The Weakness of Divine Sovereignty Expressed in Love (Mr. Roger's Neighborhood)

Rogers on the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood in the late 1960s

When watching the remake of Mr Rogers with Tom Hanks consider how this Presbyterian pastor spoke of love repeatedly in his shows and through his life. If we chose to love others with God's help we'll be given God's help; if we chose not to love others or ourself than God will not force us to do otherwise.

This is the meaning of libertarian freedom within that aspect of God's divine sovereignty. The real power of God lies not in doing something He can't do but in what He can do... boiled down to its simplest form, it is God's refusal to ever go back on His promise to love creation or not.

God will love and He will love always. But it takes two in this life to return love and to produce love amongst creation and to each other. God ever loves but it takes our acceptance of His love beginning with Jesus' atonement to pass it along.

The true power of God is not containing evil from its results but removing its affects and influences through the power of His love onto and throughout creation. This kind of sovereignty is therefore most notable for the "weakness" of its character and exercise. Love is ever frail before the might of sin and evil. Yet, like gravity, the smallest and weakest of all the nuclear forces, God's love reaches across the universe to accelerate, or pull back in, all stronger forces resisting it.

Throughout the bible both Jesus and the disciples speak to God's love as being weak in that He gave of Himself to destroy sin's power and in resurrection power declared that it will no longer rule forever. That through His sacrificial atonement to fallen creation this same creation may now be restored on the basis of His own atoning sovereignty... weak in form and in betrayal but strong in the actuating forces of selfless, sacrificial, serving love.

R.E. Slater

November 9, 2019

Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Rogers

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Was Mr. Rogers an open and relational theologian? In a new Atlantic article, he's quoted as writing this: "At the heart of the original creation is that Word (call it Love, call it Grace, call it Peace …) that essence which is lodged somewhere within each of us that longs for ultimate expression. If we choose to allow it to grow we’ll be given help. If we choose otherwise we won’t be forced. If there is such a thing as a “dark corner” of God’s nature then I think it’s God’s refusal to go back on the promise of “the creation’s freedom to love or not.”" (Thanks to JR Madill Forasteros for alerting me to this article.)

Thomas J. Oord

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My Friend Mister Rogers

Link to article

I first met him 21 years ago, and now our relationship is the subject of a new movie. He’s never been more revered—or more misunderstood.

A long time ago, a man of resourceful and relentless kindness saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. He trusted me when I thought I was untrustworthy, and took an interest in me that went beyond my initial interest in him. He was the first person I ever wrote about who became my friend, and our friendship endured until he died. Now a movie has been made from the story I wrote about him, which is to say “inspired by” the story I wrote about him, which is to say that in the movie my name is Lloyd Vogel and I get into a fistfight with my father at my sister’s wedding.

I did not get into a fistfight with my father at my sister’s wedding. My sister didn’t have a wedding. And yet the movie, called A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, seems like a culmination of the gifts that Fred Rogers gave me and all of us, gifts that fit the definition of grace because they feel, at least in my case, undeserved. I still don’t know what he saw in me, why he decided to trust me, or what, to this day, he wanted from me, if anything at all. He puzzles me now as much as he did when I first met him at the door of the apartment he kept in New York City, dressed, as he’d warned me when we spoke on the phone and he invited me over, in a shabby blue bathrobe and a pair of slippers. Fred was, let’s not forget, a rather peculiar man, and it is not just his goodness but rather the peculiarity of his goodness that has made him, 16 years after his death, triumphant as a symbol of human possibility, although just about everything he stood for has been lost.

I met Fred Rogers in 1998, when Esquire assigned me a story about him for a special issue on American heroes. I last spoke with him on Christmas Day 2002, when I called him to talk about an argument I’d had with my cousin; he died two months later, on February 27, 2003. In late 2014, I heard from two screenwriters, Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue, who were interested in using my Esquire story as the basis of a movie, and in January 2018, I received a call from the movie’s producer with the news that Tom Hanks had been cast as Fred Rogers, which meant, emphatically, that the movie would be made. A few months after that, I visited the set in Pittsburgh, where I met Matthew Rhys, the actor who had agreed to play … well, me, or some variant of me, a cynical journalist who in the end proves amenable to Fred’s life lessons—his ministry.

I had been thinking of starting this story at one of those points of departure, at one of those beginnings or one of those endings. But stories don’t only speak; they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written. And so I have to start by mentioning that I have begun writing a story about Mister Rogers the day after two young men armed with assault rifles killed a total of 31 people in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.

I am often asked what Fred would have made of our time—what he would have made of Donald Trump, what he would have made of Twitter, what he would have made of what is generally called our “polarization” but is in fact the discovery that we don’t like our neighbors very much once we encounter them proclaiming their political opinions on social media. I often hear people say that they wish Fred were still around to offer his guidance and also that they are thankful he is gone, because at least he has been spared from seeing what we have become. In all of this, there is something plaintive and a little desperate, an unspoken lament that he has left us when we need him most, as though instead of dying of stomach cancer he was assumed by rapture, abandoning us to our own devices and the judgment implicit in his absence.

What would Fred Rogers—Mister Rogers—have made of El Paso and Dayton, of mass murder committed to fulfill the dictates of an 8chan manifesto? What, for that matter, would he have made of the anti-Semitic massacre that took place last fall in his real-life Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill? The easy answer is that it is impossible to know, because he was from a different world, one almost as alien to us now as our mob-driven world of performative slaughters would be to him. But actually, I think I do know, because when I met him, one of the early school shootings had just taken place, in West Paducah, Kentucky—eight students shot while they gathered in prayer. Though an indefatigably devout man, he did not attempt to characterize the shootings as an attack on the faithful; instead, he seized on the news that the 14-year-old shooter had gone to school telling his classmates that he was about to do something “really big,” and he asked, “Oh, wouldn’t the world be a different place if he had said, ‘I’m going to do something really little tomorrow’?” Fred decided to devote a whole week of his television show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, to the theme of “little and big,” encouraging children to embrace the diminutive nature of their bodies and their endeavors—to understand that big has to start little.

Fred Rogers was a children’s-TV host, but he was not Captain Kangaroo or Officer Joe Bolton. He was an ordained Presbyterian minister who was so appalled by what he saw on 1950s television—adults trying to entertain children by throwing pies in each other’s faces—that he joined the medium as a reformer. He considered the space between the television set and the eyes of his audience sacred, and from 1966 to 2000 he taped nearly 1,000 episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, trying to make that space less profane. And although he made his living speaking to children, his message and example endure because he found a way to speak to all of us—to speak to children as respectfully as he spoke to adults and to speak to adults as simply as he spoke to children. Such fluency was the result not of spontaneous enthusiasm but rather of the rigorous editing he brought to bear on himself and everyone around him. When I first visited The Neighborhood 21 years ago, one of his in-house writers, Hedda Sharapan, told me what had happened when he’d enlisted her to write a manual intended to teach doctors how to talk to children. She worked hard on it, using all her education and experience in the field of child development, but when she handed him her opening, he crossed out what she’d written and replaced it with six words: “You were a child once too.”

Read: Mr. Rogers had a simple set of rules for talking to children

And that’s it, really—his message to doctors was his message to politicians, CEOs, celebrities, educators, writers, students, everyone. It was also the basis of his strange superpowers. He wanted us to remember what it was like to be a child so that he could talk to us; he wanted to talk to us so that we could remember what it was like to be a child. And he could talk to anyone, believing that if you remembered what it was like to be a child, you would remember that you were a child of God.

The question, then, isn’t what Fred would do, what Fred would say, in the face of outrage and horror, because Fred was the most stubbornly consistent of men. He would say that Donald Trump was a child once too. He would say that the latest Twitter victim or villain was a child once too. He would even say that the mass murderers of El Paso and Dayton were children once too—that, in fact, they were very nearly still children, at 21 and 24 years old, respectively—and he would be heartbroken that children have become both the source and the target of so much animus. He would pray for the shooters as well as for their victims, and he would continue to urge us, in what has become one of his most oft quoted lines, to “look for the helpers.”

There is no doubt that he would try to be one of the helpers. The question is whether a man who saw evil in terms of big and little would be able to help.

Read: The fetishization of Mr. Rogers’s ‘Look for the helpers’

“What do you think is going on here?” Bill Isler asked me one morning when we were driving to Fred’s hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Bill was the president of Fred’s company, Family Communications, and he hadn’t wanted Fred to cooperate with my story, because he had read my stories and knew the cruelty I was capable of. I had not yet emerged from the state of disrepute I’d entered when, in the first cover story I wrote for Esquire, I did an elaborate rhetorical dance around the sexuality of Kevin Spacey, a story of coy ill will that fooled no one. We’d been out to make a splash, and we did, earning national opprobrium and prompting Spacey’s agent to urge a Hollywood boycott of me and the magazine.

Indeed, I was assigned the story about Fred because one of the editors at Esquire thought it would be amusing to have me, with my stated determination to “say the unsayable,” write about the nicest man in the world. I was too old to have grown up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and knew him primarily as the parodied version of himself. Now Fred was in the passenger seat of the car in front of us, writing scripts for his show, and I was with his brusque protector, who’d had no better luck protecting Fred than I’d had getting Fred to answer my questions.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m writing a story about Fred and he’s cooperating?”

“Come on,” Bill said. “Do you think this happens all the time?”

“ ‘This’?”

“This! Latrobe! The time he’s given you! He’s taking you to his parents’ grave, for God’s sake!”

“He’s Mister Rogers. Isn’t that what he does?”

“Don’t act naive. We have reporters come through here all the time. They come in the morning, they talk to Fred for 20 minutes, they go home at the end of the day and write their stories. You’re different. He’s taken an interest in you.” And here he emitted a mischievous chuckle.

“There’s nothing I can do about it, but there’s nothing you can do about it either,” he said, and an hour later I saw Mister Rogers urinating behind a tree in a cemetery.

To this day, I have no idea why Fred Rogers decided to be my friend, other than the obvious: I got lucky, and I was a child once too. But not only was his friendship enduring; his interest was abiding, and he frequently expressed it in the emails he sent from his AOL account, ZZZ143. Like the choreographed gestures he used every day on his show, his email address was intended to signify, the “ZZZ” attesting to the pacific fact that he slept soundly through the night, the “143” expressing both the number of letters required to say each word in “I love you” and the Planck’s constant of his weight every time he stepped on a scale.

For as long as I knew him, we corresponded, and recently some of that correspondence resurfaced when I did a data recovery on a 21-year-old laptop moldering away in my attic. I found 70 emails in all, each from the first year of our friendship, and each very much in keeping with the man I met, profiled, and eventually asked my deepest and most troubling questions. The emails are revealing in exactly the way Fred was revealing and obfuscatory in exactly the way he was obfuscatory. He disclosed very little about himself, even to his wife, Joanne—“Oh, he never told me anything,” she says now. But as a correspondent he was emotionally forthcoming and intimate, closing often with the assurance that he kept me in his thoughts and his prayers—“And, I guess you know, each morning I pray for you; I really do”—and sometimes with ministerial ardor. “You are loved with a greater love than anyone could ever imagine, Tom. I trust that you’ll never ever forget that.”

His emails were, like so much of what he wrote to so many he wrote to, love letters. Occasionally, he reported on his worldly endeavors—for instance, sharing the question he asked when he met the Dalai Lama: “When you were taken to Lhasa at age 5 were your parents allowed to come along?” But mostly, he wrote about faith, risking “heretical” notions in answer to what he called my “big questions.” Was God good? Was I? Fred’s faith in God was unshakable, and so was his faith in goodness itself. “God’s nature has grown and grown and grown all through the ages,” he wrote on October 25, 1998.

Yet at the heart of the original creation is that Word (call it Love, call it Grace, call it Peace …) that essence which is lodged somewhere within each of us that longs for ultimate expression. If we choose to allow it to grow we’ll be given help. If we choose otherwise we won’t be forced. If there is such a thing as a “dark corner” of God’s nature then I think it’s God’s refusal to go back on the promise of “the creation’s freedom to love or not.”

He was more overtly religious in his emails than he was in conversation or on television. “You’re moving very close to the Eternal, Tom,” he wrote on November 11, 1998. “And what’s more you’re recognizing that presence.”

It is a truism by now that there was no difference between Fred Rogers and Mister Rogers, that Fred was always Fred. It also happens to be true. He was implacably on message, because the message was in the fiber of his friendships. He worked hard on his friendships; he prepared for his friendships; he took notes on his friendships; he even kept files on his friendships, and not long ago I found out that he’d kept a file on me. The files are in his archives, at Saint Vincent College, in Latrobe; apparently they are extensive—box after box of information and inspiration concerning those he loved—and in one of those boxes are the names of my wife, my dogs, and one of my nieces, who was facing trouble and for whom he prayed. There are also printouts of our correspondence and notes he took on our phone conversations, written on yellow legal pads in his eerily calligraphic hand.

Does this freak me out? No, because I used to wonder how he did it—how he was available to so many people, on so many different occasions. Now I know. I also remember that for all his scrupulous preparation, his conversation was never canned, but rather questing and free. Once, when I called to tell him the story of five people stopping their cars to help an ancient and enormous snapping turtle across a highway exit ramp in Atlanta, he asked if I was going to write about it. I said no, and asked him why he thought it might make a good story. And this was his response: “Because whenever people come together to help either another person or another creature, something has happened, and everyone wants to know about it—because we all long to know that there’s a graciousness at the heart of creation.”

I was 40 when I first met him, unsure that the work for which I was celebrated had not come at the cost of my humanity. I was 44 when I spoke with him for the last time, grateful that he had helped give my wife, Janet, and me the courage to finally begin the process of adopting our daughter. On Christmas Eve 2002, one of my cousins called our house, in his holiday cups and outraged that the year before I had chosen to obey an exacting deadline rather than attend the funeral of his father, whom I loved. Janet answered, and when she told him I wasn’t home, he took his anger out on her. I talked with him later; we argued and called it a night. But Janet couldn’t sleep, and in the small hours she found solace by asking, as both of us sometimes did and to this day sometimes do: “What would Mister Rogers do?”

The spirit of Mister Rogers counseled her to forgive the insults, and after she told me her story in the morning, I called Fred. “Thank you for calling, my dear,” he said, in a voice whose frailty I assigned to age and the morning hour. “How like you, to call on Christmas morning. How like you, to tell me that story.”

How like you. He had different things he told different people, and “how like you” was one of the things he told me, in his ongoing effort to convince me that I was a good person. It was the last thing he said to me, without telling me that he was already sick, that he was already in pain, that he was already dying. He told very few of his friends, as it turned out, and from the first time we spoke to the last, I was the kind of friend who told him things. I was not the kind of friend he told things to.

A note Fred Rogers sent to the author after they met in 1998 (Photograph: Grant Cornett; Courtesy of Tom Junod)

It was just the sort of providential timing that Fred enjoyed—that made him believe the universe was not only a loving place but also a humorous one. I was in Florida, in the spring of 2016. I had parked in front of the house where I was about to do the first interview for the book I had decided to write about my father. I was getting out of the car when my phone rang, with a call from an excited Micah Fitzerman-Blue about the Mister Rogers movie.

“Noah and I finished a draft of our script! We’re very happy with it!”

“That’s fantastic!” I said.

“And we want you to read it with an open mind!”

“Open mind?” I asked.

“Well, basically everything in the script that’s about the relationship between you and Fred is very accurate!”

“That’s good!”

“But everything else—the relationship between you and your father and you and your wife—is made up!”

I read a copy of the script over the weekend, with an open mind. On Monday morning, I wrote Micah and Noah back, along with Peter Saraf, the producer at Big Beach, the company that had optioned my Esquire story, and asked them to change my name and the names of my family members. And that’s how I became Lloyd Vogel.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like the script. I did, especially the innovation of making the entire movie an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, with the character of Fred Rogers speaking directly to the audience about the character of Tom Junod. And it wasn’t that I objected to the script’s fundamental premise, which was that my relationship with Fred was driven by the complexities of my relationship with my father, portrayed as a boozy philandering lounge act so down-at-the-heels that he sleeps in his Cadillac. My father, Lou Junod, was a boozy philanderer, to be sure. But he was also a fetishist of his own fragrant masculinity, the glories of which he expounded upon and prevailed on me to accept and evangelize in turn, as when, dressing for work, he would coat himself with oil, splash himself with Jean Naté, and then stand between me and his enormous mirror in nothing but black bikini underwear and implore me to “look—look at this body.”

I was well aware of his eccentricity, but unlike my character in the script, I had never rejected him or his message, which was that nothing is more important about a man than the way he looks, the way he carries himself, and the mystery of what my father called his “allure.” I hadn’t become a hard-bitten investigative journalist consumed by anger, but rather an ebullient charmer concerned by my capacity for silken cruelties committed in the name of revelation. I idolized my father, despite my mother’s warnings. I was seduced by him, and once I attained a degree of success I worried that I had no choice but to follow in the Bally-loafered footsteps of the man who had caused me—and my serially betrayed mother—such pain.

I responded to Fred’s entreaties not only because he offered me a different way of being a man but also because he was a seducer in his own right, with a different brand of charm. Fred gave me what I needed then and still need now: a choice. He allowed me to choose between two visions of manhood, a choice I suspect I’ll have to continue making for the rest of my life, which is why I’m writing my book and which is why I asked the producers of the movie to change the names. I’m writing the truth about Tom and Lou Junod. I decided to let Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blue tell the truth about Lloyd and Jerry Vogel.

That’s what I told myself, anyway, because what I really thought was that it wouldn’t matter—the movie wasn’t going to get made. Then one morning in January 2018, my phone rang again, with a call from Peter Saraf, the producer at Big Beach. “I just wanted to tell you that we’ve cast the role of Fred,” he said. “It’s Tom Hanks, and it changes everything.”

It wasn’t the only thing that changed everything. Fred had been dead for nearly 15 years, and the changes in the world since then meant that the stakes were so much higher now. The story was no longer just about a midlife journalist choosing what kind of man he wanted to be; it was the story of a people choosing what kind of country we want to live in. And yet I kept my distance from the movie, and the character of Lloyd Vogel, even when the part went to Matthew Rhys, who, as the uxorious Russian spy in The Americans, expertly played the tortured nice guy capable of cruelties not just silken but appalling. He’s not me, I kept assuring myself, and the story is no longer mine.

But then I traveled to the set in Pittsburgh, where I met Matthew, with his abashed smile and his watchful spaniel eyes, and, um, Mr. Hanks, with his professional good cheer. They were obliging, and sat with me for obligatory photographs in the meticulously reconstructed milieu of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. And that, strangely, was the encounter that moved me most of all—the encounter with the past. Matthew Rhys might have been playing Lloyd Vogel, but he was dressed as I used to dress back in the late ’90s, in a black mock turtleneck and an Armani blazer. The Neighborhood had been worn, almost seedy, when Fred was opening the door each day and trying to turn it into sacred ground. But there it was again, rebuilt from scratch, at once brand-new and 20 years longer in the tooth. And there I was, overwhelmingly aware that the only part of my life that someone had bothered to put back together piece by piece was the set of a children’s television show. It was part of my life. And now, once again, so was Fred.

I saw a rough cut of the movie this summer. I was alone in a screening room in New York City. I found a place in the array of red-leather seats and sat down. Suddenly the screen filled with light, I heard a familiarly tinkling piano, and Mister Rogers was talking to me—to us. Now, I should note that I was a paid participant in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. I have a financial stake in its success. I am not an objective judge of it. But I have to admit as well that I had been worried about it after I visited the set in the fall, because Tom Hanks seemed too hale and hearty—too big—to play 143-pound Fred Rogers, and Matthew Rhys too dour and hangdog to play “Lloyd Vogel,” emphasis on the quotation marks. Those qualms disappeared as soon as Tom started talking, and as soon as I saw Matthew’s eyes. They were the same watchful eyes I’d seen when I met him in person, so dark they were almost black, but now they were brimming with something recognizable, at least to me—hurt, hope. It wasn’t that he was me; it was that he had something of mine, as though he were a pickpocket, or as though I’d gone to Ancestry.com, stumbled on the page of some distant cousin, and discovered that we were born in the same hour of the same day.

I had counted on the plot’s many departures from my life to insulate me from the emotional effect of seeing some version of myself up there, but in the screening room I had no such protection, because the director, Marielle Heller, had been so faithful to the essence of the story. A long time ago, a man had seen something in me I hadn’t seen in myself, and now I was watching him see something in me and couldn’t help but ask, all over again: Who was he? Who was I? And what did he see? “You love people like me,” Matthew Rhys tells Tom Hanks. And when Hanks asks, “What are people like you?,” Rhys answers, “Broken people.” And that broke me, though I had never uttered those words to Fred in my life. He saw something in me, yes. Did he also see through me? Was my brokenness so obvious to him back then? Was Fred’s offer of friendship also a form of judgment?

When the lights came up, I staggered out of that theater like a drunk, my eyes still wet, relieved but also exhausted, and took a seat on a park bench where truly broken people were slumped. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again I saw the afternoon sunlight of New York City shining on the bald head of my friend David Granger, who’d edited my original story for Esquire 21 years earlier. He wasn’t supposed to be there; he wasn’t scheduled to be there; he had no reason to be there, except for the reason Fred liked to offer when the universe gave him a surprise: “You just never know.”

Puppet: Andy Gent; photograph: Grant Cornett; prop styling: Anna Surbatovich

It was the summer of 2018, and so it was the summer of Fred. It was also the summer of incivility—the summer when the very idea of civility was up for debate—and one night, in Tampa, Florida, the two converged.

It was the summer of Fred because of the release of Morgan Neville’s beautiful documentary about him, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, which became the highest-grossing biographical documentary ever. It was the summer of incivility because some progressive activists had decided that civility was a luxury we could no longer afford, an instrument of an intolerable status quo. How could we bother with civility when children were being put in cages? Two members of the Trump administration, Stephen Miller and Kirstjen Nielsen, were publicly scolded and shamed when they ate at restaurants in Washington, D.C., and Sarah Huckabee Sanders, then Trump’s press secretary, was refused service in Virginia.

Then, on June 22, Florida’s attorney general, Pam Bondi, attended a showing of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? in downtown Tampa, and was confronted by protesters who condemned her for her legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act and her silence in the face of the administration’s family separations at the southern border. They yelled at her and called her a “horrible person,” and when I spoke with her a year later, she told me that they’d tried to stop her from entering the theater, shouted in her face with such vehemence that she was flecked with spit, and bullied her boyfriend in an attempt to provoke a fight. She watched the movie, but she was “shaking the whole time,” and when she was on her way out of the theater they accosted her again, videotaping her as she attempted to go to her car. On the tape, a woman is heard yelling: “Would Mister Rogers take children away from their parents? Would Mister Rogers take away health insurance? … What would Mister Rogers think about you and your legacy in Florida, taking away health insurance from people with preexisting conditions? Pam Bondi, shame on you!” Remembering him as a nice man is easier than thinking of him as a demanding one.

Fred Rogers was not a particularly political man, despite the fame he won for going to Capitol Hill in 1969 and fighting for the survival of public television. In all the conversations we had over the years, I can remember only one about politics, when in the last year of his life he worried about the inevitable buildup toward the inevitable war in Iraq. In our correspondence, he limited political discussion to a single email about Bill Clinton’s impeachment, which came as an answer to one of my questions:

Last week I woke up thinking how I would like to go on the air and say something like “Whoever is without sin cast the first stone” or “The Lord’s property is always to have mercy” or some other outlandish thing, and then ask for a minute of silence to think about forgiveness for those who want it. In fact if our country could dwell on forgiveness for a while I think that would be the one real positive outcome of the pain which must be pervasive in the White House and beyond. I’ve already written letters to both the Clintons and the Gores saying that often “enormous growth comes out of enormous pain.” I trust that will be so for all of us. The attitude which makes me (sometimes physically) sick is the “holier than thou” one.

It was not a political answer, because it was an answer to everything. And yet from that email—from that everything—one can hazard a guess about Fred’s answers to the questions shouted at Pam Bondi in Tampa. It’s obvious that he would have been saddened by our country’s continued refusal to provide health care to all its citizens. It’s obvious that he would have been devastated by the cruelties committed in our name at the border, and shaken by our lack of mercy in all things, particularly our policies toward helpless children. But even more obvious is what his position would have been regarding the civility debate.

Fred was a man with a vision, and his vision was of the public square, a place full of strangers, transformed by love and kindness into something like a neighborhood. That vision depended on civility, on strangers feeling welcome in the public square, and so civility couldn’t be debatable. It couldn’t be subject to politics but rather had to be the very basis of politics, along with everything else worthwhile.

Indeed, what makes measuring Fred’s legacy so difficult is that Fred’s legacy is so clear. What he would have thought of Pam Bondi’s politics is one thing; what he would have thought of Pam Bondi is quite another, because he prayed for the strength to think the same way about everyone. She is special; there has never been anyone exactly like her, and there never will be anyone exactly like her ever again; God loves her exactly as she is. He repeated this over and over, and that his name was invoked as a cudgel by activists who probably shed tears over the documentary has haunted me since I first saw the video from Tampa. It isn’t that he is revered but not followed so much as he is revered because he is not followed—because remembering him as a nice man is easier than thinking of him as a demanding one. He spoke most clearly through his example, but our culture consoles itself with the simple fact that he once existed. There is no use asking further questions of him, only of ourselves. We know what Mister Rogers would do, but even now we don’t know what to do with the lessons of Mister Rogers.

I remember where I was when I found out he was gone. I sat at my desk early in the morning and opened up my laptop to AOL, which I still used, in part because Fred did. I hadn’t heard from him in a while, but kept expecting to, and then I did: There was a picture of him on the “AOL News” page. I didn’t even read the headline. I began to weep, and woke up Janet: “Mister Rogers died!”

But I also remember where I was when I realized he was not coming back. It was just this year, and I had gone to my alma mater, SUNY Albany, which had been rechristened the University at Albany, for a showing of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? I was watching the movie for the third time, and toward the end Fred said something in a late-in-life interview I somehow hadn’t heard before—that “the real job that we have” was to “make goodness attractive in the so-called next millennium.”

His words struck me as prophetic, but also, because they were some 20 years old and I knew how it all turned out, as an epitaph. Of course, we have failed the challenge, and failed it utterly, to the extent that nobody except perhaps Ellen DeGeneres will even take it up. And that’s when it hit me: He has no successors.

"Won’t You Be My Neighbor?" became so popular because it makes people cry unashamedly, because it shows what radical kindness actually looks like, because it depicts a man who gave his life to what turned out to be a hopeless cause—the cause of sacralizing mass media. He was a genius; he had superpowers; he might as well have been a friendly alien, thrown upon the rocks of our planet to help us find our way to the impossible possibility that we are loved. But he lost.

He knew what he was up against; he knew from the start that the fragmentation of the jump cut would lead to the fragmentation of everything else, and that the fragmentation of everything else would lead us to the first and final temptation, the temptation of hatred. He lost, because the great conceit of the internet is that it has unveiled and unmasked us, that it shows us as we really are and our neighbors as they really are, and that hate is more viral than love. How would Fred Rogers have responded to Twitter? He would have signed up for an account, @ZZZ143, #YouAreSpecial; he was not one to back away from the fray. But Twitter is a platform consecrated to the eternal pie fight—to the purposes of protest, complaint, and particularly punishment—where nobody is special and nobody is invulnerable. Who would have been Fred’s first troll? Who would have taken it upon themselves to “school” Fred, to “call him out,” to “educate” him? Who would have told him that his faith in us was misplaced, and informed him—and us—that Mister Rogers was wrong?

We went out after the movie, a bunch of us convened by the "New York State Writers Institute," sitting at a long table in downtown Albany. I sat at one end, and toward the close of the evening a woman named Theresa Bourgeois came over from the other end and sat next to me. She introduced herself and said, “You don’t know me, but I have a question to ask. What are you going to do now?”

“What am I going to do?”

“Yes. What are you going to do with this moment? Fred Rogers gave it to you. What are you going to do with it?”

In 1998, I wrote a story about Fred Rogers; in 2019, that story has turned out to be my moral lottery ticket. I’d believed that my friendship with Fred was part of my past; now I find myself in possession of a vast, unearned fortune of love and kindness at a time when love and kindness are in short supply. I keep telling myself that I don’t know how to answer Theresa’s question, that I don’t know what to do next, because Fred never asked anything of me. But of course he did. I have read his old emails, and I can see that he was very clear about what he wanted from me and everybody else. He never stooped to proselytizing. But he lived a life of prayer, and he wanted us—he wanted me—to pray.

On September 5, 1998, Fred Rogers wrote an email after I asked him whether he had seen the big movie of the day, Saving Private Ryan, and whether he had ever contemplated the possibility of military service. He answered as follows:

Dear Tom,

No, we didn’t see Pvt. Ryan. Joanne didn’t want to and I guess I didn’t either. I remember so well those days when we huddled around the radio listening to the news of battles and finally the war’s end. I remember the V days and the release of the prisoners. In fact I remember crying when I heard about the release of the prisoners. I think we all have certain prisons within us, and such news “releases” are sometimes … in some hearts … taken very personally.

I have no idea how I would have responded to a call to the war. I may have had to do alternate service … as did the "Friends". I have a friend (not a Quaker friend) who was in the Ambulance Corps. I would have probably been good at something like that. I would not have been good at shooting people though; I don’t think I could have done that.

There are a lot of people who still believe what they read about Fred on the internet—that he was a Navy SEAL who wore sweaters to cover the tattoos on his arms, each one celebrating a proud kill. I saw him standing in a locker room after his daily swim, naked as a jaybird, and can attest that his arms remained innocent of ink. But I guess that people have to call him a warrior simply to account for him, for the peculiar power of his pacifism, and in some ways they have him exactly right, as well as his wife, Joanne. Though they both called me “My dear,” they were warriors, the both of them, and Joanne remains so at 91, with her gap-toothed smile and her mobcap of curls and her twinkling eyes and her merry chuckle. I traveled to Pittsburgh for the premiere of Won’t You Be My Neighbor? simply to see her again, and when I did see her she was bleeding from a gash on her cheek. She had fallen on her way to the car sent to pick her up, but she had gotten up and now she was exchanging greetings with friends and well-wishers without any alarm or even self-consciousness about the rivulet of bright-red blood flowing down her face. “Oh, that,” she said when I asked about it. “You don’t think I’m going to let a thing like that get in the way of watching the movie, do you?”

As for Fred: It’s true that he lost, and that the digitization of all human endeavor has devoured his legacy as eagerly as it has devoured everything else. But that he stands at the height of his reputation 16 years after his death shows the persistence of a certain kind of human hunger—the hunger for goodness. He had faith in us, and even if his faith turns out to have been misplaced, even if we have abandoned him, he somehow endures, standing between us and our electrified antipathies and recriminations like the "Tank Man of Tiananmen Square" in a red sweater. He is a warrior, all right, because he is not just unarmed, outgunned, outnumbered; he is long gone, and yet he keeps up the fight.

And now he is being played by Tom Hanks, who also played the doomed hero John Miller in Saving Private Ryan. When I met Tom on the set of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, I was struck by how cordial he was and how hardworking—that he worked as hard on his cordiality as he did on everything else. He has this in common with Fred, who was a good man who worked very hard at goodness. Tom’s presence on the set moved me, because I kept thinking of John Miller, a character in a movie Fred and Joanne Rogers couldn’t bring themselves to watch. He dies to save the life of the eponymous private, to whom he says, with his last breaths, “Earn this. Earn it.” The last thing Fred Rogers ever said to me was “How like you.” He gave so much to me, so much trust and friendship, without asking me to earn it. But still I wonder whether I have. Still I find myself asking for his blessing, and like the aged Private Ryan after he walks away from the grave of the officer who rescued him, I issue a plea that sounds a little bit like a prayer:

Tell me I’m a good man. Tell me I’ve lived a good life, then tell me what to do now.

*This article appears in the December 2019 print edition with the headline “What Would Mister Rogers Do?”

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Marjorie -Suchocki - Original Sin Revisited

Original Sin Revisited

https://www.religion-online.org/article/original-sin-revisited/?fbclid=IwAR3zYoGJvL6WH8-1La8GqlIGQWJQFPULMEqbPErnA8SHDMDBDAy6RBMz35k

by Marjorie Suchocki

Marjorie Suchocki received her Ph.D. at the Claremont Graduate School, in 1974, and is Dean Emeritus at Claremont School of Theology, Claremont California.

The following article appeared in Process Studies, pp. 233, Vol. 20, Number 4, Winter, 1991. Process Studies is published quarterly by the Center for Process Studies, 1325 N. College Ave., Claremont, CA 91711. Used by permission. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

SUMMARY

Dr. Suchocki addresses the wavering fortunes of original sin in these past few centuries and explores some of the resources of process, feminist, and black theology for a contemporary development of this doctrine.

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Sin has fallen on hard times. We exist in the paradox of a time with a profound realization that our problems are systemic, far exceeding individual is-tic consent or solutions, but the fundamental approach to sin in our society remains a litany of personal failures. Yet ecological disasters, fearsome instruments of war, vast systems of classism, racism, and sexism all have impact upon our lives, and we experience ourselves as caught up in such systems with or without our consent. At a time when it could be argued that we most need it, we have lost the ancient Christian doctrine of original sin as a corporate human condition preceding and affecting each individual.

The issue, then, is this: most contemporary analyses of sin begin with the personal, and transfer it to the social, but individual analysis seems hard-pressed to account for the gravity of social ills confronting us. The tradition did a somewhat better job, even though it began with a personal analysis of sin: Adam’s fall. However, it then interpreted Adam’s fall as the corporate corruption of human nature per se, so that every human being is born already dealing with the effects of sin not directly its own. Original sin conveyed a corporate problem that then yielded individual sins, Something like this would now seem necessary, but we no longer have access to the old myth of Adam and its corporate corruption. Instead, we deal with individual sins that either remain in the private realm, or if projected into the wider social realm fail to deal with the collective power of sin and its relation to individuals. While we cannot use the myth of Adam and corporate corruption, we need to go beyond the mythology to recapture its meaning in forms that address the human and indeed, the planetary situation today.

My supposition is that the individualization of sin is the trivialization of sin, and given the systematic connection between our understanding of sin and our understanding of God as the one who addresses us in our human plight, the trivialization of sin has an inexorable affect upon two areas: the doctrine of God, and the sense of individual and corporate responsibility for social ills. hi this article, however, I will explore only the second of these suppositions and that insofar as it is entailed in a reappropriation of a doctrine of original sin. I will briefly address the wavering fortunes of original sin in these past few centuries, and then begin to explore some of the resources of process, feminist, and black theology for a contemporary development of the doctrine.

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A Brief Contemporary History of Original Sin

Since Pierre Bayle launched his satirical attacks on Adam in his immensely popular Dictionnaire in the seventeenth century, the doctrine of original sin has never been the same. Perhaps it was the rise of rationalism, with its corollary emphasis upon the individual, or the discovery of history, or the questioning of biblical authority -- but the age-old notions of the corruption of the race through Adam’s fall itself fell from theological favor, never to be thoroughly recovered. In the seventeenth century, phenomena such as the environment and the humors became substitutes for original sin in explaining the peculiar tendency to perversity within humankind, but with the loss of corporate corruption and corporate culpability, the focus on sin began its slow shift to sins, individually committed and individually suffered.

Schleiermacher was the first theologian after Bayle to resuscitate the doctrine of original sin without reliance on the myth of Adam. While Immanuel Kant also made an enormous contribution with his theory of radical evil, his emphasis led more to individual rather than corporate responsibility, and thus continued the Enlightenment trend toward individualism. Schleiermacher, however, built a theory of the solidarity of humankind in sin upon an evolutionary view of human nature. His basic thesis was that the physical aspects of human existence preceded and provided the basis for spirituality. Our physicality involved a necessary self-preservation instinct that led to protection of one’s own self or kind over against that which was defined as other -- a view not too dissimilar from what Cornel West develops in the late twentieth century as the "normative gaze that tends toward universalization of one ‘s own kind to the detriment of otherness. For Schleiermacher, spirituality -- or the God consciousness -- involved a reversal of self-interest toward an inclusive care for all existence. An important supposition in this thinking is that all existence is in fact bonded together, interwoven in a solidarity whereby each actually is involved in the other’s well-being. That is, there is a fundamental falseness to the egotism that develops from one’s physical instincts for survival, since the ontological reality is that one’s own survival is bound up with the survival of all else. As process thought would later say, all reality is interconnected. Spiritual existence, recognition of our bondedness and therefore mutual care, is congruent with our ontological reality.

For Schleiermacher, the solidarity of the race and its mutual struggle toward spiritual existence from a starting place of sensuous existence accounts for the universal tendency of humans to act against one another’s good, and so against their own good as well. Sin is not an individual phenomenon, but a social phenomenon in the sense that each individual sin is only properly understood in relation to the backdrop of sin evidenced by the race as a whole. Further, the sin of one contributes to the deeper plight of the whole, for each one affects the condition of all. Solidarity, not individuality, is the fundamental basis for understanding sin. Thus Schleiermacher reestablished a notion of original sin apart from reliance on the myth of Adam.

Schleiermacher’s major influence in the nineteenth century was in areas other than this unique development of the doctrine of original sin and its transmission. Ritschl was one of the few theologians to expand on his insights,’ considering the solidarity of the race as the fundamental condition of religion, plunging us corporately into sin and making way for a new corporate reality of righteousness in Christian salvation. But on the whole, nineteenth century philosophical theology was not particularly interested in the question of original or corporate sin; it was far more involved in various responses to Hegel, the new prominence of biblical study and its corollary "quest for the historical Jesus," and the implications of economic and psychological developments for Christian faith. The theology of original sin lay languishing in the lurch. The alternative voices came primarily from Russia in Dostoevsky, and in America through Josiah Royce. Dostoevsky also saw all humanity existing in an interconnected web of mutual responsibility, mystical in its dimensions, where each was responsible for all. In American theology, Josiah Royce probed the communal nature of sin through what he called "social contentiousness" in the tension between the individual and the community.

It remained for Walter Rauschenbusch in A Theology for the Social Gospel to deal simply and forcefully with the social nature of sin and its transmission from generation to generation in a way somewhat reminiscent of Schleiermacher, but far more oriented toward the pragmatics of contemporary life than toward the metaphysics underlying the phenomenon of sin. Rauschenbusch presumed the solidarity of humankind, and focused upon the effects of that solidarity in the transmission of sin such that each generation is predisposed to evil. He cited both biological and social transmission of sin: biological in that we inherit a physical nature with conflicting instincts, and with a great capacity for ignorance, both of which foster inertia and/or inappropriate behavior which, depending upon the degree of intelligence and will involved, lead to sin. But by far the greater factor in the transmission of sin is our embeddedness within a ready-made social system. We draw our ideas, our moral standards, and our spiritual ideals from the social body into which we are born; these are mediated to us by the public and personal institutions that make up the society. Our norms for moral action are not drawn from a disinterested study of objective reality, but are absorbed from the social environs of our childhood. Even though these norms can easily tend to the destruction of the common good, the norms are buttressed by the authority of the dominant social group, its idealization of the structures that work evil, and by the profitableness that most often is entailed in the norms of destruction. One might paraphrase Rauschenbusch by saying that "the problem of sin is that it is profitable."

From a contemporary perspective, it is clear that Rauschenbusch’s absorbing passion was to expose the capitalistic sins of American society; he did so under a normative vision of the Kingdom of God that entailed shared rather than shirked labor, and full opportunities for self-realization for all. War, militarism, landlordism, predatory industries, and finance are the demons he named that shape social institutions toward fostering their own respectability and perpetuation at the expense of justice. The individual sins that Rauschenbusch named are drink, overeating, sexualism, vanity, and idleness -- actions that were often associated with the excesses of a victimized working class. Rauschenbusch focused almost entirely on an economic understanding of sin, and did not see the psychic structures of racism and sexism that accompany and undergird the classism of economic systems. Nonetheless, his achievement is that he built on the earlier work of Schleiermacher and Royce, showing the pragmatic working out of the solidarity of the race that Schleiermacher developed. Rauschenbusch gave the strongest statement in the first half of the twentieth century relating sin to social conditions that form us against the common good, such that each generation corrupts the next.

Two world wars and the increasing importance of existentialism interrupted the theological agenda begun by Rauschenbusch. Not until the liberation theologians began to write in the sixties would social forces of evil receive again such forceful attention in American theology. Indeed, Reinhold Niebuhr, perhaps the most influential American theologian relative to political and ethical action in this century, wrote his theories of sin under the grip of Soren Kierkegaard’s more individualistic notions of the origin of sin. There is little evidence in his analysis of sin in The Nature and Destiny of Man of any indebtedness to Rauschenbusch, and as for the solidarity theories developed by Schleiermacher. Niebuhr dismissed them by saying that "the ‘cultural lag’ theory of human evil is completely irrelevant to the analysis of . . . sin (NDM 250)." Niebuhr’s antipathy toward any form of inherited sin reflected his fear that it would mitigate responsibility; hence he writes: "the theory of an inherited second nature is as clearly destructive of the idea of responsibility for sin as rationalistic and dualistic theories which attribute human evil to the inertia of nature" (NDM 262). Solidarity and its inevitable implication in corporate sin gave way to every individual’s encounter with the tension and anxiety of finitude and freedom.

Reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s development of the individual before God, Niebuhr sets the self as caught between finitude and freedom, seeking to escape vulnerability and anxiety. But this tension can only be lived creatively insofar as the individual trusts in God. Apart from this trust, the individual is pulled by the tension into either pride (the act of treating the finite as if it were infinite), or sensuousness (the sloth that causes one to retreat into the finite as if it alone were of consequence). With regard to political or corporate ills, Niebuhr tended toward a projection of the individual dilemma upon the body politic.2 He saw corporate evil as the gathered force of individual evils within the looser structure of a corporate body. Since the looser structure of the corporation, be it nation or institution, lacks anything analogous to mind or conscience, the corporate structure has little power of self-transcendence, and hence is governed by the unrestrained egoism that Niebuhr attributes to human nature in its finite aspects. Since sin is located fundamentally in freedom, and freedom is connected with human self-transcendence, corporate evil is something less than sin. Original sin relates solely to the individual’s flight from anxiety.

Early in the movement of liberation theologies, attention was indeed given to the problem of corporate evil. However, initial forays into the problem tended to see the issue in totally externalized terms. For example, James Cone wrote devastatingly about the sins of white society, and Mary Daly was exceeding clear in delineating the evils of patriarchy, but for both, the problem of corporate evil was "out there." Blacks and women deal indeed with the effects of the sins of others, but it was as if the corporate sins of the others totally absorbed all the sin there is. To speak of sin as also involving Blacks or women was to fall into the sin of "blaming the victim"; there was a myth of presumed innocence for all but those involved in perpetrating or benefiting from the structures of oppression.

The exception to this is the early work by Valerie Saiving suggesting that the sin of pride as defined throughout the tradition, but particularly in the works of Niebuhr, actually defined male existence, and that the sin most apt to describe female existence is the sin of a lack of centered existence. In the late seventies Judith Plaskow picked up this insight in Sex, Sin, and Grace. She critiqued Niebuhr for excessive attention to the sin of pride, and corrected him by expanding his understanding of sensuousness to describe the conditioning women receive that mitigates against their responsible development of selfhood. Susan Nelson Dunfee expanded this yet further, speaking of women’s "sin of hiding." However, in none of these writers is there any attention beyond the individual’s sin toward an analysis of social or corporate sin. They, no more than Niebuhr, had any use for the insights hidden within the old doctrine of original sin.

Meanwhile, one process theologian in particular began to address the problem. John B. Cobb, Jr., in his small publication called Is it Too Late? A Theology of Ecology, began addressing the corporate structures of evil insofar as they wreak their damage on the environment. Earlier, in The Structure of Christian Existence, he had also developed a system that can yet prove helpful in reconsidering the doctrine of original sin. In that work, he analyzed the peculiarities of the cultural transmission of structures of consciousness. He was concerned to explore and then compare the pluralism of these structures as evidenced in the various religions of the world, and to develop the unique particularities of Christian consciousness. There is no application of his work to original sin, but the insights are there: the dynamics of becoming are ontologically given for selves as for every other actuality, but the parameters of what a self may become are not an ontological given, but are in fact mediated by one’s particular cultural/religious situation. One could develop the insight as a metaphysical basis of Rauschenbush’s claim for the social transmission of sin.

There are several further developments in both Black and feminist theology that took place in the eighties that must be mentioned before moving on to the development of process/feminist resources for a reappropriation of the doctrine of original sin. Cornel West, in Prophesy Deliverance, speaks of the "normative gaze." Like Cone, he is addressing the racist structures of society, expanding upon Cone’s work by delving into the human tendency to universalize one’s own experience. One might associate the normative gaze with Schleiermacher’s analysis of the physiological development of self-protection and own-kind preservation that evolved through humanity’s long struggle for existence, although West does not make this association. Instead, he traces its manifestation in the past few centuries, and its invidious effects when it is accompanied by power. In dominant groups, the normative gaze becomes the creation of norms that idealize one’s own kind, subordinating otherness to serve the dominant group’s ends and purposes. In subordinate groups, the normative gaze translates into social inferiority, and internalized images of inferiority. In the latter case, the social and personal combine to produce variations of self-hatred, with a corollary projection of these feelings onto one’s own kind as a whole. A failure to own or develop one’s full potential as a human being is the result.

The feminist parallel to this development is Rosemary Radford Ruether’s analysis of sin and evil in Sexism and God-Talk. Unlike West, she relates her insights to the old doctrine of original sin, stating that "feminism can rediscover the meaning of the fall in a radically new way" (SGT 37). Sin is both individual and systemic: individually, the human condition is radical alienation from one’s true relationship to self, nature, and God; systemically, this translates into structures of domination and subordination that are enforced by the group in power. However, even though she goes so far as to say that alienating social structures are central to the transmission of the alienated and fallen condition of patriarchal sin, she no more than Niebuhr goes beyond the analysis of individual sin as the primal cause of social structures. Like Niebuhr, she speaks of both active and passive sin, or pride and sloth. Pride is acting on the capacity to set oneself up over against others, and sloth is the passive acquiescence, manifested by men as well as women, to the dominant group ego. Apart from the assertion that socioeconomic and political structures transmit the effects of pride and sloth to successive generations, there is no investigation of the differences and connections between individual and social sin.

What is needed at the present time, then, is a theology of sin that builds upon the work of the persons cited here, but that can develop a stronger connection between social structures and individuals, and with the ancient insights concerning original sin.

A New Basis for Original Sin

To restate the problem, original sin defined the human situation as one of universal implication in sin, apart from any conscious consent. Sins arise from the condition of sin. Whether classical theologians dealt with the nature of sin as pride, sloth, unbelief, disobedience, or any other variation, the exercise of such vices depended upon this original condition. The mechanism used to account for universal perversity was that the supposed first humans deviated from their given good, and with this deviation, corrupted the nature that was then passed on to their progeny. The plight today is that we experience an enormity to social evils, but we have no mechanism such as "original sin" to account for them theologically. Issues such as racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, handicapism, anthropocentrism, and whatever other ‘isms" we have devised toward the ill-being of peoples require more than an analysis of individual sin to account for the pervasiveness and depth of the problem. We must re-appropriate the doctrine of original sin in such a way that it speaks to our condition, and lends heuristic power to our personal and corporate forms of addressing evil.

Interdependence, intersubjectivity, and the peculiarities of consciousness are tools provided through process thought for developing a notion of original sin in which original sin can be interpreted as inherited structures of consciousness, acting as socially sanctioned norms, that assume the ill-being of earth or any of its inhabitants. These norms predispose us toward their perpetuation, and inevitably involve us in sin. My operative definition of sin is those intents and actions that work the ill-being of any facet of existence.

I recognize the vast inclusiveness of such a definition, and hold that there is a great variance of degrees of culpability for sin, from negligible to great, but that the working of ill-being is nonetheless appropriately named sin.

Like Schleiermacher, process theology depends heavily upon the notion of an evolutionary world of interdependent actualities. Both draw from the sciences of their day: Schleiermacher on the developing notions of evolution, and process from early twentieth-century physics. There are in fact parallels between Cobb’s exploration of the structure of Christian existence, and Schleiermacher’s development of God-conscious existence, both of which draw upon evolutionary suppositions. Process thought, more than Schleiermacher, develops the dynamism involved in evolution and in the interconnected nature of existence that is essential to both systems.

A process model is a relational model, drawing on the data of physics and biology, maintaining that we do indeed live in an interconnected universe where everything relates to everything else. From the world of the physicist Freeman Dyson, we learn of the butterfly effect: a butterfly, taking off from a flower in Beijing, has an effect on the weather patterns of mid-America. We already know of the interconnected life patterns whereby oxygen generated by rainforests nourishes all the earth, or where water falling in northern mountains means green gardens in southern California. We are no strangers to the daily witnesses of interdependence. A process-relational philosophy suggests that the interconnectedness that we experience at a macro-cosmic level is also operative at a microcosmic level, and in fact accounts for the dynamism of existence itself. Everything exists in and through its creative response to relationships beyond itself. This means that everything matters: each reality receives from all that have preceded it, and gives to all who succeed it.

If there is no reality that does not participate in this dynamic process of existence, surely it sets up a structure whereby the interactive influence between the individual and society is highlighted at the personal as well as microscopic level. If each moment of existence inherits from all of the past, then the individual and corporate actions of the past have an effect on what the present individual might become. Further, one’s social location is a critical factor in this inheritance, since one’s incorporation of the past is perspectival, rooted in particularity. One receives the past already weighted in value relative to one’s own place in the sun. There is an inevitable intentionality within that which one inherits, and this inherited intentionality strongly influences the direction of one’s own intentions.

Within this process-relational model, the totality of ourselves must be considered as a matter of relationships; these relationships are internal to who we are, and not external. We inherit from a personal past, a familial past, a social and cultural and political past -- but these are truisms. Process simply points out that this inheritance is woven into ourselves, together with our own creative response to those relationships. We become ourselves in a relative freedom through the many relationships that influence us at the depths of our being. The case is easily illustrated in every instance where one whom we love encounters hardship. Our own well-being is affected by the well-being of the one we love, so that the other’s pain causes us distress. We are internally affected by the other, and therefore dependent upon the other. Process provides a model to discuss this internality of relation: we receive from the past in our innermost nature, and through our creative response to that past, we become ourselves. In our own becoming we in our turn influence others, who must take our influence into their own becoming, and so the dance of relationship fills our days with variations of pain and pleasure. Relations are internal to who we are.

Process suggests that most of the relations that we experience are much deeper than the conscious levels of our being. We, too, inherit from the butterfly in Beijing! Most of the effects of the vast network of relations impinging upon us are screened out at preconscious levels; others are projected back onto environmental phenomena; very few make their way into conscious existence.

The implication, of course, is that the relationality that makes up the personal world of each one of us encompasses all other persons, as well as all elements in the universe preceding us. On the physical level, our very bodies are made up through internal relations to atoms streaming toward us from throughout the universe; physicists become poets when they tell us we are stardust. For the purposes of this investigation of original sin, the singularly important facet of this reality is that the old views of the solidarity of the race have a basis in ontic fact. Whether we like it or not, we are bound up with one another’s good, woven into one another’s welfare. Such a reality is easy to acknowledge at the level we call collegiality, community, and family, but the deeper reality is that our consciousness is but the rim of what we receive. Freeman Dyson reminds us of the little old lady who confronted the scientific view of the origins of the universe with the retort that everyone knew the universe was really held in existence by being placed on the back of a giant turtle. "Aha," said the scientist, "and what holds up the turtle?" "You think you’ve caught me, young man," she replied, "but it’s turtles, all the way down!" In a process world, it’s relation, all the way down. We are bound up with one another throughout the earth, inexorably inheriting from each, inexorably influencing all. Our prized individuality exists through connectedness. Individual inheritance is at the same time social inheritance.

If this is the structure of personal existence, clearly there is a renewed basis for discussing the universal effects of sin. It takes us in several directions, the obvious and the implied. Obviously, we are not isolated from the ill-being of others in the world. Events in distant Kuwait affected many families; drought in one part of the world affects the food supply in another. But if such macrocosmic and obvious interrelatedness is common, the model again says these are but "tip of the iceberg" occurrences, and that there is a lessening of our own humanity with every human evil, a heightening of our good with every human joy. There is no such thing as private ill, having no effect upon others, for private ills both derive from social effects and have social effects, yielding again further private ills.

Schleiermacher spoke of a solidarity of the race through an evolutionary journey as we evolved from purely physical existence, bound up with survival, toward modes of spiritual existence, where our survival depends upon our extending our own sense of well-being to include the well-being of others. Process affirms this insight, and expands it by going deeper into the nature of interconnectedness, and by arguing that the metaphysical basis of spirituality is the increasingly complex organization of relationships until they create first consciousness, and then self-consciousness. With self-consciousness comes in-creased responsibility for the quality of relationships, and hence the basis for the spirituality of which Schleiermacher speaks.

However, while this basic interrelationality is the foundation for a process view of original sin, it requires expansion into the peculiarity not simply of subjectivity, but of intersubjectivity at the level of social institutions that organize the shaping influence of the past upon the present. For I am convinced that the dynamics of the individual alone are not enough to account for the pervasiveness of sin, and that we need an understanding of institutions and their relationship to individuals as well.

The increased complexity of relational organization does not stop with self-conscious existence, but, upon this basis, develops yet further modes of complexity in institutions. In order to push toward a comprehensive understanding of sin that undergirds and expands insights from Schleiermacher, Rauschenbusch, Ruether, and West, process thought must focus on the intersubjectivity that is uniquely characteristic of institutions. Just as there is a grouping of many actualities in the creation of the complexity of embodied personality, even so there is obviously a grouping of many persons in the creation of an institution. Personal existence becomes uniquely personal in the achievement of self-consciousness; institutional existence gains its character through its unique form of intersubjectivity, or the cooperation of many self-conscious subjects in the joint creation of a supra-personal form of existence.

The intersubjectivity works both personally and institutionally. Notice the peculiar dynamics of a new association with an institution, whereby a person encounters a whole new configuration of her or his personal past. One’s history is contextualized in a different way, being intertwined with the histories of all others in the institution, and by the history of the institution as a whole. Part of the jarring sense of transition is the ontological demand at subliminal levels of one’s being to respond to newly relevant relationships, weaving them into one’s own continuing becoming self. New associations place new demands and invitations upon one’s becoming. Personal participation in the intersubjectivity of an institution is the recontextualization of identity. But by the same token, one’s own energies become newly interwoven with the institution and those associated with it, adding a new dimension to its character which will be manifest at greater or lesser intensities, depending upon the size of the institution. The complexity in the resulting intersubjectivity is increased still further by the overarching reality of the institution, which is woven not simply through the intersubjectivity of its members, but through the tendrils of its relationship to all of its constituencies in its own unique trajectory of time.

Institutions and social organizations work through the intersubjectivity created by concentric rings of participants, governed by the dynamic force of a rather fluid mission, or purpose for its being. The peculiar power of an institution is the sense in which its central purpose is reflected a myriad of times as if in some great hall of mirrors through the intersubjectivity created by all of its participants. This reflection process need not be at explicitly conscious levels for its effectiveness; it is enough that one has absorbed the institutional purpose to whatever degree into the internal structures of one’s identity, and then, in the naturalness of a relational world, woven that purpose into the projections of one’s own influence upon others. Within the institution, this reflection-projection process creates the peculiar intersubjectivity of the institution, nuancing and intensifying the institutional purpose, and therefore creating the power of the institution’s psychic impact on society as a whole. This psychic impact is woven into the physical or material effects of the institution as it carries out its reason for being.

Agency in institutional existence is diffuse, shared, and mutually delegated. It can take the form of hierarchy similar to that which exists in an individual person, where there is a unique governing center coordinating the relationality of all its parts, or it can build upon its ontic base of intersubjectivity and act through consensual modes. The size and complexity of the institution influences the mode of agency, in that the larger the institution, the greater the likelihood that its agency will be coordinated hierarchically. Responsibility is created and shared through the intersubjectivity of the institution, but in varying degrees, depending upon the particular institutional structure. All who participate in an institution bear a real responsibility, to one degree or another, for what the institution is.

It should be noted that the intersubjectivity of an institution allows a peculiar manipulation of that intersubjectivity for individual or specialized group advantage. Its diffuse complexity of agency can mask personal responsibility; intersubjectivity can be used to hide one’s subjectivity. That is, while institutions are more powerful than individuals, exerting greater social force, their looser and intersubjective structures lend themselves to manipulation of that social force by individuals.

In any form, institutional agency is created through intersubjectivity; it is a cumbersome agency, because diffuse. At the same time, its compounded complexity of intersubjectivity gives it power that is greater than that of a single individual, even though it may be subverted by an individual. Intersubjectivity differs from a person’s subjectivity in and through this different order of complexity. It entails a multiple nuanced and mirrored and repeated intentionality of purpose that exercises its corporate influence on the rest of society, particularly those within its immediate environs.

Institutions themselves, however, are hardly the final word, for they contribute to larger groups that are more loosely organized to create a culturally defined society as a whole, bound together as a unit through mutually albeit somewhat loosely reinforced language and customs. Again, responsibility is diffuse, permeating the intersubjectivity that actually and dynamically creates the whole, of whatever proportions that whole might be. We live in a Chinese-nesting-box world of interconnected societies, all of which impinge upon the forming consciousness of every individual. Subjectivity, or the unique mode of existence that belongs to individuals, is replaced by intersubjectivity at the level of institutions and society.

The importance of this brief discussion of persons, institutions, and society relative to the notion of original sin is that all three are involved in the mediation of both good and ill, that which makes up the richness of communal existence, and that which mitigates against it. All three are routes of inheritance, receiving the past, weaving the past, and becoming the past for the future that will succeed them. Their gift to their progeny is to provide the parameters within which consciousness becomes self-consciousness, ordered into a world. This is both bane and blessing, and insofar as it is bane, it is the perpetual origin of original sin.

The psychic power of the forms of intersubjectivity that create institutions and societies lies in their being channels for a multiply reinforced group structure of consciousness, a common grid for interpreting experience in the world. Intersubjectivity itself creates the normative structures whereby we individual subjects order our lives. Further, these structures are not externally imposed, they are internally inherited through the relationality of existence, contributing to the formation of every subjectivity that receives them.

Given this structure to social existence, then, there are two basic elements that contribute to the situation of being disposed toward sin prior to one’s consent. The first element is the interconnected structure of existence, as outlined above, and as developed through process thought; the second draws from the profound insights of black and feminist theology relative to the shaping power of the "normative gaze," or the tendency to value one’s own kind as over against the other. The normative gaze, sanctioned and channeled through the intersubjectivity of institutions and society, is sufficient to shape the consciousness of persons from birth and throughout life. The background of the normative gaze is intersubjective and therefore diffuse, but its foreground is its shaping of the norms and expectations of each individual consciousness. Since it is the individual self-consciousness that is so formed, it becomes constitutive of the self, and difficult to transcend. One’s actions from this center of consciousness will then actualize the norms, perpetuating them relative to one’s own position and perspective within the grid of the intersubjective society at large. By definition, the inherited norms cannot be questioned prior to their enactment: one is caught in sin without virtue of consent. Original sin simply creates sinners.

Against this definitional understanding of original sin, Rauschenbusch’s insights may be given full rein. He spoke to the economic dimensions of original sin when social structures are used to the so-called enhancement of the few at the expense of the many. John B. Cobb Jr.’s insights concerning the devastating effects of anthropocentrism upon earth as a whole through the restriction of well-being to the human community also follow. These views drawn from process, feminist, and Black thought are also extensions of Schleiermacher’s analysis of physical and spiritual existence, albeit translated into the language of "normative gaze" and "own-kindness.

The question remains that if we can refer to inherited structures of consciousness that normalize the good of some at the expense of others, and if these structures of consciousness form persons apart from their consent, how is it that original sin entails guilt? For we suppose that some degree of freedom and responsibility is necessary for the attribution of guilt. The requirement in a process metaphysics that freedom inhere, to one degree or another, in every subject whatsoever is the route to establishing responsibility for one’s actualization of sin. The "Catch 22" -- and the reason for appropriating the name "original sin" instead of simply describing these conditions as the way of things -- is that personal action depends upon structures of consciousness which themselves involve seeds of their own transcendence. The possibility for self-transcendence through questioning one’s structured norms creates the responsibility and therefore the guilt that is entailed in the transition from original sin to sins. However -- and we are again in a "Catch 22" -- in the nature of the case, we inherit structures of consciousness from our birth onward, and hence by the time questioning is possible, the destructive norms are already internalized. The combined power of intersubjectivity creates the grooves of subjectivity.

My introduction to this topic indicated that we need to reappropriate a doctrine of original sin to illumine the ills of our day, and our own participation in those ills. The purpose of such theologizing, however, is not to wallow in the problem, but to name the problem. Naming is itself a form of self-transcendence that has the power to draw us into transformed structures of consciousness, and a wider embrace of the well-being of all earth’s creatures. Such transformations, however, must necessarily involve a transformed mode of communal existence, a renewed intersubjectivity intentionally open to multiple forms of well-being. Such a topic also requires much further development. For the present, my aim has been to explore new foundations for the old doctrine of original sin, allowing us once again to name its power. Such naming is itself a mode of transcendence that can begin the process of transformation toward the good.

References

BS -- Susan Nelson Dunfee. Beyond Servanthood. University Press of America, 1989.

CF -- Freidrich Schleiermacher. The Christian Faith. Harper & Row, 1963.

Eth -- Dan Rhoades. "The Prophetic Insight and Theoretical-Analytical Inadequacy of ‘Christian Realism.’" Ethics 75/1(October 1964).

IAD -- Freeman Dyson. Infinite in All Directions. Harper & Row, 1989.

NDM -- Reinhold Niebuhr. The Nature and Destiny of Man, Vol. I. Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941.

PD -- Cornel West. Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity. The Westminster Press, 1982.

SCE -- John Cobb, Jr. The Structure of Christian Existence. The Westminster Press, 1967.

SGT -- Rosemary Ruether. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Beacon Press, 1983.

SSG -- Judith Plaskow. Sex, Sin and Grace. University Press of America, 1980.

TE -- John B. Cobb, Jr. Is it Too Late? A Theology of Ecology. Bruce Books, 1971.

TSG -- Walter Rauschenbusch. A Theology for the Social Gospel. Abingdon, 1945.

Notes

1Julius Mueller also developed a work on original sin that harks back to Originistic theories of pre-existent souls; however, this thesis entails many of the problems of a mythic Adam, which truncated its twentieth-century influence.

2See Dan Rhoades, "The Prophetic Insight and Theoretical-Analytical Inadequacy of Christian Realism’," Ethics, LXXV/1, October, 1964.