This is an excerpt from the as-yet unpublished book Thinking Through Sin and Judgment, in the ‘Thinking Through the Bible’ series
For all the contemporary resistance to the idea of sin, it finds some striking echoes in modern critical and cultural theory, echoes of the way in which sin effects how that we think about the world. For the Bible, the consequences of sin reach into all the areas of human life and all the human faculties. Our reasoning, our desires and our imagination: there is no part of us human beings that does not suffer the effects of the fall. This is what theologians mean when they talk of ‘total depravity’: not that human beings are as bad as they could be, but that no part of us remains untouched by sin.
The effects of sin reach into our thinking, our motives and our understanding of the world around us. Jeremiah laments that “the heart”, understood not as the organ of feeling but as the central seat of human decision-making, “is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Paul similarly argues in Romans 1 that human beings “by their unrighteousness suppress the truth”, because “what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them” (Romans 1:18-19). This awareness of the capacity for self-deception of the human heart and mind, coupled with the propensity of all human beings to suppress the truth, leads to a healthy biblical suspicion of one’s own thinking and motives. It also leads Christian theology to a reflexive self-questioning, described by David Bentley Hart as “a certain predisposition in Christian thought […] to suspect its own motives, to anticipate the discovery of hypocrisy, egoism, and sin in even its seemingly purest motives”,[1] and by Oliver O’Donovan as “the evangelical summons to be judge of ourselves”.[2]
This self-critical dynamic is a constant theme in the scriptures, repeatedly doubting the motives of those who claim to speak and act for God. It is visible in the critique of idolatry that runs from Moses and the golden calf, through the mocking of idols in Isaiah 44, to Jesus’s excoriation of the Pharisees in the gospels and Paul’s upbraiding of the Galatian church. In post-biblical times, the same impulse animates the Reformation critique of Roman Catholic idolatry, and modern denunciations of the prosperity gospel.
The idea that human beings are not simply ignorant of the truth but actively suppress it finds multiple echoes in modern cultural theory. Christian philosopher Merold Westphal thinks it so fundamental to the thought of Marx, Freud and Nietzsche that he calls them “the great modern theologians of original sin”[3] In fact, Westphal frames his triumvirate of atheists as latter-day prophets:
My central thesis is that from a religious point of view the atheism of Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche should be taken seriously as a stimulus to self-examination rather than refuted as an error. This is because their critique of religion seems to be (1) all too true all too much of the time and (2) a modern echo of an ancient assault on the devotion of the devout, the one developed by Jesus and the prophets of Israel.[4]
Marx, Freud and Nietzsche do not speak of sin directly of course, other than to mock or reject the doctrine, but they each develop a vocabulary and mode of critique that parallels the biblical motif of suppressing the truth in unrighteousness. For Freud, the analogue is found in his notion of “repression”, which describes the processes in the psyche that force the forgetting of pathogenic (traumatic) experiences and prevent their memories from returning to the conscious mind.[5] The notion was of such importance to Freud that he called it the “centre” to which all other elements of psychoanalytic thinking were related.[6] He sees the Christian religion as a symptom of repression, as Westphal explains:
Freud sees dreams and neurotic symptoms as the disguised fulfillment of repressed wishes. He, then suggests that religious beliefs are like dreams and religious practices like neurotic symptoms. In both cases the claim is that we can neither understand nor properly evaluate the belief or behavior in question until we discover the hidden drives and motives that shape them.[7]
Religion may here be the object of Freud’s critique rather than its means, but the structure he uses to attack religion is still the structure of Romans 1: we are hiding the real truth of our situation from ourselves, and this needs to be exposed and dealt with. There is a truth of which we are unaware, that we are keeping out of our conscious minds, that explains us better than the truths we acknowledge.
Turning to Marx we find something very similar, only this time the action is not called “suppressing the truth” or “repression” but “false consciousness”, a distorted way of seeing the world that has been misled by “ideology”, a deceptive system of ideas that give people a false view of how the world works, masking the true mechanisms of class struggle:[8]
If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.[9]
True consciousness can only be achieved through the relentless critique of the ideology of the ruling class that traps people in a state of false consciousness.
Nietzsche, for his part, adpots a similar approach when he seeks to unmask the Christian virtue and piety of his age as a more or less sophisticated veneer for the real truth of social relations, which is resentment and jealousy. For Nietzsche, the whole system of Western, Judeo-Christian morality is a sham. Masquerading as an ethic of love or benevolence, our morals are, he insists, a “slave morality” designed as a grand justification of weakness and defeat by those who are weak and have been defeated, the epitome of whom is Jesus hanging on the cross. It is a morality born of jealousy and resentment, designed to justify weak “lambs” and to condemn strong “birds of prey”. The lamb and bird of prey imagery comes from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, in a passage where he explains “the good, as the resentful man has thought it out” in the following way:
There is nothing strange about the fact that lambs bear a grudge towards large birds of prey: but that is no reason to blame the large birds of prey to carry off the little lambs. And if the lambs say to each other, ‘These birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey and most like its opposite, a lamb, – is good, isn’t he?’, then there is no reason to raise objections to this setting-up of an ideal beyond the fact that the birds of prey will view it somewhat derisively, and will perhaps say: ‘We don’t bear any grudge at all towards these good lambs, in fact we love them, nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.’[10]
This, for Nietzsche, is nothing other than a “the slaves’ revolt in morality” that stems from “resentment itself turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who, denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge.”[11] We deceive ourselves when we dress up this self-justifying morality in noble and virtuous language. Whatever else we might say about Nietzsche’s morality,[12] it once more follows the Romans 1 pattern of claiming that we “suppress the truth” of our own situation, a truth Nietzsche is all too happy to unmask. However much they may wish to position themselves against Christianity, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud are echoing, consciously or not, the Christian bent to suspect apparent motives; we could even impishly suggest that this complicity with the Biblical gesture of suppressing the truth is part of the truth that they, in turn, are suppressing.[13]
[1] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994) 98.
[2] Oliver O’Donovan, The Ways of Judgment: The Bampton Lectures, 2003 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005) 312.
[3] Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998) 3.
[4] Westphal, Suspicion and Faith x.
[5] See Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, in vol. 11 of The Standard Edition, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (New York: Norton, 1997) 21.
[6] Sigmund Freud, An Autobiographical Study, in vol. 20 of The Standard Edition, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al. (New York: Norton, 1989) 5-80, 32.
[7] Westphal, Suspicion and Faith 15.
[8] The term belongs to Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels.
[9] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
[10] Friedrich Nietzsche, Nietzsche: ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ and Other Writings, Student Edition, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 25-6.
[11] Nietzsche, Nietzsche: ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ 20.
[12] One of the best, fullest and most nuanced treatments of Nietzsche from a Christian perspective is to be found in David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite.
[13] For an extended treatment of the religious and theological motifs in Nietzsche’s thought, see Bruce Ellis Benson, Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008).
