Reconcilliation and Justification

(a complete wander through my mind this morning.)

There is some deep meat inside these words as technical language, but there is also a secular meaning totally fucking them up.

I wonder how much a clear explaination of what contortions the church did in order to respond to modernity would make religion more understandable as a long term faith tradition. Seriously, you look at the church, wander into any parish, right now, and you have to wonder if people were really total idiots and so some few men became hideous abusers, or if things have really gotten off the beaten path. There really is a beaten path, although it's pretty weedy right now.

The biggest problem I had with seminary was that we were working hard to learn to support the institution, and at the time, I didn't actually know that there was a difference, or, I thought going deeper into the institution was how to go deeper into faith, except that is totally wrong. It was probably always wrong, but it's particularly troublesome in times of profound change.

But, to think about reconcilliation and justification in a secular sense -

Reconciling seems to be incorporating the trauma into your world view - not that it was right, not that it makes sense or was deserved, but that it happened, and it happened to you, even if it was not deserved, even if it was wrong, reconcilliation isn't a moral stance or meaning making out of trauma, it is acknowledgment that trauma happened and that you can be whole with it - not in spite of it, or because of it - just with it.

Justification feels very different. It feels like the incorporation of the damaging event must be explained as deserving. It is the God wanted this to happen, and to happen to you, and suffering will make you a better person. It is a moral stance on the trauma, the meaning making that incoporates the trauma itself as identity forming in a moral - right or wrong - sense. The incorporation must be good or bad and it must not alter the status quo. That is really important, that we not admit to any break with the world agreement, that we deny the event the definition of trauma itself.

I don't think justify means that in a strictly religious sense, but it isn't all that fantastic in any case. Justify is an extremely legalistic term and used by Paul (the ultimate used car salesman) to connect a lot of beliefs about the coming end of the world - jews realy did think the world was about to end, with the judgment (again, a highly specialized legal term aka ruling) of God and the event of Jesus' crucifixion. What is really interesting in this is that if you take that, in combination with the secularization of the word faith, what a dirty mess you make.

Faith, in modernity and more importantly, in English, has been bent into something as close to it's opposite as can be.

"Faith, clasically understood, is not a separate dimension of life, a compartmentalized specialty. Faith is an orientation of the total person, giving purpose and goal to one's hopes and striving, thoughts and actions." Fowler

"There was a time when "I believe" as a ceremonial declaration of faith meant, and was heard, as meaning: "Given the reality of God, as a fact of the universe, I hereby proclaim that I align my life accordingly, pledging love and loyalty." A statement about a person's believing has now come to mean, rather something of this sort: "Given the uncertainty of God, as a fact of modern life, so and so reports that the idea of God is part of the furniture of his mind." Smith (in Fowler, I haven't purchased this book yet.)

And you can substitute God with ultimate concern - you need not limit God to a beard in the sky. My God is in fact quite removed from the metaphor used to discuss it. And in coming to the realization that the bible can be a big ass metaphor meant that I could finally understand the difference between true and fact - something that has also been conflated in the modern mind. But even if you substitute ultimate concern with beard in the sky into the modern definition - you still get something that hardly compels you to get out of bed in the morning, and no wonder there is so much depression and anxiety - it's a wholesale slaughter of meaning, there is no way to align yourself with furniture. I like my dining room table, but it hardly constitutes something I would live and die for, yet, consumerism really does frame dining room tables in this way.


So, I'm thinking about this phrase, justification by faith, and superficially, it has always felt that believing statements about Jesus as Christ as true means that I am going to heaven and whatever I do based on those beliefs about Jesus as Christ make what I do right.

But that isn't quite what is going on with Paul - and context really matters. Paul is saying that, given the immanent ending of the world, given your faith or alignment of your life's meaning with the teachings of Jesus, the crucifixion of Jesus acts as surety in the final judgment of God on the world. And, given that jews didn't have a heaven (sweet pad in the sky), the heaven Paul is talking about is totally earth oriented. It means you would experience, right now, in the face of the immanent judgement of God at the end of the world, a peace in yourself - an alignment of your ultimate concern with your actual existence. And that doesn't me nothing bad happens, just that you are super resilient in the face of it. And the fact that the jews and early christians believed the whole thing only had to last for a few more years, made it all the easier.

The problem, of course, is that it's a lot easier to commit to something for a short amount of time. It's the long haul that kicks you in the ass. And there is a whole lot of Christianity that concerns itself with the fact that the world didn't end and now what the fuck do we do, that Protestants (and the Anglicans fall in with the Protestants in this - at least the ones I know of) rejected or ignore or paternalize all of this work and go "back to the bible" which brings us to the dispensational millenialists, the church's response to modernism, which in hindsight strikes me as particularily short sighted. Of course, the world is still with us, and so many of us are back at square one, without benefit of the tradition that explained what to do when the world wasn't coming to a crashing end, and with the added handicap of all the language and beliefs contaminated with end of the world thinking.

No wonder church is such a bore - even when the sermon is nothing but exegesis, it never really spends time working through ultimate concerns but busies itself with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. What a shocking idea that we could wholesale reject the end of the world mentality and figure out what to do given that nihilism isn't actually working for us. I have to assume that Christianity had some meaning to last so long that wasn't just a response to the immanent end of the world, but here, my history is weak. I also see why science fiction is so appealing to me and is so full of religious overtones, it may be where the faith ended up hiding out once it was rejected by the church.