Absolution, if you choose it
Without splitting theological hairs, I arrive at a conclusion about how God sees our depravity, and our purity
If you’ve been reading Precipice since at least last September, you know that contempt is something I wrestle with. The post I wrote about it at the time was, hopefully, a serious attempt to honestly grapple with the least comfortable layers of my situation. I revisited that overarching Precipice theme, the narrow sliver of terrain I inhabit, and how I am to regard those found on the chasms on either side of it:
. . . all the destructive devotions I’ve discussed here are embraced by my actual various fellow human beings, and I have to figure out how to hold them in some kind of basic regard. I pass them on the sidewalk. I host them for Thanksgiving dinner. They’re colleagues at the university where I teach. I have them as social-media friends.
If I hold them in contempt, which Merriam-Webster defines as “the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving scorn,” I cage myself in a kind of isolation in which productive existence becomes impossible.
More fundamentally, in so doing, I sin. No matter what they have proclaimed or done, they were created by the same God who fashioned me, and have the same right to breathe and pursue happiness that I have.
Because we live in the age we do, this struggle resurfaces a lot. Yesterday, I somewhat impulsively posted to a social media platform that “as a wobbly Christian, nothing is harder for me than keeping contempt out of my heart.” In the ensuing comment thread, I was gently reminded by someone I know to be a solid Christian that contempt for the various kinds of toxicity I see all around was fine, but not to hold those who are its agents in contempt. I immediately knew she had a point. After all, one of the final things Christ said on the cross, hanging there, barely recognizable as a human being, given how shredded he was from the torture to which he’d been subjected, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
It sure sounds to me like that means that God, through that sacrifice, demonstrated that, in the ultimate sense, he sees us as unsullied.
But I’m confident that I’m not qualified to state that as an ironclad assertion.
In a post of similarly unsparing inventory-taking from November 2022 titled “From Milk to Solid Spiritual Food,” I hopefully gave myself a proper talking-to about the state of my growth:
The kind of Christian the present time calls for is one who comports himself or herself like a serious grown-up, who is sufficiently grounded in knowledge of what he of she professes to be able to stand firm, who is equipped to walk through a world such as ours.
St. Paul, in his letter to the Hebrews, admonishes them for backsliding on the maturation process they’d pursued:
For truly, by this time you ought to be teachers, but instead you need to have someone teach you again what are the beginning principles of the oracles of God, and have become those in need of milk, and not of solid food.
He lobs the same charge at the Corinthians in his first letter to them:
Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people who are still worldly—mere infants in Christ. 2 I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. 3 You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans?
I find myself guilty as charged. If I am at all able to handle the truth correctly, it is fleetingly so.
This is why I merely present my notion that God sees a purity at our cores as something I want to explore further. I’m definitely not qualified to wade into the twists and turns of the debates between Augustine and Pelagius, the Ockhamists and Thomists, the Arminians and Calvinists, and what each side in those schisms had to say about free will, predestination, and the nature of evil.
So the best I can do is take an it-seems-to-me-that approach to saying anything about it.
Okay, having thus set the table, it seems to this wobbly Christian that, in his John 10 likening of his relationship with his followers to that of a shepherd and sheep, Jesus is saying that salvation hinges on recognizing the grace right in front of us:
22 Then came the Festival of Dedication[b] at Jerusalem. It was winter, 23 and Jesus was in the temple courts walking in Solomon’s Colonnade. 24 The Jews who were there gathered around him, saying, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”
25 Jesus answered, “I did tell you, but you do not believe. The works I do in my Father’s name testify about me, 26 but you do not believe because you are not my sheep. 27 My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all[c]; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. 30 I and the Father are one.”
Why are these non-believers not his sheep? Consider what he says about how to recognize one of his sheep: They listen to his voice.
The work has been done. The one little thing we have to do is say, “I see that, I thank you for it, and declare that you are my Lord.”
I can’t believe that any serious theologian of any serious camp would tell me I was off-track with this.
If there’s some sense in which the choices we make as real time unfolds were foreordained, it seems to me that forgivenesss for them is likewise eternal.
Anyway, that’s the basis on which I’m going to proceed to look further into it.
That blood is some powerful stuff. It restores us to our factory settings. It allows us to see the purity underneath our defilement.
That is, if I’m not too far off.