christianity off from its Jewish roots and have anything coherent left. In a way, we ought to be grateful to Marcion for making the effort. He shows clearly why it is impossible. In much the same way, Thomas Jefferson rendered Christianity a valuable service by producing an expurgated version of the New Testament. He was an admirer of the ethical teachings of Jesus, but thought that they had been mixed up with a lot of superstitious nonsense about miracles and the like. He accordingly undertook to produce an account of the life and teachings of Jesus, taken from the gospels, but with the miraculous bits omitted. The result is grotesque. He has Jesus arguing with the Pharisees about whether it is moral to heal on the Sabbath Day, but omits the statement that Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, so that the argument comes across as completely pointless. Leaving the supernatural elements out of the gospels produces an incoherent residue, and we owe our thanks to Jefferson for conducting the experiment for us.

What happened to Marcion? Well, he was a wealthy man, and when he first joined the church at Rome he made a gift of six hundred thousand sesterces to the local congregation. I will not try to translate that into dollars, but it was a sum to make any church treasurer sit up and take notice. When he began preaching his doctrine, the church decided that he was guilty of heresy, and they excommunicated him and returned his money. He repented, repudiated his views, and asked to be readmitted. He was readmitted, and gave the money to the church again, and everyone was happy. He backslid, began again to insist that the god described in the Hebrew Scriptures was not the same as the being worshipped by Christians, and the church threw him and his money out again. Once again, he repented and asked to be readmitted to fellowship. He was taken back again, but this time they refused to accept his money, parhaps because they figured that they would not be free to spend it anyway, but would have to keep it in escrow in case he backslid again and they had to return it again. Shortly thereafter he died. Who inherited the money, I cannot tell you.

THE TREE AS A SIGN OF OBEDIENCE

How have orthodox Christians understood the Tree?

Probably the commonest interpretation is that the tree is simply a pledge of obedience. It is there in order that Adam and Eve may choose whether they will obey God or disobey Him. If God had commanded them, say, not to go swimming for half an hour after eating lest they get cramps, they might have thought it over and decided to keep the rule simply because it made sense. But here is a purely arbitrary command. There is nothing special about the tree. There is no reason for eating its fruit, or for not eating it, except that God has forbidden it.

The point is made in the novel PERELANDRA, by CS Lewis. In this science-fiction novel, a Christian scholar named Ransom travels to Venus and there finds a paradisal world in which two quasi-human beings, first of their race, have just been created. Most of the surface of the planet is covered with water, and the pair live on floating islands. However, there are a few fixed islands with a solid rock base, and Ransom and the Lady visit one of them. The Lady is astonished to learn that on Earth, all the lands are fixed, and that men live on them. She says to Ransom:

"There can, then, be different laws on different worlds."

"Is there a law in your world not to sleep in a Fixed Land?"

"Yes," said the Lady. "He does not wish us to dwell there. We may land on them and walk on them, for the world is ours But to stay there -- to sleep and awake there..." she ended with a shudder.

"You couldn't have that law in our world," said Ransom. There ARE no floating lands with us.... At least... this forbidding is no hardship in such a world as yours."

"That also is a strange thing to say," replied the Lady. "Who thought of its being hard? The beasts would not think it hard if I told them to walk on their heads. It would become their delight to walk on their heads. I am His beast, and all His biddings are joys. It is not that which makes me thoughtful. But it was coming into my mind to wonder whether there are two kinds of bidding."

A tempter appears and urges the Lady to break the command  against dwelling on the Fixed Island. Ransom speaks in reply:

"This man has said that the law against living on the Fixed Island is different from the other Laws, because it is not the same for all worlds and because we cannot see the goodness in it. And so far he says well. But then he says that it is thus different in order that you may disobey it. But there might be another reason." ...

"I think that He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that? You do them, indeed, because they are His will, but not only because they are His will. Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which His bidding is the ONLY reason. When we spoke last you said that if you told the beasts to walk on their heads, they would delight to do so. So I know that you understand well what I am saying."

But if the tree is simply an arbitrary pledge or test of obedience, why is it called the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil? Because by eating of it, Adam and Eve were saying in effect, "We will not be governed by God. We will not let him decide for us what we are to do and refrain from doing. We will be our own judges, will make our own decisions, will establish our own criteria of right and wrong. We will be a law unto ourselves. Instead of accepting God as our father, our creator and sustainer, our lover and leader and lord, we will set up as gods on our own. We will not accept his judgements. We will make our own."

Thus, Adam and Eve became gods, knowing good and evil; that is, they declared that they would decide for themselves what was good and what was evil, guided by no one and by no criteria except their own arbitrary whims.

THEORIES OF THE FALL AND OF THE ATONEMENT

St. Paul tells us that, "As in Adam all die, so in Christ shall all be made alive," (I Cor 15:22) and there is a close connection between the question, "What difference does it make to me what Adam has done?" and the question, "What difference does it make to me what Christ has done?" With that in mind, I am going to talk not only about various ways of looking at the Fall but also about various ways of looking at the Atonement.

(Notice that the English word "atonement" does not mean "compensatory suffering" or anything of the sort. It comes from "at-one-ment", and means the re-uniting of those who have been parted. When I first heard this, I assumed that it was simply a preacher's fanciful play on words, exploiting an accidental similarity. But I checked the dictionary and found this to be the true origin of the word. The Greek word translated "atonement" in the King James Version has a similar meaning. The meaning of Hebrew word is a little more complicated. The root meaning is "to cover, to overshadow," and hence it is in some contexts taken by some translators to mean, "to annul, to blot out.")

Christians believe that the Fall of Adam created a breach between the human race and God, and that the Death and Resurrection of Christ has bridged that gap. However, they are not at all agreed on how this works, or even what it means. (For example, although they are committed to belief in Christ as an actual historical person, some of them are not so sure about Adam.)

THE ANSELMIC THEORY

I am going to discuss various theories of the Fall and the Atonement, beginning with the one that most people know best. This theory is the forensic theory (meaning, so to speak the courtroom theory -- you remember that Quincy on TV practiced forensic medicine), usually known as the Anselmic theory (named for St. Anselm of Canterbury, although many scholars insist that it differs significantly from what St. Anselm actually taught). According to this theory, men deserved to be punished for their sins, but Christ offered to accept the punishment on our behalf, and so we are accordingly pardoned.

A preacher addressing an audience of English schoolgirls during the Second World War put it more or less like this:

OBJECTIONS TO THE ANSELMIC THEORY

As the Anselmic theory is often worded, God's Mercy disposes him to spare us the punishment due our sins, but His Justice demands that sin be punished, and the death of Christ satisfies both requirements. Many persons, however, do not find this at all a tolerable explanation, and complain that is satisfies neither Justice nor Mercy. As one writer put it,

Or as another writer puts it:

I put that question to my friend Charlie, who said: "But suppose that Sammy volunteered to accept the spanking. That would make a considerable difference."

I replied: "It would make the arrangement less unfair to Sammy. But it would not make us view the father as a kinder man, or for that matter a saner man."

It is not only those outside the church who view the Anselmic thoery with a jaundiced eye. I have heard of a little girl who came home from Sunday School to report to her parents what she had learned. She said:

So the forensic theory states that Christ was punished for our sin. But it also states that we are punished for Adam's sin. Ever since Adam ate of the forbidden tree, we are told, he had an overwhelming tendency to do wrong, a tendency which he has passed on to all his descendants, so that since his time all men have been evil by nature. Most non-Christians find this theory irrational, incomprehensible, and morally repellent. Thus one writer:

Speaking with Charlie again, I said: You think that we are punished for the sin of Adam. That is a horrible doctrine. Suppose that you are brought into court and the judge says, "Your great-grandfather was a horse-thief, and the penalty for that is hanging. I therefore sentence you to be hanged." But then John Smith steps forward and says, "I volunteer to be hanged in Charlie's place." The judge sets you free and hangs John Smith instead. Now someone says to you, "Aren't you grateful to John Smith for taking your place, when it was really you that deserved to be hanged?" Surely you would reply, "I am grateful to Smith, but the judge is a homicidal maniac! He was out to hang an innocent man (me), and now he has actually hanged another innocent man (Smith). He is the one that should be hanged, or at least locked in a padded cell for life." Isn't that what you would say?

Charlie said: Oh, but it's not a matter of my being hanged for my great-grandfather's crime. Suppose that my great-grandfather was a horse-thief, and he taught my grandfather to steal horses, and he taught my father, who taught me, and now I am about to be hanged for the horses that I stole with my own hands. That's a different situation entirely.

I said: But suppose that your upbringing has been so bad that you can't help stealing horses -- you have no choice in the matter. Is it fair to hang you for that?

He said: Oh, I think I've got a choice.

I said: Look around the room and pick out some stranger, someone you know nothing about. Now, are you prepared, without ever meeting the man, to tell me that he has at least once in his life done something wrong, and therefore will go to hell if he does not accept the saving work of Christ? You are? All right, now if you are so sure that he has gone wrong, how can you tell me that he had a choice in the matter and could have gone right? Back to the courtroom, buddy. The judge asks the prosecutor, "Have you any evidence that Charlie has stolen any horses?" The prosecutor says, "No, Your Honor, but you remember what his father was like." The judge says, "Ah yes, a man rotten to the core. If you were brought up by him, it stands to reason you would be a horse-thief -- there is no way on earth that any kid could have the strength of will to resist the effects of that kind of upbringing and turn out decent. It therefore stands to reason that you are a horse-thief, and I sentence you to be hanged." Is that fair?

He said: Whether it's fair depends on whether I have in fact stolen any horses.

I said: Do you believe that all those in heaven acknowledge Christ as their Savior?

He said: Certainly.

I said: If a boy dies at the age of six months, does he go to heaven? And is it correct to describe Jesus Christ as that boy's Savior?

He said: Yes to both questions.

I said: Does that mean that the boy would have gone to hell if it were not for the atoning work of Christ?

He said: Yes, because that boy has been born with a sinful nature, and nothing with a sinful nature can enter heaven until it has been cleansed by the blood of Christ.

I said: Then we are back in the courtroom again. This time, you are only four years old. The judge says, "Your great-grandfather was a horse-thief. You have never stolen any horses yourself, because you are too young to do so, but you have inherited a horse-thieving nature from birth, and for that I sentence you to be hanged -unless, of course, John Smith volunteers to be hanged in your place." What do you think of the judge?

He said: He's a homicidal maniac.

Now, the point I want to make is that there is a serious problem here. I am not saying that the Anselmic theory is morally detestable, but I am saying that people often understand it in terms that really are morally detestable. And this is something that as Christians we have a duty to be concerned about. There are people who have utterly turned their backs on the gospel, not because it calls them to be good and they don't want to be good, but because they regard it as a moral horror. As a Christian, you have a duty to proclaim the Good News of Christ to your non-Christian neighbors. But if you are going to tell them about Christ in a way that makes God out to be some kind of crazy sadist, far better that you kept still altogether.

In some ways, I am concerned less about those who hear an immoral theory about God and reject it than I am about those who hear it and accept it. In many households, the little girl who repeated what she had been told about the Atonement and said, "I like Jesus, but I don't like that mean old God," would be told, "Hush! You mustn't call God mean. That is a wicked thing to say. God will be very angry with you. Probably He will punish you for talking like that." And at this point the little girl subsides and either (1) becomes a secret atheist or rebel against God or (2) comes to believe that God is in fact good, but that "good" really means "too powerful to be criticized." Having noted that, in the 1950 May Day speeches in Red Square, one can count on finding only favorable things said about Stalin, she is prepared to obey God as a kind of cosmic Stalin. Of the two reactions, the former is more Christian. It is far better to be an atheist than a devil-worshipper.

IS THE ANSELMIC VIEW THE ONLY CHRISTIAN VIEW?

At this point (or earlier) a believer in forensic substitution (the Anselmic theory) may wish to say:

"What I have been hearing from you is simply an attack on Christianity. Take away the doctrine of the Atonement, the Good News that Jesus Christ has died for our sins, and there is nothing left of Christianity. If you are an enemy of Christianity, then at least have the common honesty to say so openly!"

To this I reply:

"I agree that without the Atonement there is nothing left of Christianity. What I deny is your position that without the forensic view of the Atonement, there is nothing left of the Atonement."

To this the Anselmist may say:

"I object very strongly to your speaking of 'the Anselmic theory' as if it were one of many theories of the Atonement that we as Christians are free to choose among. Forensic substitution is not a theory about the Atonement. It is simply the doctrine of the Atonement as plainly taught in the Scriptures."

I reply that of course the Anselmist's argument that the Scriptures back his view, and the Scriptural proof-texts that he offers to bolster his case, must be given a full and fair hearing. However, I ask both him and those who hear him to remember the distinction between saying, "Text A plainly affirms Theory T," and saying, "Text A is capable, without violent twisting, of being understood as referring to Theory T, and those who have long accepted Theory T, and are deeply committed to it, will quite naturally and honestly assume that to be its true meaning." More specifically, I ask them to note the distinction between substitution and forensic substitution. Every theory of the Atonement, so far as I know, implies substitution. It teaches that God became man for our sakes in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, that He was crucified, dead, buried, that He rose from the dead, and that by doing this He freed us from sin and death. Clearly this implies that the Incarnation brought us immeasurable benefits. Clearly it also implies a cost to the benefactor. Crucifixion hurts. On ANY conceivable theory of the Atonement, whether it be the Anselmic, or the Abelardian, or one of those we have yet to examine, or another theory altogether, it remains true that Christ suffered to bring us joy; that we are bought with a price; that we are redeemed, not with silver or gold, but with the blood of the Eternal Lamb; that though He was rich, yet for our sakes He became poor, that we through His poverty might be rich. From His pain comes our gain.

Given this fact, it is natural, it is inevitable, that Christian writers, both in the pages of Holy Scripture and elsewhere, should find themselves expressing the point by using the language of exchange and substitution, should say that Christ took on Himself the consequences of our sins, that He paid our debts, that He suffered in our stead. And they are right. Most true it is, that He was bruised for our iniquities, that by His wounds we are healed. But since a Christian writer would be bound to describe the reconciling work of Christ in those terms whether he believed in forensic substitution or not, the Christian reader must not take such language as evidence that the writer is talking about forensic substitution. The Christian doctrine is that, by the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, God has reconciled us to Himself. If we then ask, "What is the connection? Just how does Christ's death make us better off?" there are various possible answers. The answer of forensic substitution is that Divine Justice demands a legal penalty of suffering for sin, but (under some circumstances) does not require that the sinner and the sufferer be the same. However, those who suppose that this is the only possible answer usually do so (in my judgement) because they have never considered other possible answers, or even been made aware that other answers exist or have been offered. One purpose of this paper is to broaden their horizons.

These general remarks, are not intended as a substitute for examining the Anselmist's proof-texts. This I propose to do as soon as I have explained one other theory of the Atonement. If I were to examine the texts now, I should have to keep saying, "But why does that text fit the Anselmic theory better than some other possible theory?" which is a vague question. I propose, instead, to ask:

"How does that text fit the Anselmic theory better than the Abelardian? or the Odoic? or the Gregorian?" Hence, I do not evade the examination, but I postpone it. I can hardly ask an Anselmist to give up his theory until he sees what the alternatives are.

I mention, in passing, that the Scriptures repeatedly say that in Christ, and through His work, we are reconciled to God. If the forensic substitution theory were correct, so that the death of Christ was needed to appease God's wrath or satisfy His justice, then one would expect to hear it said that the Crucifixion reconciles God to us. But that language is never used. It is always wrath on our part that needs to be overcome. And in this I say that the Abelardian theory conforms with the words of Holy Scripture in a way that the Anselmic theory does not.

THE ABELARDIAN THEORY

I have suggested that perhaps the hanging-judge version is a distortion of the Anselmic theory rather than being the theory rightly understood, and this is a point we will come back to, but right now I should like to consider a second theory of the Atonement. It is called the Abelardian theory, after Peter Abelard. If you want a descriptive word for it, then, just as we called the Anselmic theory the forensic theory, we may call this the beau-geste thory. Abelard says that in the crucifixion, God invites men to return to friendship with him, and does so by a dramatic, costly, and generous gesture of love, a gesture that makes a loving response easy. Let me illustrate.

Suppose that I have quarreled with my best friend Oscar, and that the quarrel is entirely my fault, and I know it, but I am too stubborn to admit it and apologize. I am unhappy, but unwilling to give in. I wander into a bar and order a drink. I sit there, sipping it and feeling sullen and sorry for myself. Oscar walks in and we see each other but do not speak. He sits at the other end of the bar and orders a drink. Then a couple of rowdies begin to push me around and rough me up. Oscar proceeds to step in and bail me out, getting himself a broken nose in the process. The result: instant and complete reconciliation.

Now you will note that the broken nose is an important part of the process. If he had simply stepped to the door and shouted for the police, or if he had asked the bartender to tell the rowdies to behave on penalty of not getting any more drinks in that bar ever, and the bartender and then the rowdies had complied, or if he had pulled out a gun with tranquilizing darts and put the rowdies to sleep, I assume that I should have unbent enough to thank him politely, but his action, though welcome, would nevertheless be the sort of thing one might do for a complete stranger. It would not have cost him anything. The broken nose is what mends the broken friendship.

Now, on Abelard's view (though he expresses it a bit differently), the Crucifixion is God's taking a broken nose for us. It is his way of saying to the human race: "We have quarreled, and you are unwilling to come to me and end it. Very well, I will come to you. I love you. I want a right relationship to prevail between us. I want our friendship restored. And I want it enough to lay my life on the line for it." And just as the shock of seeing Oscar with blood all over his face breaks through my shell of stubbornness, so God's action at Calvary breaks through the shell of sulky, petty, arrogance that the human race has erected against God's love, and makes a reconciliation possible.

(Let me state for the record that the above story is fiction -I am not a barfly. It is just that when I tried writing, "I walk into a soda fountain and order a strawberry malted," the story did not seem right, somehow.)

ANSELM VS. ABELARD

This, in brief, is the second, or Abelardian theory of the Atonement, and the first comment I have to make about it is that many persons who think they are Anselmists are really closer to Abelard. Some years ago I read a tract handed to me on the street, which began by explaining the Atonement in the strictest possible (I almost said the worst possible) Anselmist language -- straight forensic substitution. We all deserve punishment, but Christ has agreed to be punished instead, and that satisfies justice. But then the second paragraph went on to give an illustration.

Now you will notice that that story is not Anselmic at all. It is Abelardian to the core. And I strongly suspect that many people who are accustomed, if someone asks them, to explain the Atonement in Anselmic terms, really view it in other terms, usually Abelardian, without realizing that they are doing so.

Let me offer another illustration.

Most of you, surely, have read THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER.

If it has been a while, and the details are hazy in your mind, I suggest that you give yourselves a treat and re-read it. The passages I am particularly concerned with at the moment are chapters 3(25-40), 6(70-100), 7(37-100), 10(95-100), 12(0-10), 12(80-100), 17(0-20), 18(55-100), and 20(0-100). Here 3(25-40) means chapter three, a passage beginning about 25% of the way through the chapter and ending about 40% of the way through.

Tom falls in love with Becky Thatcher, and they agree to be engaged. But Becky learns that Tom has been engaged before, and quarrels with him. Thereafter, they take turns, each making overtures to the other, being rejected, and going away full of hurt pride and redoubled anger. When each has finally determined to hate the other for life, Becky accidentally tears a valuable book belonging to the schoolmaster. He is interrogating Becky, when Tom leaps to his feet and shouts, "I done it!" He receives the whipping of his life, and Becky and he are reconciled.

Now an Anselmist might wish to take this as an illustration of the way in which Christ bears the penalty for our sins. But this interpretation violates the spirit of the book completely. It reads the book as follows: "Becky has done wrong by tearing the book, thus putting her and the schoolmaster at odds. The problem is how she and the schoolmaster are to be reconciled and school discipline maintained at the same time. Having set up the problem, we now bring in Tom and flog him to solve it."

But that is not at all the way the book reads. Say rather:

"Becky and Tom have quarreled. Both are unhappy as a result, but wounded pride stands in the way of any steps toward reconciliation. Then Becky gets into trouble, and Tom gets her out of it, at considerable cost to himself. His gesture of generous love elicits from her a response of love, and the quarrel is forgotten forever." And this is atonement in the pure Abelardian sense.

Note that it is unimportant that Becky's trouble results from a misdeed on her part and takes the form of a threatened punishment. If Tom had pushed her out of the way of a falling rock and had broken his leg in the process, the course of true love would have run substantially the same. The schoolmaster is not really perceived by the reader as a person -- he is just one of those natural ills, like hornets and measles, that constitute the darker side of childhood, and no reader cares about or expects anything that we would call a "reconciliation" between the schoolmaster and Becky or any other pupil.

The reader may object that in the quarrel between Tom and Becky, both are at fault, whereas the Christian maintains that in the quarrel between God and man, the fault is entirely on man's side. I grant the point. I say only that Tom's method of ending the quarrel is like Christ's, not that every detail of the story illustrates the union of Christ with his Church. It is true that Tom undergoes a sort of death-and-resurrection, once (on the island) without Becky and once (in the cave) with her, and that the latter adventure is directly responsible for the final destruction of evil, as represented by Injun Joe. But I resist the temptation to try for a full-fledged allegory (Amy Lawrence, whom we first meet in Sunday School, as a symbol of the Mosaic Covenant?), and content myself with the point about the nature of reconciliation.

(Digressive note: A parable is a story whose central point illustrates something. An allegory is a story in which all or at least many points illustrate something. Example: If you read the story of the Good Samaritan as a parable, you say that the moral is that everyone who needs my help is my neighbor. If you read it as an allegory, you say that Jerusalem is the City of God, and Jericho is the City that God has judged worthy of utter destruction, and that the man who goes down (the direction is significant) from Jerusalem to Jericho represents mankind forsaking God and falling into sin. Sacrifices and offerings (the priest) cannot help him. Oberving the law (the levite) cannot help him. Only Christ (the Samaritan) can do so, pouring into his wounds wine (the redeeming grace bought at Calvary with Christ's blood) and oil (the sanctifying grace of the Holy Spirit), setting him on his own beast (assuming a fleshly body in order that we may be like him) and bringing him to an inn (the Catholic Church), and instructing the innkeeper to care for him, giving him two pence (the Major Sacraments), with reference to a supplementary payment (the Minor Sacraments -- but some would interpret this as a reference to the Treasury of Merit), and so on. I am taking the book TOM SAWYER to be a parable, not an allegory.)

Since many persons have never heard the Atonement discussed except in forensic terms, it is possible that some of you, when I began to attack the forensic theory, thought that I was attacking the doctrine of the Atonement as such. I trust that by now it is clear that I am not. I offer the beau-geste (Abelardian) theory of the Atonement as not merely an alternative to the forensic (Anselmic) theory, and not merely a better theory, but one that subsumes the forensic theory, in the sense that it preserves all that is valuable in that theory, and is such that the holder of the forensic theory, once he understands it, is likely to respond, "Yes, that is what I was really trying to say all along."

Nevertheless, I do not consider Abelard's to be the last word on the subject, as the reader will see.

ABELARD'S THEORY AND SOME RECENT SPECULATIONS

I now propose to take a long digression and discuss some theories and speculations about the psychological makeup of human beings, speculations that seem to me to be of interest in the context of the Abelardian theory of the Atonement. Let me emphasize, however, that they are not bound up with the theology of Abelard so that it and they stand or fall together. It is perfactly possible to be a convinced Abelardian while ignoring or rejecting what follows. So if you find that the following excursion through folklore, mythology, and human quirkiness not credible, or not interesting, please do not take that as evidence that Abelard must be wrong.

THE SNAKE IN FOLKLORE

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Adam and Eve are looking at the Tree, and various psychologists and anthroplogists are looking at them. Their conclusions are, to put it mildly, varied.

One school of thought begins by comparing the story of Eden with similar stories in other cultures. For example, in the Mesopotamian story, "The Epic of Gilgamesh," we find that Gilgamesh, the great king and warrior, is troubled by the thought that, sooner or later every man must die. He makes a journey to the end of the earth, there to consult a wise hermit. The hermit tells him: "Mortality is your fate and you cannot escape it." However, he goes on to say:

THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH, NK Sanders, trans., Penguin
Classics, 3rd ed. 1972, pp. 106-107,116-117

From this and other ancient stories, some scholars construct a hypothetical original story of the Fall which runs as follows:

You will notice that this story differs from that in Genesis in that it has no moral overtones whatever. The humans did not defy God by eating of the tree: they simply followed garbled instructions in good faith. This is not a story about good and evil, but about how we happen to be mortal and the serpent immortal. Clearly the tellers have observed a snake before molting, looking wrinkled and old, and have seen it crawl out of its skin looking bright-colored and smooth and fresh, and have supposed that it was renewing its youth. The Hebrew writer does not make that mistake.

I have heard someone say: "I cannot believe that the author of Genesis is so lacking in originality that all he can give us are mere copies of pagan folktales."

I reply that anyone who calls the Genesis story a "mere copy" has not compared the two. But that the Genesis author started with a pagan folktale and revised it -- why shouldn't he? There is a traditional Jewish story about the owner of a vineyard who hired some laborers at sunrise, more at mid-morning, more at noon, more at mid-afternoon, and still others an hour before sunset. At sunset, when work stopped, he paid them off, and one worker asked, "Why have you paid this man as much for working one hour as you paid us for working twelve?" The owner replied, "Because he has accomplished as much in one hour as you have accomplished in twelve."

Now Jesus tells a very similar story, to be found in Matthew 20:1-16. Here, however, the reply of the owner is, "You agreed to work all day for one denarius, right? And I have paid you one denarius, right? And one denarius is a fair wage for a day's work, right? Well then, you have nothing to complain about. If I want to overpay this man, it's not coming out of your pocket. Are you angry because I am generous? If I want to throw my money away, why shouldn't I? It's my money."

Now my point is that the rabbis' story is almost certainly the older of the two. Probably it was well known to those who heard Jesus preaching, and they were sure they know how his story was going to end. That they were suddenly surprised by a totally different ending only helped to emphasize the contrast between the idea of God's generosity as something earned and God's generosity as a free gift. Jesus, wanting to make a point, does not think himself bound to invent a completely new story from scratch, one completely unlike anything his hearers have encountered before. Instead, he takes a story they all know by heart and gives it an unexpected twist.

Accordingly, it does not bother me a bit to suppose that the author of Genesis took an old, familiar folktale about "Why the Snake Sheds its Skin," and rewrote it, changing the point completely, to make a story about the fact that obedience to God makes men happy and disobedience to God makes them unhappy.

Instead of saying, "It is unthinkable that a Bible story should be derived from a folk-tale," someone may ask, "Why do you assume that the Bible story is derived from the folk-tale and not vice versa? Given the resemblance, there is clearly some connection. But why do you always assume that the Hebrews borrowed from their neighbors and never the other way around?" I reply that I don't always assume it. In this case, one argument for putting the folk-tale first is that doing so answers the question, "Why the snake?" Because snakes shed their skins and so are thought by many to be immortal, there is a folk-tale to explain this. When the Hebrews, under divine guidance, are led to see that what a man ought chiefly to seek is not long life, not even everlasting life, but life in fellowship with God, then the folk-tale is utterly transformed to make that point, but it still keeps some of the furnishings of the original story that can be worked into the new, such as the snake and the two trees. (You will notice that the Tree of Life does not seem quite completely assimilated.) If you take the story in the other direction, supposing that the Genesis story came first and that the folk-tale was derived from it, then you have to suppose that it was sheer co-incidence that the Genesis story provides an animal that sheds its skin, and provides two trees for the snake to reverse messages about.

THE FALL AND SEXUAL SYMBOLISM

However, many psychologists think that there is another symbolism in the story. They note that when Adam and Eve had eaten of the Tree, their first response was to realize that they were naked. Since it is hardly to be supposed that they had previously believed themselves to be wearing overalls, this must mean that they began to attach a sexual significance to being naked.

The name of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil acquires a new significance when we remember that, in Hebrew usage, "Adam knew his wife" means that Adam and his wife had sexual intercourse. We find the phrase, "to know good and evil" used in Hebrew literature where "to be capable of sex" is at least a possible meaning, and sometimes the most probable.

Moreover, the following passage from the traditions of a neighboring people is suggestive:

...Now the trapper returned, taking the harlot with him.

Obviously this is not a story about the first man. At least one large town already exists. However, in some cuneiform copies of the Epic, the trapper speaking to the woman calls Enkidu, "man as he was," and again, "man as he was in the beginning." Thus we have the idea, current in circles where the early Hebrews must surely have been familiar with it, of a man living in harmony with nature as man did "in the beginning," who through sexual experience loses that harmony, but can afterwards be said to have gained knowledge and to have become like a god.

Further, we note that in the symbolism of dreams, which is closely related to the symbolism of folklore, the eating of a fruit almost always has a sexual meaning, and that so does the presence of a serpent.

St. Augustine says that as long as man was in obedience to, and harmony with, God, Nature was in obedience to, and harmony with, man. When man rebelled against God, he lost his natural authority over nature, and now not even his own body is altogether under his control. Augustine says that this is true in general, but particularly in regard to sex. A man may clench his fist without being angry, and may be angry without clenching his fist, but the corresponding modification of the sexual organs can be neither produced nor dismissed by mere volition. On the view that man fell through a misuse or corruption of the sexual faculty, and that the serpent represents man's sexuality leading him astray, we see in the judgement against the serpent (Genesis 3:14b) a reference to the fact that man's sexuality will hanceforth not be directly responsive to his will. On the other hand, as CS Lewis points out (chapter "Milton and St. Augustine" in A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST), it is a mistake to suppose that sexuality is unique in this regard. Involuntary salivation in the presence of appetizing food is equally an instance of the disobedience of the body.

FREUD LOOKS AT RELIGION

At this point it is appropriate to say something about the theories of Sigmund Freud.

In discussing Freud and the book of Genesis, I shall be taking a somewhat different line from the one that I would have taken when I was an undergraduate. In those days, Freud went largely unchallenged. In college bull sessions, Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud were routinely mentioned as the three great pioneers of modern science, the three men who had stood up against the religious view of man and the world represented by the medieval church, the Spanish Inquisition, the Dark Ages and all that, and had proved it to be false and replaced it by the scientific world view. To question the authority of Freud would have been almost as bad as questioning the authority of Darwin. He belonged, along with Pasteur, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and a few others, in the exalted company of those whom one cannot criticize without declaring oneself an enemy of science. It was a distinct shock to me, though not an unpleasant one, to take a course in psychology and find that there were a number of professors in the department who did not account themslves disciples of Freud.

Since then, his stock seems to have fallen considerably, if not among professional psychologists and therapists, at least among dilettantes. One reason for this seems to be that, although his theories give a fairly plausible account of why males think and act the way they do, they are very unsatisfactory when you try to apply them to women. Since I am often accused of being a male chauvinist, it gives me pleasure to reflect that I was using this as an argument against Freud long before it became fashionable to do so.

Anyway, if I were making this argument a number of years ago, I would probably take it for granted that we all know that Freud's theories are true, even if we are not quite sure what they are, and that if I can plausibly maintain that Freud and Genesis are in perfect harmony, I shall have struck a major blow for the Faith. As it is, I shall be more cautious and merely suggest that we can get some useful insights into what the author of Genesis is saying to us if we compare it with what Freud has to say on a similar subject.

In so doing, I shall be drawing heavily on the ideas of Mr. BG Sanders, an Englishman who some fifty years ago wrote a small book, CHRISTIANITY AFTER FREUD, now unfortunately out of print. Mr. Sanders is both a convinced Christian and a convinced Freudian, and when it comes to explaining Freud, his credentials are considerably better than mine.

Let me begin with a sketchy account of Freud's theory of the origin of neurosis and the origin of religion.

According to Freud, our primitive ancestors lived in packs or tribes that had a sexual policy very much like that of many species of hoofed animals today. The tribe consisted of a single dominant male, his harem, and the young of both sexes. Adult males unable to obtain their own harems, assuming that they had not been killed fighting in the attempt to obtain females, led solitary and unhappy lives. Within the tribe, there was a natural tendency for the dominant male to kill his male offspring before they could grow up to challenge him. In order to prevent or postpone such killing, the females undertook to make the young males as unthreatening as possible by instilling in them two strong inhibitions:

1) You must never threaten, harm, disobey, compete with, or disrespect your father. He is the boss. He is to be honored and obeyed at all times. If he hits you, you must not hit him back. If he gives you an order, you must carry it out. You must submit to him. He is the boss.

2) You must never have sex with any of the females of the tribe. You must not even think of it. They are off-limits. They are forbidden. They are a no-no.

These two great commandments, the Parricide Taboo and the Incest Taboo, were diligently taught to all the young males as the most important rules in their lives. Under their influence, the young were not a threat to their father's domination of the tribe or his exclusive sexual role. However, as they matured, the conflict between the taboos and their biological sexual urges grew stronger, and eventually they rebelled. None of them was strong enough to challenge their father to single combat, or psychologically capable of acting on his own to break the taboos, but what they could not do individually, they did collectively. As a group, they attacked their father, defeated and killed him, and tore the body to pieces and ate it. Having done so, they felt horribly guilty about it. Although they had killed their father in order to be able to take for themselves the women of the tribe, they now felt unable to profit by their deed, and so set out to kidnap women from other tribes instead.

The thought of what they had done made them guilty and unhappy, and by way of compensating for what they had done, they broadened the Parricide Taboo into a general prohibition of murder, and the Incest Taboo into a general prohibition of adultery. They found the memory of their action so painful that they repressed it. However, the memory refused to lie dormant, and influenced their actions in distorted and symbolic form. For example, they chose a certain  species of animal and declared it to be the totem of the tribe. It was sacred and must never be eaten or killed. However, most tribes had an exception to this rule. Once a year, or once every five years, or whatever, there was a solemn feast at which the totem animal was killed and eaten by the whole tribe. No single hunter killed it, but the whole tribe acting together, or at least a hunter who had been designated as representative for the whole tribe. No individual or family made a private meal of it,   but the whole tribe participated in a communal feast. Clearly, the totem animal symbolized the father whom they had murdered, thinking to avoid guilt by acting in concert. By making and keeping a firm rule against killing the totem in the course of their everyday hunting, they acknowledged and obeyed the Parricide Taboo. By killing the totem on a special occasion, and as a group, and eating it collectively, they were symbolically disclaiming personal responsibility. It is as if they said: "You see, we are good. We obey the rules. We honor and love the tribal totem. It is only the festival, the special occasion, that forces us to act differently. And none of us commits any individual act against the totem. It is the tribe that acts, and therefore none of us. Moreover, the totem is the spirit of the tribe, and by eating it in a communal meal, we become one with the tribe and also one with the totem."

It is clear to us that the totem symbolizes the murdered father. It would not have been clear to the participants themselves. The original murderers have erased their crime from their conscious memories, and would certainly not have mentioned it to their own children. However, the memory persists from one generation to another, without being a conscious or explicit memory. How is this possible?

As for myself, I don't see that as a problem. We can all observe for ourselves how children come to reflect the attitudes of their parents without ever hearing those attitudes expressed. A young child says, "Mommy, black people aren't as good as we are, are they?" And the mother gasps and says, "Why, child, where did you ever get such a horrible idea? That's not the kind of thing we've brought you up to think. Your father and I have always been good liberals. We subscribe to the NEW YORK TIMES, and we give money every year to the Urban League, and back in the sixties we even gave a check to the Black Panthers once. And you know I have always told you be nice to the maid, and treat her exactly as if she were one of the family. I can't imagine where you picked up a nasty idea like that."

The point is that you don't need to tell your child how you feel about someone or something, or even to be aware of it yourself, in order for your child to reflect your attitudes. The technical phrase is, that he picks up on your vibes.

Some psychologists, most notably Karl Jung, have argued for the existence of a collective unconsciousness of the human race. (Some of you may have encountered the idea in the book THE ROAD LESS _, by Scott Peck.) Freud's views on the matter are best stated in his own words:

My impression from the above is that he viewed the collective mind as a figure of speech, though a highly useful one.

In any event, he believed that the unconscious mind is very good at expressing and understanding ideas in symbolic form, and that the young of the tribe, participating in the tribal ritual, will absorb into their unconscious minds the ideas that the ritual symbolizes, even though neither they nor their elders know on the conscious level what the ritual is about. The result is that every youngster, as he grows up, internalizes and reproduces in his own mind the psychological state of his murderous ancestors, a state which consists of

1) an acceptance of the two great taboos, against parricide and incest,

2) an intense though unacknowledged desire to break both taboos,

3) an unconscious feeling that he has already done so, that he carries a burden of guilt, and

4) a reaction to the tribal rituals as somehow right, as appropriate, as psychologically satisfying, as expressing and alleviating some deep need in himself.

It should perhaps be remarked that it is not only in those tribes that practice what we would call totemism that this psychological state is handed down from generation to generation. Totemism is only one device for this transmission. We mention it because here it is relatively obvious what is going on, and because totemism is probably the earliest transmission device of the lot, the one chiefly used by our remote ancestors, and the one chiefly used by modern tribes with cultures similar to that of our remote ancestors. But all religions serve to transmit the condition. The resemblance of the Christian sacrament of Holy Communion to the communal sacrifice of the totem is too obvious to need elaboration. And Freud assures us that the process goes on, though more subtly, even in cultures with no explicit religion, so that there is not a male human anywhere in the universe who does not have an OEdipus complex, that is, a subconscious desire to kill his father and mate with his mother. What is widely considered the greatest play ever written? Hamlet! Consider the plot. Hamlet's uncle Claudius kills Hamlet's father and marries Hamlet's mother, and it is Hamlet's duty to avenge these wrongs by killing Claudius. However, throughout much of the play, he seems unable to bring himself to act. Why? Because Claudius has done precisely what Hamlet himself desperately desires to do. Claudius symbolizes Hamlet's own guilty self, and the duty of killing Claudius is the duty of killing one aspect of himself, of resolutely spurning his own deepest impulses. It is not until the last scene that he finally manages to do it, and then only by killing himself in the process, by which we understand that Claudius really is Hamlet's self. Small wonder that the play so deeply moves us, that it speaks to our inmost core. Small wonder, for that matter, that the European playwright commmonly reckoned the greatest of ancient times, as Shakespeare of modern times, is Sophocles, author of the OEdipus triliogy, the tragedy of a man who did, though unknowingly, kill his father and marry his mother.

And thus Freud explains to us how a prehistoric catastrophe, the killing of the patriarch of the tribe by his sons in order to share the women of the tribe, constitutes the whole basis of morality, of religion, of art, and of neurosis, in particular of the OEdipus complex.

He goes on to explain the development of neurosis in the lives of individuals. Typically, a small child has some experience which is shocking, unpleasant, stressful, traumatic. Because he/she cannot deal with the experience directly, the memory of it is repressed into the subconscious mind. Here it remains, influencing the individual's behavior, causing him to do things which he cannot explain, and which seemingly have no point or purpose. Often some adult experience which bears some resemblance to the original experience will elicit a strong response in the subject, with an outbreak of obviously abnormal behavior, and a partial return to the conscious level of some of the repressed material.

Many of the original traumata that are responsible for neuroses involve father-son conflicts when the patient is quite young. Since every son desires to kill his father and feels guilty about this feeling, there is obviously plenty of room for trouble in that department. However, not all traumata are like this, and the example I now give is not.

Freud, in discussing this case, remarks that perhaps some of his listeners will find this a very bizarre explanation of the woman's behavior. His reply is that the behavior to be explained is pretty bizarre, and that we must not expect an ordinary cause or explanation for facts which are not the least bit ordinary themselves.

Note that for Freud there is a parallel between the disturbed individual and the disturbed race. A neurotic person typically has had an experience, usually fairly early in life, that produces feelings of conflict, anxiety and guilt. He is unable to deal with these feelings, and so on the conscious level he denies their existence and forgets the experience that gave rise to them. Thereafter, he engages in apparently pointless behavior that is a symbolic way of dealing with the original episode. Just so, the human race, whether through totemism or through other religious rituals, continues to deal symbolically with the prehistoric parricide which is at the root of our racial anxieties. In short, religion is to the race what neurosis is to the individual.

A RELIGIONIST LOOKS AT FREUD

Now anthropologists are extremely doubtful that humans ever lived, or that it was ever economically and otherwise feasible for them to live, in the sort of patriarchal tribes that Freud postulated. And there are other objections to Freud's theory.

As we have noted above, when two things resemble each other and we have ruled out co-incidence, it is a further question which is the copy and which the original (or whether both are copies of some third thing). Freud takes prehistoric men's attitude toward their father as the original, and everything else as a copy. In particular, he claims that God has no real existence, but is a projection or symbol of attitudes about our fathers formed in early childhood and reflecting the attitudes and conflicts of our prehistoric ancestors. But he does not derive his atheism from his data. Rather, he assumes atheism and interprets his data in terms of that assumption. If we begin instead with the assumption that God is real, and interpret Freud's data by Freud's methods in terms of that assumption, then (suggests Mr. BG Sanders, mentioned above as the author of CHRISTIANITY AFTER FREUD), we shall come up with quite different results.

According to Sanders's interpretation, of which I can provide only the barest summary, a turning point in human history came when our ancestors first realized that pregnancy resulted from sexual activity. Until then, children were regarded simply as a gift of God. But once parents realized that they had produced the child, they had a choice. They could continue to say: "This child and I are both God's creatures. God has entrusted this child to my care." Or they could say: "This child is something I have made, and therefore my property. I am its owner, its maker, its God." They chose the latter. Eve, after giving birth to Cain, says, "I have gained a man with the Lord," which the King James renders, "with the help of the Lord," but which has overtones of "just like the Lord," meaning that Eve is claiming to be just a much a creator as God.

In choosing to claim a God-like status with respect to his offspring, a man committed Tyranny against his son and Rebellion against God. Thereafter, in every generation, men are engaged in seeking to dominate their sons, to throw off the domination of their fathers, and to ignore or defy God's existence and status as sole Sovereign. Moreover, the sexual act, which was intended to be an expression of love and commitment to one's spouse, bcomes an expression of aggressive and competitive self-will, of the urge to dominate, the will to power, directed against one's mate, against one's offspring, against one's parents, and against God. And that is what is meant by the Fall.

PARENTHESIS: IS THE PREVIOUS LANGUAGE TOO SEVERE?

At this point, I anticipate an explosive response from my readers. Those who are Christians are likely to say, "But that is not a Christian attitude toward sex at all!" But their voices will be drowned out completely by a triumphant roar from the non-Christians: "Aha! Ever since I heard about those dreadful medieval hermits living in caves, all covered with sackcloth and ashes and lice, and never coming near a woman or a bathtub, I have suspected that Christianity is opposed to everything reasonable and beautiful and life-affirming, and now I hear a Christian openly admitting it. If only you would cast off the shackles of superstition, you would see that sex is beautiful and loving and not at all what you said. I have been reading your stuff just in case there might be something to this religion business after all, but from now on, forget it! You have convinced me that there isn't."

I reply that of course sex is basically a good thing. It would have to be. It was created by God, and everything that God has made (which means everything, period, except for God Himself), is good. (That is the main point of the Creation Hymn, with which our discussion began.) A thing can be misused, or distorted, but if it were to become BASICALLY bad, bad in its essence, it would no longer be the thing that God created but something else, and that implies the existence of a creator other than God, which is a direct and fundamental denial of monotheism.

Digression: Perhaps you remember Marcion. He denied monotheism and affirmed the existence of two gods, and there were others who carried the idea much further than Marcion, people whom we may lump together for our purposes and call Dualists, Gnostics, or Manicheans. They taught that the good god was the god of light and spirit and the human mind, and that the evil god was the god of darkness and matter and the human body. They concluded that sex was an evil thing, invented by the evil god to distract us from spiritual things. But no consistent monotheist holds this view or anything like it.

So if anyone objects to my remarks on the grounds that he has found sex to be a good and beautiful thing, I point out that that is in perfect agreement with the Christian position. However, Christian writers generally go on to maintain that the human race is not altogether what God meant it to be, and that neither is human sexuality, that both have been in some measure distorted, and that God will put both human sexuality and the rest of human nature right in all those who put themselves in his hands.

As for my saying that, in the present condition of the human race, sex tends to be associated with the will to dominate, surely that is anything but an exclusively Christian observation. In Freudian theory, the libido is both the sex drive and the will to power. Freud has been accused of many things, but seldom of being a shill for orthodox Christianity.

Or again, consider your own experience of hearing other people talk about casual sexual contacts. More than once, listening to someone in a dormitory or locker room talking about his affairs, I have thought, "Good grief, this guy doesn't even LIKE women -except in the sense in which a headhunter may be said to like heads. His attitude is clearly that his date is the enemy. If he manages to get her into bed with him, then he wins. If she manages to get home without going to bed with him, then she wins. (Presumably she gets extra points if she manages to keep him sufficiently hopeful so that he will ask her out again.)" I will not ask you whether this kind of attitude has ever affected your own thinking, but simply whether you have encountered people who obviously did think that way, and encountered too many to dismiss them as freaks, as rare exceptions to the general rule that need not be taken into account.

Ask yourself about ordinary English usage. A great deal of human experience is stored in the way people use words. Consider how people use expressions of the form, "Bleep you!" where the first word is replaced by either of the two common English sexual verbs. Clearly, they are not intending to express love, gentleness, affection, or even the fact of finding pleasure in the person of the addressee. The corresponding idiom is found in many other languages.

Once more, so that there will be no danger of misunderstanding (foolish me, there is ALWAYS a danger of misunderstanding). I am not saying that sex is a bad thing, but that it is a good thing seriously tainted by the Fall. I add (remember Lewis's comment on St. Augustine) that it is a mistake to think of the taint of sin chiefly in this context. In Whyte's THE ORGANIZATION MAN, he describes his experiences as a traveling salesman selling Vick's Vaporub to small drugstores in the 1930's. Sometimes he hesitated to push a customer into making a large order, realizing that it was not to the customer's advantage to tie up an excessive amount of capital and shelf space in the product. His supervisor made the rounds with him one day to observe his selling technique, and commented, "You haven't gotten the idea. Remember that the man on the other side of the counter is the enemy!" Sex is by no means the only context in which we are tempted to treat other people as means rather than as ends. Nor are sex and economics the only two contexts. Nor is giving up sex the appropriate remedy, any more than giving up economic activity.

BACK TO SANDERS

According to Sanders, then, the discovery that children are caused by sex was the occasion for men's choosing to grasp at equality with God by regarding themselves as the creators, and hence the owners, the rulers, and as it were the gods, of their children. Moreover, just as (according to Freud) the rituals of totemism, intended to assuage the repressed and unacknowledged guilt of men who have killed their father, in fact reinforces that guilt and transmits it to the next generation, so (according to Sanders) religious rituals, but also and more especially sexual activities, tend to reinforce and perpetuate man's unresolved conflicts with his parents, with his offspring, with his mate, and with God. Sanders supposes that before the Fall, men were directly conscious of the presence of God. After the Fall, however, the knowledge that had previously been a delight to them became an awkwardness and discomfort. They repressed the knowledge of God, so that it was confined to the subconscious, emerging into conscious thought only in fragmented and distorted form, and as such forming the basis for the beliefs and practices of most religions.

Now if God exists at all, then he is of supreme importance, and a man's relations with God will be more fundamental to his personhood than his relations with anyone else. We therefore find that according to Freud, the Fall consists of an act of rebellion against one's father, with God as a symbol and shadow or projection of that father; but according to Sanders, it is the act of rebellion against God that is primary, with inter-generational conflict a real battle, but one that finds its roots in that fundamental rebellion.

Freud and Sanders both recognize Judaism as a unique religious phenomenon, one that cannot be classified as just another offshoot of totemism, and they undertake to explain how the history of the Jewish people (being led by Moses out of slavery in Egypt) brought about the resurrection, out of the collective subconscious folk-memory of the Jewish people, of a substantial fragment of repressed knowledge concerning the existence and nature of God (Sanders's formulation -- Freud would say: of repressed memories of prehistoric parricide, symbolized by the idea of God as a projection of the father-figure). These theories I will not go into. You can read them for yourselves in Sanders's book and in Freud's MOSES AND MONOTHEISM.

But now we come to the person of Jesus Christ. In him, as Sanders and indeed all Christians believe, God acts to restore the human race. Now we are told that Jesus was born of a virgin. Some people resent this doctrine, because they take it to mean that sex is essentially unclean. But the traditional Christian answer to the question, "Why was it appropriate that Christ be born of a virgin?" is, "It was not fitting that a human action should bring God into the world, should be the efficient cause of the Incarnation." It is true that God took human nature upon him in the womb of the virgin with her consent. However, her consent did not CAUSE God's act, and it was in itself an act of submission and obedience to the will of God, and a setting aside of self-will in a sense in which Joseph's act in begetting the child could not have been.

Jesus, then, was born with no human father, and therefore, in Freudian language, without an OEdipus Complex, without the fundamental neurosis which is otherwise the common lot of mankind. In Sanders's terms, since both Joseph and Mary are completely free from any temptation to think of him as their creature, they do not transmit to him the will to power, sexually expressed, which renders men unwilling and unable to accept God as their loving Father and rightful Sovereign. There is no inter-generational conflict between them, and he grows up free of any trace of resentment or resistance against a parental usurpation of God-like authority over him, free of any resulting will himself to dominate or tyrannize others, free of any barrier to a willing acceptance of the Sovereignty of God, and therefore free of any tendency to repress the knowledge of God into his subconscious. He accordingly had, simply as man, the full conscious direct awareness of God that men did before the Fall. Thus his human nature offers no hindrance to union with deity in the Incarnation.

Now when Freud first developed his theories of neurosis, he thought that it would be sufficient to explain to the patient the exact nature and cause of his disorder. He supposed that an intellectual understanding of why he was behaving irrationally was all a patient needed in order to start behaving rationally instead. It didn't work that way, and Freud found that it was necessary for the patient to re-enact his original childhood traumatic experience. Guided by the therapist, the patient would probe his own memory and in effect regress to his childhood state, where he would then re-experience his feelings of resentment, hostility, and guilt toward his father, but with the therapist in the role of his father. The therapist, instead of demanding the repression of these feelings as the real father did, would offer the patient acceptance, understanding, and forgiveness. The effect of this was to heal the wounds of the original conflict, and to reconcile the patient with his father and with himself.

In like manner, Jesus began his public ministry by preaching, by simply telling people about God, offering them intellectual understanding. But even for those who believed him, intellectual understanding was not enough. Instead of bringing men back into a right relationship with God, Jesus' preaching stirred men to anger and resentment. He was trying to bring into their conscious minds an awareness that they had been suppressing with good reason. They accordingly vented on him the hostility that they felt towards God. They crucified him. Now when the human race killed Christ, it was re-enacting the rebellion against God it had committed in its infancy. And when Christ responded with love and forgiveness, the result was to cure the wounds created by the original conflict, and to reconcile the human race to God and to itself. Hence, Sanders remarks: "Freud, though he does not go far enough, is quite right as far as he goes. Religion is the neurosis of the race -- and our Lord Jesus Christ is the psychoanalyst!"

A DASH OF COLD WATER ON SANDERS

One difficulty in interpreting the Fall along Sanders's lines is that he treats the connection between sex and domination as a consuquence of human sin. In fact, there is evidence that sex is also associated with dominance in some non-human species. Consider the following account (along with many similar observations in recent books on primates, or on animal social behavior):

It appears that it is not only the sons of Adam for whom the sexual impulse has become an expression of the will to power.

Now it should be noted that this difficulty is a variant of the problem posed by the triumph of evolutionism. Given that carnivorous animals had roamed the earth for millions of years before the first man, pain and death could not longer be called simply consequences of the sin of Adam. But the Genesis story does not assert that the world was totally uncorrupted by sin before the disobedience of Adam and Eve. The serpent is already crafty and deceitful when we first meet him. Christian tradition understands the serpent to be a fallen angel in disguise, and so connects him with an earlier rebellion of creatures whom God has created with a free choice to obey or disobey. (NOTE: This is a widespread Christian view, but it is not mentioned in any Christian Creed that I know of, nor is it taught with unmistakable plainness anywhere in Holy Scripture. It is NOT an essential part of the Faith.) Their rebellion, it may be thought, corrupted sub-human organic life on this planet. If we interpret Sanders's thesis along these lines, then we say that man did not begin with a sexuality free from the urge to dominate, but rather had the opportunity, once he achieved reason and reflection, to accept both his partner and his offspring as his fellow creatures and to let a new attitude, based on reason, supersede his previous merely instinctive attitudes.

An alternative theory would be that the Fall of Man somehow had the effect of corrupting the sexuality of closely allied species. How this effect took place is a difficult question, although the theory of morphological resonance, which we shall be examining below in a different context, suggests a possible answer. The supposal that the early men who fell were so early as to be a common ancestor of present-day humans and macaques strikes me as a truly desperate shift. In short, I see here a serious difficulty in the Sanders-Freud view of the Fall of Man. I therefore emphatically remind you that rejecting the Freud-Sanders amplification of the Abelardian theory of the Atonement does not entail rejecting the Abelardian theory itself. It merely means that a particular attempt to synthesize Abelard's theology with the insights of another discipline has not succeeded.

SANDERS AND ABELARD

In the previous few paragraphs of this paper, we have considered the beau-geste (or Abelardian) theory of the Atonement (which I illustrated with the story of Oscar in the bar), and the Sanders (Christian-Freudian) theory of original sin. According to this last theory, man's refusal to accept the fact of his dependence on God has alienated him from both God and other men (gender-inclusive). It has bred in him not only an unwillingness to accept God's lawful authority, but a will to dominate others, a disposition to regard other humans as means rather than as ends, as things to be used rather than as persons to be loved. The effects of this disposition can be seen in many areas of life (as when Whyte's supervisor told him, "The man on the other side of the counter is the enemy!"), but (says Sanders) are particularly acute in the sexual relationship, where it is especially important to regard one's partner as an end in her(him)self, and especially easy to regard her(him) instead as simply a means to one's own ends. These attitudes are passed to the next generation in the same way as many other attitudes not explicitly articulated, but in particular (says Sanders) they are reinforced by the act of reproduction, which tempts parents to think of themselves as the creators, and therefore the owners, of their offspring. This cycle was broken by Jesus of Nazareth. Virgin-born, he had no human father, and hence no OEdipus complex -- no Original Sin. His was the full, conscious awareness of God that was natural to man before the Fall caused it to be repressed into the subconscious. In Him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (not that sinlessness in itself made him Divine, but rather that when God chose to take human nature upon Him in the person of Jesus, there was nothing in the human nature of that person to make such a choice unfitting). When men turned against Jesus and crucified Him, it was a re-enactment of the prehistoric rebellion against God of the human race in its infancy (in effect an attempted deicide) and had the same effect as when a patient comes to think of a therapist as his father, re-enacts with the therapist his conflicts rooted in a forgotten infancy, and is accepted by the therapist.

Now it seems to me that the Sanders view of the Fall and Original Sin implies or at least suggests a beau-geste theory of the Atonement. However, the converse is not true. It is perfectly possible to reject Sanders's views and accept those of Abelard. I mention this since I suspect that some of you, especially if you are not disciples of Freud, but perhaps even if you are, may reject Sanders's views or simply shrug them off on the grounds that you do not understand them (for which the fault may be partly mine), and I should hate to have you automatically reject the beau-geste (or Abelardian) theory of the Atonement in the process, under the impression that the two are inseparable.

OBJECTIONS TO THE ABELARDIAN THEORY

As the reader has probably noticed, I have a considerable sympathy for the Abelardian position. Certainly I am convinced that it conveys a truth that is an essential component of any adequate understanding of the Atonement. However, I do not think that it is the whole truth. For one thing, at least as I have here stated it, it appears to make the effects of Christ's redeeming work purely subjective. What alters our relation with God is not the action of Christ, but our awareness of the action of Christ. From this, two results follow:

(1) If the Abelardian theory is the whole truth about our redemption in Christ, then it appears that the saving work of Christ is of absolutely no value to anyone who has not heard of it. You will note, looking back at the Oscar story, that what brought about reconciliation was not the broken nose, but my awareness of the broken nose. If I had not noticed or been aware of what Oscar had done, it would have accomplished nothing toward ending the quarrel. An Abelardian view of the Atonement seems to give more support than an Anselmic one to the theory that all who have never heard the Gospel are damned.

(2) If the Abelardian theory is the whole truth about our redemption in Christ, then it appears unnecessary that the Incarnation should actually have taken place. If Oscar's nose had not been broken, but I thought that it had, the result would have been the same. And likewise, if there had never been any Incarnation, if Jesus of Nazareth had been only a folk-tale or myth, it would not matter, as long as the story had the effect of encouraging people to think of God as loving, merciful, forgiving, ready to take the first step toward reconciliation, ready even to suffer to attain it, with the result that they were moved to abandon their stubbornness and self-will, and seek God's grace.

There have certainly been Christians who believed the first of these conclusions (usually without deriving it from Abelardian premises), but I am emphatically not one of them. Again, there will doubtless be many persons who will welcome the second conclusion, but I am even more emphatically not one of them. As I see it, the second conclusion makes the whole Gospel account of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus into a parable. When we say that the stories of the Prodigal Son and of the Good Samaritan are parables, we mean, not that they did not happen, but that it does not matter whether they did or not -- the point is the moral lesson, that God loves us, and that we ought to love others. If it turns out that other religions have other myths or parables, or other forms of expression, that convey equally well to their adherents the message that reality is somehow on the side of Goodness and Niceness, then those religions are really doing the same job as Christianity, and we have no reason to regard them as inadequate substitutes for it. Now whatever the merits of this position, it is clearly incompatible with what the majority of those who have called themselves Christians during the last two thousand years have meant by the term. As far as I can see, the only honest way of stating the second conclusion is that Christianity is in fact false, but that it has (like some other beliefs, true and false, religious and otherwise) made some persons happier and nicer than they otherwise might have been.

Having thus argued, let me turn about and say that the preceding argument seems to me to rest on a curiously truncated view of the Abelardian position. God does not, on the Abelardian view, suffer and die for us simply in order to get the rumor going that He loves us. He does so because He does in fact love us, and His redemptive work is the natural expression of that love. If one of the results of His action is that we come to realize how much He loves us, so much the better, but it makes no sense to analyze the action as if our awareness of that love and the Reality of that love were two unrelated phenomena. Nor does it make sense to draw from the Abelardian theory the conclusion that a Parsi (for example) whose own religion has taught him to trust in the goodness of God has no need of the Gospel. Try looking at it from his point of view for a moment. Suppose that you tell him what God has done for us in the person of Jesus Christ, and SUPPOSE THAT HE BELIEVES YOU. Is it conceivable that he will say: "That is very interesting, but telling me was really a waste of time. You see, I already knew that God is righteous and merciful, so one more piece of evidence that He is makes no difference to me!"? Will he not rather reply something like: "I already knew that He loved me, but I had no idea how much, or what that love had cost Him. Thank you for telling me, so that I can respond to His gracious deed in love and gratitude!"?

But at the same time, I do not believe that the Abelardian theory is the whole truth. I therefore do not stop here, but proceed to the discussion of still another theory.