* This essay is a truncated version of a longer essay published as Issue 2 of Mountain Rain, a periodical of Awarezen. Apart from more detailed argumentation, the full essay includes an intriguing excursion into the nature of Jesus' resurrection body and and its implications for our lives. Readers interested in reading the full version can email the author for a PDF copy.
In this essay, I wish to reflect on, interrogate, and critique the mainline biblical notions of sin, guilt, and shame in the Christian narrative about creation and humanity. This narrative is one that makes the supernatural and objective act of divine atonement and redemption absolute and necessary. In so doing, I propose the thesis that such notions and their corollary event of substitutionary atonement as dominantly conceived are unwarranted and unnecessary for a spiritually-evolving life based on wholesomeness, much less for a fully-evolved life of enlightened wisdom and compassion in the fullness of consciousness.
Sin is usually defined as “falling short of the glory of God” and describes both the original sin of selfish resistance to God’s sovereign rule and disobedience to God through willful transgression of the boundaries of God’s commandments and law. As a result, each person who sins is tainted with objective guilt in the eyes of God and tormented by subjective guilt psychologically. In addition, there is both divine condemnation from above and inner condemnation from within that is connected to a sense of shame. Taken together, these three “undesirables” weigh down on every human being who inherits this tripartite legacy from humanity’s original parents Adam and Eve.
Hence, every human being is born with this original sin (and guilt and shame) deserving of punishment in the form of wrathful penalty of God that is summarily meted out on us. The penalty and price that sinful humanity has to pay takes the form of all kinds of suffering, sickness, finally death, and eternal separation from the presence of God after death. But for those who believe in Jesus as their Lord and Saviour who has redeemed them by atoning for this penalty of sin through his vicarious death on the cross, the way is open for eternal fellowship with God in a life free of suffering, sickness, and death, which can be foretasted here on earth but permanently experienced to the full in the post-mortem state or at the second coming of Christ, whichever comes earlier. A relatively minuscule lifespan of a hundred or so years (mostly less) on earth thus dictates an eternity of either heavenly bliss with God or hellish torment bereft of God. So much for a sense of proportionate justice.
On Origins
Having sketched in brief the mainline biblical concepts of sin, guilt, and shame in relation to the theology of redemptive atonement by Jesus, I am now ready to delve more deeply into how I see these concepts and their psychosocial origin. When I survey world religious memes about the human condition, I see the Judaeo-Christian tradition as being unique in their construction of the notion of sin, which is essentially judicial and legalistic in substance apart from any moral or ethical connotations. Asian spiritual traditions that I am familiar with speak of ethically unwholesome or degenerating activities of body, speech, and mind that lead beings into suffering and pain not as a consequence of transgressing some God-dictated law or injunction but as a natural consequence of cosmic cause and effect. While the Judaeo-Christian tradition insists on an extra-creational God who stands outside the cosmos as its sovereign creator and controller as well as jury and judge over each human being’s destiny, Asian spiritual traditions do not admit of such a concept of God. While some Asian worldviews espouse the Divine in various ways (as in strands of Indian subcontinental religion) or not at all (as in the Buddhism of South and Southeast Asia, the Himalayan plateau, and East Asia), God or ultimate reality is inalienable from all persons and phenomena, with the cosmos itself co-extensive with and embedded within God as its deepest or highest reality. An ontologically separate divine reality simply makes no sense to much of Asian spiritual consciousness.
But how did this idea of an ontologically divorced God and a judicial cosmos come about? My view is that it came about not from “above” but from “below,” not as an outcome of God’s revelation of himself and his ways but as humanity’s projection of its judicial consciousness onto the cosmos at large. Given that there is no evidence for the existence of a sovereign creator God outside the cosmos as biblically imagined, and for other reasons that dissuade me from belief in such a God the chief of which is the perennial problem of evil, I would place my bet on an “atheistic” cosmos (if theism is defined in mainline Christian terms) coupled with an epistemologically agnostic stance towards the reality of God (given that God as such may lie beyond the ken of my knowledge and thus not knowable at least for now).
However, if I were to define theism in evolutionary and radically non-separative terms where divinity, cosmos, and humanity are co-extensive in a seamless single fabric of reality, then I would probably describe my paradigm as that of “panentheism.” This is where the cosmos and life in their totality are in essence God while not exhausting all that God is. In other words, I can accept a God who transmutes itself into the totality of the cosmos and life but who simultaneously extends beyond that cosmos in inconceivable ways. I do so not out of any fear of moral accountability to a sovereign standalone God but more because rational and moral reasoning compel me to do so. I am simply not persuaded by available non-evidence and religious apologetics to the effect that such a God as conceived in Abrahamic monotheism exists. Given this skepticism of mine, my view of God would not be one of a sovereign all-controlling and all-powerful God of mainline biblical imagination. Rather it is a God of boundaryless consciousness and non-controlling egoless love integrally entwined with and embracing material and biological realities. This “cosmotheandric” God, to borrow Raimon Panikkar’s term, is not omnipotent but amipotent (following Thomas Jay Oord) — that is, egolessly loving in a non-controlling way which is maximally but not all powerful. In line with open relational theology, I see such a God as open to change with no predetermined outcomes and utterly relational in its fluid evolving nature, thus dynamic and non-substantialist in its fundamental essence.
Jewish Exceptionalism
In light of this cosmotheandric view of God which I do not know to be indubitably true but am persuaded to think as true, my sense is that the dominant Judaeo-Christian view of God or monotheism is a particular cultural mindset writ large. My view is that the ethnocultural people group known as the Israelites over time came to view themselves as privileged recipients of special revelation from their tribal warrior God Yahweh identified with their ancestral god of the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob called El.[i] Writer and scholar Karen Armstrong writes informatively about the origins of the Israelite God Yahweh and his identification with El, ostensibly “the Canaanite High God worshipped by the patriarchs.”[ii]
Be that as it may, there evolved within the mindscape of the Israelites that their God has called them to possess the lands they have migrated to and to flourish there, blessing them with protection and victory as long as they obeyed their God’s divine dictates and commandments. A blood-sealed agreement or covenant between the Israelites that Moses led and their God was thus struck, where the Jews were to worship Yahweh exclusively and give up all traces of worshipping other “strange” gods. The notion arose of God’s law given through their leader and prophet Moses, a set of ten commandments which became later known as the Mosaic law. A covenantal view of the Jewish people’s relationship with their God Yahweh or El involving legal obedience to divine injunctions embedded their self-identity of divine chosenness and divine entitlement to land rights where they lived. Without going into any detail on the intellectual history of these covenantal ideas and practices, suffice to say that I believe no supernatural explanation needs to be invoked in order to account for Jewish self-understanding of themselves as a people and of their God. My impression is that the sociohistorical forces and pressures on a migratory tribal collective in a hostile environment surrounded by antipathic forces and peoples would suffice to account for the way Jewish thinking and identity is shaped and formed. A warring, vengeful, and seemingly all-powerful God that specially privileges and protects their own tribal kind against their enemies bracketed as the proverbial Other would suit the Jewish purpose of self-definition, self-preservation, and communal security. That there can be strict obligations and laws governing their relationship with their protective war God is not a surprising development. Later Christian thinking would see a selection of ancient Jewish scriptures as a repository of God’s special revelation to the world and as complement to the books of the New Testament.
Moving on from Jewish religious identity and history, we are now ready to comment on the emergence of notions of sin, guilt, and shame within the divinely-imposed judicial context of Judaeo-Christian discourse. Mimetic theory in my view accounts for the generation and evolution, imitation and consolidation of the gamut of social and individual desires, necessitating a matrix of structures and rules for social order and control. Out of these strictures and rules, it is not difficult to imagine the emergence of subjective feelings of sin, guilt, and shame in tandem with objective conceptions of the same when these strictures and rules are seen to be abrogated by members of Jewish society. Thus arose the need and necessity for some psychosocial mechanism to resolve the problem of individual and collective accumulations of sin, guilt, and shame in their personal and collective psyche. This then accounts for the need for violent vindictive scapegoating of an ostensibly popular and innocent victim (vis-à-vis the apocalyptic prophet and thaumaturgic preacher known as Jesus of Nazareth), serving structurally as a psychodynamic release valve for the mass psychic storehouse of sin, guilt, sand shame that threatens to boil over and wreck society.
All this means that there exists a potent toxic cocktail of inner traumatic afflictive feelings inextricably entwined with mimetic scapegoating of the morally innocent and a much-needed social psychodynamic release mechanism. This cocktail is concocted based on the worldview of a judicial cosmos presided over by a cosmic legalistic judge Yahweh or El, a view that is in turn projected and reinforced by their communal acts of faith and multiple acts of falling short of covenantal standards. It is also not too far-fetched to imagine that emotions of fear, stress, and anxiety might be associated with this sense of sin, guilt, and shame, considering the conditionality of God’s protection and blessings on people’s obedience to the law of God. Thus, a shortfall in obedience would necessarily invoke the wrath of God and the withdrawal of his blessings, if not outright judgement upon them in a devastating way. The emotionally heightened and hyper-pressured crucible of collective sin and guilt needs an outlet. I now draw on Rene Girard’s mimetic theory as an approach to teasing out this social release mechanism for the Israelites as found in the doctrine of substitutionary atonement.[iii]
Interrogating Substitutionary Atonement
The theology of substitutionary atonement is that of vicarious substitutionary punishment on one person for the collective sins of all humanity by having an innocent Other receive sin’s penalty in humanity’s stead. In Christian belief, this innocent Other is Jesus Christ, the incarnate logos who became flesh for the sake of salvation of the world. The dominant belief is that just as the first human Adam sinned against God and reaped sin on all of humanity post-Adam, the second Adam who is Jesus the Christ obeyed God perfectly and thus reaped salvation from sin and its penalty for all of humanity for all time. But the catch is this: each human being is required to personally make the choice to believe in Jesus and receive the gift of salvation from sin in order for them to make it to heaven after death. Failure to do so would result nonetheless in eternal hellish torment. This argument is problematic in its absence of logical symmetry: if it does not require human belief in sinful Adam’s rebellious disobedience for subsequent humanity to be tainted with that same Adamic sin and its penalty, why does it then require human belief in sinless Christ’s substitutionary atonement for humanity to be saved and redeemed from the same? If, as the logic goes, we are all subject to God’s holy wrath as a result of Adam’s sin per se, then by the same logic, we should all be subject to God’s gracious salvation as a result of Christ’s saving obedience alone. Applying the same logic, why should the gift of salvation not be universally accessible and actualized rather than requiring an act of selective choice, since the burden of sin was universally applied and hyper-imposed on humanity without any selective choice or even self-consciousness on our part post-Adam?
I submit to you that this theology as commonly touted makes no sense. Looking at it from a moral philosophical point of view, it makes even less sense. I am referring to the problem of evil and suffering. Philosophers have pointed out and many laypeople who reflect a little would soon see that the idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-loving God is not compatible with the presence and persistence of evil and suffering in the world. I have argued my case in other essays and will not repeat those arguments here. Suffice to say that my main objection to the “triple-omni God” (omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent) as I call it lies in the fundamental logic of “as above, so below” in this sense: if God could allow for free will and have no evil and suffering in heaven, why not have the same on earth? Why allow for free will with consequential evil and suffering on earth? I have not been persuaded in the least by numerous theological attempts (technically called theodicies) to explain away this conundrum.
On Evolution and Enlightenment
That said, the question can be asked as to why spiritual evolution and enlightenment, and not anything else, should come to be seen as the raison detre and summum bonum of life. The simple answer is this: spiritual evolution and enlightenment is a natural and logical corollary to our experience as conscious living beings. To be alive is to be conscious, To be conscious is to have the capacity to know and be aware. Being conscious, we experience knowingly or unknowingly an innate longing to be truly and fully happy, permanently and unconditionally happy. To be knowing and aware — being cognizant — is an actuality, not a mere belief. This actuality is at the same time a potential. This potential is for consciousness to be infinitely expanded and unimpeded beyond the confines of its current spatiotemporal, psychological, and moral dimensions. This liberated consciousness also happens to be a state of ineffable, indestructible, and immeasurable happiness that we are longing for from our depths. A congenial mental feeling is happiness. The longing for happiness is the fundamental propensity of all sentient beings. Infinite happiness is bliss (ānanda).[iv] Bliss is posited as none other than the very dynamic nature of liberation (vimutti) and enlightenment (sambodhi). Enlightenment can be designated as the supreme truth (paramasatya) and highest divinity (paramabrahma). Hence, the very nature of our consciousness and the very motion of our lives is towards this pristine infinite bliss of enlightenment.
We can see and experience for ourselves that enlightenment is not a mere concept of philosophy or a dogma of religious faith. This caricature of enlightenment as a religious or dogmatic assertion derives from looking at Asian epistemes through a reductive and distortive Eurocentric prism. European Orientalism can inadvertently project western categories of “religion” versus “philosophy” versus “practice” onto unsuspecting Asian epistemes of dharma and sambodhi, mistakenly stuffing these epistemes into the conceptual boxes of “religion” or “faith.” Suffice to say that we must be careful not to commit this error. That said, let us examine the notion of enlightenment. Contrary to Orientalist assumptions, enlightenment is not a matter of religion or faith but a practical reality and experience that is open and accessible to each of us. It is a living and breathing reality that we can feel in our hidden depths and everyday consciousness — as that very impulse towards unadulterated bliss and a persistent yearning for freedom.
Sin and Guilt: Globalized and Internalized
We can story this trajectory of life and consciousness in many ways, mythopoetically or metaphorically or scientifically, but the reality of enlightenment is not a fantasy. It is rooted in our moment by moment, everyday experience. It extends from the ground of our prosaic experience towards the sky of unlimited freedom and bliss. Along the way, there may be obstacles of socially constructed bondages of sin, guilt, and shame. These bondages may be present even in persons outside the Jewish tribal identity. Historical, sociocultural, and political processes have resulted in a global world order and globalized Eurocentric culture where aspirations and desires are shaped and molded by forces of Judaeo-Christian ideas and values. Not least of which is the pervasive and dominating political economy of neoliberal capitalism with beginnings in the western Industrial Revolution conjoined at the hip with the proverbial Protestant work ethic. Much of modern culture and normative practice has its roots in the Judaeo-Christian worldview, especially given the lasting reverberating impacts of western colonialism and imperialism in much of the majority world. It is not surprising that notions of sin, guilt, and shame would have seeped into collective psyche of the modern industrialized world. Couple this with Asian memes of filial piety and deferment to elders, loyalty to motherland and fidelity to rulers, as lived in the normative Confucian ethics of Chinese civilisation, we then have a potent psychosocial matrix that conduces to unwarranted upsurges of sin-, guilt-, and shame-consciousness among people who fall short of normative standards rightly or wrongly perceived. In such a case, there is a need for a remedial and therapeutic process of resolving this unnecessary and harmful sense of sin, guilt, and shame, quite apart from the profound spiritual processes and practices of contemplation (for example in Buddhist meditation systems and Indian or Tibetan tantric yoga).
Here, the biblical narrative and theological matrix of Jesus Christ as the stainless innocent “lamb of God” who vicariously “takes away the sins of the world” can play a powerful role in healing anguished psyches traumatized by internalized guilt and shame based on wrongly perceived sense of sin. In the poignant narrative of Jesus’ crucifixion and death on the cross, we can discern the mimetic reality of culturally-shaped desire and aspiration (manifesting as normative expectation and value internalized in one’s psyche) and the psychotherapeutic reality of vicarious substitutionary atonement for sin (or shortfall in meeting normative expectation and value that have been internalized) effected by an innocent victim who serves as the divine scapegoat. Taken together, these two experiential realities of mimetic normative desires and psychotherapeutic scapegoating can effectively co-contribute to the real possibility of sin-consciousness remediation and guilt/shame-consciousness dissolution. I suggest that this is indeed the case. Therefore, the power and value of the biblical theo-narrative of Jesus as incarnate Word suffering and crucified for all sinful humanity and creation lies not in its objective truth but in its subjective therapeutic efficacy. This is how I now frame and make sense of my own “personal encounter” with Jesus in 2014.
Conclusion: An Alternative Imaginary
In conclusion, this essay has extended a reflective and interrogative critique of mainline biblical notions of sin, guilt, shame and their corollary need for substitutionary redemptive atonement by an ontologically separate creator God-incarnate acting as a human being in creation to effect post-mortem entry into a place called heaven. It critiques these notions as unwarranted and unnecessary citing logical, moral, and explanatory problems in their underlying assumptions. In place of these notions, this essay proposes an alternative imaginary and discourse of a cosmotheandric God and alternative mechanisms for the causal efficacy of “substitutionary redemptive atonement” in terms of mimetic, psychodynamic, and therapeutic theories.
It further espouses the alternative empirically-attested vision of spiritual evolution and uncontrived enlightenment in terms of full liberation of consciousness from its apparent limitations, indivisible from and co-extensive with infinite happiness that is blissful freedom. On this trajectory of evolution and enlightenment, what is needed is an empirically verifiable, theoretically and practically rigorous, clear and comprehensive, precise and profound, inspirational and illuminating path of spiritual practice comprising contemplative science, processes, and technology. All of these alternative ideas and discourses are ultimately seen and known by insight as empty of inherent existence, contingent on conceptual imputation within a shared matrix of language, conception, and measurement system. And emptiness is not a belief or dogma but a heuristic and a fact — a plain fact to be realized for oneself by inquiring into the actual nature of experience to its innermost depths and dimensions.
But even if one is to reflexively critique this alternative imaginary as a meta-narrative in its own right, it is nonetheless an open imaginary that is unafraid to continually readjust and reconstruct itself given its conceptual pliancy derived from the space of sheer contingency and thus emptiness. New empirical findings and fresh logical excavations are more than welcomed in this empty transparent adventure of intellect, intuition, and spirit. This journey of inquiry into truth has no end, like an endless river. Even as it merges into the ocean, the ocean itself is fathomless. Where does it end or begin? Do we dare to embark upon this oceanic adventure, open to the mystery of unknowing? I hope so.
Soli deo gloria. Sarva mangalam. 阿弥陀佛.
[i] For a cogent fascinating account of the evolution of God-belief in the Abrahamic faiths, see Karen Armstrong (1993). A History of God. From Abraham to the Present: The 4000-Year Quest for God. Great Britain: William Heinemann Ltd.
[ii] See for example Armstrong, p.21-33 for an account of the origins and early history of Yahweh identified with El as the God of the Jewish people.
[iii] For an excellent scholarly coverage of Girard’s mimetic theory, see Wolfgang Palaver (2013). Rene Girard’s Mimetic Theory. Translated by Gabriel Borrud. East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press.
[iv] The notion of infinite happiness or bliss as being the fundamental propensity of sentient beings is attributed to Shrii Shrii Anandamurti (Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar) whose seminal treatise of Ananda Sutram expounds this very idea. Sarkar also equates this infinite bliss with the divine (brahma).
