This short paper will seek to examine and refute Augustine’s view of Original Sin and the ability of the will to choose to turn towards God. It was Augustine view, and the view of the reformers after him, that if one denies these tenants, then one is forced to adopt the views of Pelagius, namely that Jesus was just an enlightened man. I will employ three arguments to discount Augustine’s above claims. The first one involves a logical extension of the personhood of Jesus. The second argument demonstrates the need for a total free will as a prerequisite for sin. The third argument gives an alternate understanding of how God can cause faith and at the same time, faith can be freely chosen. Finally, an alternate view of soteriology will be given. |inline

Can humans be liberated from their flaws in Augustine’s teachings? They cannot; yet, they are to try. Augustine constantly reminds his readers that due to the results of the fall, the human will is in a state of constant rebellion. An example of this is the idea that every sexual act is a sin. Ruether maintains that Augustine thought that due to the fall every sexual act had lust at its root and was the way original sin perpetuated in the world.

Harrison showed Augustine’s reply to conversion and to the question of liberation. He thought that true liberation from our sinful nature would come in the next life. With that said, Augustine also thought that one was to constantly apply the “ask, seek, knock” mindset of Matthew 7:7 to one’s life. It was more important to have this mindset than to have understanding of true doctrine. It seems that for Augustine, the conditions that the fallen world finds itself in prevent any from truly turning towards God. Once the Holy Spirit has instilled in a person the desire for God or the delight in loving God, then a person can use their intellect to try to turn the unruly will towards God. On a side note, Harrison talked about the idea of the weight of the soul and it finding rest in delight on the way towards fully loving God. This seems to mirror Aristotle’s physics of rest, that a body’s natural position is rest. The Greek idea of substances seeking their place seems to factor heavily in Augustine’s metaphysics. I wonder how his explanations would have changed if he knew of the more modern versions of science.

In Augustine’s entire framework, his treatment of sex is both odd and seemingly logically necessary. As a product of the latter 20th century some of his ideas seem strikingly ad hoc, starting with the idea that if the fall had not happened, “Eve would have remained virginal in intercourse and parturition, never losing her bodily integrity.” It is hard to understand what that even would mean, let alone why it is necessary. I do not identify with the idea that virginity is necessarily better than non-virginity. From my Christian tradition, sex is a wonderful thing in its proper place; it is a gift of God to married couples. This thinking would exclude the idea of Eve being a perpetual virgin in an unfallen world. Ruether also has Augustine setting Eve closer to the “lower soul” than Adam. I think that Augustine has male/female as parts of a whole and they are only whole in union as the image of God, but I might have misread something in the readings. The idea that Eve was lesser than Adam and Adam’s sin being obeying his wife is similarly curious.

With these things said, it is very easy to identify with the movement that would completely sweep away with Augustine’s ideas of sex and gender hierarchy and all that comes with it. What West argues for is the keeping of some of the stuff that came along with the ideas of sex and sin for Augustine. She implores us to not throw out the baby with the bath water. Augustine did have some good things to say about the misappropriation of desires.

The chapter in the latter half of Conjuring Culture I found the most interesting was the chapter on Wisdom. The beginning question of the chapter, “What is the relationship between African, American and European elements in this [Black folk tradition] experience?” intrigued me. The idea of wisdom literature as not being very concerned with historical narration is relatively new to me. It is a very different way of looking at the world. I have always employed the narrow scope of viewing things either through the historical narrative or the abstract philosophical lens. Thus the ethos and cosmos would always remain separate. I found the following quote to sum up the idea of wisdom:

“Wisdom fulfills one of religions fundamental functions which is to bind together ethos and cosmos, the sphere of action and the sphere of the world. It does not do this by demonstrating that this conjunction is given in things, nor by demanding that it be produced by our action. Rather it joins ethos and cosmos at the very point of their discordance: in suffering and more precisely, in unjust suffering. Wisdom does not teach us how to avoid suffering, or how magically to deny it… [but] how to endure, how to suffer suffering.”

I found a similar truism in Dixon’s problem with the either/or distinctions that are used so commonly in the West. In binary opposition there is always a preferred element. When the least preferred element is attached to actual groups of humans, it leads to a dehumanization of the loosing group, which in turn usually leads to atrocities. It was very reminiscent of Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities by Albert Bandura. What I liked the most was that the categories themselves are not the problem, but the either/or distinction was the problem. Adopting a both/and approach will allow one to maintain distinctions which really appear to be there that does not result in atrocities and injustice.

I also found the idea in the latter part of the chapter, the idea of High John the Conqueror, to be a fascinatingly creative construct.

“He was a wisper, a will to hope, a wish to find something worthy of laughter and a song. Then the whisper put on flesh. His footsteps sounded across the world in a low, but musical rhythm as if the world he walked on was a singing drum. The black folds had an irresistible impulse to laugh.”

I found a curious resemblance to the “whisper of a hope putting on flesh” with the way The Gospel of John describes the Word becoming flesh. High John served to sow the seeds of hope in the midst of their suffering and to conjure their freedom. Once again this concept was expressed most clearly in the following quotation:

“My mama told me, and I know that she would not mislead me, how High John Conqueror helped us out. He had done teached the black folks so they knowed a hundred years ahead of time that freedom was coming. Long before the white folks knowed anything about it at all… A heap sees, but a few knows. ‘Course the war was a lot of help, but how comes the war took place? They think they knows, but they don’t. John the Conqueror had done put it in the white folks to give us our freedom, that’s what. Old Massa fought against it, but us could have told him that is wasn‘t no use. Freedom just had to come. The time set aside for it was there. That war was just a sign and a symbol of the thing.”

That passage embodies all that Smith has set up in chapter five. It displays the Monkey-Lion dueling with the Monkey employing “wit over force” to accomplish his aims. The Monkey/John is not deceitful, but in his struggle over Old Massa/Lion he has to use his wit to turn the tables and bring about justice.

The first half of the book, Conjuring Culture is an odd read. I do not mean this in a negative way, but just to say the ideas and concepts are quite foreign to the world I have known. The religious culture of Black Americans is extremely creative. The way in which the base religions fused and reacted with the Christianity that they were exposed to, presumably after their enslavement is very intriguing. I believe it parallels with the experience of the Mexican Indians and Catholicism. However, I gather from the author that the use of “conjure theology” is unique to the African, and consequently the black American religious experience. The way that native-African religious ideas were reinterpreted as biblical types is intriguing.

The idea of typology to reinterpret biblical events as a prophecy of the black American events is very creative. It not only was used to give hope and strength to the religious members, but also to invoke the action of the deity to make the prophecy come to pass in their lives. The best examples of this are Exodus, Ethiopian, Moses, and Egyptian themes. These strategies of inducement served not only to give the people a sense of purpose, but to also speak to speak these things into existence. Another function was to tie together the people of the group and to craft an identity for them. It is noted in the reading that the very action of creating an idea of god is to create oneself in relation to it. Likewise, when a group creates an idea of god, they create an identity of the group in relation to that god. This is one of the ideas behind the usage of Psalm 68:31: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God” (KJV).

The use of Psalm 68:31 was incredible powerful and diverse. There was a linking together of biblical themes to match their situation. The God of the Ethiopians would lead his people out of Slavery (Egypt) just like the God of the Hebrews did. Egypt was not only used as a symbol of slavery, but also of the destiny that there would be black princes. This pointed to the royal nature of the people and back, along with the Ethiopian kingdom, to the days of the two great black kingdoms.
It is very interesting to see how the religious culture of black Americans synthesized the religions and cultures of Europe and Africa into a synthesis that used to not only give them strength and comfort in their circumstances, but to also conjure up a betterment of their situations. It seems bizarre at first to imagine Moses as a conjure man that leaned secret words from God to recreate reality. But when viewed in the larger framework that Smith presents it begins to fit in naturally. The themes were constantly being reinvented to adapt to the current situation. It is hard to grasp at some of the concepts found in the reading, but with the repetitive frame work in which Smith reveals his theory aids in grasping the concepts presented.

Why did Luther find the bondage of the will to be a comfort? The short answer is that it allowed him to be incredibly abrasive to his opponents and get away with it. The long answer is that it, along with the rest of his metaphysics, allowed him to be sure in his salvation. Luther seems to hold that we, as humans are completely enslaved to sin. He writes that “free-will without grace is not free at all, but is the permanent prisoner and bondslave of evil, since it cannot turn itself to good .” Therefore, for Luther, in order for a will to be truly free, it must be able to always choose the good. Thus the “ineffective power” of the will to choose good renders it as “no power ”. The only way for the will to choose God is by the grace of God enabling. It is evident that only some men choose to seek God, therefore God predestines some to receive this enabling grace and must therefore also choose to not give it to the others. These special individuals that receive grace are called the elect. Luther places an extremely high value on the will of God. For Luther whatever God wills comes to pass. God does not suspend his will for the sake of others like Denck suggested. When God wills that the elect receive grace and are saved, this willing cannot be altered or changed by anyone, even God, because it would be outside of His nature. So, in the realization of the bondage of the will to sin and to God, Luther can be comforted that his salvation is not in jeopardy by any sins he might commit, such as the sins of the false dichotomy and of the straw man.

A polemicist is someone “who argues in opposition to others.” Try to think of the opposing talking heads one sees so much on quasi-news programs. These people are in such direct opposition to each other that they become entrenched. They do not fight for truth for its own sake, but for their view.

“The polemicist , on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.”

Besides his very practical advice on the polemicist, Foucault’s most intriguing concept is the Panopticon. Upon first reading, Foucault and Bentham’s Panopticon is a terrifying construct. Anytime power is wielded with such cool efficiency and detachment, one is reminded of the dehumanizing effect on the subjugated and as a consequent on those that administrate this power. The idea of the Panopticon as a laboratory is an especially heinous notion as the idea of human lab-rats it the highest expression of dehumanization.

However, the Panopticon differs from the more overt uses of force and control that one is used to. It is easy to rally against a tyrant-king or a slave master, but the Panopticon is quite different from these concepts. Instead of constant brute force enthralling a subject, the Panopticon trains the subject to be one’s own master; it grafts the tyrant-king onto the vassal, creating a compound subject. This is done, by my understanding, by the constant threat of supervision, via the transparency of the subject’s surroundings. The unverifiability of the Panopticon serves to make the system feasible, since it would be impossible to actually monitor for deviance and administrate force to correct deviations.

Before investigation, this process smacks of oppression. In Bentham’s version of the Panopticon, this is surely the case. However, one does need to ask if the subjects in Bentham’s Panopticon are deserving of this oppression. If they are prone to violent acts and have injured members of society, then perhaps is it perfectly justifiable to mold their behavior and graft onto these individuals the tyrant-king. Panopticon is really terrifying when Foucault projects the idea of the Panopticon onto all of society. It strips one of their humanity and reduces one to a potential lab-rat. It also strips one’s spouse, one’s mother, one’s brother, all of one’s friends into lab-rats; a very sour notion indeed!

Once this machine of molding has been discovered, the first question one is lead to ask is, “Who is doing or benefiting from this power over me?” In Bentham’s Panopticon, it is the owner or operator of the prison/lab that wields the power and can have an array of uses, from the beneficent to the treacherous. When applied to society at large, as Foucault does, there is no one that one can point to as wielder of the power. It is diffused throughout society; it is present everywhere with no centralized nexus of power and administration. Therefore, no one can point to the oppressor. If there is no oppressor that can be pointed to, how can one be oppressed? Likewise if there are no actors or agents to morally evaluate, how can the system be judged from a moral standpoint of just or unjust?

Foucault describes this network of discipline as a physics of power. This physics of power can be likened to the force of gravity that binds us all to the earth. Just like gravity serves as a bind on all of humanity, stripping them of certain freedoms. It is inescapable and there is no way to rebel against it. Even in jumping and flight, one is still bound to its ruses and is using the rules of the game to play in another way. Similarly, Foucault’s Panopticon is a description of the new physics of power that has developed. No one is free from the system nor can they be set free. There is nothing to be set free from, as any change, political, personal or relational is merely a change in speed or location, not a change in the way power is administered. Therefore, this method of power administration is not to be evaluated morally, as it is merely a statement of condition.