Eternal Damnation Was Invented 400 Years After Jesus
Deconstructing Christianity: Many atonement-related concepts were invented long after Jesus. Avoiding damnation was one of them.
Sin and redemption are important issues in Christian thinking; they are certainly addressed in the epistles (see the first six chapters of Romans). If we who follow the teachings of Jesus endeavor to have the mind of Christ and to be inwardly enlivened through the Spirit within us, then it would seem our behavior should reflect that, rather than reflecting a lack of self-awareness and mindless subjection to the body’s emotional and physical impulses, which end in death anyway. In this way, inward righteousness is associated with life, and outward sin with death. Our participation in Christ’s death and resurrection through spiritual practice is understood as cleansing, freeing us from heedless behavior, and training us to develop proper ways of living and relating to others.
While sin and atonement were an issue for early Christians, they were not the central issue. We who have learned Christianity in the time since sin, crucifixion, and atonement were shifted to a place of central importance have difficulty understanding this. When we read about sin, crucifixion, and atonement in scripture, we read into them the assumption of their centrality in our shared history and the Christian life. This is taught explicitly in many traditions. The actual history of Christianity attests otherwise.
We do not experience new life in Christ because we come to deserve it once we acknowledge Christ’s atonement for our sins; we experience new life in Christ because we engage an ongoing spiritual practice of presupposition (faith) that we have the unmerited favor of God (grace), that Jesus’ self-emptying, loving, nonviolent ways of thinking and living are our ultimate patterns, that he or his movement was resurrected and exalted, and that we can expect the same for ourselves on some level. Atonement for sin—for that which is associated with spiritual death—is a by-process of this endeavor. My next post discusses how sin, Jesus’ suffering, and atonement took center stage in Western Christianity. Augustine (354–430), Bishop of Hippo Regius laid the groundwork for that.
It was in the distressing, depressing context of brutal violence and the breakdown of law and social order attendant on the eventual fall of Rome and the Western empire that Augustine developed one of his rather more problematic contributions to theology: the doctrine of original sin. In The Literal Meaning of Genesis (De Genesi ad litteram), Augustine argues that the creation stories in Genesis are written to suit the limited understanding of the people at the time, and are ultimately not to be understood in literal terms. These stories are told simply and allegorically to communicate in a way people can understand. (Augustine also believed that God created the world with the capacity to develop, a view harmonious with biological evolution.)
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But for Augustine, the serpent story in the third chapter of Genesis is no allegory for our development of the capacity to reason and be manipulated through reason, for the acquisition of self-conscious awareness concerning good and evil, for the pleasures of sexuality vs. the difficulties of pregnancy, for the harsh demands of agriculture over the supposed paradise of gathering, for the question of why people die. In Augustine’s entirely new interpretation of this allegory, he introduces the claim that the sin of Adam condemned all of his descendants not merely to natural death, but to eternal damnation.
This would eventually necessitate granting central importance to atonement within Western Christianity to which Roman Catholics and Protestants are heir. It speaks to the meaning of Jesus’ unique embodiment of God-consciousness, which Eastern and Western Christians would eventually view very differently. The Eastern Orthodox view, defined by Maximus the Confessor (ca. 580–662) is that the Word became flesh to show us how oneness with God is possible for us. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-4–1109) would define the doctrine of atonement in the West: The Word became flesh to expiate the sin of Adam, and thus prevent humanity’s eternal damnation.
Jewish exegetes had never taken Augustine’s view of the third chapter of Genesis. Neither would Greek-speaking Christians in the Eastern empire, who were less affected by the scourge of lawless barbarism. Original sin left Western Christianity with a problematic legacy that links sexuality with sin and alienates people from their humanity, and from the physical bodies that ground their spiritual being.
To his credit, issues with his sexuality and worthiness notwithstanding, Augustine otherwise observed a principle of accommodation when interpreting scripture. In his view, God had adapted revelation to how people understood the world at the time. With any new understanding of nature relevant to scripture, the interpretation of scripture must change.
Augustine believed that if a literal interpretation seemed to teach hatred, it must be interpreted allegorically so that it teaches love. This is reflected in a cartoon of Jesus speaking to some people, saying, “The difference between me and you is, you use scripture to determine what love means, and I use love to determine what scripture means.” Or as Michael Curry, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church was fond of saying, “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.”
Irenaeus (c. 130–c. 202) was a Greek Christian leader from Smyrna who lived more than two hundred years before Augustine. He was chosen Bishop of Lugdunum (Lyon, France today) and is credited with expanding Christian communities in the southern regions of Gaul. He was a student of Polycarp (65–155) Bishop of Smyrna, who was said to have been tutored by John the Evangelist; and thus, he was thought to be the last known living connection with the apostles. Irenaeus’ best-known work is Against Heresies (Adversus Haereses) in which he offers both scripture and the traditions handed down from the apostles as the basis for orthodoxy, in refutation of the gnostic sects of early Christianity, about which there was a panic in his time.
Irenaeus’ teaching about the unity of God, over and against gnostic teaching about a God divided into various emanations, is also reflected in his teaching concerning the unity of salvation’s story. He saw our forebears in the garden as exhibiting the primordial immaturity of humankind as it fell into an awkward and painful first self-consciousness. For Irenaeus, this begins our slow and painful collective process of spiritual maturation into the image and likeness of God. Jesus’ life, suffering, and death offer a recapitulation of this journey to fulfillment by one who finally got it right. Through Christ’s vicarious completion, God opens a path for us on the journey to which we are called.
How different our history might have been had Irenaeus’ developmentally-oriented teaching about sin and ‘the fall’ had as much influence on the theology of the church as did that of Augustine’s original sin and damnation! Christianity has clung to that legacy for far too long, and to the immature, black-and-white understanding of human frailty that goes with it. Our natural state provides the means and potential to develop and grow as human beings, not some automatic condemnation to eternal damnation. It is time for Christianity to throw the manufactured doctrine of original sin overboard and to start understanding human spirituality from the standpoint of human cognitive, social, and psychological development instead.