Today’s Great Problem—the Problem behind many of our greatest other problems—is that we don’t have enough sinners.
The reason we
don’t have enough sinners is that we don’t have enough sin. Without sin we are
trapped in a space where we have no choices.
You see, sin
implies that I am doing something that I can do differently. The
Decision-Makers in our world today cannot do anything differently. They have no
choice. Ask them. That’s what they will say.
Why is Mr. Putin
trying to take over Ukraine? He will say he has no choice. It is his destiny to
restore Russia to its ancient (imagined) glory. The Ukrainians opposing him say
that they have no choice either: they have to oppose his dreams.
Why is Mr.
Netanyahu killing tens of thousands of the people in Gaza. He has no choice.
Gaza belongs to Israel, and the people who oppose that idea, Hamas, have to be
defeated, no matter what it costs.
On the level of realpolitik,
Mr. Netanyahu cannot stop the war in Gaza because stopping it will cost him
his parliamentary majority. If the tiny minority party that is the key to his
retaining a majority in the Israeli parliament should leave his coalition, his
government would fall, and he would probably go to jail. Those people of the
tiny minority party, the ones who believe that God wants every inch of ancient
Israel to be controlled by a Jewish government, have no choice. God wants every
Palestinian off the land, permanently, forever, never to return. What else can
they do?
In all of this
there is no sin. There is just blind fate, deterministic, out-of-control fate.
We outside observers see what has to be done, but we know there is no one who
can change the situation. We just have to wait for things to work themselves
out.
There are no
sinners. There are just pawns under the control of political and economic and
social forces. We all understand this. We accept it. It is sad. It is a
challenge to our dreams of a future governed by rationality and technology and
even beauty. Things are definitely going in the wrong direction, but what can
we do about it? We are powerless.
In earlier, less
enlightened ages, there were sinners. Of course there were many people who did
not see themselves as able to change, but there was a wider recognition that
some of the actors in great dramas were actual sinners, able to change what
they were doing and deliberately choosing to continue their bad actions. There
was, at least I speculate and hope, a wider moral condemnation of their
behavior and a recognition that there were other possibilities beyond blind
political fate. Today that moral condemnation is gone, swallowed up in a
consensus that, even though we construct our political and social systems, we
are sometimes powerless to control them. It is easier for us to look at evil
and say, “Sad, but what can anyone do? This and this and this will have to
change before the situation can get better. And this and this and this are not
likely to change in the near future. We are powerless.”
That’s an easy way
to respond to evil. It is easy, but it is deterministic. It takes us off the
hook, and it dampens our moral outrage. Those other people aren’t so bad. They
have no choice.
My Christian
worldview says that human actors have choices. We who look on may refrain from
judging bad actors, and say that “they” have no choice. Do “they” know better?
My Christian world
view says that all of us are free to do good and to do evil. We are free to
change our behavior. We are free to accept forgiveness, if we are willing to
engage with the people we have hurt. We are free to offer forgiveness, if we
are willing to engage with the people who have hurt us.
My Christian world
view says that the God of all creation, who created us as moral creatures, is
willing and even anxious to forgive us, no matter how evil our actions have
been. That God pleads with us to be as forgiving, and to be open to being
forgiven, because. short of forgiveness, there is only death.
NPR this morning
said that there are more children in the world today growing up in the midst of
warfare than ever before in history. Every such child will continue in life
with emotional and moral disabilities that will continue to harm them and
everyone around them for years to come.
We are not doing
well. We need more sinners.
As I reflect on
what I have written above, the name of William Shakespeare comes to mind. The
stories he told could help us to see that people with great power are also
moral actors. And his stories could make us think about what happens when powerful
moral actors face decisions about evil in their own actions.
